ten feet. It was navigable for the ancients, to whom water transportation was much cheaper, relatively, than it is to us; they could make profitable use of smaller boats for freight than we can. On the southern bank of this river, near latitude 42°, fifteen miles from the sea, where the ascending navigator finds the first hills near the water's edge, and where he also encounters an island, there Rome was built. Its situation combined military and commercial advantages. Its hills and its island were admirably suited for fortification; and it was at the head of navigation, on the largest stream of Italy's western slope, which, being much nearer than the eastern slope to Carthage, Sicily, Spain, Gaul, and Sardinia, was destined to possess the leading cities of the peninsula.

The territory of the Romans was bounded on the north by that of the Etruscans, on the east by that of the Sabines, and on the south by that of the Latins. Beyond Latium to the southward was the land of the Volscians; east of Latium was that of the Æquians, and east of the Equians and Volscians were the Samnites. All these nationalities seem to have been divided into numerous city states, or petty republics.

SEC. 423. Legendary Period.-The history of Rome may be divided into four periods: first, the legendary, from 754 to 280 B. C.; second, the historical republic, from 280 to 30 B. C.; third, the pagan empire, from 30 B. C. till 300 A. D.; and fourth, the Christian empire, a remnant of which maintained its independence until 1452 A. D. The last of these four periods does not come within the scope of this volume.

The legendary period includes almost five centuries, nearly equally divided between monarchy and republic. The story of Rome, under the kings, as accepted until

the present century, is mythical. It has no connected thread of trustworthy narrative. It abounds with impossibilities. It may be compared with the tale of a notorious falsifier, relating to a matter in which he is interested, containing a multitude of indubitable misrepresentations, without evidence enabling us to verify such of his statements as are in themselves credible.

According to legend, the city of Rome was laid out on a large scale and founded by Romulus, whose father was a god, whose mother was a Latin woman, and whose foster mother was a she-wolf. He collected a large number of followers, mostly Latins, from neighboring states, and, with their aid, built the houses and walls of his capital. He became its first king, and he established a formidable military power. Instead of ruling despotically, as did other monarchs of his time, he transferred the supervision of his government and all legislative authority to a senate of three hundred nobles, collected in a regularly organized deliberative body. After a long reign, nearly all the years of which were spent in triumphant war, he made the throne elective, and gave the election to the senate. According to this story, Rome never had a hereditary monarchy. His successor, Numa, was not his son or relative, but a Sabine, who devoted his energies, during a long reign, to the arts of peace, and especially to the organization of an ecclesiastical system, in accordance with divine revelations given to him immediately. The fifth king, Servius Tullius, who was the son of a slave, transferred the highest political power from the senate to the freemen, or all those who formed the army of the republic. Under his reform, the popular assembly elected the king, enacted laws, and authorized peace and war.

In all there were seven kings, who belonged to three

different nationalities-Latin,Sabine,and Etruscan. They occupied the throne for two hundred and forty-four years, an average of thirty-four years—incredibly long average reigns for elective monarchs. The story of the Roman monarchy abounds with impossibilities and improbabilities, and it lacks every kind of authentication that should entitle it to our acceptance.

The overthrow of the royal government is attributed to the popular indignation at an outrage committed by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last king, on Lucretia, wife of the noble Collatinus. In the main events of this revolution, as reported by Livy, there is nothing incredible, but our faith is overtaxed when we find that twenty-five years later, in 485 B. C., Rome was saved from destruction by the intercession of Veturia, mother of the traitor Coriolanus, at the head of a Volscian army; and that after thirty-six years more, in 449 B. C., the government of the decemvirs was overthrown in a revolution provoked by an outrage threatened to a Roman maiden, Virginia; and that about a century later an important constitutional amendment, providing that one of the consuls should always be a plebeian, proposed by the plebeian tribune, Licinius Stolo, was suggested by a desire to pacify his wife, who was offended by the higher honor paid to her brother-in-law, the patrician, consular tribune, Sulpitius.

States are not saved and constitutions are not changed so often in authentic history as in Roman legend. The story of Lucretia, or that of Virginia, that of Veturia, or that of the wife of Stolo, if it stood alone, might deserve our faith, but the four are too many for a brief period in the life of a small city, especially when we observe that their marvelous combination is associated with a number of other wonderful incidents which are introduced like

the surprises in a dramatic plot. We are told that even if it be admitted that these statements are historically untrustworthy, they are, nevertheless, “so rich and so beautiful that they give us an insight into the early genius of the people which would never have been divined from the imitative literature which has been handed down as Roman." Unfortunately for this theory, the early genius of a people cannot be understood from the fictions of some one exceptional romancer among them, especially if that man should happen to be, as is possible, of foreign blood and education. There is a considerable share of Greek influence, and, perhaps, of direct participation, in the earliest literature of Rome; and the Roman legends are rather Greek than Roman in their character.

Our only record of the events of the four hundred and seventy-four years in the legendary period, is made up of myths and legends, that are of no value, mixed with traditions that have a historical basis. These traditions are inseparably entangled with the legends, and, besides, are conflicting and so confused in their chronological arrangement and in the connecting explanations that no critical acumen can now draw the line between the true and the false. We have no contemporaneous authority to guide us; no history of this period written by an ancient author who had much regard for historical truth with capacity to find and transmit it to later times. Records were kept in legendary Rome, the most notable being the annals of the Pontifex Maximus, or chief priest of the state, who had charge of the calendar, and made brief mention, under their respective dates, of such events as consular elections, eclipses, pestilences, famines, floods, and droughts, and, perhaps, also of glorious victories and disastrous defeats. These pontifical annals were destroyed in 390 B. C., when

Rome was captured and burned by the Gauls, and whether they had much historical value for later years is doubtful. No author known to us quoted their language or expressed an opinion of their merit.

In historical times, many patrician houses preserved copies of the orations delivered at the funerals of their distinguished men, with laudation of the achievements of their ancestors. Such family records, traces of which are observable in many chapters of Livy, cannot be regarded as trustworthy sources of history; they have not been preserved to our time; nor while they were in existence were they subjected to careful examination by any critical historian.

Another source of information for the later historians was the popular ballads, which recited the achievements of the early Romans in a manner suited to entertain their descendants and to heighten their pride in their ancestry. Like the funeral orations, all these ballads have been lost, and they are not even mentioned as of historical value by Livy or Dionysius. It may be presumed that the best of them were far inferior in poetic effect, as in historical suggestion, to the substitutes for them offered to modern readers by the fancy of Macaulay in his Lays of Ancient Rome.

SEC. 424. Literary Poverty.—The poverty of republican Rome in literature is as astonishing as her wealth in political and military capacity. A generation after she had acquired dominion over all of peninsular Italy, and two centuries after Athens had reached the height of her glory under Pericles, Rome had not yet one poet, dramatist, historian, philosopher, or other author whose name has been preserved to our time. Her earliest historian was Fabius Pictor, who was a contemporary of Hannibal,