of one hundred persons has been proved by Savigny, in the first volume of his history of the Roman law.  This constitution continued to exist till a late period of the middle ages, but perished when the institution of guilds took the place of municipal constitutions.  Giovanni Villani says, that previously to the revolution in the twelfth century there were at Florence one hundred buoni nomini, who had the administration of the city.  There is nothing in the German cities which answers to this constitution.  We must not conceive those hundred to have been nobles; they were an assembly of burghers and country people, as was the case in our small imperial cities, or as in the small cantons of Switzerland.  Each of them represented a gens; and they are those whom Propertius calls patres pelliti.  The curia of Rome, a cottage covered with straw, was a faithful memorial of the times when Rome stood buried in the night of history, as a small country town surrounded by its little domain.

The most ancient occurrence which we can discover from the form of the allegory, by a comparison of what happened in other parts of Italy, is a result of the great and continued commotion among the nations of Italy.  It did not terminate when the Oscans had been pressed forward from Lake Fucinus to the lake of Alba, but continued much longer.  The Sabines may have rested for a time, but they advanced far beyond the districts about which we have any traditions.  These Sabines began as a very small tribe, but afterward became one of the greatest nations of Italy, for the Marrucinians, Caudines, Vestinians, Marsians, Pelignians, and in short all the Samnite tribes, the Lucanians, the Oscan part of the Bruttians, the Picentians, and several others were all descended from the Sabine stock, and yet there are no traditions about their settlements except in a few cases.  At the time to which we must refer the foundation of Rome, the Sabines were widely diffused.  It is said that, guided by a bull, they penetrated into Opica, and thus occupied the country of the Samnites.  It was perhaps at an earlier time that they migrated down the Tiber, whence we there find Sabine towns mixed with Latin ones; some of their places also existed on the Anio.  The country afterward inhabited by the Sabines was probably not occupied by them till a later period, for Falerii is a Tuscan town, and its population was certainly at one time thoroughly Tyrrhenian.

As the Sabines advanced, some Latin towns maintained their independence, others were subdued; Fidenae belonged to the former, but north of it all the country was Sabine.  Now by the side of the ancient Roma we find a Sabine town on the Quirinal and Capitoline close to the Latin town; but its existence is all that we know about it.  A tradition states that there previously existed on the Capitoline a Siculian town of the name of Saturnia, which, in this case, must have been conquered by the Sabines.  But whatever we may think of this, as well as of the existence of another ancient town on the Janiculum, it is certain that there were a number of small towns in that district.  The two towns could exist perfectly well side by side, as there was a deep marsh between them.