in Daunia from the Oscans, higher up along the Adriatic from the Sabellians and Umbrians: and the continued progress of the Sabellians subsequently occasioned the Ausonian Opicans to attack the Latins, a people sprung from an earlier emigration of other tribes belonging to their own race. The further changes do not require a

summary.

THE PRELIMINARY HISTORY OF ROME.

ENEAS AND THE TROJANS IN LATIUM.

I Now turn with pleasure toward my proper mark, from the wearisome task of gleaning detached and mostly unimportant notices concerning the Italian nations; and I retire from the seductive impulse to divine the nature of what has perished, by continually renewing the examination of these often uncertain fragments. Yet I must still linger a while on ground of the same kind with the most insecure part of what I have just quitted, but ground belonging essentially to Rome, and over which our road must needs pass to the mythical part of Roman story; a part that must be kept separate, but may not be excluded. If the object of an investigation concerning the Trojan colony in Latium were to decide 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 any testimonies as to an event five hundred years antecedent to the time when all is still fabulous and poetical in the history of Rome and what traces could have been preserved, to supply the place of evidence which obviously cannot possibly exist? when the Trojans with Eneas, even according to the account which assigns them the greatest importance, were not an immigrating tribe such as would alter the people it united with, and

impress its character distinctly on the new formation. In the earliest Roman narrative they are represented as the crew of merely a single ship: and even in the later, which might lead us to look for a somewhat larger number, they are still no more than a small band, for whom the fields of one village were sufficient. There being no trace of such a settlement to be found in Latium a thousand years afterward, would be no proof against the strangers having come thither.

The real object of this investigation is, to determine whether the Trojan legend is ancient and homesprung, or adopted by the Latins from the Greeks; and whether there is any chance of explaining how it originated. Besides it is worth the while to collect the peculiar features of the earliest Roman accounts, which are very little known.

Let none look on this inquiry with scorn, from thinking that Ilion too was a fable, and a voyage into the unknown West was impossible. It is true, the Trojan war belongs to the region of fable, so that we cannot select a single point among its incidents as more or less probable than the rest yet undeniably it had a historical foundation. That the Atrids were kings of the Peloponnesus, is unquestionable. Nor can the voyage to Latium be termed impossible; since the boldness of mariners is by no means checked by the imperfect condition of their vessels: nor is their knowledge of distant regions to be measured by the notions of their countrymen who remain at home, in an age without books, or maps, or men of learning.

The story that the Trojans were not utterly destroyed at the fall of Troy, but that a part of them survived, and that this remnant had been governed by the house of Æneas, is as old as the Homeric poems. True, it does not by any means follow from this, that the legend which makes the descendants of Æneas rule over emigrants at a distance from Troy, was equally old; we can only say, there is no contradiction between the two. All that is

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exprest in the well-known passage of the Iliad*, is that a Trojan people would continue to exist and it would certainly be more natural to refer the prophecy to the independent Dardanians under Eneas, whose situation would enable them to occupy the desolated territory of Ilium immediately after the departure of the Greeks, than to a distant settlement in regions which, even if they were known to the mariner, were altogether obscure to the poet; but that Troas and the Hellespont in the Homeric age had long been full of Æolian colonies. Arctinus of Miletus too, a poet contemporary with the building of Rome, only related, unless the abstracts in the Chrestomathia of Proclus are incorrect, that Æneas and his followers, being terrified by the portentous fate of Laocoon's children, abandoned the city and withdrew from the general ruin to mount Ida. It is certainly possible that his account of what afterward befell the fugitives, might be overlooked in those abstracts. But Dionysius was acquainted with the poems of Arctinus, and not merely with his Ethiopid, but also with his Destruction of Troy: for he gives us his story of the stealing of the false Palladium 521: and he does not combine this story with the accounts which stated that the image had been brought by the Trojans into Italy. Now if the Milesian poet, whose great antiquity Dionysius expressly urges, had related anything about a subsequent emigration of Æneas, it is inconceivable that Dionysius should have neglected his evidence for the settling of the Trojans in Italy, when he was amassing all he could muster out of Hellanicus, Cephalon, and other writers so much more recent.

In the Laocoon of Sophocles 22 Æneas was represented as retiring before the taking of the city, and as having been followed by great numbers to new abodes, the desire of many of the Phrygians. But even if Sophocles took the

* xx. 307-308.

521 I. 69. 22 Quoted by Dionysius 1. 48.

fable of his tragedy in the main from the ancient cyclic poet I have been speaking of, still it no way follows, that he did not in this instance exercise his customary licence, of making a free selection out of the narratives contained in other poems on the fall of Troy.

Dionysius seems neither to have been acquainted with Pisander, nor with the lyrical poem of Stesichorus on the destruction of Ilion. If credit is due to the account, that Virgil formed the second book of the Æneid entirely on the model of Pisander's epic poem 523, we then know that the latter sang, how Eneas after the fall of the city made his escape with a part of the Trojans, and emigrated; and that too not as a traitor, nor through the clemency of the Argives: but we are not warranted in drawing any conclusions as to a further coincidence between his story and Virgil's. The age of Pisander, if he was the Camiræan, is quite indeterminate, lying between that of Hesiod and the thirty-third Olympiad.

Stesichorus however sang of the emigration of Æneas, almost in the same way as Virgil; for the representations on the Iliac Table seem entitled to confidence. In them we find the hero preserving his father and the holy things, -with but slight variations from Virgil's description,and embarking with his followers for Hesperia. Stesichorus, who died in the fifty-sixth Olympiad, lived in the latter half of the second century: still from the vague account of Eneas leading some Trojans into Hesperia, to that of his founding a colony in Latium, there is certainly a wide step and it is very doubtful whether Stesichorus reached this extreme limit. In Arctinus at least his chief exploit was his saving the Palladium: among the holy things too mentioned by Stesichorus, this we may be sure was the most precious treasure: but this Palladium, the Greeks

523 Macrobius Saturn. v. 2. It is inconceivable that Macrobius should, as has been conjectured, have taken Pisander of Laranda for older than Virgil: if here as elsewhere he was merely a compiler, the grammarian he copied from lived still nearer to the age of Severus.