from the sea, on the highest of which, at nearly the same height with the summit of Helvellyn, stood the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the scene of the common worship of all the people of the Latin name. Immediately under this highest point lies the crater-like basin of the Alban Îake; and on its nearer rim might be seen the trees of the grove of Florentia, where the Latins held the great civil assemblies of their nation. Further to the north, on the edge of the Alban hills, looking towards Rome, was the town and citadel of Tusculum; and beyond this, a lower summit, crowned with the walls and towers of Labicum, seems to connect the Alban hills with the line of the Apennines just at the spot where the citadel of Præneste, high up on the mountain side, marks the opening into the country of the Hernicians, and into the valleys of the streams that feed the Liris. "Returning nearer to Rome, the lowland country of the Campagna is broken by long green swelling ridges, the ground rising and falling, as in the heath country of Surrey and Berkshire. The streams are dull and sluggish, but the hill sides above them constantly break away into little rocky cliffs, where on every ledge the wild fig now strikes out its branches, and tufts of broom are clustering, but which in old times formed the natural strength of the citadels of the numerous cities of Latium. Except in these narrow dells, the present aspect of the country is all bare and desolate, with no trees nor any human habitation. But anciently, in the time of the early kings of Rome, it was full of independent cities, and, in its population and the careful cultivation of its little garden-like farms, must have resembled the most flourishing parts of Lombardy or the Netherlands." nius of Collatia was supping with them. And they disputed about their wives, whose wife of them all was the worthiest lady. Then said Tarquinius of Collatia, 'Let us go and see with our own eyes what our wives are doing, so shall we know which is the worthiest.' Upon this they all mounted their horses and rode first to Rome; and there they found the wives of Titus, and of Aruns. and of Sextus, feasting and making merry. Then they rode on to Collatia, and it was late in the night; but they found Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius of Collatia, neither feasting, nor yet sleeping, but she was sitting with all her handmaids around her, and all were working at the loom. So when they saw this, they all said, 'Lucretia is the worthiest lady. And she entertained her husband and his kinsmen, and after that they rode back to the camp before Ardea. "But a spirit of wicked passion seized upon Sextus, and a few days afterwards he went alone to Collatia, and Lucretia received him hospita bly, for he was her husband's kinsman. At midnight he arose and went to her chamber, and he said that if she yielded not to him he would slay her and one of her slaves with her, and would say to her husband that he had slain her in her adultery. So when Sextus had accomplished his wicked purpose he went back again to the camp. "Then Lucretia sent in haste to Rome, to pray that her father Spurius Lucretius would come to her; and she sent to Ardea to summon her husband. Her father brought along with him Publius Valerius, and her husband brought with him Lucius Junius, whom men called Brutus. When they arrived, they asked earnestly, 'Is all well? Then she told them of the wicked deed of Sextus, and she said, 'If ye be men, avenge it.' And they all swore to her, that they would avenge it. Then she said again, I am not guilty; yet must I too share in the punishment of this deed, lest any should think that they may be false to their husbands and live.' And she drew a knife from her bosom, and stabbed herself to the heart. "At that sight her husband and her father cried aloud; but Lucius drew the knife from the wound, and held it up, and said, 'By this blood I swear that I will visit this deed upon King Tarquinius, and all his accursed race; neither shall any man hereafter be king in Rome, lest he do the like wickedness.' And he gave the knife to her husband, and to her fa We have already adverted to the difficulty of determining where fiction ends and real history begins in the early Roman annals, and the scanty foundation there is in authentic records, for any of the early legends of their history. Fully alive, however, to the exquisite beauty of these remains, and the influence they had on the Roman history, as well as their importance as evincing the lofty character of their infant people, Dr. Arnold has adopted the plan of not rejecting them altogether, but giving them in a simple narrative, something like the Bible, and commencng with his ordinary style when he arrives at events which really rest on historic ground. This is certainly much better than entirely rejecting them; but, at the same time, it introduces a quaint style of writing, in re-ther, and to Publius Valerius. They marvelcounting these early events, to which we can hardly reconcile ourselves, after the rich colouring and graphic hand of Livy. As an example of the way