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[Illustration: Marcia wove her basket, putting a band of red around the curve.]
Frontispiece.
Copyright, 1922,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
to
Maitland C. Lamprey
It is scarcely necessary to say that these stories are not meant to be taken as history, even legendary history. The tales of the founding of Rome and of the early life of the Italian races are many and contradictory. It is quite possible that future discoveries may disprove half the theories now held on these subjects. There must have been, however, heroic semi-savage figures like the Romulus of the legends, and the aim of the author has been to re-create in some degree the atmosphere and the surroundings in which they may have lived.
The various customs and events introduced here were not, probably, part of the history of one generation. It is possible, however, that as a tree grows from a seed, the laws of the future city were foreshadowed and suggested in the relations between the Romans as individuals and between the town on the Palatine and its neighbors.
It will be observed that the forms of Latin
and Italian names used in these stories do not
us.
It is said by some authors that the original
immigrants from whose customs and
traditions Roman civilization developed came
from Greece, and in that case such Greek forms
as Vitalos
might have been preserved long
after such clipped forms as Marcus
and
Marcs
became current. Inasmuch as Italian
peasant names hardly ever end in anything but
a vowel it seems illogical to take it for granted
that in a colony of farmers, such as the men who
founded Rome, the names would all have taken
the classical Latin form at first. They would
have been much more likely to vary according to
the ancestry, dialect and intelligence of the
family. Later they would tend to a conventional
form as certain families of distinction set a
standard for others to follow and took pride in
keeping their own speech correct.
In short, the period described here is a transition stage, and like any age of the founding of a new civilization, contains incongruous elements. It has been stated that even in the great days of the Roman Empire the number of people who actually spoke correct classical Latin was extremely small in proportion to the whole population of any city.
Marcia, the little daughter of Marcus Vitalos the farmer, sat on a sheltered corner of a stone wall, making a willow basket. Basket weaving was one of the first things that all children of her people learned, and she was very clever at it. Her strong, brown fingers wove the osiers in and out swiftly and deftly, as a bird builds its nest. The boys and girls cut willow shoots, and reeds, and grasses that were good for this work, at the proper time, and bound them together in bundles tidily, for use later on. The straw, too, could be used for making baskets and mats after the grain was threshed out of it.
A great many baskets were needed, for they
were used to hold the grain, and the beans, and
the onions, and the dried fruit, and the various
other things that a thrifty family kept stored
away for provisions. They were also used to
gather things in and to carry them in, and
some
The house in which she lived was one of the oldest in the village on the slopes of the Mountain of Fire. It was so old that there was no knowing how many children had grown up in it, but they were all of the same family,—the family of the Marcus Vitalos Colonus who built it in the first place. This long-ago settler was called Colonus, the farmer, not because he was the only farmer in the neighborhood, for everybody worked on the land, but because he was an unusually good one, a leader among them in the understanding of the good brown earth and all its ways.
His sons after him took the name Colonus,
for among their people it was considered very
important to belong to a good family. As soon
as a man’s name was mentioned his ancestry was
known, if he had any worth the naming. The
ancestor of all this people was said to have been
Mars, the god of manhood and all manly deeds.
Their names showed this, for the common ones
It was very quiet in the village just now, for
all the men were off getting in the harvest. The
grain lands and the pastures were some distance
away, wherever the land was suitable for crops or
grazing. Every morning, directly after breakfast,
every one who had anything to do away from
the village went out, and usually did not come
back until supper time. It was said that the
first Marcus Vitalos was the leader who had
persuaded the people to settle down in one place
instead of moving about, driving their herds here
and there. It was said also that he began the
custom of a common meal in the middle of the
day for all the men who were working on the
land. This not only saved time and trouble, but
made them better acquainted and gave them time
to talk over and plan the work during the hottest
The people were very careful to do everything
according to custom. Almost everything they
did had been worked out long ago into a sort
of system, which was considered the best possible
way to do it. Certain customs were always observed
because the gods of the land were said to
be pleased with them. Whether the gods had
anything to do with it or not, these children of
Mars were certainly more prosperous than most
of their neighbors, and had many things which
they might not have had if it had not been for
their careful ways. The soil of the sunshiny
mountain slopes was rich and fruitful and easy
to work; the clear mountain waters were pleasant
and wholesome, and in certain places there were
hot springs which had been found good to cure
disease. It was not strange that they believed
Marcia wove her basket, putting a band of red around the curve before she began to draw it in, and her thoughts went far and near, as thoughts do.
The family spent very little time indoors when
it was possible to be in the open air. The mother
sat spinning in the doorway, and the baby played
at her feet. The father was harvesting, and
Marcs was out with the sheep. The next
younger brother, Bruno they called him, had gone
fishing. Supper was in an earthen pot comfortably
bubbling over the fire. It would be
ready by the time they all came home. Marcia
had had her dinner and helped clear away before
she came out here. Although the people had
some vegetables and herbs, their main crop was
grain. It was a kind of cereal a little like wheat
and a little like barley, with a small hard kernel,
and they called it corn,
which meant something
that is crushed or ground into meal.
When it was pounded in a mortar and then boiled
soft, it made good porridge. Boiled until it was
very thick, and poured out on a flat stone or
board to cool, it could be cut into pieces and eaten
from the hand. The children had all they
Marcia was rather a silent girl, with a great deal of long black hair in heavy braids, level black brows over thoughtful eyes, and a square little chin. As she began to draw in her basket at the top, she was thinking of the stories the old people sometimes told about a long-ago time when their ancestors lived in another and far more beautiful place. There the rivers ran over sands that gleamed like sunshine, and all the land was like a garden. The houses were larger than any here and built of a white stone. There were stone statues like those she and Marcs sometimes made in clay for the children to play with, but as large as men and women and painted to look like life. The gods came and went among the children of men and taught them all that they have ever known, but much had since been forgotten. So ran the story.
Sometimes in the heart of this mountain there
were rumblings underground, as if the thunder
had gone to earth like a badger. The old people
said then that the smith of the gods was working
Marcia looked up at the mighty crest so far above, and then down across the valley, where the stubble of the grain fields shone golden in the westering sun. The river, winding away beyond it, was bluer than the sky. She wondered whether, if her people should ever go away, they would tell their children how beautiful this land was. But of course they never would go. They had lived too long where they were ever to be willing to leave their home on the mountain. No other place could be like it. The floods that sometimes ruined the lowlands never rose as high as this; the wandering, warlike tribes that sometimes attacked their neighbors did not trouble them here. They belonged to the mountain, as the chestnut trees and the squirrels did.
Me make basket,
announced her little sister,
pulling at the withes, her rag doll tumbling to
Up! up!
O Felic’la (Kitty), don’t; you’ll spoil sister’s
work! I’ll begin one for you.
The Kitten had got her name from her disposition, which was to insist on doing whatever she saw any one else doing, just long enough to make confusion wherever she went. What with showing the little fingers how to manage the spidery ribs of the little basket she began, and working out the braided border of her own basket, Marcia’s attention was fully taken up.
She did not even see that Marcs was driving
in the sheep until they began crowding into the
sheepfold. The walls of this, like the walls of
the house itself, were of stone, laid by that long-ago
Colonus, and as solid and firm as if they
were built yesterday. The stones were not
squared or shaped, and there was no mortar, but
they were fitted together so cleverly that they
seemed as solid as the mountain itself. They
hardly ever needed repair. The roofs, of seasoned
chestnut boughs woven in and out, seemed
almost as firm as the stonework. This place
had been settled when the farmers had to fight
wolves every year. Even now, if the wolves had
a hard winter and got very hungry, they sometimes
came around and tried to get at the sheep.
Why were the sheep coming in so early?
Marcs looked rather disturbed, and he was in a hurry. Bruno too was coming home without any fish, an unusual thing for him; and he looked both scared and puzzled. The mother was standing in the door, shading her eyes with her hand and looking at the sky. Marcs caught sight of the girls in their corner.
You had better pick up all that and go in,
he called to them. Pater sent us home as quick
as we could scamper. See how strange the sky
is.
They all looked. Little Felic’la, with round eyes, dropped her basket and pointed.
Giants,
said she.
It did not take much imagination to see, in the dark clouds spreading over the heavens, huge misty figures like gigantic men, or like gods about to descend upon the earth.
Mater,
said Bruno, the spring and the
stream have dried up.
The father was hurrying up from the grain
fields, and the boys ran to help him manage the
frightened cattle and get the load under cover.
Other flocks of sheep and other men with oxen
Suddenly there was a crash as if the earth had
cracked in two. Everything turned black. The
Marcia caught up her little sister and the baskets together and groped her way to the door. Her mother darted out to drag them in and barred the door against the unknown terrors outside. The boys and their father were under the cattle shed, with the stout timber brace against the door; it had been made to keep out wild beasts. In the roar of the tumult outside the loudest shout could not have been heard.
The terrific detonations above were heavier than any thunder that ever rolled down the valley, sharper than any blows of a giant hammer. The earth trembled and rocked under foot. Then came a pounding from all sides at once, like the trampling of frantic herds. An avalanche of dust and cinders came through the smoke hole and put out the fire. Part of the roof had fallen in, for they could hear stones tumbling down on the earth floor. Through the opening they saw a crimson glow spreading over the sky. Only the beams in one corner, the corner where the mother and her children were, still held firm.
At last the rain of ashes was over, the stones
no longer fell, and it was light enough for them
to see each other’s faces. They had no way of
knowing how long they had crouched there in the
Are you safe, Livia? And the children?
The man’s deep voice was shaking. But even
as he spoke he saw that they were alive and unhurt.
He took his baby boy from his wife’s
arms, and put the other arm round the two girls,
while the little boys clung to him as far up as
they could reach. Livia sprang up at the first
sight of Marcs and Bruno, for Marcs was bleeding
all down one side of his face and his shoulder,
where a stone had glanced along.
I was trying to catch the white heifer,
he
said rather shamefacedly, but she got away.
It’s only a scrape along the skin—let me go,
Mater.
And before she had fairly done washing
off the blood and bandaging the cuts, he was
out from under her hands and out of doors after
Bruno.
Cautiously they all went out, and stood outside
the wall, gazing about them. Everything as far
as they could see was gray with ashes and cinders
and stones. Here and there the woods were on
The walls of their own house and of most of the others in the village had been wrenched and thrown down in places by the twisting of the earth. Then the roof had given way under the pelting rocks. In the corner where Livia and her children had taken shelter, one timber, a tree trunk set deep in the ground, had held firm and kept the roof from falling. The same thing had happened in the narrow cattle shed. They went on to see how their neighbors had fared.
There was less loss of life than one might
have expected, considering that the oldest man
there had never seen anything like this. The
people were trained to obey orders and look out
for themselves. The father was the head of the
family, and in any sudden emergency the people
did not run about aimlessly but looked to
who
Whatever the strange and terrible outbreak of the Mountain of Fire could have meant, the people had no thought of abandoning the land. Within a few days they were repairing or rebuilding their huts and returning to the habits of their daily life. Centuries might pass, more than one such calamity might befall the village, but there would still be men living on the same spot where their forefathers lived, on the slopes of the Mountain of Fire.
All the same, a great change had taken place,
and they felt it more as time went on. They
began to see that the land that had once brought
forth food for them all would not now feed them
with any such abundance. They would be
lucky if they could secure enough food to keep
them alive. Some of the fields were burned over
by the lava stream; some were ruined by the
dammed-up river. Cattle and sheep had been
killed or had run away. Much of the grain and
Yet rather than leave their homes and be strangers and outcasts without a country, they endured cold and scarcity and every kind of discomfort, even suffering. Outside the land they knew were unknown terrors,—races who did not speak their language or worship their gods; soil whose ways they did not understand, and very likely far worse troubles than had come upon them here. Most of the people simply made up their minds that what must be, they must endure, because anything else would only be a change for the worse.
There were a few, however, who did not take this view. The first to suggest that some might go away was Marcus Colonus. He spoke of it to a little group of his friends while they were in the forest cutting wood. Sylvius, whose wife and children were killed when the stones fell, and Urso the shaggy hunter, who never feared anything, man or beast, and Muraena the metal-worker, a restless fellow who knew that he could get a living wherever men used plows and weapons, all agreed that if Colonus went they would go. If ten heads of households joined the party, it would make a clan. But first the head of the village must be consulted.
Old Vitalos was the grandfather of Marcus Colonus and related in one way or another to nearly every person in the village. When his grandson came to him and told what he had in mind, the old chief stroked his long white beard and did not answer at once. He seemed to be thinking, and he thought for a long time.
