3 national law of the fetials,' he endeavours to maintain peace, he encourages agriculture, and lastly he and Numa were the only two Roman kings who died a natural death. The story of Ancus is stripped of the miraculous element. Even the account of the uninterrupted peace which prevailed during the reign of Numa is not repeated without modifications. Ancus is represented as peaceful, but at the same time as ready and able to fight. There is by this means nothing left to provoke scepticism, while at the same time an opportunity is given to attribute to this king the introduction of the fetials, and the laws of peace and war. Hence a war with the Latins 2 is attributed to Ancus, in which he is said to have conquered four towns, and to have transplanted their inhabitants to Rome. Dionysius, moreover, tells long and tedious stories of wars with Fidenæ, the Sabines, Volscians, and Veientines, with all of which wars Livy is unacquainted. What is further related of Ancus, viz., that he built a prison, founded Ostia, and established saltworks, belongs to a class of statements which, for reasons that are not always intelligible, the annalists apparently referred at random, now to one king, now to another. Thus, for instance, the excavation of a granted that the art of writing was practised at that time in Rome, and that Numa Pompilius had left written law books. We shall frequently have occasion to notice the carelessness or ignorance of Greek and Latin writers, in making statements which a knowledge of or attention to law, religion, or custom would have shown them to be utterly unfounded. It is, therefore, not in all cases safe to defend the ancient writers by saying that they must have known, better than we know, the condition of the society about which they wrote. Their carelessness and want of critical accuracy too frequently counterbalanced their superior opportunities of knowing the truth. 1 According to Dionysius (ii. 72), and Plutarch (Numa, p. 12), it was Numa who introduced the fetiales. Cicero (De Rep., ii. 17) ascribes their institution to Tullus Hostilius. Livy (i. 32), in naming Ancus Marcius as the author of the fetial law, contradicts his own narrative (i. 24), where he had referred to it as existing under Tullus. 2 Livy (i. 32) mentions as the cause of this war the rupture of the alliance with Tullus Hostilius, of which, however, he has reported nothing. 3 These towns-viz., Politorium, Tellenæ, Ficana, and Medullia-if they ever existed as separate communities, must have been very insignificant. Not a trace of any of these places was left in historical times, nor is even the locality of any of them known (see Schwegler, Röm. Gesch., i. 599). Medullia is reported as conquered a second time by Tarquinius Priscus (Livy, i. 38). CHAP. V. BOOK I. Ancus and the Roman plebs. Patricians and plebeians. Supposed distinction between 4 2 trench (the so-called Fossa Quiritium) is ascribed not to Ancus alone, but to Numa,' to Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus,3 with this difference, that it is called at one time a sewer 3 constructed in Rome, at another a ditch for the fortification of the Quirinal, at another a ditch surrounding Ostia.5 Thus the credit of having added the hill Coelius to the town is claimed for Romulus, for Tullus Hostilius, for Ancus Marcius, and for the elder Tarquin. The Etruscan captain, Coles Vibenna, from whom the name of the hill is generally derived, has no settled place in the chronicles of the regal period, and by Festus is even split into two persons, called respectively Coles and Vibenna. According to Dionysius, Varro, and Paulus Diaconus, he came to Rome under Romulus; according to Tacitus, under Tarquinius Priscus.* What we have said is sufficient to show the worth of the alleged history of Ancus Marcius. We might now take leave of this king, if the high authority of Niebuhr did not compel us to examine an hypothesis concerning the origin of the Roman plebs, which he has ventured to base on the story of King Ancus, and which has been adopted by most modern historians." The ancients, and all modern writers before Niebuhr, were of opinion that from its very beginning the Roman people consisted of patricians and plebeians. According to this view the plebeians were clients, that is, dependants or tenants of the patricians, bound to perform special services, in return for which they enjoyed the protection of the patricians, especially in cases of legal prosecutions. This view, though simple and intelligible, is rejected by Niebuhr as untenable, and altogether wrong. He puts in plebeians its place a theory for which no evidence can be found in the ancient writers, and which has not even the merit and clients. 1 Dionysius, ii, 62. 2 Livy, i. 44. Aurel. Victor, de vir. ill. 8. Cicero, De Rep., ii. 8. Dionysius, ii. 50. Livy, i. 30. See the passages in Schwegler, Röm. Gesch., i. 507, n. 5, 6. Becker, Röm. Alterthümer, ii. 1, 135. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 628. of clearness, simplicity, and probability. According to this theory, there was at first no plebs in Rome at all, and the people consisted only of patricians and clients. It was Ancus Marcius, according to Niebuhr, who added the plebs to the original inhabitants, by transplanting the conquered Latins to Rome, under new conditions and on a new legal footing, neither placing them as patricians and clients in the existing three tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, nor making a new tribe of them, as Tullus had done with the Albans, but forming them into a distinct class of citizens, with peculiar rights and duties. From this time forward there were three classes of citizens in Rome,-the patricians, their clients, and the plebeians, whose political contests make up the principal part of the internal history of Rome. To establish this theory Niebuhr brings the following arguments. CHAP. V. urged for In historical times the Aventine Hill was the principal Arguments quarter of the Roman plebs. This hill was peopled by this disAncus Marcius with the conquered Latins. Ancus was tinction. unable to form them into a new tribe; for, by the establishment of the third tribe, that of the Luceres under Tullus Hostilius, the framework of political organisation was complete, and could be disturbed no more. Ancus was consequently compelled to create a new legal status for the citizens whom he had incorporated, and this he did by placing them as plebeians by the side of the patricians and their clients. This reasoning is exposed to several serious objections:2 to these 1. The plebeians did not dwell on the Aventine alone, Objections but in every part of the city, and especially in the country.3 arguments. 