those of Cære are mentioned on occasion of the prodigy which befell them, when they shrunk so that an oracle fell out without the touch of a human hand*. Those of Albunea must have been written on some material like that of the Prænestine ones, since they were found in the bed of a river. 1130 The banishment of the kings was commemorated every year by the Regifugium or the Fugalia on the 24th of February. This is the ground on which Dionysius states that four months of the year were still to come: that is, he reckoned according to the average of the Athenian calendar, the first month of which coincided more or less with July; and assumed that the festival was a day historically ascertained. But its connexion with the Terminalia, which it follows immediately, infers that the day was merely chosen with a symbolical view. * Livy xxi. 62. xxii. 1. 1130 v. i. COMMENTARY ON THE STORY I HAVE related the tale of the last king's glory and of his fall no less nakedly than it must have stood in those bald Annals, the scantiness of which made Cicero think it his duty, and induced Livy, to throw a rich dress over the story of Rome. That which is harmonious in a national and poetical historian, would be out of tune in a work written more than eighteen hundred years later by a foreiner and a critic. His task is to restore the ancient tradition, to fill it up by reuniting such scattered features as still remain, but have been left out in that classical narrative which has become the current one, and to free it from the refinements with which learning has disfigured it : that distinct and lively view, which his representation also should aim to give, should be nothing more than the clear and vivid perception of the outlines of the old lost poem. Had a perfectly simple narrative by Fabius or Cato been preserved, I would merely have translated it, have annext the remnants of other accounts, and then added a commentary, such as I now have to write on my own text. Certain as it is that Rome possest Sibylline books, and yet none can tell who wrote them, or say more than that the Sibyl is a poetical creation; it is no less indubitable that Tarquinius was a tyrant, and the last king of Rome: and no criticism is able to pierce further, or to sever what is historical from the poem: all it can do is to shew what is the state of the case. It is true, the most glaring among the chronological impossibilities vanish in some measure, when we look at this story independently of the dates fixt by the pontiffs for Priscus and Servius. If however it be then no longer inconceivable that Brutus should have been a grandson of the former, still all else that is told of him continues nevertheless to be a string of absurdities. That the second Tarquinius should have reigned for more than the five and twenty years assigned to him, can neither be assumed by those who maintain that this narrative is substantially historical; nor will a candid inquirer deem it credible. But how then is it to be reconciled, that Brutus should be a child at the beginning of the reign, and at the end of it the father of young men who join in a conspiracy with the exiles? When Dionysius states that they were scarce grown out of boyhood, he introduces a fiction of his own, but to no purpose. Besides how could a person who was thought to be a natural, be the king's lieutenant, with the obligation of performing priestly ceremonies, and the power of convoking the citizens? and can we suppose that while he was invested with such an office, he had not even the management of his own fortune? 1131 In contradiction to the two historians, who represent the subjugation of Latium as effected by persuasion, Cicero says that it was subdued by arms Nor is the discrepancy less, where the Veientines are the only Etruscan people named by him as having endeavoured to restore the banisht family by military force 32: so that the introduction of the Tarquinians into the tale of this war is a forgery; which was devised, because of course there could be no place where the exiles would rather have sought for aid, or more readily have found it, than in their pretended home. 1131 De Re p. п. 24. Omne Latium bello devicit. 32 Tusc. Quæst. ш. 12(27). See note 1202. Their migration to Cære, totally unconnected as it is with the subsequent Etruscan wars, is derived from the pontifical lawbooks; where it was brought forward as the origin of the right conferred by the community of franchise to go and settle there as a citizen. The story of Sextus and the people of Gabii is patched up from two well-known ones in Herodotus*, without any novel invention. Besides it is quite impossible that Gabii should have fallen into the hands of the Roman king by treachery: had such been the case, no one-I will not say no tyrant, but no soverain in antiquity-would have granted the Roman franchise to the Gabines, and have spared them all chastisement by the scourge of war; as Tarquinius is said to have done by Dionysius himself 1133 In fact the record of this favour accorded to them was contained in the treaty with Gabii, which in his days was still to be read in the temple of Dius Fidius: it was painted on a shield cased with the skin of the bull slain at the ratification of the league The very existence of a treaty, though reconcilable with the case of a surrender, puts the forcible occupation out of the question. 34 The spoils with the produce of which Tarquinius undertook the building of the Capitol, the tithe of what was taken at Pometia, were estimated by Fabius at forty talents 35. Others, Piso for instance, have stated the whole, III. 154. v. 92. 1133 IV. 58. 34 Dionysius IV. 58. 35 It is owing to one of the many corruptions in our received editions, that we now find quadringenta instead of quadraginta in Livy 1. 53, 55, against the manuscripts. Though, when he wrote, it may no longer have been generally known, that the Italian talent weighed a hundred pounds, so that 400 talents were equal to 40000 pounds; still he could never have perceived such an enormous difference between those two sums as his expressions imply. Pometinæ manubiæ vix in fundamenta suppeditavere. Eo magis Fabio-crediderim-quam Pisoni, qui XL millia pondo argenti seposita in eam rem scribit: summam pecuniæ neque ex unius tum urbis præda sperandam, et nullius, ne horum of which that sum was the tithe,-four hundred talents, or forty thousand pounds of silver-to have been only the tenth part; so that the remaining nine must have been given up to the soldiers, every one of them receiving five pounds of silver, or five thousand ases. Nay, once on the wing they do not stop here; these 4000 talents, near a million sterling, were nothing more than the gold and silver found in Pometia: all the rest of the property was abandoned to plunder 1156. It is worth remarking that the very author who banisht all marvels out of his history, took no offense at this enormous absurdity. But even the number given by Fabius, out of which this fiction was spun, betrays its fictitious origin: for, assuming that the booty, after the principle of the ancient confederacies, was divided between the Romans, Latins, and Hernicans, the tithe on the whole, if the Roman share was forty talents, amounted to thrice as much, that is, to twelve times ten talents: where accordingly we find the very same numbers on which these meagre fictions are perpetually ringing the changes 7. Nay, Pometia cannot possibly have been destroyed under Tarquinius; for a few years after, in the first age of the consulate, it is besieged and taken *: and its greatness no doubt is entirely fabulous. It may be true quidem magnificentiæ operum, fundamenta non exsuperaturam. Livy cannot have been thinking of smaller talents than the Attic; and between these and the Italian the difference was only that between 2400000 and 4000000 drachms. 1136 Dionysius IV. 50, compared with Livy 1. 55. This on a calculation gives us an army of 72000 men; and the share of every soldier, merely in hard cash, is equivalent to 50 beeves. See p. 453. 37 With such barrenness of invention did those annalists, to whom Dionysius looked for more copious details, go to work, perpetually repeating themselves, and transferring incidents from one story to another, that the spoils won from the Latins, not in alliance with them, at the battle of Regillus, out of which spoils games were celebrated, were set down at 40 talents. Dionysius vi. 17. |