Before written histories, or pictured records, or even songs telling the history of a people, were in use, the memories of the old folk formed the only source of information that there was. As old men will, they told what they knew over and over again, and those who heard, even if they did not know they were remembering it, often remembered a story and told it over again, when their time came. The experiences and the wisdom that old Vitalos had gathered in the eighty years of his useful life were stored in his mind in layers, like silt in the bed of a river. Now he was digging down into his memory for something that had happened a long time ago.
When he had done thinking, he spoke.
My son,
he said, you tell me that you
desire to go forth and make your home in another
land.
I desire it not, my father,
said Colonus,
unless it is the will of the gods. I have thought
that it may be best.
He did not know it, but while the old man’s mind was busy with the past, his keen old eyes were busy with the strong, well-built figure, the stubborn chin and the fearless eye of this man of his own blood. Colonus walked with the long, sure step of the man who knows where he is going. The fingers of his hand were square-tipped and rugged, the kind that can work. He was Saturn’s own man, made to work the land and produce food for his people. He would not give up easily, nor would he be dismayed by difficulties.
And where will you go?
was the chief’s
next question.
That I do not know,
said Colonus. Yet
something I do know. The mountain folk are
not friends to us, and we should have to fight
them. Their land is all one fortress, not easy
to take. To the sea we will not go, for we know
nothing of the ways of the sea-tamers. Perhaps
our gods would not help us in those things,
which are strange to our lives. There remains
the plain beyond the marsh, where the river runs
out of the valley. I have been there only once,
but I remember it. Around it are mountains,
and the plain itself is broken by low hills, as we
have seen from our heights. In such a land we
might live according to customs of our
fore
The patriarch looked at the fire on the altar, which burned in his house as in every other house of the village; then he looked keenly at his grandson.
There are two ways of living in a strange
place, Marcus Colonus,
he said. One is, to
live after the manner of those who are born there,
obey their gods, learn their law, eat their food,
work as they do, join in their feasts and their
games. The other is to fight them, and drive
Colonus hesitated. My father,
he said, to
take the first path, I must change my nature and
become another man, which I would not do even
if I could. Here or in another country, or in the
moon if men could go there, I should be Colonus,
the farmer,—not a sailor, or a trader, or any
other man. To take the second way I must be
leader of many fighting men, and this is not possible,
since if we go we must take our wives and
children. It is in my mind, my father, that there
may be a middle way. If we hold to our own
customs and are faithful to our own gods and to
one another, surely the gods should keep faith
with us. If we hurt not the people of the land
where we go, but stand ready to defend ourselves
against any who try to attack us, they may allow
us to live as we please. If not, then must we
fight for the right to live.
The old chief smiled. My son,
he said,
you are wise with the wisdom of youth. Yet
sometimes that is better than the unbelief of age.
It is better to die fighting strangers than to die
by starvation, or to fall upon one another, and I
have had fear that one or the other might happen
here, for truly the land is changed. It may be
that this plan of yours shall end in new branching
Now I have a story to tell you, and you will
give careful heed to it, and not speak of it lightly,
but store it away in the secret places of your
mind. Sit down here, close to me, for I do not
wish to be heard by any listener.
Many years ago, before you were born, or
ever the road was made over the marsh or the
bridge across the river, our people were at war
with a strange people from the north. My son,
whom you resemble, went to fight against them
and did not come back. Whether he died in
battle and was left on some unknown field we did
not know. We never knew, until in after years,
one who was taken prisoner with him came back,
his hair white as snow, and told what he had seen.
In that country of which you have spoken,
where a plain stretches away toward the sea, and
is guarded with mountains and divided by a yellow
river, there are people who speak a language
like ours and are sons of Mars, as we are. Some
live in the hills and some in the plain, and some
on the Long White Mountain. Beyond the
river the people are strange in every way and
their gods are also strange and terrible.
Now among the people of the Long White
The daughter of the elder brother was a fair
woman, and my son was a strong and comely
man, and in secret they married. Then did my
son escape, thinking to come back with an army
and bring away his wife with their twin boys.
But the wicked chief discovered what had been
done, and killed the mother and the children, and
sent a war party after my son to kill him also.
He could have escaped even then, for he crossed
a river in flood by swimming. But when they
called to him that his wife and her two sons were
dead, he returned across the river and fought
his pursuers until they killed him. Then he went
to find his beloved in that unknown country
which is neither land nor water and is full of
ghosts.
Now it is in my mind that if that evil chief
is dead, the people of his country may welcome
you among them. Or if he is not dead, and the
elder brother still lives, he may be your friend,
since we are of one race and speak one language.
Colonus rose and bowed to the old man, and went home.
Now the way was clear to prepare for the
emigration, and from time to time others came
to talk about it and join the company. Besides
the four men who had made the plan in the first
place, there were finally seven others,—Tullius,
who knew all the ancient laws and customs well,
Piscinus the fisherman, Pollio the leather worker,
Cossus, an old and wary fighter, the two Nasos,
quiet and able farmers (all of whose children had
the big nose that marked the family), and Calvo,
whose great-grandfather had bequeathed to his
descendants a tendency to grow bald young.
Calvo already had a little thin spot on the crown
of his head, though he was not much over thirty.
Among them they had all the most necessary
trades and could supply most things they needed.
coloni or farmers. They
had to understand the care of the land in order
to get through the first years without starving to
death, for there were no cities where they went.
Muraena could make unusually fine weapons, and he took care that each of the party should be provided with the best that he could make. The grain was chosen with care, for when they found the place for their settlement they would want it for seed. The finest animals were chosen to stock the farms. The women who were not going made gifts of their best weaving to the housewives who were. The lads who were old enough to fight gave especial attention to their bows and their slings, and spent a good deal of time practicing.
All the men who had agreed to go had sons and daughters except Sylvius, and most of the children were old enough to do something to help. They were very much excited, and secretly most of them were rather scared.
There was no priest in the company; that is
to say, there was no man who had nothing else
to do, for that was not the custom among the
Ramnes. They chose a man they all trusted for
this office. Tullius was chosen priest by the
coloni. It was due to his advice that the water
jars and the leather bottles for water-carrying
were well selected, strong and numerous. It was
a hobby of his, the drinking of pure water, and
he believed it had more to do with health than any
other one thing. He also believed that the gods
do not protect the careless and the lazy. For
instance, if a man were to pray to Mars to keep
his house from being destroyed by fire, and then
burn brush on a windy day in summer, when the
wind was blowing that way, and a spark happened
to light on the thatch, Mars would not be
likely to put it out. He would let it burn. If
the gods went to the trouble of saving people from
the consequences of not using common sense, they
would show themselves to be fools, and not in the
least god-like. Tullius prayed at all proper
times, but when he was working he worked with
his head as well as with his hands. He said that
that was what heads were for.
In the month of spring when day and night are equal, and the young lambs frisk on new grass, a company of young men and girls went slowly out from a little town on the eastern side of a great mountain range. The long narrow country stretching out into the sea, which is now called Italy, is divided by this range lengthwise into two parts, and in the earliest days of the country the people on one side had hardly anything to do with those on the other. On the coast toward the sunrise were many harbors, and seafaring men from other countries came there sometimes to trade. On the other side, the young people who were now setting their faces westward did not at all know what they would find.
They were all of about the same age, and they
looked grave and a little anxious; some of the
girls had been crying. The day had come when
they were to leave the place where they had been
born and brought up and go into an unknown
They belonged to the Sabine people, who used to live on the banks of the rivers not far from the coast, and kept cattle and sheep and goats, and raised grain and different kinds of vegetables, and had vineyards. The land was so rich that they had more food and other things than they needed, and used to trade more or less with the strangers from other countries. So many strangers came there and settled in course of time that the first inhabitants were crowded back toward the mountains, away from the sea. Then war parties of Umbrians from the north came pushing their way into the country, and the peaceable farming folk were obliged to retreat still farther up the rivers into the mountain, and clear new land and settle it. This happened all a long time ago. It was not easy to live there, and they were poorer than they used to be, for so much of the land was rock and forest that they had to spend a great deal of their time getting it into a fit condition for either grain or cattle or anything else. But they learned to do most things for themselves, as mountain people do; they were not afraid of hard work or danger, and although they lived plainly they were comfortable.
But even here they were not let alone. About twenty years earlier, before any of these boys and girls were born, the Umbrian war parties came up into the higher valleys, and the Sabines had to fight for their very lives. They won the war and drove back the invaders in the end, but it began to seem that some day they would be wiped out altogether and forgotten.
After this war there were some hard years. Many of the men had been killed, and the fields had been neglected when the fighting was going on. Where the enemy came they trampled down and ruined the vineyards, and burned houses and barns, and drove off the flocks and herds for their own use. That one year of war almost ruined the work that had been done in half a lifetime. If they were to be obliged to spend half their time defending what land they had, every year would be worse than the last.
Finally Flamen the priest, the man most respected
in the central and largest of the towns,
spoke of an old custom called the sacred
spring.
It was a method of making sacrifice to
the gods when things came to a very evil pass
indeed. In a way it was a sacrifice, and in a
way it was a chance of saving something from
the general ruin. Flamen believed that if they
kept a sacred spring
their guardian god,
When villages agreed to keep a sacred year, as these finally did, they gave to the gods everything that was born in that year. The cattle, sheep, goats and poultry were killed in sacrifice, when they were grown. But the children born that spring were not killed. They were taught that when they were old enough they were to go out and build homes for themselves in another land, trusting in the great and wise god Mars to show them where to go. If this was done, even though the Umbrians attacked the country again and again, and killed off the people or made them slaves, there would still be Sabine men and women living in the old ways, somewhere in the world. And now the time had come for them to set out to find their new home.
Flamen the priest gave a daughter in the year
of the sacred spring; Maurs the smith gave a
son. Almost every family in all the country
At daybreak on the day that had been decided upon, the farewell ceremonies began. Hymns were sung and a feast was held, prayers and sacrifices were made; there were all sorts of farewell wishes and loving hopes and instructions. Nothing, however, could make it anything but a very solemn occasion. The young people must go beyond the mountains, for on this side they could have no hope of finding any place to live. No one knew what awaited them. But whatever happened, no one would have dreamed of breaking the promise made to the gods. A pledge is a pledge, and not the shrewdest cheat can deceive the gods, for they know men’s hearts.
Flam’na, the wife of young Mauros the maker
of swords, looked back just once as they lost
sight of the village. Then she led in the singing
of the last of the farewell songs. She had a
beautiful voice, clear and strong and sweet; her
husband’s deeper tones joined hers, and then all
the young voices took up the song as streams run
into a river. The fathers and mothers heard the
wild music of their singing floating down from the
mountain forest as they climbed the narrow trail.
They were following a path which the young men
knew from their hunting expeditions, which led
around the shoulder of the mountain to a pass
On the western slopes, as far as the hunters had ever gone, there were no people living in villages—only scattered woodcutters and hunters, and here and there a poor ignorant family in a little clearing. If they went far enough down to reach the upper valleys of streams or rivers, they might find just the sort of place they wanted for their new home. Others must have done this in the past, or there would never have been the custom of the sacred spring, for the emigrant parties would have been all killed off or starved to death. The young men said that what others had done they could do, and they went valiantly on, chanting a marching song.
In these spring days, as time passed, the mornings
were earlier and the twilights later. They
lived well while their provisions lasted, and there
was game in the forest and fish in the little
streams. They always carried coals from their
camp fires to light the next fires, and in the cool
evenings the leaping flames were pleasant.
There were three groups of the young people,
from three different villages. At night they
gathered in three camps; each company
which
ate bread together was made up of relatives and
friends. After they had crossed the mountain
pass and before they had gone very far on the
other side, they halted for a day to talk matters
over and decide what to do next. It was very
important now to take the right course.
The youths gathered under a huge oak to hold a council while their wives and sisters and cousins busied themselves with affairs of their own. The men would have to do the fighting, and the girls were quite willing to leave the general plans to them. They were a sober and serious group of young fellows as they sat there in the dappling sunshine. It was enough to make any man serious. Mars had brought them so far without any serious mishap, and he might go on protecting them all the rest of the way; but the question was, how to discover what was best to do. All the ways down the mountain looked very much alike, and yet one might lead into a country inhabited by fierce and cruel enemies, and another into a barren rocky waste, and another to a fertile valley.
Mauros was their leader, so far as they had
Each of the gods had certain favorite animals, birds and plants. Mars had plenty of servants he could send to do his will, and surely he would show them what to do.
Flam’na stood with her cousins, watching
Mauros as he stood in the center of the silent
group under the great oak tree. The fires were
In the camp to the right of this, not long after
the departure of the ox, one of the girls saw
something red moving high up on the trunk of
a tree, and pointed it out to her brother. His
eyes followed hers, and soon all the company
The third company had no time to watch the
others, for some wolves had winded their sheep,
and the young men had to run to fight them off.
Some of them chased the skulking gray thieves
for some distance and came back with the news
that the wolves had led them southward to a
rocky height, where they could look over the tops
of the trees below and see an uncommonly fine
place for the colony. This was as plain a sign
All three of the Sabine colonies prospered and grew strong, and although they had little to do with each other they lived in peace with relatives and neighbors. There came to be many villages on the slopes of the Apennines in which the Sabine language was spoken. This was the last time that they were forced to keep a Sacred Year, for the Umbrian war parties left them alone, and perhaps did not even know where they were; and the mountain land was pleasant and fertile, out of the way of floods. There was no reason in the world why the brave young couples who founded their homes here, and worked and played and kept holiday, and loved the green earth as all their forefathers had loved it, should not be prosperous and happy, and they were, for many a long year.
When the Sabines came to the western side of the mountain range, they did not try to plow much land at first. They had to find out what the land was like.
People who lived by pasturing their cattle and
sheep wherever it was convenient hardly ever
settled in the same place for good, because the
pasture differs from year to year even in the same
neighborhood. A hillside which is rich and green
in a wet year may be barren and dry when there
are long months with no rain. A valley that is
rich in long juicy grass in spring may be under
water later in the summer. Herdsmen need to
range over a wide country, and especially they
need this if they keep sheep. The sheep nibble
the grass down to the roots, and when they have
finished with a field there is nothing on it for any
other animal that year. But the true farmer,
who uses his land for a great many different purposes,
can shift his crops and his pasturage
For a farm of this kind, a place between mountain and plain is best, with a variety of soil and good water supply. In such a mountain valley as the Herpini chose, with wooded heights above it, the roots of the trees bind the earth together and keep the wet of the winter rains from drying up, so that there is not often either flood or drought, and almost always good grass is found somewhere in the neighborhood. The people began by raising beans and peas to dry for winter, and herbs for flavoring, and in the summer they had kale and other fresh vegetables. Now and then, for a holiday, they killed a sheep or a young goat or a calf and had a feast. The heart and inner organs were burned on the altar for an offering to the gods; the flesh was served out to the people, cooked with certain herbs used according to old rules. For vineyards and grain fields, which needed a certain kind of soil, they chose, after awhile, exactly the ground which suited them, and plowed their common land, and sowed their corn and planted their vines.
Most of the farm land was worked by all the
people in common. This was a very old custom.
There were good reasons for it. In farming, the
work has to be done when the weather is suitable.
heredium, as it
was called.
Everything connected with the cultivation of
the land was in the hands of twelve men chosen
for it, called the Arval Brethren, or the Brethren
of the Field. It was their work to see that all
was done according to the well-proved rules and
customs, that the gods received due respect, and
In a society where people have to depend upon each other in this way, there is no room for a person who will not fit in, and who expects to be taken care of without doing his share of the work. Here and there, in one village and another, a boy grew up who shirked his work, took more good things than his share and made trouble generally. Sometimes he got over it as he grew older, but sometimes he did not; and if he could not live peaceably at home, he had to be driven out to get his living where he could. There was no place in a village ruled by the gods for any one who did not respect and obey the laws.
These outlaws did not starve, for they could
get a kind of living by fishing and hunting, and
they stole from the ignorant country people and
from travelers. They were known after awhile
as banditti, the banished men, the men who had
been driven out of civilized society. Some of
them left their own country altogether and went
down to the seashore, or into the strange land
across the yellow river. The people in the villages
did not know much about them. They
were very busy with their own concerns.
There were two great festivals in the year, to
[Illustration: The people gathered in the public square]
The other festival came in the spring, when
the grass was green and the leaves were fresh
and bright, and flowers were wreathing shrubs
There were no books or written records; not even a written language was known to the villagers. The priest of the village, who kept account of the days when ceremonies were due, and the changes of the moon, gave out the news, each month, of the things which were to happen. The months were not all the same length, and no two villages had just the same calendar. The year was counted from the founding of the city, whenever that was, and naturally it was not the same in different places. The people gathered in the public square, waiting to hear what Emilius the priest had to tell them.
He was a tall and noble-looking man, generally
beloved because he always tried to deal
justly and kindly with his neighbors, and was so
wise that he usually succeeded. The person who
paid him the deepest and most reverent attention
was little Emilia, his daughter, who believed
Emilia was six and a half years old. This
would be her first May festival, to remember,
for she had been ill the year before when it came,
and one’s memory is not very good before one
is five years old. Her bright gold-brown hair
curled a little and looked like waves of sunshine
all over her graceful small head. It was tied
with a white fillet to keep it out of her eyes, and
in the fillet, like a great purple jewel, was thrust
an anemone from a wreath her mother had been
making. Her mother dressed her in the finest
and softest of undyed wool, bleached white as
snow. She wore a little tunic with a braided
girdle, and over her shoulders a square of the
same soft cloth as a mantle; it looked like the
wings of a white bird as it shone in the morning
sun. On her feet were sandals of kidskin, and
around her neck was a necklace of red beads that
had come from far away. A trader brought
them from the place by the seashore where such
things were made. From this necklace hung a
round ball of hammered copper, made to open
in two halves, and inside it was a little charm
to keep off bad spirits. The charm was made
Emilia had never in her life known what it was to be afraid of any one, or to see any one’s eyes rest upon her unkindly. The world was very interesting to her. It was filled with wonderful and beautiful things, especially just now. Each day she saw some new flower or bird or plant or animal she had never seen before. Spring in those mountains was very lovely. It hardly seemed as if it could be the real world.
The people were all rather fine-looking and strong and active. They worked and played in the open air and led healthy lives, and being well and full of spirits, there was really no reason why they should be ugly.
Emilius told them when the feast of Maia would take place. The moon, which was called the measurer, was all they had to go by in reckoning the year. The feast was to be the day after it changed. Emilius repeated the names of the Brethren of the Field, and mentioned things that should be done to prepare for the feast, and that was all.
Far up on the heights of the mountain above,
in among the rocks where nothing grew except
wind-stunted trees and patches of moss and fern,
there was another settlement of which the
vil
One was a runaway from this very place, and he knew it was nearly time for the May festival. His name was Gubbo, and he had been cast out of the village because he was cruel. He liked to torment animals and children; he liked to compel others to give him what he wanted. When finally he had been caught slashing at the favorite ox of a man he had had a quarrel with, he had been beaten and kicked out and told never to come back. He had wandered about for some years, and then joined the banditti on the mountain.
These banditti came from many towns; some
were even of another race, of the strange people
beyond the river. There were not very many of
them, but there were enough to surprise and beat
down a much larger number if circumstances
favored. Their usual plan was not to fight in
They did not spend all or even very much of their time in their mountain den. They had picked this country as their headquarters because it was largely wilderness above the farming belt. The rocks held many caves and good strongholds. Often they went off and were gone for perhaps a month at a time, prowling about distant settlements, or haunting the roads the traders traveled. Many a luckless merchant had been knocked on the head from behind, or dragged out of his boat and drowned, by these thieves, with no one to tell the tale.
They had found the Sabines here when they
came, and it had not seemed worth while—yet—to
quarrel with them. The scattered country
folk, who went in deadly fear of the robbers and
did whatever they were told, said that the farmers
could fight, and kept watch over what they had,
and had very little but their animals and food
stores. There was no use in provoking a war
There was no use in upsetting these quiet folk so that they could not work. They could be told that unless they brought to a certain place, at certain times, grain, cattle and other provision, and left them for the outlaws, something terrible would happen to them. They certainly could not hunt the mountains over for the band, and they could not know how many or how few there were. This plan worked well in other places, and it would do very well here.
The leader, the oldest of the robbers, had once been a slave, and he knew all the things that are done to slaves who resist their masters. The others were afraid of him, and there were very few other things in the world of which they were afraid. He listened to the report of Gubbo and his companion, and sent them back to watch the village during the time of the festival, see who the chief men were, how well off the people seemed to be, how many fighting men they had, and where they kept their grain and other stores.
For five days one or the other of the bandits
was always watching from the edge of the rock.
If they had been the kind of men to understand
beauty, they must have owned that the festival
The young girls had a great part in the dancing
and singing and processions of Maia. A
tall pillar, decorated with garlands and strips
of colored cloth, had been set up, and a circle
of white-robed little maidens, with wreaths of
flowers on their heads, danced around it. Little
Emilia sat sedately in the center, wand in hand,
and directed the dancing. There were stately
processions, and marching and countermarching
of white figures bearing garlands; the oxen appeared
with their horns wreathed in flowers;
blossoms were strewn all over the public square
as the day passed. The blessing of Maia was
asked upon the springing grain, now standing
like a multitude of fairy sword blades above the
brown soil; upon the bean and pea vines climbing
as fast as ever they could up the poles set for
them; upon the vineyards, every vine of which
was tended like a child; and upon the orchards,
When the day was over, and all the people were asleep, the spies went back to the den in the rocks and told what they had seen.
The chief decided that these people were to be let alone all through the summer and early fall, until all their stores of wine and grain and fat beasts were in, and they went afield to get nuts in the forest. That would be the time to strike. The child of the head priest could be carried off, perhaps, or the son of the chief man of the village. Then one of the country people would be sent to tell the villagers that unless they agreed to furnish provisions at certain times and places, the child would be killed. That would bring them to heel.
So the summer passed, and the unconscious, happy people prayed for a good harvest.
The new moon was rising above a wet waste of marsh and tussock and tasseled reeds. A man and two boys climbed hastily up a hill. Before them they drove a bleating, cold, rain-wet, bewildered flock. As any shepherd will admit, sheep are among the silliest creatures in the world, and if there is any way for them to get themselves into trouble they will do it. Even so small a flock as this had proved it abundantly.
A dry time, when all the grass in the usual
pastures was burned brown or eaten down to the
roots, had been followed by a rainy fall and winter.
The shepherd and his two foster sons—his
wife had long been dead—left their hillside
pastures by the river and went with their flock
wherever they could find any grass. They meandered
about for some time on the great plain
that was usually too wet for sheep; that grass
was rank and sometimes unwholesome, but it
For hours they herded the tired flock up and down, among hills and gullies, until they came on a little hollow among bushes, out of the way of the water, where they could stop and get a little sleep. The man and the boys were all three wet, cold and hungry, even hungrier than the sheep were, for they could not eat grass; hungrier than Pincho, who now and then caught some sort of wild creature and ate it on the spot. They ate what little they had left, and then one kept watch while the others slept, by turns, in the driest place that could be found.
When it was light enough to see, they looked
about to find out where they were. Farther
down the slope and to one side of them was a
village, and the people there kept sheep and
also cattle. Nobody seemed to be doing much
The boys did not know what this meant, for they had never been near a village on a holiday,—and not often at any time. But the shepherd knew; he knew that it must be a feast day, and he told the boys that if they wished to go to the village and see what was going on, he would look after the sheep. They must not try to go in unless they were asked, and they ought not to take Pincho; some one might see him and kill him for a wolf, not knowing that he was tame.
But Pincho had something to say about that. He had no intention of being left behind, and the shepherd had to cut a thong off his sheepskin cloak to tie up the determined beast. Then when the boys were about two-thirds of the way to the village, something came sniffing at their heels, and there was Pincho, with the thong trailing after him; he had gnawed it in two.
His young master only laughed. Here,
Pincho!
he said good-humoredly, and as the
young wolf came and licked his hand he made a
loop of the trailing end and thrust his strong
brown fingers into it. And so they came up to
the edge of the village where the people were
making ready the feast,—two boys and a wolf.
The lads were both rather tall for their years, and moved with the wild grace of creatures that constantly use every muscle and never get stiff or lazy. They wore only the shepherd’s tunic of sheepskin with the wool outward, and a braided leather girdle to hold a knife and a leather pouch. In his left hand each held a crook, with a sharp flint point at the other end so that it could be used as a spear if a weapon were needed. The taller led the wolf, which fawned and licked his bare feet; the other, who was not quite so dark of hair and eye, was playing on a reed pipe, taking up the call of the pipers and weaving it into a simple melody. For a moment the people did not know who they could be. All the shepherd boys in that neighborhood were known. Surely only gods come out of the forest would be accompanied by a wolf.
They did not enter the village. They halted on the outside where they could look into the square and see what was going on, and they stared in silent wonder, like animals.
The fact was that they were so hungry that if
they had dared, they would have rushed on the
tables and seized the bread and meat and honey
cakes, and run away into the forest to devour
them as if they were wolves themselves. As it
was, the intelligent nose of Pincho caught the
[Illustration: Whoever they were, it was proper at this time to offer food to strangers]
Whoever they were, it was proper at this time to offer food to strangers, and if they were gods or wood spirits this was the way to find it out. The wife of Emilius the priest, a tall and gracious woman, took up a flat basket-work tray and filled it with portions of the various good things on the nearest table. By the way they took the food and ate it, she saw that they were probably only hungry boys. Pincho got the bones, but only when it was certain they were not mutton bones. He had never been allowed to find out what the flesh of a sheep was like. This was a portion of a yearling calf.
The matron’s little daughter, a straight, slender,
bright-haired child, came with her, and when
Pincho sniffed curiously at her little sandalled
feet she did not draw back, but stooped and
patted his head. The boy with the reed pipe,
when he had finished his share of the food, sidled
away toward the musicians, but the other one
stayed where he was, his arm round the shaggy
neck of the young wolf, and they asked him
questions. He explained, when they were able
to make out what he said—for he spoke in a
thick voice as the peasants did—that he and
his brother lived with a shepherd on the other
Why do you stay away from your own village
on a holiday?
asked the child straightforwardly.
We have no village,
the boy answered.
We live by ourselves.
The little maiden knit her straight, dark, delicate brows. People who had no village and lived by themselves had never come to her knowledge before. She thought it must be very dull not to have any holidays, or playmates.
Do the sheep and the wolves live together
in your country?
she asked, watching Pincho’s
wedge-shaped, savage head as he gnawed his
bone.
No; but Pincho is not really a wolf. He is
my friend.
How can you be friends with a wolf?
persisted
the small questioner. Wolves are
thieves and murderers. They kill sheep. If
they killed only the old sheep, I would not care.
The old ram with horns knocks people down.
But they kill the little lambs.
Pincho has never killed a sheep.
Emilia, my child,
said her mother, it is
time for the dance of the children.
And she
led her little daughter away.
The boys of the village were very curious about Pincho. He had been caught when he was a tiny cub and his mother had been killed. There were two cubs, but the other one died. This one slept at his master’s feet every night. The lad beckoned to his brother, who began to play a curious, jerky tune, and then the boy and the wolf danced together, to the wonder and entertainment of the villagers. Then in his turn the boy began to ask questions. What was a holiday and why did they keep it?
The boys explained that there were many holidays at different times. There was one in the later days of winter called the Lupercal, in honor of the god who protected the sheep. That was the shepherds’ festival, and when it took place, the young men ran about with thongs in their hands, striking everybody who came in the way. The day they were now keeping was Founder’s Day, in honor of the founder of their town.
This was puzzling. How could one man found a town? A town grew up where many people came to live in one place.
Nay, my son,
said a white-haired old man,
the oldest man in the village, who had sat down
near the group. He spoke in the language the
shepherd spoke, so that it was easy to understand
him. That is nothing more than a flock of
crows or a herd of cattle that eat together where
there is food. The man who founds a city determines
first to make a home for the spirits of his
people, as a man who builds a house makes a
home for his family. His gods dwell in this
place, and he himself will dwell there when he is
dead, and his spirit is joined to theirs. Without
the good will of the spirits there is no good fortune.
How can men know what is wise to do,
or what is right, if they do not ask help of the
gods, as a child asks its father’s will? Have you
never heard this? Has your father not told
you?
We have neither father nor mother,
said
the boy, but not shamefacedly,—even a little
proudly. We were found when we were little
children by Faustulus the shepherd who is to
us as a father, and we serve him.
This did seem rather strange. Some of the village people drew back and whispered among themselves. Could the lads be gods or spirits indeed? They were strong and handsome—but who knew what things lived in the forest?
Nay,
said Emilius, they have eaten our
salt.
The shepherd sometimes prays,
the lad was
saying thoughtfully. He prays when he has
lost his way. I asked him once when I was very
small what he was saying, and he said that he
prayed to his god. He said the god was like a
man, but had goat’s legs and little horns under
curling hair, and played on a reed pipe. My
brother said that he had seen him in the forest,
but I never did. When the shepherd sees anything
unlucky, he makes the sign of his god—thus.
He held up his fist with all the fingers except
the little finger doubled in; this, with the thumb,
stuck straight up. He calls it
making the
horns.
The people across the river have many gods,
he went on cheerfully. Once I ran away and
found a boat, and went over there, to see what it
was like. The priests watch the flight of birds
for signs; and the people give a great deal of
time to fortune telling. An old witch told mine
for love, and she said that I should rule over a
great people. Then I laughed and came away,
for I knew that she must think me a fool to be
pleased with lies. She said that their laws were
taught the priests by a little man no bigger
The priest Emilius smiled. My son,
he said
kindly, these things are foolish and lead to
nothing. If you will stay with us and help to
tend our flocks, you shall learn of our gods, and
live as we do, sharing our work and our play.
But unless you obey our law we cannot let you
stay. The gods are not pleased when strangers
come into their sacred places.
The founder of our city is as a kind father
who watches us and sees what we do, whether it
is good or whether it is evil. Our children are
his children, and our fortunes are his care, as
they were when he was alive and ruled his people
wisely as a father. This is why we honor him.
Will you stay with us and be our herd boy?
The lad stood up, his staff in one hand, the
other in the loop of the wolf’s collar. We owe
the shepherd our lives,
he said, with his proud
young head erect. We will go back to him
and serve him until we are men. When I am a
man, I think I will found a city of my own.
His brother laughed. In a flash the lad turned on him and knocked him down. Emilius caught him by the shoulder.
My boy,
he said sternly, there must be
no quarreling on a holiday. Go back to your
The villagers, puzzled, curious and a little afraid, watched the two wild figures and their strange companion move away into the long shadows of the woodlands. They did not come back when any one could see them, but about a week later there was found at the door of the priest a basket woven roughly but not unskillfully of the bark of a tree, lined with fresh leaves and filled with wild honey and chestnuts.
The boy with the pet wolf did not come again to the village where he had first seen a holiday feast and heard what religion was, but he saw a great deal of it for all that. His brother never cared to go back and seemed to take no interest in what he had seen.
Pero, one of the shepherds, while out looking
for stray lambs on the hills, met the youngster
and his wolf coming down with two of the woolly
black-faced truants. They had been hunting,
the boy said, and had come across these lambs
far up on the heights where lambs had no business
to be, and brought them back. When the shepherd
asked the lad his name, he said the Cub
was as good a name as any. The shepherd was
an old man and had seen many queer things in
his life and heard of queerer ones. He had
found that most frightful stories, when one came
to know the truth of them, were some quite
nat
Pero was a little lame from a fall he had had several years ago, although he got about more nimbly than some younger men. He found the help of this wild youth and his wilder companion very convenient at times. After awhile he began to see that the Cub was very curious about the customs of the Sabine village. He did not ask many questions, but he would listen as long as Pero would talk. Many a long still hour the two spent, on the grass while the sheep grazed, or coming slowly down the slope toward the village at nightfall, but always, when they came near the village gate, Pero would look around presently and find that he was alone.
The first time that Pero noticed this curiosity
In the beginning there were no writings, or deeds, or public records to mark the line of a farm, and the only way to protect property rights was by ceremonies which would make people remember the boundary lines, and the landmarks which it was a horrible crime to move.
Pero began by explaining that every house of
the village had to be separated from every other
house by at least two and one half feet. As
each house was a sort of family temple, the home
of the spirits of the ancestors of that family;
naturally nobody but these spirits had any right
there. Two families could not occupy the same
house any more than two persons could occupy
the same place. On the same plan, each field
was enclosed by a narrow strip of ground never
The boundary line of each field was marked by
a furrow, drawn at the time the field was marked
out for the village or the individual owner. At
certain times, this furrow would be plowed
again, the owners chanting hymns and offering
sacrifices. On this line the men were now placing
the landmarks they called the termini. The
terminus was a wooden pillar, or the trunk of a
small tree, set up firmly in the soil. In its
planting certain ceremonies were observed.
First a hole was dug, and the post was set up
close by, wreathed with a garland of grasses and
flowers. Then a sacrifice of some sort was offered—in
this case a lamb—and the blood ran
down into the hole. In the hole were placed also
grain, cakes, fruits, a little honeycomb and some
wine, and burned, live coals from the hearth
fire of the home or the sacred fire of the village
being ready for this. When it was all consumed
the post was planted on the still warm ashes.
If any man in plowing the field ran his furrow
beyond the proper limit, his plowshare would
be likely to strike one of these posts. If he
went so far as to overturn it or move it, the penalty
was death. There was really no excuse
The Cub looked down at the solemnly marching group, the white oxen, and the setting of the posts with bright and interested eyes.
I have seen something like this before,he said
I have seen something like this before,
he
said. Everywhere it is death to move a landmark.
In some places not posts but stones are
used. The dark people across the river say that
he who moves his neighbor’s landmark is hated
by the gods and his house shall disappear. His
land shall not produce fruits, his sons and grandsons
shall die without a roof above their heads,
and in the end there shall be none left of his
Pero stared in astonishment. Where did
you hear all that?
he asked.
When I was younger I ran away and crossed
the river,
said the Cub calmly. They are
strange people over there, not like your people.
They go down to the sea in boats. I went in a
boat also, but I did not like it. There was a
fat trader on the boat, and when we were outside
the long white waves along the shore, and
the wind came up and rocked our boat, his face
turned the color of sick grass. Perhaps my face
did also; I do not know. We were both very
sick. After that I came back to tend sheep
again, for I do not like that place.
They have a god called Turms there who is
the god of traders, and of thieves, and of fortune
tellers. They pray to him for good luck, for
they believe very much in luck. He is sometimes
seen in the shape of a beggar man with a dog
and a staff that has snakes twisted about it, and
a cap with a feather in it.
The Cub stood up laughing and slipped away
down under the rocks with his wolf; it almost
seemed as if he had flown. As Pero stared after
him, he remembered that the lad had an eagle
The Cub had spent time enough on the other side of the river to know something about the people, and he had interesting things to tell. They enjoyed bargaining and spent much time buying and selling. They could make fine gold work, bright-colored cloth, and brown vases with black pictures painted on them. Their walls were often painted with pictures. When a trader from that country, named Toto, came to the village, Pero remembered some of the things he had been told. The people bought some of his trinkets, but by what they said of them when the brightness was worn off and the color faded, he was not a very honest merchant. Pero remembered then that this people had the same god for trading and for stealing.
The Cub said that he had been to other villages
along this mountain slope, and they seemed
to be as separate as if they were islands on a
sea of waste wilderness. They did not have
their feasts on the same day, they did not measure
time alike; in some ways they were almost
as far apart in their ideas as if they had been
Often, late at night, after Pero had gone home, the Cub would lie on a high rock that overlooked the village, looking down at the twinkling circle of lights that meant altar fires in homes. Then he would look up at the twinkling points of light in the sky, and wonder if the gods lived there, and if the lights were the altar fires of their homes. If he had known that Pero once half believed him to be a god in disguise, he would have been very much surprised. He was only a boy, without father, mother or home, and he wished he knew what lay before him in the life he had to live.
He could keep sheep, he could hunt, he could
fight, he could run and swim better than most
boys of his age, and there was no beast, fowl,
His brother never seemed to have such
thoughts. Give him enough to eat and drink, a
fire to warm him in winter and a stream to bathe
in when the summer suns were hot, and his reed
pipe to play, and that was enough. He would
spend hours playing some tune over and over
with first one change and variation and then
another. Even the wolf, now grown large and
powerful, with his gaunt muzzle and fierce eyes,
was more of a companion than that. He was
always ready for a wrestle or a race or a swim
One day the Cub lay on his favorite rock, hidden by a low-sweeping evergreen bough, when he heard shrieks and outcries. Peering over the edge, he saw that in the edge of the woods below, where some women and children were picking up nuts the men had shaken down for them, something was happening. Half a dozen fierce men had rushed upon them and caught up one of the children and run away, so quickly that by the time the fathers and brothers got there no one could say which way they had gone. They joined some others hidden in the woods, and came straight past the rock where the Cub was watching. They were going to keep the child until they got what they wanted. He could hear them talking. The biggest man had the child on his shoulder. Her little face, as he got a glimpse of it, was very white, but she did not cry out.
