Among all the Greek cities built after the return of the Heraclidæ, there was none so insignificant, that Ephorus, and the writers who after him introduced the origins of cities into general history, would have been unable to state specifically and with sufficient certainty the people from which the colony had issued, and the founders who led it and gave laws to it; in far the most cases they also fixed the epoch of the foundation. When Rome was founded, which yet is supposed to be more recent than perhaps the greater part of those Greek cities; from what people the eternal city originally arose; is precisely what we do not know. But it is no less suited to the eternity of Rome for its roots to lose themselves in infinity, than what the poets sang of the rearing and deification of Romulus, befits the majesty of the city. A god, or no one, must have founded it.

Now while I acknowledge this with a love, the sincerity of which none but a bigot, insincere himself, could seek to call in question, while I allow the heart and the imagination their full rights; I at the same time assert the claims of the reason, to take nothing as historical which cannot be historical; and, without refusing to the noble tradition its place at the threshold of the history, to inquire whether it can be in any degree ascertained to what people the original Romans may have belonged, and what changes attended the rise of that state which, when the light of historical truth begins to dawn, is Rome.

When the existence of an unknown southern continent was generally believed, when its outline was drawn on maps, and it was deemed presumptuous incredulity to reject it as a fiction, an essential service was then done to knowledge by the voyagers who crossed that outline, and shewed that, though certain points and coasts included in it really existed, they conferred no reality on the imaginary continent. A further step was to give a comprehensive proof of its nonexistence. But the demands of geography could be satisfied only by the examination of the several islands which existed in the place attributed to the supposed continent; and if the navigator was kept off and prevented from landing on them by reefs and breakers, if mists obscured his view of them, still what he perceived was no longer merely negative gain: and many inferences might be drawn from our knowledge of such countries, as there were good grounds for considering to be similar or identical in their nature and population with the regions which could not be directly explored.

I do not inquire who built Rome, and gave laws to her; but what Rome was, before her history begins, and how she grew out of her cradle: on these points something may be learnt from traditions and from her institutions.

The festival called Septimontium preserved the remembrance of a time when the Capitoline, Quirinal, and Viminal hills were not yet incorporated with Rome; but when the remainder of the city, to the extent afterward inclosed, with the exception of the Aventine, which was and continued a borough, by the wall of Servius, formed a united civic community. It consisted of seven districts, which as such had each its own holidays and sacrifices even in the age of Tiberius: Palatium, Velia, Cermalus, Cælius, Fagutal, Oppius, Cispius. Not that every one of these places had a claim to be called a hill: one unquestionably, and perhaps a second, lay in the plain at the foot of a hill. Others were hights, which in later times were accounted to appertain to some neighbouring hill, as though forming a part of it, with the view of not reckoning up more than seven in Rome: for even in regard to this division, a form which had belonged to an early age and a petty state of things, was subsequently stretched by the Romans to fit a very enlarged state.

The appointment of the first dictator is placed in the tenth year after the first consuls; and by the oldest annalists T. Larcius is named as the person. Among a variety of contradictory statements, one invented by the vanity of the Valerian house assigned this honour to a nephew of Publicola. According to the date just mentioned Larcius was consul at the time, and so would only have received an enlargement of his previous power: another account related as the occasion of the appointment, what sounds probable enough, that the republic had been placed by an unfortunate choice in the hands of two consuls of the Tarquinian faction, whose names were subsequently rendered dubious by indulgence or by calumny.

That the name of dictator was of Latin origin, is acknowledged; and assuredly the character of his office, as invested with regal power for a limited period, was no less so: the existence of a dictator at Tusculum in early, at Lavinium in very late times, is matter of history; and from Latin ritual books, which referred to Alban traditions, Macer was enabled to assert that this magistracy had subsisted at Alba; though it is true that the preservation of any historical record concerning Alba is still more out of the question than that of any concerning Rome before Tullus Hostilius.

