Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/71

Rh over is peculiar in their public and private life, and that the distinction between them and the other Latins and Italians in general is pre-eminently the distinction between citizen and rustic. Rome, indeed, was not a mercantile city, like Corinth or Carthage, for Latium was an essentially agricultural country, and Rome was in the first instance, and continued to be, pre-eminently a Latin city. But the distinction between Rome and the mass of the other Latin towns must certainly be traced back to its commercial position, and to the type of character produced by that position in its citizens. If Rome was the emporium of the Latin districts, we can readily understand how, along with, and in addition to Latin husbandry, urban life should have attained vigorous and rapid development there, and thus have laid the foundation for its distinctive career.

It is far more important, and more practicable, to follow out the course of this mercantile and strategical growth of the city of Rome, than to attempt the useless task of analyzing the insignificant and but little diversified communities of primitive times. The course of this development may still be so far recognized in the traditions regarding the successive circumvallations and fortifications of Rome, the formation of which necessarily kept pace with the growth of the Roman commonwealth in importance as a city.

The town, which in the course of centuries grew up as Rome, in its original form embraced according to trustworthy testimony only the Palatine, or "square Rome" (Roma quadrata), as it was called in later times from the irregularly quadrangular form of the Palatine hill. The gates and walls that enclosed this original city remained visible down to the period of the Empire: the sites of two of the former, the Porta Romana, near S. Giorgio in Velabro, and the Porta Mugionis, at the Arch of Titus, are still known to us, and the Palatine ring-wall is described by Tacitus from his own observation, at least on the sides looking towards the Aventine and Cælian. Many traces indicate that this was the centre and original seat of the urban settlement. On the Palatine was to be found the sacred symbol of that settlement, the "outfit vault" (mundus), as it was called, in which the first settlers deposited a sufficiency of everything requisite for a household, and added a clod of their dear native earth. There, too, was situated the building in which the curies assembled for religious and