The boy rose and followed them with his wolf
at his heels. He knew a spring some distance
above, where he thought they would be likely to
stop for a drink. They did. They were far
enough away by this time not to fear pursuit,
and they had passed a rocky place where they
could hold the narrow trail against many times
The Cub crept up, inch by inch, until he was within a few feet of the savage, careless group by the spring, and behind them, on a bank about six feet high. Only the child was facing him. He showed himself for an instant, and laid a finger on his lips, and beckoned. She struggled free from the man who was holding her, striking at him with her little hands, and he laughed and let her go. Even if she tried to run away, they would catch her. But she only staggered unsteadily toward the bank, as if to gather some bright berries there.
The instant she was clear of the group two figures hurled themselves through the air,—a man and a wolf, or so it seemed in the moment or so before the thing was over. There was a snarling, growling, breathless struggle, and then the two strange figures were gone, and so was the child, and the bandits were nursing half a dozen wolf bites and various cuts on their shoulders and arms. Some they had given each other in the confusion, and some were from the long, keen knife the Cub had ready when he leaped among them.
The lad went straight down the mountainside
with his wolf at his heels and the child on his
From his rock he watched them returning
with the child, all talking at once. It seemed
to him a great deal of talk about what could not
Pero never saw the boy with the wolf again. When he heard Emilia’s story of her rescue, he was inclined to think that they were gods after all,—Mars himself, for all any one could say. But the Cub, feeling much older, was far away, and it was long before he returned to that countryside.
The story the robbers had to tell, when they returned to their captain, was not a very likely one. It was so unlikely that they took time to talk the matter over thoroughly before attempting to face him. Perhaps it would be better to tell a lie, if they could concoct one that would do. The trouble was that they could not think of any explanation for their failure, that was likely to satisfy him any better than the plain facts.
Of course it seemed impossible that a man and
a wolf should be traveling peaceably in company,—to
say nothing of taking a child out of the
hands of several strong and reckless men. But
even so, where had they gone? One of the men
had been quick enough to thrust with his spear at
the wolf as he got it against the sky,—and it
went through nothing. He forgot that the
motion of an animal is usually quicker than the
human eye, on such occasions. Moreover, though
two of them went back down the path until they
Gubbo, who came from that village, assured
them that its gods were powerful indeed. He
had not, when he and the other man were watching
it, seen anything like this man and wolf apparition,
and it was certainly remarkable enough
to attract attention. Neither had the country
people ever mentioned such a thing. Privately,
Gubbo did not believe much in gods, but he was
afraid of them for all that, because he was not
sure. Gubbo’s father had impressed upon him
very hard that if he did wrong, bad luck would
surely overtake him. The patience of the gods
was great, but they knew everything, and in the
end no man could escape them. Gubbo, wincing
at the pain where the wolf’s teeth had caught him,
was uncomfortably wondering whether his bad
luck had begun. There had never been any other
failure to kidnap somebody, when men were sent
to do it. Perhaps the bad luck in this case came
from the fact that one of the party was attacking
It was just as well for him that he did this, for the men who returned to the den in the rocks and reported to the chief had a very bad time of it. The leader was executed, and so was the man who had had charge of the child. Of the other three, one died of the bite of the wolf and the others were very ill. After that, not a man of them could have been induced to join in an attack against that village. The chief wisely did not press the matter. After all, that was the nearest village of all those in their range, and it might not be altogether prudent to arouse the anger of the fighting men. It might lead to discovery.
The Cub, as he made his way back to the hut
of Faustulus, was doing a great deal of thinking.
When he was younger he had sometimes dreamed
of being captain of a band of outlaws, because
that seemed the only chance to be captain of anything,
for a fatherless boy. But he had no taste
One day he asked his brother how he would
like to gather the masterless men of all that
neighborhood into a band of soldiery, to live by
hunting and by fighting for any chief who would
give them their living. They were growing too
old to live much longer as they had lived. Perhaps
if they could gather followers enough, they
could go somewhere after awhile and make a
place for themselves. First they might go to
the Long White Mountain, where there was a
rather large town, and see what the prospect was
for such an undertaking. They had already
What can you do?
asked the youth consideringly.
Gubbo said that he could teach tricks in knife work to almost any man; also he could wrestle.
Try me,
said the Wolf, slipping out of his
heavy tunic. He enjoyed the rough-and-tumble
that followed more than he had anything since he
used to play with his wolf. This man really
He is a brute,
said the Ram bluntly.
He is,
said the leader. But he can teach
you fellows something.
They learned a great deal from the villainous-looking newcomer, though if he had not been a little afraid of the young head of the troop, they might have paid a heavy price for their learning. The latter found out by judicious questioning that the den was where he had supposed it was. After a time he began to see that Gubbo was doing his men no good. The man was cruel, treacherous and base. Two or three times he had played tricks which others were blamed for. One day Gubbo heard that a merchant was coming along the road to the mountain villages, and at the same time he was sent on scout duty that way. He watched in the bushes until the man came along slowly, muffled in a long mantle, with a donkey loaded with panniers. He seemed to be old; his beard was white. Gubbo sprang on him; the man turned in that instant and met him with a knife thrust. Then the Wolf straightened up, dropped his white goat’s-hair beard and wig, and went back to camp. The bad luck that Gubbo feared had got him at last, and nobody mourned him at all.
Wolf and the Piper and their troop spent some seasons in fighting and adventure, and then they disappeared. It was said that they had separated.
This was true, but they had separated for a purpose. If the company went together to the lair of the banditti they might as well go blowing trumpets and beating drums; it would be known long before they came near. Their orders were to go by twos and threes, and when the moon was full to meet near a certain great rock that overlooked the valley where the river became a lake and then went on. One by one, as the young leader sat watching on this rock, dark forms came slipping through the shadows and joined him. Last of all came his brother, who had guided some of the party by a very roundabout way.
When all were there, and sentinels posted, he
unfolded his plan. Above the place where they
now sat, among the tumbled rocks of a narrow
valley, was the headquarters of a most pestiferous
company of robbers. For years they had terrified
and despoiled the people of the villages,
and if any resisted they were tormented almost
beyond endurance in many different ways. The
people were expected to turn over to them at certain
times and places practically everything they
produced, except just enough for a bare living.
His plan was this. They were to steal upon
this den of banditti and take it by surprise.
Gubbo had said that it was not fortified to any
extent, because the chief relied on the locality
not being known. They were to kill the chief
and such men as could not be trusted to behave
themselves if they had a chance. Perhaps some
would join the troop and abide by its rules.
They would take the stronghold for their own,
and keep it as a place to return to when they were
not busy elsewhere. Then, instead of making
enemies of the villagers or keeping them so terrified
that they dared not refuse any request, let
them make a friendly agreement. If the people
who lived in these valleys gave them a certain
tribute three or four times a year—a certain
part of the crop, whatever it was—they would
take care that there was no more plundering and
kidnaping, and the farmers could attend to their
own affairs in safety and comfort. If any enemy
The plan was approved, as the young chief knew it would be. He had talked it over beforehand with each man separately. If the people were ungrateful enough, after the den of thieves was broken up, not to agree to the plan proposed, they could take their chance with other thieves, but he thought that after what they had been through in the last few years they would be willing to agree to almost anything.
As men are apt to do when they are much
feared, the banditti in the rock-walled ravine were
growing rather careless. The scouts of the
Wolf’s troop were able to follow their movements
closely. On the following night, when their
destruction was to take place, the robbers were all
in camp, having just returned from one of their
expeditions to bring up supplies. The fat calf
and the fowls and other provisions were sizzling
and stewing over great fires. There was plenty
As he grew older, the robber captain was fonder of eating and drinking, and now he sat on a handsome ivory stool near the fire—for the night was chilly—waiting for the meat to be done to a turn. The cook was a stout, short, bright-eyed man, a slave from across the river, and there was very little that he did not know about preparing rich dishes.
It was a windy night. The wind howled
among the trees and down the ravine as if it were
chasing something. It was like the howling of
wolves, though there had been no wolves on that
All of a sudden arrows came shooting down on the careless banditti, and almost every one found its mark. Down to the roofs of the huts and to the ground came leaping figures, well armed and fighting with the strength and skill of trained men. Whenever they could they disarmed and bound their men, but the leader of the banditti was an exception to this rule. He was killed without a chance to surrender.
When every man in the camp of the banditti
Next day, when things had been cleared up and put in order, each prisoner’s case was taken up separately. A few, whose deeds were the terror of the countryside, were executed. The rest were glad enough to join the troop under the Wolf, on probation. If they did well, they should be full members in time.
The people of the villages were thankful to
buy protection on the reasonable terms offered.
They did not know exactly who these men were
who had rid them of the banditti; some supposed
they were a troop of soldiers from some chief.
They almost never saw any of the band. The
tax demanded was brought to a certain place and
left there, and that was all. Emilius the priest
often wondered why these men did not ask anything
of his village, but they never did. Their
village was the only one that had hardly ever
suffered from the banditti. It was very odd.
He never connected either of these facts with the
long-ago visit of the shepherd youths and the
tame wolf. So matters went on for a year or
two. A guard was always left at the stronghold,
but the men were often absent. Merchants and
traders learned that they could get these men to
The preparations at the village on the Mountain of Fire were completed during the winter, and the little company of men, women and children made ready to go out into the unknown world as soon as a favorable day arrived. It was a more serious undertaking than any they had known or even heard of before. Even when their ancestors came to this place, so long ago that no one could remember when it was, it was after a lifetime of wandering; they were not used to anything else. This company was made up of people who had never in their lives been more than a day’s journey from the place where they were born, and what was more, hardly any of their forefathers had, for generations.
It was made still more difficult and doubtful
by the fact that they were taking their women
and children with them. There was no other
way. There was not too much to eat in the
vil
They left the mountain on the day that was
later called the Ides of March, at the beginning
of spring, and slowly they followed the shining
river out into the valley. Two-wheeled carts
drawn by the oxen were loaded with the stores
and clothing they were able to take with them.
The fighting men had their weapons all in order.
The boys were helping drive the cattle and sheep,
and the married women had the younger children
with them. Every one who was able to walk,
walked. The eldest girl in each of the families—none
was over ten years old—had charge
of one most important thing—the fire. The
little maidens walked soberly together, feeling a
What-
repeated a little yellow-haired
girl, called Flavia because she was
so fair. She was the daughter of Muraena the
smith, and the youngest of the ten.
ever happened?
Ursula, the biggest girl, laughed. If we
were crossing a river and one of us got drowned,
she said teasingly.
But they wouldn’t excuse us for anything
short of that.
But if it did go out—if all of the fires were
put out?
persisted Flavia, walking a little
closer to Marcia, whose word she felt that she
could trust. She had visions of a dreadful anger
of the gods,—another night of darkness and
terror like the one they all remembered.
Should we never have a fire again, and have
to eat things raw, and freeze to death, and let
the wolves eat us up?
Certainly not,
answered Marcia reassuringly.
Father told me all about that when I
was younger than you are. Don’t you remember
how they kindled the fire in the new year?
Flavia shook her yellow head. I never
noticed.
She had been so taken up with the
chanting and the ceremonies that she had not
seen how the fire actually blazed up on the altar.
They do it with the
terebra and the tabula.
The tabula is a flat wooden block with a groove
cut in it, and the terebra is a rubbing-stick that
just fits the groove. They have some very fine
chaff ready, and they move the stick very fast
in the groove until it is quite hot. Don’t you
know how warm your hands are after you rub
them together? When there is a little spark it
always kindle a fire in that way.
What if the
asked Flavia.
terebra and the tabula were
lost?
They would make others.
If I rubbed my hands together long enough,
would they be on fire?
asked the child. She
did not yet see how fire could be made just by
rubbing bits of wood together. In fact, it was
so much easier to keep the fire when it was once
made that this was hardly ever done. It was
only done regularly once a year, at the beginning
of the month sacred to Mars. Then all the altar
fires were put out and the priest kindled the
sacred fire in this way afresh.
The girls all laughed, and Marcia answered,
No, dear, it is only certain kinds of wood that
will do that. I suppose the gods taught our
people long ago which they were. The hearth
god lives in the fire, you know. I always think
it is like a living thing that will die without care.
Father says that the fire keeps away the wicked
fever spirits.
What’s fever?
asked Yaya, on the other
side. Did you ever have it?
No, never; but Father did once, when he was
Although the children did not know it, a blazing
fire and wool clothing help to keep away the
malarial fever of a wet wilderness. The people
believed that their gods taught them to keep up
a fire, to wear clean wool garments and to drink
pure water, and it is certain that they were wise
in doing all these things religiously, as they did.