The Romans have no common national name for the Sabines and the tribes which are supposed to have issued from them: the latter, whether Marsians and Pelignians, or Samnites and Lucanians, they term Sabellians. That these tribes called themselves Savini or Sabini, is nearly certain from the inscription on the Samnite Denarius coined in the Social war; at least as to the Samnites, whose name is in every form manifestly, and in the Greek Σανῖται directly, derived from Savini: but the usage of a people whose writings have perished, like every thing that is extinct in fact, has lost its rights. I think myself at liberty to employ the term Sabellians for the whole race; since the tribes which were so named by the Romans, are far more important than the Sabines; and it would clearly have offended a Latin ear, to have called the Samnites Sabines: for investigations like those of this history a general name is indispensable.

When Rome crossed the frontiers of Latium, the Sabellians were the most widely extended and the greatest people in Italy the Etruscans had already sunk, as they had seen the nations of earlier greatness sink, the Tyrrhenians, Umbrians, and Ausonians. As the Dorians were great in their colonies, the mother-country remaining little; and as it lived in peace, while the tribes it sent forth diffused themselves widely by conquests and settlements; so, according to Cato, was it with the old Sabine nation.

In every state the constitution of which was grounded on a certain number of houses, a commonalty grew up or subsisted by the side of the burghers or of the freeholders. They who belonged to this commonalty, were not only recognized as freemen, but also as fellow-countrymen: they received like succour against foreigners, were under the protection of the laws, might acquire real property, had their motes for making by-laws and their courts, were bound to serve in time of war, but were excluded from the government, which was confined to the houses.

The origin of the commonalty, though exceedingly various, in cities mostly coincides with that of the rights of the pale-burghers; of the dwellers within the pale or the contado: but it increased in extent and still more so in importance, when a city acquired a domain, a distretto, containing towns and a variety of small places. Among the ancients, the inhabitants of such a domain were sometimes taken in a body under the protection of the law and admitted to the rights of freemen; more frequently this was done in the case of such as removed thence into the city: these were persons of very different rank, gentle and simple.

It is well known that, before the Julian reformation of the calendar, the Roman was a lunar year, which was brought, or was meant to be brought, into harmony with the solar by the insertion of an intercalary month. The great Joseph Scaliger, with that piercing eye which converts the declarations of such as know not what they are saying into evidence of truth, discovered the original system of this computation with indisputable certainty. He has shewn that the principle was to intercalate a month, alternately of 22 and 23 days, every other year during periods of twenty-two years, in each of which periods such an intercalary month was inserted ten times, the last biennium being passed over. As five years made a lustre, so five of these periods made a secle of 110 years.

The notion that Italy was in a state of barbarism, and that science was first introduced there through the intercourse between Rome and Greece, must give way, when on the contrary we see this easy and regular computation of time so entirely forgotten in the very age of literary refinement, that Cæsar found the year 67 days in advance of the true time, and was forced to borrow his reformation of the calendar from foreign science.

The appointment of the dictator by the curies is a step backward from the constitution of Servius, evincing a settled plan to rob the plebeians of its advantages and honours, while its burthens were still to remain with them. The encroachments of the patricians went further: the election of the consuls was also withdrawn from the centuries: that it was so will be proved in the sequel of this history, at the period when the plebeians recovered a part of their rights. If this was a sheer usurpation, and not a compulsory bargain, it must have occurred before the secession of the commonalty.

What are we to think of a history which contains not a word of such changes! And deep as is the obscurity lying over this period, no less gloomy is everything belonging to it that our researches can discover. After the banishment of the Tarquins the government had behaved with kindness to the commonalty: it is related that all duties were then done away with; that the city took the salt-trade into its own hands, to put a stop to the extortion of the retail-dealers: the statement that the plebs was exempted from tribute, must be understood to mean, either that the whole charge of paying the troops was thrown upon the ærarians, or that the system of arbitrary taxation introduced under the last Tarquinius was abolished.

