Concerning the origin of the Oenotrians Pherecydes wrote: that Oenotrus was one of the twenty sons of Lycaon, and that the Oenotrians were named after him, as the Peucetians on the Ionian gulph were after his brother Peucetius. They migrated from Arcadia, seventeen generations before the Trojan war, with a numerous body of Arcadians and other Greeks, who were pressed for room at home: and this, says Pausanias, is the earliest colony, whether of Greeks or barbarians, of which a recollection has been preserved.

Other genealogists have stated the number of the Lycaonids differently: the names which occur in Pausanias amount to six and twenty, and several may probably have dropt out of his text. Apollodorus says there were fifty, and one name is wanting in him. Very few in the two lists are the same: Pausanias has no Peucetius, Apollodorus neither him nor Oenotrus: but what is strangest is, that, though all their names indicate them to have been founders of races or of cities, still the latter mythologer makes them all perish in Deucalion's flood. It is clear that he or the author he followed absurdly mixed up a legend about certain impious sons of Lycaon, who perhaps were nameless, with the tradition which enumerated the Arcadian towns and those of kindred origin according to their reputed founders.

The narrative, which since the loss of the ancient Annals has chanced to acquire the character of a traditional history, relates that, after the battle of the forest of Arsia, the Tarquins, in order to obtain more powerful succour, repaired to the court of Lar Porsenna, the king of Clusium; and that he, when his intercession had been rejected, led his army against Rome in their behalf. But this cannot possibly have gained universal currency: Cicero, who yet was very well acquainted with the celebrated legend of Porsenna and Scævola, says, neither the Veientines nor the Latins were able to replace Tarquinius on the Roman throne. So that he either held the Veientine war in which Brutus falls, to be the same with Porsenna's: or he discriminated between the latter, as a war of conquest, and the attempts of the neighbouring states to place the government of Rome in the hands of the man who had thrown himself on their protection, and who was to pay them dear for it. And such no doubt is the older and genuine representation.

This narrative then makes the Etruscans under Porsenna march singly against Rome: and so the story runs in Livy: it is by a palpable forgery that in Dionysius we find Mamilius and the Latins taking part with him: the son-in-law of Tarquinius forsooth could not possibly remain inactive.

I have undertaken to write the history of Rome; from the earliest times of the city, unto the period when the sovranty of Augustus over the Roman world was undisputedly acknowledged. I begin, where a new people arose out of the confluent settlements of divers nations; my goal lies, where this people had incorporated millions with itself, and had imparted to them its language and its laws; where it ruled from the rising unto the setting sun, and the last of the kingdoms that proceeded from Alexander's conquests, was become one of its provinces. Long before any historical record of particular individuals occurs in those times, the forms under which the commonwealth existed, may be recognized with certainty: so firmly, and for centuries indelibly, were they impressed upon every thing, and so entirely was the individual identified with the community. At the close of the time which I purpose to embrace, the nation resolves itself into a fermenting mass, in which the form, now that the soul has abandoned it, daily becomes more indistinct and decays.

Numberless are the events and the changes through which the Romans passed from one of these limits to the opposite: vast destinies, mighty deeds, and men who were worthy to wield a gigantic power, have preserved the memory of much in the story of Rome, even during the most ignorant ages.

The History of Rome was treated, during the first two centuries after the revival of letters, with the same prostration of the understanding and judgement to the written letter that had been handed down, and with the same fearfulness of going beyond it, which prevailed in all the other branches of knowledge. If any one had asserted a right of examining the credibility of the ancient writers and the value of their testimony, an outcry would have been raised against his atrocious presumption: the object aimed at was, in spite of all internal evidence, to combine what was related by them; at the utmost one authority was in some one particular instance postponed to another, as gently as possible, and without inducing any further results. Here and there indeed a free-born mind, such as Glareanus, broke through these bonds; but infallibly a sentence of condemnation was forthwith pronounced against him: besides such men were not the most learned; and their bold attempts were only partial and were wanting in consistency. In this department, as in others, men of splendid talents and the most copious learning conformed to the narrow spirit of their age: their labours extracted from a multitude of insulated details, what the remains of ancient literature did not afford united in any single work, a systematic account of Roman antiquities: what they did in this respect is wonderful.