When they found a good spring on their journey
they filled their water bottles and left a little
gift there for the god of the waters. They kept
near pure running water when they could, and
away from standing water, even if they had to
go a long way round to do it. In the sudden
damps and chills of the lowlands through
which they traveled the tunics and mantles of
pure wool kept them from taking cold, and there
It was a long time, however, before they came in sight of any place that could be thought of as a home. Most of the country they saw was not inhabited except by a stray hut dweller here and there, getting a miserable living as he could,—simply because the land was not fit to live in. They crossed a rolling plain, where the marshes were full of unpleasant looking water, and the air at night was full of singing, stinging insects that drove the cattle frantic. It was not quite so bad near the fires. The insects seemed to dislike the smoke, or perhaps their wings could not carry them through the strong currents of air that the flames made around them. As soon as possible they moved up toward the higher land, and here at last they came in sight of the river of the yellow waters, the great river that ran down to the sea. Beyond that they could not go without meeting strange people and the worship of strange and cruel gods.
Every night the beehive covers were taken off
the baskets, and the fires were kindled, and in
a round hut that was like a big basket lid, a
bed of coals was made ready for the next day’s
One night when they were carefully covering the coals with fine ashes, Marcia and Tullia and Flavia looked up and saw two strange men standing near and looking down at them. They were startled but not at all frightened. The strangers would not be there if they were not friends; the men would not allow it. The two youths did not say anything; they watched for a few minutes, smiling as if they liked what they saw; then they turned away. They looked very much alike, and walked alike, and their voices were alike; but one was a little taller and darker than the other and always seemed to take the lead. They were not like the rude, ignorant, pagan people who sometimes came to stare and beg and perhaps to pilfer when they found some one’s back turned. They looked like the people of Mars. But what could they be doing away out here?
The next day there was great news to tell.
In the first place, the fathers of the colony had
decided to stay here a few days, and let the cattle
feed, and the women wash their clothing and rest
for a little before going on. The water was
This was wonder enough, to be sure, but there was more to come. The wicked uncle of the two brothers had killed their mother and father, and told one of his servants to take the twin boys down to the river and drown them. They were babies then. The servant did not like to do this. He may have been afraid he would get into trouble if he did it and any of their people found it out later. He may have hated to do the cruel work, for they were strong and handsome little fellows. At any rate he put them in a basket and gave the basket to a slave, telling him to throw it into the river.
The river was in flood just then, and its banks
were overflowed for miles on each side. There
was water everywhere, and the ground was soft
so that it was hardly possible to get down to the
real river, where the water was deep and the current
strong. If the children had been thrown
into that, they would have drowned at once.
But the slave did not take time to go all the way
In flood time, as Ursula had often heard her
father the hunter say, animals are sometimes so
frightened that the fierce and the timid take
refuge together on some island or rocky ridge,
without harming each other at all. This flood
had come up suddenly and drowned some of
them in their dens. A wolf that had lost her cubs
A shepherd named Faustulus came that way when the flood had gone down, looking after a lost sheep. He found wolf tracks, and grasping his spear firmly, traced them to this knoll. He found the gray wolf curled up there with the two babies, asleep and warm and rosy, in the circle of her big, strong body.
The shepherd did not know just what to do.
He thought that if he tried to take the children
away from her she would fight, and they might
When this remarkable story was told, there was intense interest in the strange kinsmen. The girls were a little afraid of them. Their eyes were so bright and keen, their teeth so white, and their faces so bronzed and stern that they looked rather savage, especially in their wolf-skin mantles and tunics. But the boys all wished that they could join the patrol in the mountains.
For two days the colonists remained where they were, talking with the two brothers about the country. At last it was settled that the very hills where the two foundlings had grown up would be the best place for the colony to live!
Near the yellow river, there was a group of
seven irregular hills which had never been inhabited,
because the place was far from any town,
and the neighboring chiefs had no especial use
for it. There was good water on these hills and
pasture enough for all the herds, if the woods
were cleared off. The hills were so shaped that
they could be defended, and from those heights
they could see for miles and miles across the
plain. The wild face of Romulus changed and
The colonists crossed the plain to the seven hills, with the brothers guiding them, and on the largest, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river, they made their camp and set up the beehive temple for the last time. Here, they hoped, the sacred fire would burn year after year, and their people find a home.
The colony had chosen for their home one of the largest of the seven hills, squarish in form and more or less covered with woodland. They began at once to fence it around, to keep their beasts from wandering out and thieves and wild beasts from getting in, for all this country was very lonely. They had done this sort of thing so often since they left their old home that they did it quickly and rather easily. It was the habit of their people to save time and strength wherever they could, without being any less thorough. To do a thing right, in the beginning, saved a great deal of loss and trouble in the end.
While some cut down trees that grew on the
land where they intended to make their permanent
settlement, others trimmed off the branches
as fast as the trees were down, and cut the logs
to about the same length, and pointed the ends.
The boys gathered up the branches and cut firewood
from them. The brush that was not needed
When they had logs enough to begin fencing,
all placed ready for use, they dug holes along the
line they had marked out with a furrow, and
planted the logs side by side as closely as they
could, like large stakes. In any newly settled
place, where trees are plenty, this is the most
easily built fortification settlers can have, and
the strongest. A stone or earth wall takes
much longer to build. It is still called a
palisade, a wall of stakes,—just as it was
by men who built so, thousands of years ago
and called a sharpened stake a
A
fence built of boards set up in this way is called
a paling fence, and the boards are called palings.
The word fence itself is only a short word for
palum.defence,
—a defence made of pointed stakes
planted in the ground.
The earth that was dug up was always thrown
inside and formed the basis of a low earthwork
There was a gateway at the top of a slope that was not so deep as the others, placed there so that if the colonists were outside and had to run for shelter, they could get in quickly. Almost anywhere else, a person who tried to get in and was not wanted would have to climb the hill under fire from the slingers and bowmen above. He must then get over the perfectly straight log wall, which afforded no foothold, because all the nubs of the branches had been neatly pared off, and force his way over the sawlike top in the face of men with long spears. No matter what sort of neighbors the colonists might have, they would think twice before they tried that.
The gate was made as strong as possible, of
smaller tree trunks lashed together, and strengthened
on the inside by crosspieces. When it was
closed, two logs, one at the top and one at the
bottom, were laid in place across it. Some one
was always there to guard it, day and night, and
Although strongholds like this had not been necessary for many years in their old home, there was one, built of stone in the ancient days, and never allowed to go to ruin. It seemed very adventurous to the boys to be erecting defences like that for their own families. But Romulus and Remus had told them that this would be the only way of being quite safe. They had a great deal that petty thieves might want to steal; and the chief Amulius might take it into his head to send a force to attack them, if he knew that so large a party of strangers had come in. When they had been there some years, and more people had joined the colony, the seven hills could be fortified so that nobody could take them. Colonus himself could see that, and it gave him a feeling of confidence and respect for his young cousin to know that he had seen it too.
By the time the palisade was finished, not only
most of the land within it was clear, but the material
for the huts was ready and some huts had
been built. The timber was piled as it was cut,
by the boys of the various families, on the lots
marked out for the houses. The younger children
cut reeds and grass for thatching and for
the fodder of the cattle. They did this work
Later the men would gather stone for a stone wall in place of the palisade, to run along the same line, and then the seasoned timbers of their log wall would still be good for building purposes. There was a steeper and narrower hill near the river which would make an excellent fortress. But the thoughts of the colony now were given to laying out farms.
They cleared and laid out wheat fields and
orchards and vineyards as soon as they found
land suitable. As any farmer knows, the sooner
land is cultivated the more can be got out of it;
it is not work that can all be done in a year, or
two years, or three. This is especially true of
land never used before for anything but pasture,
and much of this had never been used even for
that. Sheep do not like wet ground, and both
sheep and cattle, unless they were tended constantly,
might stray into the swampy low
grounds. Drainage would help that land; when
some of it was drained it would make rich lush
meadows and golden grain fields. The land-loving
Vitali could see visions of richer crops than
any they had ever harvested, growing on that
The children who were here, there and everywhere, watching all that was done and helping where they could, felt as if they were looking on at the making of a new world. It was really almost like a miracle—some of the ignorant marsh folk thought it was one—when that uncultivated hilltop, overgrown with bushes and wind-stunted trees and with the rocky bones of it cropping out here and there, became a trim encampment of orderly thatched huts. The beasts grew sleek and fat on the good fodder and grazing, and no one had appeared so far who had any evil designs. In fact, few persons came near them at all. It was as if they had the new world all to themselves.
In the house-building the children helped considerably
after the men got the timber frames up.
Instead of building stone walls, they were going
to do what they had sometimes done before when
a wall was run up temporarily,—use mud. They
set stakes in rows along the walls, not close together
like the palisade, but far enough apart for
twigs and branches to be woven in and out between
them like a very rough basketry. When
this was done the men built a kind of pen on the
ground, for a mixing bowl, and brought lime
wattle and daub
fashion have been known to last hundreds of
years.
The thatched roof was four-sided, running up
to a hole in the middle to let out the smoke.
When it rained, the rain dripped in around the
edges of the hole and ran into a tank under it.
The altar with the sacred fire was at one side of
this tank, and when the room was dark the flame
was reflected in the wavering, shining depths of
the water. The space opposite the door, beyond
the altar, was where the father and mother slept,
and later it might be walled off into a private
room. Other rooms could be partitioned off
along the sides. In later times there was a
small entry or vestibule between the door and the
inner rooms. But although the other rooms
might vary in number and size and use, the
atrium, the middle space, in which were the altar
and the impluvium or water pool, remained the
same. It was the heart of the home. Here the
family worship was held, and this was the common
room of the family.
The plan of the encampment itself was like
the house on a larger scale. The huts were built
around the inside of the palisade, with a separating
space or belt of land that was never
plowed or built on—the pomerium, the space
before the wall.
In the middle was an open
square which was to the town what the atrium
was to the house,—the common ground, where
public worship was held, announcements made,
and public affairs social or religious carried on.
Here was the beehive hut with the sacred fire,
and all other temples or public buildings there
might be would open on this square. The line
of encircling houses made a sort of inner defense
line, and even if any stranger could have climbed
the wall for purposes of robbery or spying, it
would have been hard for him to pass the houses
without being found out.
This was the ancient way in which all the towns
of this race were built. As the towns increased
in size, other gates were opened, and streets laid
out, but always after the same general plan.
And as a family never stayed indoors when it
was possible to work or play in the open air, so
the colonists did not stay inside their wall when
they could go out on the common land and make
it fruitful. Their descendants are seldom contented
to live inside walls and streets, where they
While the colonists were clearing the land on the Square Hill, building huts and laying out farms, they saw nothing of Romulus and Remus. The old shepherd Faustulus came up now and then to look at the work as it went on, and plainly thought these newcomers wonderful and superior beings. But the wolf’s foster children were fighters, not husbandmen, and this work was not in their line at all.
The fathers of the colony were not altogether
sorry that this was so. They felt that if the
hunters, woodsmen, shepherds, soldiers of fortune,
and outlawed men Romulus commanded
should happen to quarrel with peaceable people
like the settlers, it might create a very unpleasant
state of things. The brothers themselves were
friendly enough, but it was not certain whether
they could keep their men from plunder or fighting
if they tried. Such bands, so far as Colonus
To the colonists there was a very great difference
between the ways of different people. The
words they used showed it. Civil life began
when men lived in a city, but this was not a
large settlement of miscellaneous persons, but
a permanent home of men who all worshiped the
citizen,
and the life
itself was civilized,
the life of men who served
one another and the whole community—men,
women and children—looking out for its future
as they would for the prosperity of their own
family. In fact, such a body of people usually
began with a group of relatives, as this one had.
Without this dependence on one another to do
the right thing, there could not be civilization.
A company
was a group who were so far
friends as to eat bread together. This in itself
was a proof of a sort of friendship, for in eating
a man had to lay down his weapons and be more
or less off guard; when men ate together they
were all off guard for the time. Community
meant a group of families or persons bound together
by kindred or friendship or common interest,
and stronger for being bound together,
as a bundle of sticks is stronger than separate
sticks can be. Religion
meant something
stronger still, the binding together of people who
felt the same sort of ties to the unseen world,
who worshiped in the same way, and loved the
same sweet, old, familiar prayers and chants, and
believed in the same unseen rulers of life and
death.
The various words for strangers outside these
ties which bound them to their own people were
out of doors,
the forest people, the
foreigners.