in which he treats this interesting but difficult part of his subject, we give his account of the story of Lucretia, the exquisite episode with which Livy terminates his first book and narrative of the kings of Rome. "Now when they came back to Rome, King Tarquinius was at war with the people of Ardea; and as the city was strong, his army lay a long while before it, till it should be forced to yield through famine. So the Romans had leisure for feasting and for diverting themselves and once Titus and Aruns were supping with their brother Sextus, and their cousin Tarqui led to hear such words from him whom men called dull; but they swore also, and they took up the body of Lucretia, and carried it down into the forum; and they said, 'Behold the deeds of the wicked family of Tarquinius.' All the people of Collatia were moved, and the men took up arms, and they set a guard at the gates, that none might go out to carry the tidings to Tarquinius, and they followed Lucius to Rome. There, too, all the people came together, and the crier summoned them to assemble before the tribune of the Celeres, for Lucius held that office. And Lucius spoke to them of all the tyranny of Tarquinius and his sons, and of the wicked deed of Sextus. And the people in their curia took back from Tar quinius the sovereign power, which they had given him, and they banished him and all his family. Then the younger men followed Lucius to Ardea, to win over the army there to join them; and the city was left in the charge of Spurius Lucretius. But the wicked Tullia fled in haste from her house, and all, both men and women, cursed her as she passed, and prayed that the furies of her father's blood might visit her with vengeance. "Meanwhile King Tarquinius set out with speed to Rome to put down the tumult. But Lucius turned aside from the road that he might not meet him, and came to the camp; and the soldiers joyfully received him, and they drove out the sons of Tarquinius. King Tarquinius came to Rome, but the gates were shut, and they declared to him from the walls the sentence of banishment which had been passed against him and his family. So he yielded to his fortune, and went to live at Cære with his sons Titus and Aruns. His other son, Sextus, went to Gabii, and the people there, remembering how he had betrayed them to his father, slew him. Then the army left the camp before Ardea and went back to Rome. And all men said, 'Let us follow the good laws of the good King Servius; and let us meet in our centuries, according as he directed, and let us choose two men year by year to govern us, instead of a king.' Then the people met in their centuries in the field of Mars, and they chose two men to rule over them, Lucius Junius, whom men called Brutus, and Lucius Tarquinius of Collatia." powerful monarchy, whose sway extended from the northern extremity of the Campagna to the rocks of Terracina; and that it was then more powerful than it ever was for the first hundred and fifty years of the Commonwealth! The Roman kingdom is compared by Arnold, under the last of the kings, to Judea under Solomon; and the fact of a treaty, recorded in Polybius, being in that year concluded with Carthage, proves that the state had already acquired consideration with distant states. "Setting aside," says our author, "the tyranny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering that it was his policy to deprive the commons of their lately acquired citizenship, and to treat them like subjects rather than members of the state, the picture given of the wealth and greatness of Judea under Solomon may convey some idea of the state of Rome under its latter kings. Powerful amongst surrounding nations, exposed to no hostile invasions,, with a flourishing agriculture and an active commerce, the country was great and prosperous; and the king was enabled to execute public works of the highest magnificence, and to invest himself with a splendour unknown in the earlier times of the monarchy." But mark the effect upon the external power and internal liberties of the nation, consequent on the violent change in the government and establishment of the Commonwealth, as portrayed in the authentic pages of this liberal historian. "In the first year of the commonwealth, the Romans still possessed the dominion enjoyed by their kings; all the cities of the coast of Latium, as we have already seen, were subject to them as far as Terracina. Within twelve years, we cannot certainly say how much sooner, these were all become independent. This is easily intelligible, if we only take into account the loss to Rome of an able and absolute king, the na Every classical reader must perceive the object which our author had in view. He has in great part translated Livy, and he wishes to preserve the legend which he has rendered immortal; but he is desirous, at the same time, of doing it, as he himself tells us, in such a manner that it shall be impossible for any reader, even the most illiterate, to imagine that he is recording a real event. It may be pre-tural weakness of an unsettled government, judice, and the force of early association, but