Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/61

Rh to their present level, and a considerable space was gained for tillage on the mountain itself.

The summits also of the last offshoots of the Sabine range are natural fastnesses of the Latin plain; and the cantonstrongholds there gave rise at a later period to the considerable towns of Tibur and Præneste. Labici too, Gabii, and Momentum, in the plain between the Alban and Sabine hills and the Tiber, Rome on the Tiber, Laurentum and Lavinium on the coast, were all more or less ancient centres of Latin colonization, not to speak of many others less famous and in some cases almost forgotten.

All these cantons were in primitive times politically sovereign, and each of them was governed by its prince with the co-operation of the council of elders and the assembly of warriors. The feeling, however, of fellowship based on their community of descent and of language not only pervaded the whole of them, but manifested itself in an important religious and political institution—the perpetual league of the collective Latin cantons. The presidency belonged originally, according to the universal Italian as well as Hellenic usage, to that canton within whose bounds lay the meeting-place of the league; in this case it was the canton of Alba, which, as we have said, was generally regarded as the oldest and most eminent of the Latin cantons. The communities entitled to participate in the league were in the beginning thirty—a number which we find occurring with singular frequency as the sum of the constituent parts of a commonwealth in Greece and Italy. What cantons originally made up the number of the thirty Old Latin communities, or, as with reference to the metropolitan rights of Alba they are also called, the thirty Alban colonies, tradition has not recorded, and we can no longer ascertain. The rendezvous of this union was, like the Pambœotia and the Panionia among the similar confederacies of the Greeks, the "Latin festival" (feriæ Latinæ), at which, on the "Mount of Alba" (Mons Albanus, Monte Cavo), upon a day annually appointed by the chief magistrate for the purpose, an ox was offered in sacrifice by the assembled Latin stock to the "Latin god" (Jupiter Latiaris). Each community taking part in the ceremony had to contribute to the sacrificial feast its fixed proportion of cattle, milk, and cheese, and to receive in return a portion of the roasted victim. These usages continued up to a late period, and are well known: