CHAPTER IV

The Beginnings of Rome

Ramnes

About fourteen miles up from the mouth of the river Tiber hills of moderate elevation rise on both banks of the stream, higher on the right, lower on the left bank.  With the latter group there has been closely associated for at least two thousand five hundred years the name of the Romans.  We are unable, of course, to tell how or when that name arose; this much only is certain, that in the oldest form of it known to us the inhabitants of the canton are called not Romans, but Ramnians (Ramnes); and this shifting of sound, which frequently occurs in the older period of a language, but fell very early into abeyance in Latin,(1) is an expressive testimony to the immemorial antiquity of the name.  Its derivation cannot be given with certainty; possibly “Ramnes” may mean “the people on the stream.”

Tities, Luceres

But they were not the only dwellers on the hills by the bank of the Tiber.  In the earliest division of the burgesses of Rome a trace has been preserved of the fact that that body arose out of the amalgamation of three cantons once probably independent, the Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, into a single commonwealth—­in other words, out of such a —­synoikismos—­ as that from which Athens arose in Attica.(2) The great antiquity of this threefold division of the community(3) is perhaps best evinced by the fact that the Romans, in matters especially of constitutional law, regularly used the forms -tribuere- ("to divide into three”) and -tribus-("a third”) in the general sense of “to divide” and “a part,” and the latter expression (-tribus-), like our “quarter,” early lost its original signification of number.  After the union each of these three communities—­once separate, but now forming subdivisions of a single community—­still possessed its third of the common domain, and had its proportional representation in the burgess-force and in the council of the elders.  In ritual also, the number divisible by three of the members of almost all the oldest colleges—­of the Vestal Virgins, the Salii, the Arval Brethren, the Luperci, the Augurs—­ probably had reference to that three-fold partition.  These three elements into which the primitive body of burgesses in Rome was divided have had theories of the most extravagant absurdity engrafted upon them.  The irrational opinion that the Roman nation was a mongrel people finds its support in that division, and its advocates have striven by various means to represent the three great Italian races as elements entering into the composition of the primitive Rome, and to transform a people which has exhibited in language, polity, and religion, a pure and national development such as few have equalled, into a confused aggregate of Etruscan and Sabine, Hellenic and, forsooth! even Pelasgian fragments.