2. The Aventine and the valley which lay between it 4 and the Palatine were far too small to receive the many 'Niebuhr, Röm. Gesch., i. 422; English translation, i. 398. 2 See the author's Researches, p. 12 (Forschungen, p. 10). Schwegler, Röm. Gesch., i. 630. This Livy, i. 33: T m quoque multis millibus Latinorum in civitatem acceptis, quibus ut iungeretur Palatio Aventinum, ad Murciæ datæ sedes.' valley of Murcia was, however, at that time still covered by a swamp, and, according to the received tradition, was not drained till the time of the Tarquinii by the Cloaca Maxima (Livy, i. 35; Ovid, Fast., ii. 391). Then the greatest BOOK 1. thousand Latins whom Ancus is said to have settled there. 3. It was not before the Icilian law, fifty-one years after the expulsion of the kings, that the Aventine appears to have become the principal plebeian quarter. Up to that time it had been mostly arable land and pasture. 4. The story of the transplanting of conquered populations to Rome deserves no credit. It is not at all probable that the cultivators of the surrounding districts were taken away from their fields and their farms, and made to live in the city, where they could only be a useless rabble. Nor can we imagine that a hostile population, just conquered in war, were transplanted in great numbers to Rome to be settled on such a hill as the Aventine, which formed a respectable stronghold, where they might have become troublesome or dangerous. In historical times the Romans were accustomed to adopt a policy the very reverse of that ascribed to Ancus. Instead of carrying their conquered enemies to Rome, they sent Roman colonists into the conquered towns. The unauthenticated accounts of the regal period which speak of the reception of Sabines, Albans, and Latins in Rome, are either invented to explain the alleged rapid growth of the city, or they proceed from a misunderstanding. The expression that the conquered Latins were received into the city, implying that they were made Roman citizens,' may have been erroneously interpreted as meaning that they were bodily transferred to Rome. 5. There is no ground for supposing that the conquered Latins were received under conditions different from those under which the alleged transfer of Albans took place under Tullus, even if we allow, for argument's sake, that 2 portion of it was used as a race-course. Becker (Röm. Alterth., ii. 310, n. 1) and Niebuhr saw that this locality was not sufficiently large to accommodate the thousands of conquered Latins, alleged to have been transferred to Rome. They took refuge therefore in the hypothesis, that only a part of the Latins were located here. It is needless to say that such an hypothetical limitation materially weakens the cogency of the argument and the strength of the evidence. 'In civitatem recepti.'-Livy, i. 33. 2 This is also the opinion of Göttling (Römische Staatsverfassung, § 87), and they were brought to Rome at all by Ancus. If it be true, as Niebuhr supposes, that Tullus formed the tribe of the Luceres out of the Albans, it is difficult to see why Ancus could not have formed a fourth tribe out of the Latins, or what prevented him from distributing them equally among the three existing tribes. 6. There was no difference in historical times, in point of constitutional rights, between Clients and Plebeians. It is a groundless assumption that any such difference existed in the time of the early kings, of which we possess no authenticated records. CHAP. V. 7. All accounts concerning King Ancus are unhistorical. If Ancus was only the reflected image of Numa, and Numa himself only the personification of an imaginary religious lawgiver, the story of the settlement of Latins in Rome falls to the ground, and it would be unsafe to base upon such doubtful facts any hypothesis about the origin and the rights of the different classes of citizens in ancient Rome. The stories of Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius are like shadowy forms, which vanish into nothing as we approach them. Perhaps even the names and the order of succession of the seven kings, and the character of the story, as it is found in Livy and Dionysius, are the result of mere chance. By some other chance Romulus might have been succeeded by Servius, and instead of Tullus the third king might have been called Coelius.' We must altogether cast aside the notion that the neatly adjusted General series of events in the regal period is even so much as an outline of real events. The whole history of the kings is worthless in its detail. All that we can hope to do is to form from the various materials a rough picture of the Becker (Röm. Alterth., ii. 1, 135), though they fail to draw the necessary conclusion. By Appian (i. 2) he is called Ancus Hostilius, instead of Tullus Hostilius. If Etruscan annals had been preserved, we might possibly have found in them the following list of Roman kings: 1. Romulus, 2. Tages, 3. Cœlius, 4. Marcius, 5. Tarchon, 6. Mastarna, 7. Tarquinius. The wife of Tarquinius Priscus is called Tanaquil after such Etruscan annals; her Latin name is Gaia Cæcilia. -See Niebuhr, Röm. Gesch. i. 395, 401; English translation, i. 372, 377. untrustworthiness of the regal history. |