The story of Damaratus acquires a seductive look of historical truth, from the positive manner in which it connects itself with Cypselus, whereby it appears at the same time to confirm the chronological statements with regard to L. Tarquinius. Now could it be assumed that the story was transplanted in this shape from native traditions into the earliest annals, it would only have the more weight in consequence of the gross ignorance as to Grecian affairs displayed by the annalists even so late as in the seventh century of the city, and of their manifest incompetence for contriving that the tables of the pontiffs should synchronize with the history of Corinth. Did they not even consider Dionysius a contemporary of Coriolanus? did they not fancy, running off into the opposite errour, that in the year 323 the Carthaginian armies crossed over into Sicily for the first time?

But this apparent chronological coincidence stands and falls with the dates assigned to L. Tarquinius; and the only foundation for these is a trick played with numbers. In the bare empty outline, which is clearly an invention, there may seem to be such an agreement: but the old Roman story was enormously at variance with those dates, and there is no possibility of a reconcilement: what looks like one has only been brought about by glossing over some things and distorting others.

The keepers of the Sibylline books had recorded, that the first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated in the year 298, and that from that time forth it always recurred after an interval of 110 years, such being the duration of a secle. This statement is at variance with accounts in the annals, which fixed the celebration of the secular festivals in very different years: these annalists would have no weight at all, if they had really contradicted the authentic books; but on the other hand we have no need to suppose that these books noted down anything more than the close of a secle, and the epoch when the beginning of a new one, according to the precepts of the ceremonial law, should have been celebrated by the people, in gratitude for the continuance of its existence in a new period; without regarding whether the solemnity was deferred from circumstances, as was so often the case with a festival vowed to the gods.

If we go back according to this rule from that first secular epoch of which a historical register was preserved, the end of the first, or rather the beginning of the second secle, falls in the year of the city 78.

Iapygia comprehended the South-east of Italy; according to the more ancient writers, from Metapontum, or, including that city, from the Siris, to mount Garganus, or, as the Greeks call it, mount Drion; where it is probable that, in their early geography, Ombrica immediately began. Even Polybius in his time, when enumerating the Italian forces, includes the Iapygians and Messapians under one head. It does not indeed anywhere appear that the Romans gave such an extent to Apulia: yet it certainly seems clear that Iapyx and Apulus are the same name.

In this large country the Greeks distinguished three tribes, the Messapians, Peucetians, and Daunians: the first on the peninsula to the east of Tarentum; the Peucetians to the north of them along the coast from Brundusium to Barium; hence as far as mount Garganus the Daunians. The first about the beginning of the fourth century were enemies of the Tarentines, the two latter tribes their allies. The Messapians however are divided, at least by Strabo, into two tribes, the Sallentines and the Calabrians; the former in Leuternia, on the eastern coast of the Tarentine gulph; the Calabrians from the Iapygian promontory northward, on the Adriatic.

With regard to the purpose of the Servian constitution to impart an equal share in the consular government to the plebeians, every one may frame surmises at his pleasure: that it granted them the right of taking part in elections and in legislation, is known to all.

Servius, as for the sake of brevity I will call the lawgiver in accordance with the writers of antiquity, would have communicated these rights in the simplest manner by following the same method whereby in feudal states the commons obtained a station alongside of the barons, and by ordaining that all national concerns should be brought both before the council of the burghers and that of the commonalty, and that the decree of the one should not have force without the approval of the other, and should be made null by its rejection. This was the footing the plebeian tribes subsequently stood on for some time in relation to the curies: not however until the ties of an amicable intercourse between the two orders had already become so manifold, that their tranquillity was no longer troubled except by a few very wrongheaded incendiaries; not until all had recognized the necessity of labouring for the good of their common country, conformably to the institutions which actually existed.

When we reach the borders of mythical story, which without a miracle could not be immediately followed by annals, we are constrained to adopt a division of time into periods: so that I am not to be reproached for its being immethodical. The opinion we are to form with regard to the pretended histories of the period just marked out, is evident from a comparison of the two historians. Livy under 251 and 252 narrates a war against Pometia and the Auruncians, and repeats the same again afterward, under the year 259, as a war against the Volscians; of an oversight like this Dionysius could not be guilty, and he relates it only in the latter year. On the other hand Livy, who on this point is the more inconsiderate of the two, displays much greater judgement on occasion of the Sabine wars; mentioning nothing about them except two triumphs out of the Fasti; without a syllable on the military occurrences of the five campaigns circumstantially recounted by Dionysius.

Nor does the latter go less into detail in describing the events of the Latin war; concerning which nothing but the battle of Regillus is narrated in Livy; except under 255, where it is said, as briefly as possible, that Fidenæ was besieged, Crustumeria taken, Præneste came over to the Romans.

I combine these two nations, not for the sake of intimating an affinity between them, but because both alike were unconnected, so far at least as we know, with the history of Italy until the later times of the Roman republic, and both dwelt to the south of the Alps only as parts of nations which out of Italy were widely diffused; in very early times too they seem to have been contiguous in the plain of the Po.