and the distractions produced by the king's atwe can hardly reconcile ourselves to this Mo- tempts to recover his throne. The Latins may saic mode of writing the history of the most have held, as we are told of the Sabines in remote events. Every author's style, to be this very time, that their dependent alliance agreeable, should be natural. The reader ex- with Rome had been concluded with King periences a disagreeable feeling in coming Tarquinius, and that as he was king no longer, upon such quaint and perhaps affected pas- and as his sons had been driven out with him, sages, after being habituated to the flowing and all covenants between Latium and Rome were vigorous style of the author. It would be bet- become null and void. But it is possible also, ter, we conceive, to write the whole in one if the chronology of the common story of uniform manner, and mark the difference be- these times can be at all depended on, that the tween the legendary and authentic parts by a Latin cities owed their independence to the difference in the type, or some other equally Etruscan conquest of Rome. For that war,. obvious distinction. But this is a trivial mat- which has been given in its poetical version ter, affecting only the commencement of the as the war with Porsenna, was really a great work; and ample subject of meditation is sug-outbreak of the Etruscan power upon the nagested by many facts and passages in its later pages. We have previously noticed the decisive evidence which the Cloaca Maxima and the treaty with Carthage in the time of Tarquin afford of the early greatness of the Roman monarchy. But we were not aware, till reading Arnold-even Niebuhr has not so distinctly brought out the fact that at the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins and the commencement of the Republic, Rome was already a tions southward of Etruria, in the very front Rome the Tiber was now lost. Rome itself was surrendered to the Etruscan conqueror; his sovereignty was fully acknowledged, the Romans gave up their arms, and recovered their city and territory on condition of renouncing the use of iron except for implements of agriculture. But this bondage did not last long; the Etruscan power was broken by a great defeat sustained before Aricia; for after the fall of Rome the conquerors attacked Latium, and while besieging Aricia, the united force of the Latin cities, aided by the Greeks of Cuma, succeeded in destroying their army, and in confining their power to their own side of the Tiber. Still, however, the Romans did not recover their territory on the right bank of that river, and the number of their tribes, as has been already noticed, was consequently lessened by one-third, being reduced from thirty to twenty. "Thus within a short time after the banishment of the last king, the Romans lost all their territory on the Etruscan side of the Tiber, and all their dominion over Latium. A third people were their immediate neighbours on the north-east, the Sabines. The cities of the Sabines reached, says Varro, from Reate, to the distance of half a day's journey from Rome; that is, according to the varying estimate of a day's journey, either seventy-five or an hundred stadia, about ten or twelve miles. "It is certain, also, that the first enlargement of the Roman territory, after its great diminution in the Etruscan war, took place towards the north-east, between the Tiber and the Anio; and here were the lands of the only new tribes that were added to the Roman nation, for the space of more than one hundred and twenty years after the establishment of the commonwealth." Such were the disastrous effects of the revolution which expelled Tarquinius Superbus, even though originating, if we may believe the story of Lucretia, in a heinous crime on his part, on the external power and territorial possessions of Rome. Let us next inquire whether the social condition of the people was improved by the change, and the plebeians reaped those fruits from the violent change of the government which they were doubtless led to expect. the habit of borrowing money of the burghers; that the distress continuing, they became generally insolvent; and that as the law of debtor and creditor was exceedingly severe, they became liable in their persons to the cruelty of the burghers, were treated by them as slaves, confined as such in their workhouses, kept to taskwork, and often beaten at the discretion of their task-masters." Various were the miseries to which the commons were reduced in consequence of the revolution, and inexorable the rigour with which the nobles pressed the advantage they had gained by the abolition of the kingly form of government. The civil convulsions and general distress, Dr. Arnold tells us, terminated in the establishment of an exclusive oppressive aristocracy, interrupted occasionally by the legalized despotism of a single individual. "Thus the monarchy was exchanged for an exclusive aristocracy, in which the burghers or patricians possessed the whole dominion of the state. For mixed as was the influence in the assembly of the centuries, and although the burghers through their