I turn with pleasure toward my proper mark, from the wearying task of gleaning detached and mostly unimportant notices concerning the Italian nations; and I withdraw myself from the seductive impulse, of trying to divine the nature of what has perished by the continually repeated contemplation of these often uncertain fragments. Yet I must still linger awhile on ground which is of the same kind with the most insecure part of that I have just quitted, but which belongs essentially to Rome, and over which our road must needs pass to the mythical part of Roman story; which must be kept separate, but may not be excluded.

If the investigation concerning the Trojan colony in Latium aimed at deciding with historical probability, by means of direct and circumstantial evidence, whether such a colony actually settled on that coast, a prudent inquirer would decline it. He would deem it absurd to expect evidence as to an event that preceded by five hundred years the time when all is still fabulous and poetical in Roman history: and what traces could be preserved, to supply the place of evidence which obviously cannot possibly exist, when the Trojans with Æneas, even according to the account which assigns the greatest importance to them, were not an immigration such as alters the people it unites with, and distinctly impresses its character on the new formation?

It was from the books of the pontiffs and augurs, that Livy took the formularies for the solemn proceedings of national law; formularies which, after prevailing for many ages, had in his day been long obsolete, and the origin of which was traced back to the kings. This is certain with regard to the formulary in trials for treason, containing the evidence for the existence of that appeal to the people, which Cicero knew of from the pontifical and augural books: nor is it more questionable as to those used in the consecration of a king, in the proceedings of the Pater Patratus at a treaty, in those of the fecials, and in the surrendering of a city. A conjecture about the nature and character of these books is not a presumptuous exploring of a thing that fate has forbidden us to know. They can only be conceived as collections of traditions, decisions, and decrees, laying down principles of law by reporting particular cases: and thus fragments of old poems might be contained in them, such as the law of treason from the lay of the Horatii.

The increase of the senate, whereby the number of senators was raised to three hundred, is ascribed uniformly, with a single, and that too a doubtful, exception, to the first Tarquinius. On the other hand, there are great differences in the statements as to the number he introduced; with respect to which, and to my opinion that this increase was effected by the admission of the third class, it would be an idle repetition for me to speak again.

But the most difficult point in the whole earlier history of the constitution is the formation of the three new centuries attributed to the same king: an innovation which, in consonance to the spirit of such personifications, inasmuch as it confines itself to an extension of the constitution established by Romulus, is placed before the time of Servius Tullius; while it is later than the calling up of the Luceres into the senate, by which act that constitution received its complete developement.

As Idomeneus and Diomedes, so Philoctetes, Epeus, and some of the descendants of Neleus, were brought over to Italy, with Greek warriors and Trojan captives, by other legends, which appropriated and interpreted a variety of relics and monuments. But from none of these pretended settlements did any Grecian people arise; these Greeks must have been metamorphosed and have vanished, like the companions of Diomedes.

The most ancient settlement which acknowledges them, is the Chalcidian at Cuma; originally planted on Ischia and the adjacent small islands. The Alexandrian chronologers assigned it to times of vast antiquity; undoubtedly merely for the sake of connecting its founders with heroic genealogies. For where they were destitute of positive statements, like those as to the time at which the Greek cities in Sicily were founded, they had recourse to computing by generations, which pushed the earliest epochs much too far back. With regard to Cuma they found no era; because that city had long ceased to be Grecian: and if they tried to date its foundation from references to genealogies, then, contrary to all credibility, it came out long anterior to that of the earliest among the less remote Grecian colonies. That the leaders of the emigrants who settled there, bent their course over unexplored waters, is intimated by the legend, that their ships were preceded and guided in the daytime by a dove, at night by the chime of the mystic bronze: but even from the eastern coast of Sicily, the first settlement on Ischia would still have been a bold adventure.