The Ligurians are among those nations which the short span of our history embraces only in their decline. Philistus, in representing the Sicelians as Ligurians, who had been expelled by Umbrians and Pelasgians, is not only blind to the identity of the Siculians and the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians; he is certainly no less mistaken as to the extraction of the Ligurians: but his mistake arises only from the very common errour, of confounding two irruptions which the same country has experienced at different times; as the nations that have successively inhabited Dacia, the Getes and Goths, the Huns and Hungarians, are taken one for the other; and in obscure traditions the same people appears, in some as invading, in others as driven out. During his banishment, which he passed in the countries on the Adriatic, Philistus may have learnt among the Umbrians themselves, out of their ancient books, that their forefathers and the Siculians had expelled Ligurians out of Tuscany; and it would be unwise to treat this information with contempt on account of his having understood it confusedly.

It is impossible to believe that the ancient lays in their original form spoke of Damaratus as the father of L. Tarquinius: but Polybius must have found this account already extant in the Roman Annals; and it may also have occurred in Ennius; nay even in the later forms assumed by the old poem, when the stories of Zopyrus and Periander were woven into it. Such lays, even in the hands of learned bards, are perpetually altering their features, shifting and changing until they vanish away.

When Cypselus, the offspring of a marriage of disparagement, by uniting with the commons had overthrown the oligarchy at Corinth, and was taking vengeance on the persons who had aimed at his life, many of the Bacchiads fled, among the rest Damaratus. Commerce had not been esteemed disreputable among the Corinthian nobility; as a merchant, Damaratus had formed ties of friendship at Tarquinii; he settled there. He brought great wealth with him; the sculptors Euchir and Eugrammus, and Cleophantus the painter, accompanied him; and along with the fine arts of Greece he taught the Etruscans alphabetical writing. Renouncing his country for ever, he took an Etruscan wife, and to the sons whom she bare him, gave the names and education of their own land, together with the refinements of Greece.

The tribes in the states of antiquity were constituted in two ways; either according to the houses which composed them, or to the ground which they occupied: it may seem as if these two kinds coincided, when at the settlement of a city a whole tract of land was assigned to a tribe consisting of certain houses; this however did not form the bond of union. Dionysius, a diligent investigator of antiquities, expressly makes this distinction between the earlier Roman tribes, which he calls genealogical, and those of Servius which he calls local; wherein he assuredly followed older authors. Aristotle, it is true, takes no notice of the constitution by hereditary tribes, any more than Polybius; for although in their times the ancient forms were still in existence here and there, no one any longer thought of arranging a state according to combinations of families.

The genealogical tribes are more ancient than the local, to which they almost everywhere give way. Their extreme of rigour is in the form of castes; where one is separated from another, without the right of intermarriage, and with an entire difference of rank; each having an exclusive unalterable calling; from which, where need requires it, an individual may be allowed to descend; but to rise is impossible.

The Tarquinii, from what has been said, may have been glad, even more so than any other citizens, of a change, by which the power, until then enjoyed by a single individual, was placed annually within the reach of every noble member of their house, and was secured to them, without being divested of anything but its priestly dignity. For the kingly power was transferred, with no abridgement but this, to the annual magistrates, who in those times still retained the name of prætors. Hence the accurate Dion Cassius, deviating from all other writers, did not use the name of consuls until after the decemvirate; when, as he conceived, the appellation was changed. I allow myself to imitate the example of Livy and Dionysius in giving this glorious name to the immediate followers of the kings. For which reason I here introduce the remark, that this title is neither to be derived from consulting the senate, nor from giving counsel: for, at the beginning of the republic especially, commanding was far more than either the one or the other the distinguishing attribute of the consulate. Without doubt the name means nothing more than simply collegues: the syllable sul is sound in præsul and exsul, where it signifies one who is: thus consules is tantamount to consentes, the name given to Jupiter's council of gods.

I have related the tale of the last king's glory and of his fall no less nakedly than it will have appeared in those homely Annals, the scantiness of which appeared to Cicero to make it his duty, and induced Livy, to throw a rich dress over the story of Rome. That which is harmonious in a national and poetical historian, would be out of tune in a work written more than eighteen hundred years later by a foreigner and a critic. His task is to restore the ancient tradition with greater completeness, by reuniting such features as have been preserved here and there, but have been left out in that classical narrative which has become the current one, and to free it from the refinements with which learning has disfigured it: that distinct and lively view, which his representation also aims to give, is nothing more than the clear and vivid perception of the outlines of the old lost poem. Had a perfectly simple narrative by Fabius or Cato been preserved, I would merely have translated it, have annexed to it whatever remnants I could collect of other accounts, and have added a commentary, such as I now have to write on my own text.

This destruction was the act of the usurper, this the price for which his accomplices allowed him to rule as king, without even the bare show of a confirmation by the curies. Every right and privilege conferred by Servius upon the commonalty was swept away; the assemblages at sacrifices and festivals, which had tended more than all other things to form them into united bodies, were prohibited; the equality of civil rights was abolished again, and the right of seizing the person for debt reestablished: the rich plebeians, like the sojourners, were subjected to arbitrary taxation: the poor were kept at task-work with sorry wages and scanty food, and many were driven by their hardships to put an end to themselves.