clients exercised no small control over it, still they did not think it safe to intrust it with much power. In the election of consuls, the centuries could only choose out of a number of patrician or burgher candidates; and even after this election it remained for the burghers in their great council in the curia to ratify it or to annul it, by conferring upon, or refusing to the persons so elected the Imperium;' in other words, that sovereign power which belonged to the consuls as the successors of the kings, and which, except so far as it was limited within the walls of the city, and a circle of one mile without them, by the right of appeal, was absolute over life and death. As for any legislative power, in this period of the commonwealth, the consuls were their own law. No doubt the burghers had their customs, which in all great points the consuls would duly observe, be cause, otherwise on the expiration of their office they would be liable to arraignment before the curiæ, and to such punishment as that sovereign assembly might please to inflict; but the commons had no such security, and the uncertainty of the consul's judgments was the particular grievance which afterwards led to the formation of the code of the twelve tables. "We are told, however, that within ten years of the first institution of the consuls the burgh "The most important part," says Arnold, "in the history of the first years of the commonwealth is the tracing, if possible, the gradual depression of the commons to that ex-ers found it necessary to create a single magistrați treme point of misery which led to the institution of the tribunalship. We have seen that immediately after the expulsion of the king, the commons shared in the advantages of the revolution; but within a few years we find them so oppressed and powerless, that their utmost hopes aspired, not to the assertion of political equality with the burghers, but merely to the obtaining protection from personal injuries. with powers still more absolute, who was to exer cise the full sovereignty of a king, and eren without that single check to which the kings of Rome had been subjected. The Master of the people, that is, of the burghers, or, as he was other wise called, the Dictator, was appointed, it is true, for six months only; and therefore liable, like the consuls, to be arraigned after the expiration of his office, for any acts of tyranny which he might have committed during its "The specific character of their degradation continuance. But whilst he retained his of is stated to have been this; that there pre-fice he was as absolute without the walls of the vailed among them severe distress, amounting in many cases to actual ruin; that to relieve themselves from their poverty, they were in city as the consuls were within them; neither commoners nor burghers had any right of ap peal from his sentence, although the latter had enjoyed this protection in the times of the monarchy." At length the misery of the people, flowing from the revolution, became so excessive that they could endure it no longer, and they took the resolution to separate altogether from their oppressors, and retire to the sacred hill to found a new commonwealth. "Fifteen years after the expulsion of Tarquinius, the commons, driven to despair by their distress, and exposed without protection to the capricious cruelty of the burghers, resolved to endure their degraded state no longer. The particulars of this second revolution are as uncertain as those of the overthrow of the monarchy; but thus much is certain, and is remarkable, that the commons sought safety, not victory; they desired to escape from Rome, not to govern it. It may be true that the commons who were left in Rome gathered together on the Aventine, the quarter appropriated to their order, and occupied the hill as a fortress; but it is universally agreed that the most efficient part of their body, who were at that time in the field as soldiers, deserted their generals, and marched off to a hill beyond the Anio; that is, to a spot beyond the limits of the Ager Romanus, the proper territory of the burghers, but within the district which had been assigned to one of the newly created tribes of the commons, the Crustuminian. Here they established themselves, and here they proposed to found a new city of their own, to which they would have gathered their families, and the rest of their order who were left behind in Rome, and have given up their old city to its original possessors, the burghers and their clients. But the burghers were as unwilling to lose the services of the commons, as the Egyptians in the like case to let the Israelites go, and they endeavoured by every means to persuade them to return. To show how little the commons thought of gaining political power, we have only to notice their demands. They required a general cancelling of the obligations of insolvent debtors, and the release of all those whose persons, in default of payment, had been assigned over to the power of their creditors; and further, they insisted on having two of their own body acknowledged by the burghers as their