No one can ascend up to their springs along the streams by which the tribes of the present human race have been carried down: still less can any eye pierce across the chasm, which there severs the order of things wherein we and our history are comprised, from an earlier one. That a former race of mankind has passed away, is a general popular belief; and it was shared and cherished by the Greek philosophers: but they dissent from the people in this: Plato and Aristotle suppose that a few, embers as it were, had escaped from the general ruin, and that from them a new race of mankind had gradually spread over the desolated earth; while the people in the renewed life of man saw a new creation, the Lai of Deucalion, the Myrmidons of Æacus; and deemed the extinct race rebels against the heavenly powers, led astray by the consciousness of their enormous strength. So the later Jews dreamt of giants before the deluge; so the Greeks of the Titans of Phlegra, and of those who perished in the flood of Deucalion or of Ogyges: so the savages of North America fable of the Mammoth, that the devastated world had invoked the lightnings of heaven, and not in vain, against the reason-gifted monster, the man of the primitive age.

The contemporaries of Camillus, though they had a firmly rooted belief in the legends about Romulus, would have laughed at any one who, as the most intelligent men did three centuries after, should have represented the institution of the senate as a politic measure issuing from the free-will of the founder of the city. In the cities of all the civilized nations around the Mediterranean, a senate was no less essential and indispensable than a popular assembly; it was a select body of the elder citizens: such a council, says Aristotle, there always is, whether the constitution be aristocratical or democratical: even in the oligarchal, be the number of sharers in the sovranty ever so small, some counsellors are appointed to prepare public measures.

That the Roman senate, like the Athenian of Clisthenes, corresponded to the tribes, has been already explained: but we may go further, and affirm without hesitation, that originally, when the number of houses was complete, the senate represented them immediately, and by a number proportionate to theirs. The three hundred senators at Rome corresponded to the three hundred houses, the number which was assumed above on good grounds: the decurion of each gens, who was its alderman, and the president in its by-meetings, would represent it in the senate.

Concerning the origin of the Oenotrians Pherecydes wrote: that Oenotrus was one of the twenty sons of Lycaon, and that the Oenotrians were named after him, as the Peucetians on the Ionian gulph were after his brother Peucetius. They migrated from Arcadia, seventeen generations before the Trojan war, with a numerous body of Arcadians and other Greeks, who were pressed for room at home: and this, says Pausanias, is the earliest colony, whether of Greeks or barbarians, of which a recollection has been preserved.

Other genealogists have stated the number of the Lycaonids differently: the names which occur in Pausanias amount to six and twenty, and several may probably have dropt out of his text. Apollodorus says there were fifty, and one name is wanting in him. Very few in the two lists are the same: Pausanias has no Peucetius, Apollodorus neither him nor Oenotrus: but what is strangest is, that, though all their names indicate them to have been founders of races or of cities, still the latter mythologer makes them all perish in Deucalion's flood. It is clear that he or the author he followed absurdly mixed up a legend about certain impious sons of Lycaon, who perhaps were nameless, with the tradition which enumerated the Arcadian towns and those of kindred origin according to their reputed founders.

The narrative, which since the loss of the ancient Annals has chanced to acquire the character of a traditional history, relates that, after the battle of the forest of Arsia, the Tarquins, in order to obtain more powerful succour, repaired to the court of Lar Porsenna, the king of Clusium; and that he, when his intercession had been rejected, led his army against Rome in their behalf. But this cannot possibly have gained universal currency: Cicero, who yet was very well acquainted with the celebrated legend of Porsenna and Scævola, says, neither the Veientines nor the Latins were able to replace Tarquinius on the Roman throne. So that he either held the Veientine war in which Brutus falls, to be the same with Porsenna's: or he discriminated between the latter, as a war of conquest, and the attempts of the neighbouring states to place the government of Rome in the hands of the man who had thrown himself on their protection, and who was to pay them dear for it. And such no doubt is the older and genuine representation.

This narrative then makes the Etruscans under Porsenna march singly against Rome: and so the story runs in Livy: it is by a palpable forgery that in Dionysius we find Mamilius and the Latins taking part with him: the son-in-law of Tarquinius forsooth could not possibly remain inactive.