Soon however the oppressed had the wretched solace of seeing the exultation of their oppressors turned into dismay. The senators and men of rank were, as under the Greek tyrants, the nearest object for the mistrust and the cupidity of the usurper: after the manner of those tyrants he had formed a body-guard, with which he exercised his sway at pleasure. Many lost their lives; others were banished, and their fortunes confiscated: the vacant places were not filled up: and even this senate, insignificant as its small number made it, was not called together.

About the time of the Persian wars, the Etruscans excited the fears and attention of the Greeks, as masters of the Tyrrhenian sea; although Dionysius is mistaken in supposing that the Greeks named the whole west of Italy Tyrrhenia after them: that name belongs to the period of the genuine Tyrrhenians. When they were confined to Tuscany, and even there had become dependent on the sovranty of Rome, their renown passed away, and the contemporaries of Polybius held their former greatness to be fabulous. In Roman history they are of importance only in the period from the kings to the Gallic conquest; afterward in comparison with the Sabellian tribes they are quite inglorious. By, the Greeks they are mentioned mostly to their discredit, sometimes as pirates, sometimes as gluttons; by the Romans only as aruspices and artists: it is not a traditional opinion which has taught the moderns, that, without regard to the extent their empire once had, they were one of the most remarkable nations of antiquity. The ruins of their cities, the numerous works of art which have been discovered, the national spirit of the Tuscans who saw in them ancestors they were proud of; even the tempting enigma of a language utterly unknown; all this has drawn the attention of the moderns toward them above every other Italian tribe; and the Etruscans are at present incomparably more celebrated and honoured, than they were in the time of Livy.

It is one of the most credible traditions handed down from the earliest times, that the primitive race of the Latins had dwelt about mount Velino and the lake of Celano as far as Carseoli and toward Reate, and had been driven thence onward by the Sabines who came from Aquila. This was Cato's account; and if Varro, who enumerated the towns they had possessed in those parts, was not imposed upon, not only were the sites of those towns distinctly preserved, as well as their names, but also other information concerning; them, such as writings alone can transmit through so many centuries. Their capital Lista was lost by a surprise; and the exertions of many years to recover it by expeditions from Reate proved fruitless. Withdrawing from that district, they came down the Anio; and, even at Tibur, Antemnæ, Ficulea, Tellenalo, and farther on at Crustumerium and Aricia, they found Siculi, whom they subdued or expelled. That Præneste was also a town of the Siculi, seems to be implied by the statement, that it formerly bore the Greek name of Stephane.

This primitive race was called by the Romans Aborigines, a word supposed to signify ancestors, but which it is surely simpler to interpret, the original inhabitants of the country, answering to the Greek Autochthones.

In this division of the nation, the preponderance of numbers may not have been so entirely on the side of the plebeians, as it will probably appear to every one, even to him who has thoroughly rid himself of the delusive notion that the patricians of those ages are to be regarded as a nobless; a class, which in fact was to be found within both the estates. Had the superiority of the plebeians been such as to leave no doubt that the issue of a contest with arms, since matters had unhappily gone so far, would be in their favour, they would never have contented themselves with a compact which merely gave them back a part of the rights they had been robbed of. And yet the commonalty, if it stood together as one man, was evidently so strong, that their opponents betrayed the uttermost infatuation in not endeavouring to separate the various classes which composed it; nay, in wronging and outraging them all at once; the noble and rich, by withholding public offices from them; such of the gentry as without personal ambition were attached as honest men to the well-being of their class, by depriving it of its common rights and privileges; the personal honour of both, by the indignities to which such as stood nearest to the ruling party were the most frequently exposed, and by which men of good birth were the most keenly wounded; every one who wanted to borrow money, and all the indigent, by the abominable system of pledging the person and of slavery for debt; in fine high and low, by excluding them from the public domains, where many, who had been stript of their property by the loss of the territory beyond the Tiber, might have found a home.

A computation of time, which ascending from a given point determines its earliest epoch by artificial combinations, may seem unfit for and unworthy of being used in chronology. But for practical purposes nothing more is requisite, than that the point it begins at be fixed relatively: the first year even of our own common era is notoriously misplaced: only such chronological determinateness must not be mistaken for historical certainty. The dignity of Rome purges its era from the blot of having owed its origin to fraud.

History requires more than one era; Asia a different one from Europe: such eras as reckon backward, or are necessarily dependent on a supposition ascertained to be utterly wrong, are positively bad: different eras are suited to different times; thus the Spanish from the battle of Actium was appropriate so long as the Western empire lasted: afterward it ought to have given way to the general Christian era much sooner than it did; as that of Nabonassar was very reasonably made to yield to the Seleucidian. The greater or less value of an era for practical purposes depends on three qualities: that it begin early enough to comprehend the period of such dates as are really historical, within its sphere in its forward course; that this sphere without straining include the history of the most important nations which come within it; and that the reason which entitles the era to preference, remain long unaltered.