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however, had come to them, which they were not of a temper to surrender; and when they turned their backs upon the city they had recovered for their grandfather, they were already determined to build a city of their own. Both sought the honor of laying its foundations, though the legend represents them as having intended to rule it jointly; but Romulus took the charge upon himself, and drove the plough around the limits he designed upon the Palatine. Remus, enraged by the choice of the place, as well as by his brother's assumption of superiority, came up in derision to leap over the furrow that marked the line of the future walls. A quarrel arose between the brothers and their several adherents; hard words brought on hard blows; and Remus fell, slain by the hands of Romulus, or, as some said, by one of Romulus's followers. The survivor made a show of lamentation; but the city was founded, and the festival of the Shepherds 10 was held in rejoicing over its opening destinies, too lamentably presaged by the conflict and the crimes with which they then began. Not the least ominous record of the tradition is that which it bears concerning the violation of the religion to

8 Liv., I. 6. Dion. Hal., I. 85, 86. 9 Ovid, Fast., V. 837 et seq. Plut., Rom., 10. De Vir. Illustr., Cap. I. This collection, commonly passing under the name of Aurelius Victor, an historian of the empire, was "founded, according to the extremely happy conjecture of Borghesi, upon the elogia inscribed on

the statues of celebrated men in the Forum of Augustus." Niebuhr, Hist., Vol. III. note 122.

10 The Palilia. Plut., Rom., 12. "And little Rome appears. Her cots arise, Green twigs of osier weave the slender walls, Green rushes spread the roofs; and here and

there

Opens beneath the rock the gloomy cave."

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which Silvia, the mother of the hero and founder, had sworn fidelity in vain."

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The reign of Romulus was always declared to have been long and glorious. If it began, as the lays related, with the asylum he opened for runaways,12 or the ravishment of the Sabine virgins enticed to the festivals of their wild neighbours,13 it ended with the supremacy of his state over all the nearest settlements, which made haste, apparently, after the example was once set them, to submit to the bolder arms and the stronger laws of the Romans.14 The constitution of the people was ascribed to their earliest king; 15 too much, perhaps, to his renown, yet so naturally, that it would be difficult to find a commencement for many of their institutions, if his name were not to be used as that of the first lawgiver of Rome. He led his people to battle; and when the victory was won, he taught them how to lay up its spoils in store, instead of wasting them at the moment they were gained. He ordained the classes into which his followers and the people whom they subdued were distributed; devolving on each its duties or its

11 For the variations in these and the other legends, see Malden's History, end of Ch. I., and Ch. IV.

sword, and therewith victorious." History of the World, L. p. 503. Populum Romanum ipse facit." Flor., I. 1. "Ortum e par

15 66

12Sine discrimine." Liv., I. vula Romuli casa." Val. Max., II. 8. Cf. Dion. Hal., II. 15.

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8. "Dans la naissance des sociétés," says Montesquieu, "ce sont les chefs des républiques qui font l'institution." Décad. et Grand. des Rom., Ch. I.

privileges, and gathering all within the fold of the religious and the civil customs he learned from his kindred, and from the strangers, likewise, by whom he was obeyed. Yet the only reasons for saying that Romulus did these things are knowing that they were done, and supposing him to have had life and power to do them.

But setting aside the name of Romulus as too disputed to be continually cited, it is to be remembered that there must have been some chief or chiefs to direct the achievements by which the first age of Roman history was signalized. The "brigands and semibarbarians," as they are called by one of their own historians,16 could not sweep down in sallies from the Palatine without a leader; nor was it by any common impulse that they were able to persuade the enemies they had to combat, as well as those they first subdued, to join them in their newly founded city. At the same time that the conquered were admitted as citizens, a detachment of the conquerors was always sent to occupy the vanquished territory as a colony, in which the Roman was rather a soldier than a settler. More extraordinary is the tradition that describes the betrayal of the Capitoline by Tarpeia to the Sabine army, which Titus Tatius, the king, led against the ravishers at Rome, to have been followed by the union of the two people in a com

16"Jam latrones et semibarbari." sors, Julian, Jovian, and Valens; at Eutropius, I. 3. the command of the last of whom, he wrote a compendium of Roman history.

Eutropius lived under the emperor Constantine and his succes

mon league," that, far from being disturbed by the death of Tatius, was corroborated under the rule of the Roman monarch. Many of the Latin towns in the neighbourhood were also united after being overcome; 18 and there are vestiges of an Etruscan settlement or immigration,19 which made another part of the fast-increasing state. The foundations were no sooner laid than the wall and the tower, so to speak, were erected by the very hands which might have been expected to be raised with deadliest force against them.

The two great classes into which the Roman world was divided, almost from its first existence, were those of the conquered and the conquerors, between whom there will only too often be occasions, in this history, of noting the separation and the contrast. In the times of the earliest kings, the Patricians were in one class, the other being composed of their clients and their slaves; but as victories multiplied, the lower class included the Plebeians within and the strangers without the state. It will be, by and by, in season to describe the various members of the inferior division with the attention due them in a history of Roman liberty; but for the present, we may be content to become acquainted with the original people of Rome.

17" Regnum consociant, imperium omne conferunt Romam. Ita geminata urbe," etc. Liv., I. 13. See Cic., Pro Balbo, 13, and Tac., Ann., XI. 24, for the excellence of the policy which Romulus adopted towards strangers.

18 Liv., I. 11. Dion. Hal., II. 35, 36.

19 Under a Lucumo, who gave aid to Romulus against the Sabines. Festus, s. v. Cœlius Mons. Varro, De Ling. Lat., V. 9, ed. Spengel. Cic., De Rep., II, 8.

Strictly speaking, the Patricians were not all conquerors; for the first associations contracted between the settlers on the Palatine and the various people whom they not only admitted, but doubtless, in many instances, solicited to share their fortunes, were such, in great part, as to place the new-comers on equal terms with the old. The names of the three original Tribes, the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres, constituted, as the legends inform us, within brief periods of one another, bear witness to apparently equal relations amongst the Romans or the Latins, the Sabines, and the Etruscans, who were combined together in the extension, if not in the establishment, of the city.20 The Ramnes, that is to say, the followers of Romulus, may have had some pretensions above the rest on account of their priority;" and it is quite evident that the third Tribe of Etruscans was not admitted to all the privileges of the other two, until some time after their union. But, in a general point of view, either of the three was on the same footing with the others, as Patricians, that is, in the early times, as freemen. Amongst the individual members of each Tribe the territory of the state was divided in small but equal shares; 22 and to them be

20 The origin of the word Ramnes is plainly enough connected with that of Romulus or Rome. Tities is from Tatius, the Sabine king; and Luceres from Lucumo, Lucus, or Lucerus, all susceptible of some sort of explanation connecting them with an Etruscan derivation. "Nominatæ [tribus], ut ait Ennius, Ta

tienses a Tatio, Ramnenses a Romulo, Luceres, ut Junius, a Lucumone," etc. Varro, De Ling. Lat., V. 9.

21 Celsi Ramnes." Hor., Art. Poet., 342. Cf. Dion. Hal., II. 62.

22 Ager Romanus primum divisus in partes tres, a quo tribus appellatæ," etc. Varro, De Ling. Lat.,

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