I have undertaken to write the history of Rome; from the earliest times of the city, unto the period when the sovranty of Augustus over the Roman world was undisputedly acknowledged. I begin, where a new people arose out of the confluent settlements of divers nations; my goal lies, where this people had incorporated millions with itself, and had imparted to them its language and its laws; where it ruled from the rising unto the setting sun, and the last of the kingdoms that proceeded from Alexander's conquests, was become one of its provinces. Long before any historical record of particular individuals occurs in those times, the forms under which the commonwealth existed, may be recognized with certainty: so firmly, and for centuries indelibly, were they impressed upon every thing, and so entirely was the individual identified with the community. At the close of the time which I purpose to embrace, the nation resolves itself into a fermenting mass, in which the form, now that the soul has abandoned it, daily becomes more indistinct and decays.

Numberless are the events and the changes through which the Romans passed from one of these limits to the opposite: vast destinies, mighty deeds, and men who were worthy to wield a gigantic power, have preserved the memory of much in the story of Rome, even during the most ignorant ages.

The History of Rome was treated, during the first two centuries after the revival of letters, with the same prostration of the understanding and judgement to the written letter that had been handed down, and with the same fearfulness of going beyond it, which prevailed in all the other branches of knowledge. If any one had asserted a right of examining the credibility of the ancient writers and the value of their testimony, an outcry would have been raised against his atrocious presumption: the object aimed at was, in spite of all internal evidence, to combine what was related by them; at the utmost one authority was in some one particular instance postponed to another, as gently as possible, and without inducing any further results. Here and there indeed a free-born mind, such as Glareanus, broke through these bonds; but infallibly a sentence of condemnation was forthwith pronounced against him: besides such men were not the most learned; and their bold attempts were only partial and were wanting in consistency. In this department, as in others, men of splendid talents and the most copious learning conformed to the narrow spirit of their age: their labours extracted from a multitude of insulated details, what the remains of ancient literature did not afford united in any single work, a systematic account of Roman antiquities: what they did in this respect is wonderful.

I turn with pleasure toward my proper mark, from the wearying task of gleaning detached and mostly unimportant notices concerning the Italian nations; and I withdraw myself from the seductive impulse, of trying to divine the nature of what has perished by the continually repeated contemplation of these often uncertain fragments. Yet I must still linger awhile on ground which is of the same kind with the most insecure part of that I have just quitted, but which belongs essentially to Rome, and over which our road must needs pass to the mythical part of Roman story; which must be kept separate, but may not be excluded.

If the investigation concerning the Trojan colony in Latium aimed at deciding with historical probability, by means of direct and circumstantial evidence, whether such a colony actually settled on that coast, a prudent inquirer would decline it. He would deem it absurd to expect evidence as to an event that preceded by five hundred years the time when all is still fabulous and poetical in Roman history: and what traces could be preserved, to supply the place of evidence which obviously cannot possibly exist, when the Trojans with Æneas, even according to the account which assigns the greatest importance to them, were not an immigration such as alters the people it unites with, and distinctly impresses its character on the new formation?

It was from the books of the pontiffs and augurs, that Livy took the formularies for the solemn proceedings of national law; formularies which, after prevailing for many ages, had in his day been long obsolete, and the origin of which was traced back to the kings. This is certain with regard to the formulary in trials for treason, containing the evidence for the existence of that appeal to the people, which Cicero knew of from the pontifical and augural books: nor is it more questionable as to those used in the consecration of a king, in the proceedings of the Pater Patratus at a treaty, in those of the fecials, and in the surrendering of a city. A conjecture about the nature and character of these books is not a presumptuous exploring of a thing that fate has forbidden us to know. They can only be conceived as collections of traditions, decisions, and decrees, laying down principles of law by reporting particular cases: and thus fragments of old poems might be contained in them, such as the law of treason from the lay of the Horatii.