protectors; and to make this protection effectual, the persons of those who afforded it were to be as inviolable as those of the heralds, the sacred messengers of the gods; whosoever harmed them was to be held accursed, and might be slain by any one with impunity. To these terms the burghers agreed; a solemn treaty was concluded between them and the commons, as between two distinct nations; and the burghers swore for themselves, and for their posterity, that they would hold inviolable the persons of two officers, to be chosen by the centuries on the field of Mars, whose business it should be to extend full protection to any commoner against a sentence of the consul; that is to say, who might rescue any debtor from the power of his creditor, if they conceived it to be capriciously or cruelly exerted. The two officers thus chosen retained the name which the chief officers of the commons had borne before, they were called Tribuni, or tribe masters; but instead of being merely the officers of one particular tribe, and exercising an authority only over the members of their own order, they were named tribunes of the commons at large, and their power, as protectors in stopping any exercise of oppression towards their own body, extended over the burghers, and was by them solemnly acknowledged. The number of the tribunes was probably suggested by that of the consuls; there were to be two chief officers of the commons, as there were of the burghers." Thus, all that the Roman populace gained by the revolution which overturned the kingly power, was such a diminution of territory and external importance as it required them more than one hundred and fifty years to recover, and such an oppressive form of aristocratic government as compelled them to take refuge under a dictator, and led to such a degree of misery as, eighteen years after the convulsion, made them ready to quit their country and homes, and become exiles from their native land! At the close of the third century of Rome, and fifty years after the expulsion of the Tarquins, Arnold gives the following picture of the external condition of the Republic: "At the close of the third century of Rome, the warfare which the Romans had to maintain against the Opican nations was generally defensive; that the Equians and Volscians had advanced from the line of the Apennines and established themselves on the Alban hills, in the heart of Latium; that of the thirty Latin states which had formed the league with Rome in the year 261, thirteen were now either destroyed, or were in the possession of the Opicans; that on the Alban hills themselves, Tusculum alone remained independent; and that there was no other friendly city to obstruct the irruptions of the enemy into the territory of Rome. Accordingly, that territory was plundered year after year, and whatever defeats the plunderers may at times have sustained, yet they were never deterred from renewing a contest which they found in the main profitable and glorious. So greatly had the power and dominion of Rome fallen since the overthrow of the monarchy." It was by slow degrees, and in a long series of contests, continued without intermission for two hundred years, that the commons recovered the liberties they had lost from the consequences of this triumph in this first convulsion; so true it is, in all ages, that the people are not only never permanent gainers, but in the end the greatest losers by the revolution in which they had been most completely victorious. The next great social convulsion of Rome was that consequent on the overthrow of the Decemvirs. The success of that revolution operated in the end grievously to the prejudice of the commons, and retarded, by half a century, the advance of real freedom. Every one knows that the Decemvirs were elected to remodel the laws of the commonwealth; that they shamefully abused their trust, and constituted themselves tyrants without control; and that they were at last overthrown by the general and uncontrollable indignation excited 'by the atrocious violence of Appius to the daughter of Virginius. A juster cause for resistance, a fairer ground for the overthrow of existing authority, could not be imagined; it was accordingly successful, and the immediate effect of the popular triumph was a very great accession of political power to the commons. Arnold tells us "This complete revolution was conducted chiefly, as far as appears, by the two consuls, and by M. Duilius. Of the latter we should wish to have some further knowledge; it is an unsatisfactory history, in which we can only judge of the man from his public measures, instead of being enabled to form some estimate of the merit of his measures from our acquaintance with the character of the man. But there is no doubt that the new constitution attempted to obtain objects for which the time was not yet come, which were regarded rather as the triumph of a party, than as called for by the wants and feelings of the nation; and therefore the Roman constitution of 306 was as shortlived as Simon de Montfort's provisions of Oxford, or as some of the strongest measures of the Long Parliament. An