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.