The Romans are not accounted to belong to any of the Italian nations: the writers who talk with credulous simplicity about the people of Romulus as a colony from Alba, still do not on that account ever reckon them among the Latins; and in the traditions of the oldest times they appear equally strangers to all the three nations in the midst of which their city stood. Hence their history, if it only aim at giving an epical narrative of actions and events, may certainly insulate itself; and thus almost all among the ancients who wrote it, have severed it from that of the rest of Italy. But there is no glory from which the Romans were further removed, than from that of the Athenians, of being an original and peculiar people: they belonged to no nation, only because, as even their fables and disfigured legends let us clearly perceive, they arose from the combination of several that were wholly strangers to one another. Each of these transmitted its peculiar inheritance in language, institutions, and religion, to the new people, which in every thing constituting a national distinction was assuredly always unlike some one of its parent races. The previous history of those nations would therefore prepare the way for that of Rome, even if the latter had remained confined to the city.

The country between Oenotria and Tyrrhenia was called by the Greeks Opica or Ausonia. Aristotle says: bordering on the Oenotrians, toward Tyrrhenia, dwelt the Opicans; formerly and to this day known by the additional name of Ausonians. He does not confine their country to Campania; for he terms Latium also a district in Opica. Cuma in Opica was distinguished by that addition from the Æolian: Nola was called by Hecatæus an Ausonian city; others will have called it Opican. The south-east boundary must be placed at the Silarus; and the Roman account, that Ausonia was once the name of the country between the Apennines and the lower sea, is not to be understood of the more southern coast. The notion that Temesa, far south of the Silarus, whence the Greeks of the Homeric age drew their copper, was founded by the Ausonians, seems to rest only on a misunderstanding of the expression used by an Alexandrian poet.

Before the people who gave the country their name, took possession of the coast, then a part of Tyrrhenia, the name Ausonia or Opicia was applied to their territories in the interior, Samnium was the country of the Opicans before it was conquered by the Sabellians: and it was preserved in recollection that the land about Cales and Beneventum was the first which was called Ausonia.

The story of Damaratus acquires a seductive look of historical truth, from the positive manner in which it connects itself with Cypselus, whereby it appears at the same time to confirm the chronological statements with regard to L. Tarquinius. Now could it be assumed that the story was transplanted in this shape from native traditions into the earliest annals, it would only have the more weight in consequence of the gross ignorance as to Grecian affairs displayed by the annalists even so late as in the seventh century of the city, and of their manifest incompetence for contriving that the tables of the pontiffs should synchronize with the history of Corinth. Did they not even consider Dionysius a contemporary of Coriolanus? did they not fancy, running off into the opposite errour, that in the year 323 the Carthaginian armies crossed over into Sicily for the first time?

But this apparent chronological coincidence stands and falls with the dates assigned to L. Tarquinius; and the only foundation for these is a trick played with numbers. In the bare empty outline, which is clearly an invention, there may seem to be such an agreement: but the old Roman story was enormously at variance with those dates, and there is no possibility of a reconcilement: what looks like one has only been brought about by glossing over some things and distorting others.

The keepers of the Sibylline books had recorded, that the first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated in the year 298, and that from that time forth it always recurred after an interval of 110 years, such being the duration of a secle. This statement is at variance with accounts in the annals, which fixed the celebration of the secular festivals in very different years: these annalists would have no weight at all, if they had really contradicted the authentic books; but on the other hand we have no need to suppose that these books noted down anything more than the close of a secle, and the epoch when the beginning of a new one, according to the precepts of the ceremonial law, should have been celebrated by the people, in gratitude for the continuance of its existence in a new period; without regarding whether the solemnity was deferred from circumstances, as was so often the case with a festival vowed to the gods.

If we go back according to this rule from that first secular epoch of which a historical register was preserved, the end of the first, or rather the beginning of the second secle, falls in the year of the city 78.