Among a people who all spoke
the same language, the thick-tongued country
people, whose ideas were few, like their needs and
their occupations, were the barbarians,
—the
babblers. And in a place like the settlement
they were making now, a little island of orderly,
intelligent life in a waste of almost uninhabited
wilderness, the scattered hut dwellers were the
pagans,
the people of the waste. But almost
every word that meant a civilized family or town
had in it the idea of obligation. People must
see that they could not be lawless and have any
civil life at all. Civil life meant living together
and living more or less by rules that were meant
for the comfort and welfare of all.
Now the wild followers of Romulus could
surely not be united by any such law as this.
They fought as if Mars himself had taught them,
the country folk said; but the worship of this god
of manhood meant a great many things besides
fighting. No settlement could be strong where
the men were free to fight one another, knew
nothing of self-control, made no homes. Just
how much Romulus understood of this, Colonus
was not sure. As it proved, he understood a
Suddenly, as they always came and went, the twins appeared one day at the gate of the palisade and were made very welcome. It happened to be a feast day, the feast of Lupercal, which came in midwinter, and the fact was that Romulus had found this out and had come that day on purpose. He was always interested in sacrifices, omens, and old customs. Remus had brought his pipes, and while he played for the dancers some wild music that none of them had ever heard, Romulus came over to the older men. He was rather quiet for a long time, watching all that went on, and his eyes turned often to the fire on the altar.
My uncle,
he said at last to Marcus Colonus,
when they were seated a little apart from the
others, I came here to tell you the desire of my
heart, and now that I am here, I feel afraid.
There is much in the world that I have never seen
and do not know. With you, I feel like a little
boy who has everything yet to learn.
This was a surprise to Colonus, and it was a
pleasant one. This young man, who had fought
his way to power and leadership at an age when
most boys are still depending on their fathers for
advice in everything, had somehow learned to be
gentle and reverent, and not too sure of himself.
This was a thing that Colonus could not have
There is no need for you to be afraid,
he said cordially. We are all your friends
here. We owe you much for your aid and
counsel. You are of our blood. This is your
home whenever you come among us.
The young leader stole a quick look from his
keen, dark eyes at the older man. He had
opened the conversation with that speech, not because
he did not mean it, for he did; he felt very
rude and ignorant among these kinsfolk of his,
with their kindly, pleasant ways, and practical
wisdom, and unconscious dignity. He was perfectly
honest in saying that. But he said it just
then because he wished to find out how Colonus
felt toward him, and how far he could count on
his approval and support in a plan he had. It
would be better not to ask for help at all than to
ask for it and be refused. The young chief of
outlaws was proud. He was also wise, with the
sagacity of a wild thing that has had to fight for
life against all the world from birth. He never
had really trusted anybody. The weak who were
afraid to oppose him might do it if they dared.
The strong must not be allowed to see his weakness
or they would take the advantage. The old
That is very good of you,
he said gratefully.
But I am not, after all, really one of you. I
was not brought up as your sons have been. I
cannot be sure that they would trust me as my
own men do. If I were sure—
And then he stopped.
Do you mean,
asked Colonus, that you
wish the help of our young men in some expedition?
Romulus decided to risk it. If it is wise in
your eyes,
he said.
We are strangers in this land,
said Colonus
deliberately, and we must be careful what
we do. You had better tell me exactly what the
plan is, for I cannot judge in the dark. If I
He suspected that Romulus had some plan for making war against his wicked uncle and winning back the place that he and his brother had been robbed of. He wished to know more of the young man’s ways of thinking and acting before he made any promises. It might be a very good thing if Amulius were overthrown, for he was feared and hated even by his own people. The colonists were not strong enough to do it themselves, and it was not their quarrel, but it was a very grave question whether they would not have to fight the soldiers of Amulius sooner or later. He had never troubled the few scattered shepherds and hunters by the riverside, but a settlement like theirs, if it grew and was prosperous, might attract his attention.
It was natural enough for Romulus to desire
to overthrow the man who had cast him out of
his rightful place, but whether he could do it was
another matter. The young men would not
make any trouble about joining him in his war if
they were allowed to, for he was already a sort of
hero among them. But if they drifted into the
vagabond godless life of the outlaws in the forest,
Very often conversation goes on without the use of words. This is so in animals, who seem to understand each other without any talk at all. There is more or less of it even among modern, civilized men. The two kinsmen were not so far from the wild life of their ancestors that they did not see through each other to some extent. Romulus knew well enough that the colonists ruled their lives by ancient customs, and by what they could learn of the will of the gods. A man like Marcus Colonus would naturally have some questions to ask of a young fellow who paid no more attention to old rules and ceremonies than a wild hawk. The youth intended to answer as many of these questions as he could, before they were asked.
A long time ago,
Romulus began, his dark
eyes fixed thoughtfully on the leaping flames,
when my brother and I were boys, Faustulus
the shepherd took us farther from our pastures
They knew the name and the history of the
founder of the city, who came from a far country
with his people, and was led by a wolf to the place
where the city was to be. Although he had long
been dead, he was remembered and loved. The
priest said that his spirit was often with them and
blessed them when they did right. He was to
them a kind father, who never forgets his children.
Then, not understanding how one man could
found a city, I asked the priest, and he told me
that the city was not a mere crowd of people,
but the home of the gods and of the ancestors of
the people, as a house is the home of a man. The
unseen dwellers by the fireside require not great
houses, but when the fire is kept burning they
love it as do the living. Then I watched and
saw the processions, and the dancing, and heard
the chanting of songs and the sacred music, and
all that was done in honor of the founder. I
saw that the city was the home of a man, living
or dead, forever and ever. Then I said,
When
I am a man, I will found a city in the place where
My brother laughed, and I, being angry, knocked
him down. I wanted to kill him in that moment.
But the priest told me that there must never be
quarreling on a feast day, because it brought ill
luck. I was afraid that the founder of the city
saw me and was angry. I went away. But
from that time I have always wished to found a
city in this place, and for that reason I was glad
when your people came and I could lead them
here.
Colonus found this story a touching one. It showed a reverence and affection for the things he had not known, which he was glad to see in this strong young man.
And that is your secret desire?
he said,
smiling.
That is my dream,
said Romulus. And he
looked at the older man with eyes that had a
question in them.
If you are to found a city here,
said Colonus
slowly, Mars must lead you as he leads us. If
our young men fight in your battles, your men
must come and live with us and worship our gods
and obey our laws. That is what a city means.
How will these things be, Romulus, son of the
Ramnes, son of the wolf?
My men will go where I go,
said Romulus
This also is in my mind, my uncle, and
you shall tell me whether it is a wise plan or the
hasty vision of youth. There are many in the
army of Amulius, my uncle, who hate him as
much as they fear him. He suspects that we are
the children he tried to murder, and will try to
hunt us down and make the people we have protected
betray us. Perhaps they will fight for
themselves if they will not fight for us; I do not
know. But there is not one among my men,
the youth lifted his dark head in high confidence,
who follows me from any other reason than
because he wishes. They do not all love me,
he
added, with a grin that showed his sharp white
teeth, but I am their leader and they will die
fighting before they will yield to Amulius.
If then I lead my men boldly against Amulius,
not waiting for him to be ready, not staying
until he sends his slaves to hunt me down, not
letting him hear of our coming till we are there,
I think that we may succeed, and then will the
land be freed. He himself is old and has not
led men to war for many years. I think that
many in his army will refuse to fight against us,
and others will yield without much fighting, and
when we have come and taken his city, the people
who obey him now will be glad. But my grandfather
is still alive, and he, and not my brother
When my grandfather is again ruler where
he has the right, then would I come here and
found my own city in my own place where the
she-wolf saved our lives. Was she not the servant
of Mars?
Colonus nodded thoughtfully. It would
seem so.
Then shall my people be your people, and
your gods my gods,
said Romulus, his clear voice
cutting the rest like the call of a trumpet. The
young people on the other side of the square
looked curiously at the two, the young man and
the older one, so deep in talk, and Remus, laughing,
began to play again. It was a sweet and
piercing measure that set all their feet flying.
Colonus stood up and took his young kinsman
by the hand. You are of our blood,
he said,
and your fight is our fight. We have talked
of this among us, and have thought that perhaps
you would do this. I think that our council will
be of one mind with me in this matter. The gods
guide you, my son.
Never in his life had Romulus felt in
his own soul the strength of kinship as he
felt it after the colonists agreed to join
their forces with his. He had made his men into
a fighting force when courage was almost the only
virtue they had, but there was no natural comradeship
between them as a whole. Here were
men of his own people, welded together by all
the ties of a boyhood and manhood spent together
in one place, and they were ready to stand by him
to the death. It seemed to give him a strength
more than human. Remus was his brother, but
he too was different and did not understand. He
was no dreamer; he would have been content to
go on all his life a shepherd boy or a soldier. But
these men understood; they looked down the road
of the years to come and planned for their children
and grandchildren. That was why they
were willing to let their sons go to fight against
the tyrant Amulius under a stranger and a
cap
There were anxious days in the settlement by the yellow river, after the young men marched away. Even if Romulus won the victory, perhaps there would be some who would not come back. And if he failed, the first the colonists would know of it would be an army coming to kill or enslave them all.
Not quite a month after the departure of the little fighting force the watchmen on the wall saw far away on the plain a single running figure. At first they could not be sure who it was. The word flew about the colony and soon the people were gathered wherever they could get a view of the running man. It was toward evening; the long shadows stretched over the level ground, and the red sunset made the still waters look like pools of blood. Everything was very quiet. They could hear the croak and pipe of the frogs, far below at the foot of the hill.
On and on came the racing figure, and now he
had caught sight of the people on the hill, for he
lifted his arm and waved to them again and
again. It was good tidings; that was the meaning
of his gesture in their signal language.
Many hastened to meet him, but the path down
Victory! Vic-to-ry! Romulus forever!
Ai-ya! Victory! Vic-to-ry! Romulus
forever!
His mother began to cry for joy and pride.
The other women did not dare to yet. They did
not allow themselves to be really glad until the
small boys came scampering in ahead of their
elders, to be the first to tell. Amulius was dead
Caius Cossus lived to be very old, and his long life brought him much honor and happiness, but never again, so long as he lived, did he have so glad a triumph as when he came in at the gate of the little, rude town by the river, and told the story of the fight at Alba Longa to the fathers and mothers who had the best right to be proud of it. It was the first battle the young men of the colony had ever been in, and a great deal would have depended on it in any case. They were strangers, with their reputation for courage and coolness all to make.
When the young messenger had had a chance to get his breath and some food and drink—and the best in the place was none too good for him—he told the story of the campaign from the beginning.
Romulus had separated his force into three
companies and sent them toward Alba Longa by
three roads and in small groups, not to attract
attention, until they were within a few hours’
Some of the country people were there to serve
as guides. There was a way around the city
to the back, where the wall was not so high, and
Remus and his party would go first and come
around that way. The colonists were to swing
to the left, where a road branched off, and come
up toward the gate where the barracks were.
Romulus himself with his own men would attack
the main gate just after dawn and push his way
It all went as it was planned. The headlong rush of the young chief and his men, who were as active and sinewy as cats, took them through the main gate and over the walls almost at the same moment. They had brought slim tree trunks with the nubs of the branches left on, for ladders, and rawhide ropes on which they could swarm up over the walls in half a dozen places at a time. The soldiers were completely taken by surprise, and many surrendered at once. The invaders were in the public square and pushing into the palace of the chief almost before the bewildered and terrified people found out what had happened. Romulus himself was the first to enter the private rooms of Amulius, and there he found the old chief dying from a spear wound in the breast. The captain of his guard had killed him and then offered his sword to Romulus in the hope of being the first to gain favor.
A man who is false to one master will be
false to two,
said Romulus, with a flash like
lightning in his dark eyes. He ordered the captain
bound and turned over to his grandfather,
when he should arrive, for judgment. This was
not the sort of timber he wanted for an army.
If the captain had surrendered, it would have
been very well, but to kill his master in his room,
unarmed, for a reward, was black treachery, and
it was not the young chieftain’s plan to encourage
either traitors or cowards.
From the steps of the palace he sent the triple drum roll sounding through the gray light of a rainy morning, and heard it answered by the battle shout of the young men of the colony, as they came charging into the gate, and by the shrill piercing music of the pipes from the company Remus led. The three companies met in the square, keeping order and rank as if it were a game, and as they saw their leader standing in the doorway in the red flame of the torches, they shouted the triple shout of victory. Standing there in his armor, above the savage confusion, the white faces of the people uplifted to him from the crowded streets, he looked every inch a chieftain. He beckoned his brother to his side, and lifted his sword, and all was still.
