Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/68

48 of a suitable settlement to that unhealthy and unfruitful spot in a region otherwise so highly favoured, and that it must have been necessity, or rather some special motive, which led to the establishment of a city there. Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact: the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus, is nothing but a naïve attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain the singular circumstance that the place should have arisen on a site so unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome with the general metropolis of Latium. Such tales, which claim the name of history, but which are merely improvised explanations of no very ingenious character, it is the first duty of history to dismiss; but it may perhaps be allowed to go a step further, and after weighing the special relations of the locality to propose a positive conjecture, not regarding the way in which the place originated, but regarding the circumstances which occasioned its rapid and surprising prosperity and led to its occupying its peculiar position in Latium.

Let us notice first of all the earliest boundaries of the Roman territory. Towards the east the towns of Antemnæ, Fidenæ, Cænina, Collatia, and Grabii lie in the immediate neighbourhood, some of them not five miles distant from the gates of the Servian Rome; and the boundary of the canton must have been in the close vicinity of the city gates. On the south we find at a distance of fourteen miles, the powerful communities of Tusculum and Alba; and the Roman territory appears not to have extended in this direction beyond the Fossa Cluilia, five miles from Rome. In like manner, towards the south-west, the boundary betwixt Rome and Lavinium already occurred at the sixth milestone. While in a landward direction the Roman canton was thus everywhere confined within the narrowest possible limits, from the earliest times, on the other hand, it stretched without hindrance on both banks of the Tiber towards the sea. Between Rome and the coast there occurs no locality that is mentioned as an ancient canton-centre, and no trace of any ancient canton-boundary. The legend, indeed, which lias its definite explanation of the origin of everything, professes to tell us that the Roman possessions on the right bank of the Tiber, the "seven hamlets" (septem pagi), and the important salt-works at its mouth, were taken by King Romu-