Iapygia comprehended the South-east of Italy; according to the more ancient writers, from Metapontum, or, including that city, from the Siris, to mount Garganus, or, as the Greeks call it, mount Drion; where it is probable that, in their early geography, Ombrica immediately began. Even Polybius in his time, when enumerating the Italian forces, includes the Iapygians and Messapians under one head. It does not indeed anywhere appear that the Romans gave such an extent to Apulia: yet it certainly seems clear that Iapyx and Apulus are the same name.

In this large country the Greeks distinguished three tribes, the Messapians, Peucetians, and Daunians: the first on the peninsula to the east of Tarentum; the Peucetians to the north of them along the coast from Brundusium to Barium; hence as far as mount Garganus the Daunians. The first about the beginning of the fourth century were enemies of the Tarentines, the two latter tribes their allies. The Messapians however are divided, at least by Strabo, into two tribes, the Sallentines and the Calabrians; the former in Leuternia, on the eastern coast of the Tarentine gulph; the Calabrians from the Iapygian promontory northward, on the Adriatic.

With regard to the purpose of the Servian constitution to impart an equal share in the consular government to the plebeians, every one may frame surmises at his pleasure: that it granted them the right of taking part in elections and in legislation, is known to all.

Servius, as for the sake of brevity I will call the lawgiver in accordance with the writers of antiquity, would have communicated these rights in the simplest manner by following the same method whereby in feudal states the commons obtained a station alongside of the barons, and by ordaining that all national concerns should be brought both before the council of the burghers and that of the commonalty, and that the decree of the one should not have force without the approval of the other, and should be made null by its rejection. This was the footing the plebeian tribes subsequently stood on for some time in relation to the curies: not however until the ties of an amicable intercourse between the two orders had already become so manifold, that their tranquillity was no longer troubled except by a few very wrongheaded incendiaries; not until all had recognized the necessity of labouring for the good of their common country, conformably to the institutions which actually existed.

When we reach the borders of mythical story, which without a miracle could not be immediately followed by annals, we are constrained to adopt a division of time into periods: so that I am not to be reproached for its being immethodical. The opinion we are to form with regard to the pretended histories of the period just marked out, is evident from a comparison of the two historians. Livy under 251 and 252 narrates a war against Pometia and the Auruncians, and repeats the same again afterward, under the year 259, as a war against the Volscians; of an oversight like this Dionysius could not be guilty, and he relates it only in the latter year. On the other hand Livy, who on this point is the more inconsiderate of the two, displays much greater judgement on occasion of the Sabine wars; mentioning nothing about them except two triumphs out of the Fasti; without a syllable on the military occurrences of the five campaigns circumstantially recounted by Dionysius.

Nor does the latter go less into detail in describing the events of the Latin war; concerning which nothing but the battle of Regillus is narrated in Livy; except under 255, where it is said, as briefly as possible, that Fidenæ was besieged, Crustumeria taken, Præneste came over to the Romans.

I combine these two nations, not for the sake of intimating an affinity between them, but because both alike were unconnected, so far at least as we know, with the history of Italy until the later times of the Roman republic, and both dwelt to the south of the Alps only as parts of nations which out of Italy were widely diffused; in very early times too they seem to have been contiguous in the plain of the Po.

The Ligurians are among those nations which the short span of our history embraces only in their decline. Philistus, in representing the Sicelians as Ligurians, who had been expelled by Umbrians and Pelasgians, is not only blind to the identity of the Siculians and the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians; he is certainly no less mistaken as to the extraction of the Ligurians: but his mistake arises only from the very common errour, of confounding two irruptions which the same country has experienced at different times; as the nations that have successively inhabited Dacia, the Getes and Goths, the Huns and Hungarians, are taken one for the other; and in obscure traditions the same people appears, in some as invading, in others as driven out. During his banishment, which he passed in the countries on the Adriatic, Philistus may have learnt among the Umbrians themselves, out of their ancient books, that their forefathers and the Siculians had expelled Ligurians out of Tuscany; and it would be unwise to treat this information with contempt on account of his having understood it confusedly.