advantage pursued too far in politics, as well as in war, is apt to end in a repulse." "The revolution did not stop here. Other and deeper changes were effected; but they lasted so short a time, that their memory has almost vanished out of the records of history. The assembly of the tribes had been put on a level with that of the centuries, and the same principle was followed out in the equal division of all the magistracies of the state between the patricians and the commons. Two supreme magistrates, invested with the highest judicial power, and discharging also those important duties which were afterwards performed by the censors, were to be chosen every After a continued struggle of seven years, year, one from the patricians, and the other from however, this democratic constitution yielded the commons. Ten tribunes of the soldiers, to the reaction in favour of the old institutions or decemviri, chosen, five from the patricians of the state, and the experienced evils of the and five from the commons, were to command new,-and another constitution was the result the armies in war, and to watch over the rights of the struggle which restored matters to the of the patricians; while ten tribunes of the same situation in which they had been before commons, also chosen in equal proportions the overthrow of the Decemvirs; with the adfrom both orders, were to watch over the liber-dition of a most important officer-the Censor, ties of the commons. And as patricians were endowed with almost despotic power-to the thus admitted to the old tribuneship, so the as- patrician faction. This decided reaction is semblies of the tribes were henceforth, like thus described, and the inferences deducible those of the centuries, to be held under the from it fairly stated by Dr. Arnold. sanctions of augury, and nothing could be determined in them if the auspices were unfavourable. Thus the two orders were to be made fully equal to one another; but at the same time they were to be kept perpetually distinct; for at this very moment the whole twelve tables of the laws of the decemvirs received the solemn sanction of the people, although, as we have seen, there was a law in one of the last tables which declared the marriage of a patrician with a plebeian to be unlawful. "There being thus an end of all exclusive magistracies, whether patrician or plebeian; and all magistrates being now recognised as acting in the name of the whole people, the persons of all were to be regarded as equally sacred. Thus the consul Horatius proposed and carried a law which declared that, whoever harmed any tribune of the commons, any ædile, any judge, or any decemvir, should be outlawed and accursed; that any man might slay him, and that all his property should be confiscated to the temple of Ceres. Another law was passed by M. Duilius, one of the tribunes, carrying the penalties of the Valerian law to a greater height against any magistrate who should either neglect to have new magistrates appointed at the end of the year, or who should create them without giving the right of appeal from their sentence. Whosoever violated either of these provisions was to be burned alive as a public enemy. "Finally, in order to prevent the decrees of the senate from being tampered with by the patricians, Horatius and Valerius began the practice of having them carried to the temple of Ceres on the Aventine, and there laid up under the care of the ædiles of the cominons. "In the following year we meet for the first time with the name of a new patrician magistracy, the Censorship; and Niebuhr saw clearly that the creation of this office was connected with the appointment of tribunes of the soldiers; and that both belong to what may be called the constitution of the year 312. "This constitution recognised two points; a sort of continuation of the principle of the decemvirate, inasmuch as the supreme government was again, to speak in modern language, put in commission, and the kingly powers, formerly united in the consuls or prætors, were now to be divided between the censors and tribunes of the soldiers; and secondly, the eligibility of the commons to share in some of the powers thus divided. But the partition, even in theory, was far from equal: the two censors, who were to hold their office for five years, were not only chosen from the patricians, but, as Niebuhr thinks, by them, that is, by the assembly of the curiæ; the two quæstors, who judged in cases of blood, were also chosen from the patricians, although by the centuries. Thus the civil power of the old prætors was in its most important points still exercised exclusively by the patricians; and even their military power, which was professedly to be open to both orders, was not transmitted to the tribunes of the soldiers, without some diminution of its majesty. The new tribuneship was not an exact image of the kingly sovereignty; it was not a curule office, and therefore no tribune ever enjoyed the honour of a triumph, in which the conquering general, ascending to the Capitol to sacrifice to the guardian gods of Rome, was wont to be arrayed in all the insignia of royalty. |