On the mixture of the Peloponnesian and Thessalian legends of the adventures of Hercules, and the confusion of Hercules with foreign heroes. On the general character of the heroic mythology.

1. We must now entreat the indulgence of our readers when we enter upon an obscure and difficult part of our subject, and one lying beyond the limits of historical record. We allude to the Peloponnesian fable of Hercules; a collection of legends doubtless for the most part invented subsequently to the Doric invasion, and intended by that nation in great measure to justify their conquest of the Peninsula, and to make their expedition appear, not as an act of wrongful aggression, but as a reassertion of ancient right. Some hero (perhaps even of the same name) must have existed in the Argive traditions in the time of the Persidæ, and the resemblance may have been sufficiently striking to identify him with the father of the Doric Hyllus. We shall therefore consider the destroyer of the Nemean lion as a native Argive hero; but the delay experienced at his birth, and his consequent exposure to want and toil, evidently belong to the Doric tradition, as well as the enmity of Juno; fables which were partly borrowed from the worship of Apollo, and may partly have been intended to indicate the contrast between the ancient worship of Argos and that of the invading race.

On the Doric Dialect.

1. The ancient grammarians divided the Greek language into four distinct branches–the Doric, Ionic, Attic, and Æolic; the latter including all dialects not comprised under the other three heads, because only one branch of it, the Lesbian, was the written language of one species of poetry: and yet this latter division must unquestionably have contained different species less connected with each other than with some branches of the other three dialects. It is, however, pretty well agreed that the several Æolic dialects together contained more remains of the primitive Grecian or (if we will so call it) Pelasgic language, than either the Doric, Ionic, or Attic; and that at the same time many forms of the latter were preserved with great fidelity in the Latin tongue; partly because the life of the Italian husbandmen bore a nearer resemblance to that of the ancient Greeks than that of the later Greeks themselves, and because neither their literature, nor any fastidious sense of euphony and rhythm, induced them to soften and refine their language. But of the more polished dialects, that of Homer, though differing in many points, yet in others doubtless closely resembled the original language, which must once have been spoken from Thessaly to the Peloponnese, and was variously metamorphosed in the Doric, Ionic, and Attic dialects.

On the diversity of Apollo Nomius, and Apollo the father of Æsculapius, from the Doric Apollo. That Apollo was not originally an elementary deity.

1. Having now treated of the extension and propagation of the worship of Apollo, and some of the most remarkable legends and fables connected with it, our attention is next turned to the nature and character of the religion itself.

In the first place, then, we shall remind the reader of a position sufficiently established by the foregoing inquiries; viz. that the Apollo of Tempe, Delphi, Delos, Crete, Lycia, Troy, Athens, and the Peloponnese, is the same god, and not, as was very frequently the case in the religions of Greece, a combination of several deities under one name. This conclusion we supported as well by historical accounts respecting the foundation of his numerous temples, as by memorials of another kind; viz. the recurrence of the same names, rites, and symbols; such, for example, as the titles of Lycius and Lycia, Delphinius and Pythius; the oracles and sibyls; the purifications and expiations; the custom of leaping from rocks; decimations; the golden summer, and bloodless oblations; the laurel-berries; the legend of the Hyperboreans, and the cycle of eight years. Hence the theologians mentioned by Ciceroe were wrong in endeavouring without any authority to make a distinction between the Athenian, Cretan, and Hyperborean Apollo.

Domestic occupations of the Spartans. Funeral ceremonies of the Dorians. On the national character of the Dorians in general. Its varieties in the Dorians of Sparta, Crete, Argos, Rhodes, Corinth, Syracuse, Sicyon, Phlius, Megara, Byzantium, Ægina, Cyrene, Crotona, Tarentum, Messenia, and Delphi.

1. After Anacharsis the Scythian had visited the different states of Greece, and lived among them all, he is reported to have said, that “all wanted leisure and tranquillity for wisdom, except the Lacedæmonians, for that these were the only persons with whom it was possible to hold a rational conversation.” The life of all the other Greeks had doubtless appeared to him as a restless and unquiet existence, as a constant struggle and effort without any object. In addition to the love of ease, which belonged to the original constitution of the Dorians, there was a further cause for this mode of life, viz. the entire exemption from necessary labour which the Spartans enjoyed, their wants being supplied by the dependent and industrious classes. Several writers have dwelt on the tedium and listlessness of such an existence; but the Spartans considered an immunity from labour an immunity from pain, and as constituting entire liberty. But, it may be asked, what was there to occupy the Spartan men from morning to night?

