Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/78

54 his worship had occupied as their citadel a square hill, some 160 feet above the sea, whose steep and rocky sides fell sharply to the southern banks of the Tiber, and to the marshy ground which the river sometimes overflowed. Three communities seem to have had their residence as well as their refuge on this hill, while their farms (pagi) lay around it; these three oldest settlements of the oldest Rome were the Cermalus, the Velia, and the Palatium. The whole hill came to be called the Palatine; its natural strength was increased by massive masonry, fragments of which we may see still on its northern and western sides; and its position as commanding the Tiber, and as the outpost of Latium on the borders of Etruria, marked it out for a great future.

This triple community would probably have been called by the Greeks a or  in the earlier sense, as we saw it used of the Arcadian communities which went to form the city of Megalopolis. It could hardly have been deemed a real ; nor can we name a time at which the City-State of Rome began its true existence. But we can trace two stages of its growth, in each of which the genius of the Latins for cohesion was the guiding spirit of its advance. There were other hills around the Palatine which invited settlement. Four communities on the Esquiline formed a union with the three on the Palatine, and this union was kept up in the memory of the Romans for centuries by the festival of the Septimontium on 11th December, which had not become quite forgotten even in the