The increase of the senate, whereby the number of senators was raised to three hundred, is ascribed uniformly, with a single, and that too a doubtful, exception, to the first Tarquinius. On the other hand, there are great differences in the statements as to the number he introduced; with respect to which, and to my opinion that this increase was effected by the admission of the third class, it would be an idle repetition for me to speak again.

But the most difficult point in the whole earlier history of the constitution is the formation of the three new centuries attributed to the same king: an innovation which, in consonance to the spirit of such personifications, inasmuch as it confines itself to an extension of the constitution established by Romulus, is placed before the time of Servius Tullius; while it is later than the calling up of the Luceres into the senate, by which act that constitution received its complete developement.

As Idomeneus and Diomedes, so Philoctetes, Epeus, and some of the descendants of Neleus, were brought over to Italy, with Greek warriors and Trojan captives, by other legends, which appropriated and interpreted a variety of relics and monuments. But from none of these pretended settlements did any Grecian people arise; these Greeks must have been metamorphosed and have vanished, like the companions of Diomedes.

The most ancient settlement which acknowledges them, is the Chalcidian at Cuma; originally planted on Ischia and the adjacent small islands. The Alexandrian chronologers assigned it to times of vast antiquity; undoubtedly merely for the sake of connecting its founders with heroic genealogies. For where they were destitute of positive statements, like those as to the time at which the Greek cities in Sicily were founded, they had recourse to computing by generations, which pushed the earliest epochs much too far back. With regard to Cuma they found no era; because that city had long ceased to be Grecian: and if they tried to date its foundation from references to genealogies, then, contrary to all credibility, it came out long anterior to that of the earliest among the less remote Grecian colonies. That the leaders of the emigrants who settled there, bent their course over unexplored waters, is intimated by the legend, that their ships were preceded and guided in the daytime by a dove, at night by the chime of the mystic bronze: but even from the eastern coast of Sicily, the first settlement on Ischia would still have been a bold adventure.

The Romans are not accounted to belong to any of the Italian nations: the writers who talk with credulous simplicity about the people of Romulus as a colony from Alba, still do not on that account ever reckon them among the Latins; and in the traditions of the oldest times they appear equally strangers to all the three nations in the midst of which their city stood. Hence their history, if it only aim at giving an epical narrative of actions and events, may certainly insulate itself; and thus almost all among the ancients who wrote it, have severed it from that of the rest of Italy. But there is no glory from which the Romans were further removed, than from that of the Athenians, of being an original and peculiar people: they belonged to no nation, only because, as even their fables and disfigured legends let us clearly perceive, they arose from the combination of several that were wholly strangers to one another. Each of these transmitted its peculiar inheritance in language, institutions, and religion, to the new people, which in every thing constituting a national distinction was assuredly always unlike some one of its parent races. The previous history of those nations would therefore prepare the way for that of Rome, even if the latter had remained confined to the city.

The country between Oenotria and Tyrrhenia was called by the Greeks Opica or Ausonia. Aristotle says: bordering on the Oenotrians, toward Tyrrhenia, dwelt the Opicans; formerly and to this day known by the additional name of Ausonians. He does not confine their country to Campania; for he terms Latium also a district in Opica. Cuma in Opica was distinguished by that addition from the Æolian: Nola was called by Hecatæus an Ausonian city; others will have called it Opican. The south-east boundary must be placed at the Silarus; and the Roman account, that Ausonia was once the name of the country between the Apennines and the lower sea, is not to be understood of the more southern coast. The notion that Temesa, far south of the Silarus, whence the Greeks of the Homeric age drew their copper, was founded by the Ausonians, seems to rest only on a misunderstanding of the expression used by an Alexandrian poet.

Before the people who gave the country their name, took possession of the coast, then a part of Tyrrhenia, the name Ausonia or Opicia was applied to their territories in the interior, Samnium was the country of the Opicans before it was conquered by the Sabellians: and it was preserved in recollection that the land about Cales and Beneventum was the first which was called Ausonia.