Among all the Greek cities built after the return of the Heraclidæ, there was none so insignificant, that Ephorus, and the writers who after him introduced the origins of cities into general history, would have been unable to state specifically and with sufficient certainty the people from which the colony had issued, and the founders who led it and gave laws to it; in far the most cases they also fixed the epoch of the foundation. When Rome was founded, which yet is supposed to be more recent than perhaps the greater part of those Greek cities; from what people the eternal city originally arose; is precisely what we do not know. But it is no less suited to the eternity of Rome for its roots to lose themselves in infinity, than what the poets sang of the rearing and deification of Romulus, befits the majesty of the city. A god, or no one, must have founded it.

Now while I acknowledge this with a love, the sincerity of which none but a bigot, insincere himself, could seek to call in question, while I allow the heart and the imagination their full rights; I at the same time assert the claims of the reason, to take nothing as historical which cannot be historical; and, without refusing to the noble tradition its place at the threshold of the history, to inquire whether it can be in any degree ascertained to what people the original Romans may have belonged, and what changes attended the rise of that state which, when the light of historical truth begins to dawn, is Rome.

When the existence of an unknown southern continent was generally believed, when its outline was drawn on maps, and it was deemed presumptuous incredulity to reject it as a fiction, an essential service was then done to knowledge by the voyagers who crossed that outline, and shewed that, though certain points and coasts included in it really existed, they conferred no reality on the imaginary continent. A further step was to give a comprehensive proof of its nonexistence. But the demands of geography could be satisfied only by the examination of the several islands which existed in the place attributed to the supposed continent; and if the navigator was kept off and prevented from landing on them by reefs and breakers, if mists obscured his view of them, still what he perceived was no longer merely negative gain: and many inferences might be drawn from our knowledge of such countries, as there were good grounds for considering to be similar or identical in their nature and population with the regions which could not be directly explored.

I do not inquire who built Rome, and gave laws to her; but what Rome was, before her history begins, and how she grew out of her cradle: on these points something may be learnt from traditions and from her institutions.

The festival called Septimontium preserved the remembrance of a time when the Capitoline, Quirinal, and Viminal hills were not yet incorporated with Rome; but when the remainder of the city, to the extent afterward inclosed, with the exception of the Aventine, which was and continued a borough, by the wall of Servius, formed a united civic community. It consisted of seven districts, which as such had each its own holidays and sacrifices even in the age of Tiberius: Palatium, Velia, Cermalus, Cælius, Fagutal, Oppius, Cispius. Not that every one of these places had a claim to be called a hill: one unquestionably, and perhaps a second, lay in the plain at the foot of a hill. Others were hights, which in later times were accounted to appertain to some neighbouring hill, as though forming a part of it, with the view of not reckoning up more than seven in Rome: for even in regard to this division, a form which had belonged to an early age and a petty state of things, was subsequently stretched by the Romans to fit a very enlarged state.

The appointment of the first dictator is placed in the tenth year after the first consuls; and by the oldest annalists T. Larcius is named as the person. Among a variety of contradictory statements, one invented by the vanity of the Valerian house assigned this honour to a nephew of Publicola. According to the date just mentioned Larcius was consul at the time, and so would only have received an enlargement of his previous power: another account related as the occasion of the appointment, what sounds probable enough, that the republic had been placed by an unfortunate choice in the hands of two consuls of the Tarquinian faction, whose names were subsequently rendered dubious by indulgence or by calumny.

That the name of dictator was of Latin origin, is acknowledged; and assuredly the character of his office, as invested with regal power for a limited period, was no less so: the existence of a dictator at Tusculum in early, at Lavinium in very late times, is matter of history; and from Latin ritual books, which referred to Alban traditions, Macer was enabled to assert that this magistracy had subsisted at Alba; though it is true that the preservation of any historical record concerning Alba is still more out of the question than that of any concerning Rome before Tullus Hostilius.

The Romans have no common national name for the Sabines and the tribes which are supposed to have issued from them: the latter, whether Marsians and Pelignians, or Samnites and Lucanians, they term Sabellians. That these tribes called themselves Savini or Sabini, is nearly certain from the inscription on the Samnite Denarius coined in the Social war; at least as to the Samnites, whose name is in every form manifestly, and in the Greek Σανῖται directly, derived from Savini: but the usage of a people whose writings have perished, like every thing that is extinct in fact, has lost its rights. I think myself at liberty to employ the term Sabellians for the whole race; since the tribes which were so named by the Romans, are far more important than the Sabines; and it would clearly have offended a Latin ear, to have called the Samnites Sabines: for investigations like those of this history a general name is indispensable.

When Rome crossed the frontiers of Latium, the Sabellians were the most widely extended and the greatest people in Italy the Etruscans had already sunk, as they had seen the nations of earlier greatness sink, the Tyrrhenians, Umbrians, and Ausonians. As the Dorians were great in their colonies, the mother-country remaining little; and as it lived in peace, while the tribes it sent forth diffused themselves widely by conquests and settlements; so, according to Cato, was it with the old Sabine nation.

In every state the constitution of which was grounded on a certain number of houses, a commonalty grew up or subsisted by the side of the burghers or of the freeholders. They who belonged to this commonalty, were not only recognized as freemen, but also as fellow-countrymen: they received like succour against foreigners, were under the protection of the laws, might acquire real property, had their motes for making by-laws and their courts, were bound to serve in time of war, but were excluded from the government, which was confined to the houses.

The origin of the commonalty, though exceedingly various, in cities mostly coincides with that of the rights of the pale-burghers; of the dwellers within the pale or the contado: but it increased in extent and still more so in importance, when a city acquired a domain, a distretto, containing towns and a variety of small places. Among the ancients, the inhabitants of such a domain were sometimes taken in a body under the protection of the law and admitted to the rights of freemen; more frequently this was done in the case of such as removed thence into the city: these were persons of very different rank, gentle and simple.

It is well known that, before the Julian reformation of the calendar, the Roman was a lunar year, which was brought, or was meant to be brought, into harmony with the solar by the insertion of an intercalary month. The great Joseph Scaliger, with that piercing eye which converts the declarations of such as know not what they are saying into evidence of truth, discovered the original system of this computation with indisputable certainty. He has shewn that the principle was to intercalate a month, alternately of 22 and 23 days, every other year during periods of twenty-two years, in each of which periods such an intercalary month was inserted ten times, the last biennium being passed over. As five years made a lustre, so five of these periods made a secle of 110 years.

The notion that Italy was in a state of barbarism, and that science was first introduced there through the intercourse between Rome and Greece, must give way, when on the contrary we see this easy and regular computation of time so entirely forgotten in the very age of literary refinement, that Cæsar found the year 67 days in advance of the true time, and was forced to borrow his reformation of the calendar from foreign science.

The appointment of the dictator by the curies is a step backward from the constitution of Servius, evincing a settled plan to rob the plebeians of its advantages and honours, while its burthens were still to remain with them. The encroachments of the patricians went further: the election of the consuls was also withdrawn from the centuries: that it was so will be proved in the sequel of this history, at the period when the plebeians recovered a part of their rights. If this was a sheer usurpation, and not a compulsory bargain, it must have occurred before the secession of the commonalty.

What are we to think of a history which contains not a word of such changes! And deep as is the obscurity lying over this period, no less gloomy is everything belonging to it that our researches can discover. After the banishment of the Tarquins the government had behaved with kindness to the commonalty: it is related that all duties were then done away with; that the city took the salt-trade into its own hands, to put a stop to the extortion of the retail-dealers: the statement that the plebs was exempted from tribute, must be understood to mean, either that the whole charge of paying the troops was thrown upon the ærarians, or that the system of arbitrary taxation introduced under the last Tarquinius was abolished.

No one can ascend up to their springs along the streams by which the tribes of the present human race have been carried down: still less can any eye pierce across the chasm, which there severs the order of things wherein we and our history are comprised, from an earlier one. That a former race of mankind has passed away, is a general popular belief; and it was shared and cherished by the Greek philosophers: but they dissent from the people in this: Plato and Aristotle suppose that a few, embers as it were, had escaped from the general ruin, and that from them a new race of mankind had gradually spread over the desolated earth; while the people in the renewed life of man saw a new creation, the Lai of Deucalion, the Myrmidons of Æacus; and deemed the extinct race rebels against the heavenly powers, led astray by the consciousness of their enormous strength. So the later Jews dreamt of giants before the deluge; so the Greeks of the Titans of Phlegra, and of those who perished in the flood of Deucalion or of Ogyges: so the savages of North America fable of the Mammoth, that the devastated world had invoked the lightnings of heaven, and not in vain, against the reason-gifted monster, the man of the primitive age.

The contemporaries of Camillus, though they had a firmly rooted belief in the legends about Romulus, would have laughed at any one who, as the most intelligent men did three centuries after, should have represented the institution of the senate as a politic measure issuing from the free-will of the founder of the city. In the cities of all the civilized nations around the Mediterranean, a senate was no less essential and indispensable than a popular assembly; it was a select body of the elder citizens: such a council, says Aristotle, there always is, whether the constitution be aristocratical or democratical: even in the oligarchal, be the number of sharers in the sovranty ever so small, some counsellors are appointed to prepare public measures.

That the Roman senate, like the Athenian of Clisthenes, corresponded to the tribes, has been already explained: but we may go further, and affirm without hesitation, that originally, when the number of houses was complete, the senate represented them immediately, and by a number proportionate to theirs. The three hundred senators at Rome corresponded to the three hundred houses, the number which was assumed above on good grounds: the decurion of each gens, who was its alderman, and the president in its by-meetings, would represent it in the senate.