Ye who know what Amulius did in the days
he began, know now that
he is dead.
Ye who know that he killed his own sons for
fear they should grow up and rebel against him,
fear him no more, for he is dead.
Ye who have been bowed down with the burden
of his cruelty and his greed, rise up and stand
straight like men, for he is dead.
Ye, the gods of his fathers and mine, who
know what he was in his lifetime, I call on ye to
judge whether his slayer did well to kill him, for
he is dead.
Ye, the people of the Long White Mountain,
who have heard the name of Romulus and the
name of Remus, know now that we are the children
whom he would have slain after he had killed
our father and our mother, and that we were
saved by a wolf of Mars to live and rule our own
people now that Amulius is dead.
Ye, the people of Alba Longa, of the ancient
home of our race, take Numa for your chief now,
and be loyal to him and serve him, for he who
took the right from him is dead!
There was an instant’s pause, and then shouts
of Numa! Numa!
broke from the people.
If Romulus had claimed the place for himself
they would have shouted his name just as readily,
but this was not Romulus’ plan at all. The
This did away with the last bit of resistance. The remainder of the army was only too glad to surrender, and messengers were sent off to tell Numa the good news and bring him home in triumph to his own place. When they had welcomed him, they would come to the hill beside the river and found their own city.
It was a day long to be remembered when the Romans returned, the young men marching lightly with laughter and singing, their young leaders in the van. The people went out to meet them with music and rejoicing, and there was a great feast in the colony. But to Colonus the most precious moment of that day—not even excepting the first sight of his own son Marcus—was that in which the young and victorious Romulus came to him where he stood with Tullius the priest, and knelt before them, saying,
Tell me that I have done well, my fathers,
Then they blessed him and crowned him with the victor’s crown of laurel. The outlaw had found his own people.
In the weeks that followed the slaying of
Amulius, Romulus sat many hours each day
with the older men, consulting and planning.
He was very quick to understand all that he
heard and saw, and very anxious not to leave out
the least ceremony proper to the founding of the
city. Each one of these ceremonies had a meaning.
The founder of the city was to the community
what the father of a family was to his
household; he was a sort of high priest. It was
a strange experience for the wild young chief
of a band of men of no family,—outlaws and
almost banditti. From a forest lair with no temple
and no altar he had come to a town where the
altar was the heart of everything. From expeditions
planned and directed by himself, in
which his will was the only law, he was now to be
the head of a life in which everything was guided,
more or less, by customs so old that no one could
say where they came from. He was no man’s
The fathers of the city saw more and more clearly the difference between the two brothers. Remus did not, apparently, take any interest in the traditions and the ceremonies so strange to him and so familiar to the colonists. Romulus had been leader in all their expeditions, not because he tried to make himself first and crowd his brother down into second place, but because his men would follow him anywhere, and they did not seem to have the same faith in Remus. Moreover, Remus did not seem to care to be a leader. He never sat, silent, planning and working out a way to do what seemed impossible, as Romulus did. Romulus was not a great talker unless at some especial time when he had something it was necessary to say. He was in the habit of thinking a matter over very thoroughly before he said anything at all about it. People wondered at his lightning-like decisions in an emergency, but the men who knew him best knew that he had often come to them privately beforehand, and talked the whole thing over, without their knowing what he was after until the time came.
Remus did most of the talking, in fact. He
was fond of raising objections and expressing
Therefore the Romans were surprised when Remus objected to the choice of the Square Hill for the sacred city. In his opinion the one next to it, which had been named the Aventine, the hill of defense, because that was where the soldiers had encamped, would be the place. There was no sign that the Square Hill was favored by the gods. If Romulus considered signs and omens so important, how could he be so sure that he had the right to choose the place himself?
Romulus’ black brows drew together. He had
not thought of it in that way. He had intended
to choose, so far as he could be certain of it, the
very place where he and his brother were found
by the shepherd, for the sacred enclosure which
would be the heart of the city. He had talked
with Tullius, who thought this entirely right;
the almost miraculous rescue of the two children
was a sign, if any were needed. But Remus recalled
the custom that the priesthood beyond the
It was a still day, late in spring, and most of
the birds had already flown northward on their
usual migration. For a long time none appeared.
Then Remus gave a shout. He saw
winging their way slowly but steadily a flock of
vultures,—six in all. If that were the only
flight observed during the day, it would seem that
the Aventine was the right hill, after all. The
sun began to sink and cloud over. Then from
the mountains where Romulus had gathered his
troop, and on which his eyes were resting, arose
a dark moving spot that spread into a cloud of
outspread wings,—vultures again, and many of
them. There were twelve altogether. The
[Illustration: A plan of Rome in classical times, showing the seven hills]
On what would now be called the twenty-first of April, the day when the sun passes from the sign of the Ram into the sign of the Bull, in the beginning of the month sacred to Dia Maia, the goddess of growth, the city was founded.
The first rite was one of purification. Fire, which cleanses all things, was called upon to make pure every one who was to take part in the ceremonies of the day. The father of the city stood with Romulus near a long heap of brushwood. With a coal from the altar fire Romulus lighted the pile and leaped across the flame, followed by the others in turn.
Then around the spot where Faustulus had
always said he found the children, Romulus dug
a small circular trench. The space inside this
was called the mundus, the home of the spirits.
Here the ancestors of all these people who had
left their old homes might find a new home, a
place where they would still be remembered and
honored, a sort of sacred guest chamber in the
life of the new city. These invisible dwellers by
the altar would see their children’s children and
all their descendants keeping the good old customs
and the ancient wisdom from dying out,
just as they showed their ancestry in their eyes
and hair and gait and way of speaking.
The things that were put in this trench, in a
outfit vault,
were all symbols
of the life of the people. First Romulus himself
threw into it a little square of sod that he had
brought from the courtyard of the house where he
was born, on Alba Longa. Each of the fathers
of the colony in turn threw in a piece of sod
they had brought from their old homes on the
Mountain of Fire. This, like so many things
in old ceremonies, was a bit of homely poetry.
When a man was obliged to leave the place where
he was born he took with him a little of the sod.
Even to-day we find people taking from their
old homes a root of sweetbriar, or a pot of shamrock
or heather, a cutting of southernwood or of
lilac. The look and the smell of it waken in
them a love that is older than they are, that goes
back to some unknown forefather who brought it
from a still older place, perhaps, centuries ago.
To the people of long ago this feeling was part
of religion.
Together with the earth there were placed in
the circle some of the grain, the fruit, the wine,
and all the other things that made a part of the
life of the people. Finally an altar was built
in the center of it, and a fire was lighted there
from coals brought by the young girls. This
was the hearth fire of the spirits and was never to
be allowed to go out except once a year. Then
terebra
and tabula, and all the other hearth fires would
be lighted from it.
Now came the last and most important ceremony,
the tracing of the line of the wall around
the city itself,—the urbs, the home of the people.
This of course had all been decided upon beforehand,
and the places for the gates had been fixed.
Romulus wore the robes of a priest, and his head
was veiled by a kind of mantle, in order that
during the ceremony he might not see anything
that would bring bad fortune. The copper plow
was drawn by a white bull and a white cow, the
finest of all the herd. As he turned the furrow
When he came to the places where the gates
were to be, Romulus lifted the plow and carried
it over. These openings in the furrow were
called the portae,—the carrying places. Of
course, where there was a gate, the soil must be
trodden by many feet, and there the furrow was
interrupted. It is not known where all of these
gates were, but the one called Porta Mugionis,
the Gate of the Cattle, out of which the herds
were driven to pasture, was where the Arch of
Titus stands in the Rome of to-day. The Porta
Romana was the river gate and there were others
leading to the common land to the other hills.
This first enclosure was afterwards sometimes
called Roma Quadrata,—the square city by the
river.
When the wall was built, a little inside this
No human being among the lookers-on who
reverently followed the procession around this
city that was to be, could have told what thoughts
and feelings filled the soul of Romulus. Perhaps
he felt the solemnity of it even more than
he would if he had been accustomed to all these
beliefs from childhood. Things that he had
dreamed of, things that he had seen from a distance
as an outlaw and a vagabond, were part
of the scene in which he was now the central
figure. He had the sensitive understanding of
others’ feelings and thoughts which a man gains
when he has had to depend on his instincts in
When the circle was all but completed something
happened which no one could have foreseen.
Remus had followed all that was done with a
rather mocking light in his eye. He did not believe
in the least what these people believed.
Suddenly he stepped past the others, and with a
jeering laugh leaped across the furrow. If he
had stabbed his brother to the heart, it could not
have made more of a sensation. It was a deliberate,
wilful insult to everything that religion
meant to these people. All Romulus’ hot temper
and his new reverence for the ways of his
forefathers blazed up in an instant, and he struck
his brother to the earth with a blow. Even one
single blow from his hard fist was not an
expe
There were places where such an act as that of Remus would have been punished with death, but Romulus did not know that. He had struck out as instinctively as a man might knock down a ruffian who insulted his wife. Such an insult might not be a physical injury, but the intention would be enough to warrant punishment. The older men of the colony were inclined to think that the gods had done the thing. Romulus himself did not. He never got over it, though he never spoke of it. That day took the boyish carelessness out of his eyes and set a hard line about his mouth. It was the proudest and most sacred day of his life, and now it was the saddest.
After the founding of the city and the tragic ending of the day, Romulus went away, no one knew exactly where. He was gone for some time, He told Marcus Colonus that he was going to Alba Longa, where some of his men still were as a garrison for Numa. But he did not stay there many days.
Although he was the founder and in one way the ruler of his city, this did not mean that he was obliged to stay there to settle all its problems. Most of them were solved by the common law and common sense of the colonists. Their ruler had no authority over them contrary to custom, and custom would apply in one way or another to almost everything they did. Hence the young man was free to go wherever he saw fit.
The fancy took him to cross the river and see
the old woman who had told him when he was a
boy that he was to be the ruler of a great people.
He found her still alive, though so old that her
Welcome, king,
she said.
Just how much she had heard of his life from
traveling traders and vagabonds, no one can say,
but she seemed to know a great deal about it.
She told him that when he returned to his own
country, if he followed certain landmarks and
dug in the ground at a certain point near the river
bank some distance from Rome, he would find
an altar and a shield of gold. The shield, she
said, had fallen from heaven, and was intended
for him, because he was the especial favorite of
Mars, the god of war. He did not take this
very seriously, but he found himself much interested
in the ways of this strange people. Their
priests knew how to measure distances, and mark
out squares, and consult the stars. Their metal
workers, dyers and potters knew how to make
curious and precious things. The fortune tellers
had a great reputation all over the country.
Their name, soothsayers, meant those who tell
the truth.
The old woman told him that it was a great
mistake for those who were born under a certain
star to try to get away from their fate. If a man
were born to be a ruler and a commander of men,
it was useless for him to try to make himself a
In talking with the soothsayers, he heard a
great deal about the influence of the stars. The
priests also put great faith in this. They divided
the sky into twelve parts, or houses, as they called
them, and each of these was ruled by some star
named after a god. In the course of the year
Romulus was acute enough to see that these
people knew him for a chief, and that some of
what they told him was flattery; but he was not
sure how much of it was. He had not wandered
about his world for twenty-odd years without
seeing the difference in people. He knew that
the great art of ruling men successfully lies in
understanding their different characters and not
expecting of any person what that person cannot
do. The rules of the villages were very well for
a small place, where all of the people were related.
But how would they fit such a miscellaneous collection
of people as seemed likely to gather in the
town by the river? His mind was gradually
One thing he could see very clearly, and that
was that for a long time yet the colonists would
have to give especial attention to disciplined warfare.
He wished that there were more of them.
If they ever had a quarrel with the dark Etruscans
beyond the river, it would be a fight for
When he left the land beyond the river, he paid a farewell visit to the old witch, and she told him again that he was born to rule. He hoped that he was.
When he came back to the Square Hill, he
found the fathers of the colony confronting a new
problem, which they had no tradition to help
them settle. The problem was what to do with
the new settlers who were coming in for protection
and in the hope of getting a living, but who
were not of their own people. Often they had
not intelligence enough to understand what the
colonists meant by their customs. This was
something that Romulus had expected. He had
his answer ready. He said that there was a god
of whom he had heard, called Asylos, who protected
homeless persons and serfs who had escaped
from cruel masters, and that they might
set apart a space outside the walls and dedicate
it to this god. There his own soldiers could live,
and there would be a place for any one who came
who would work for a living. And this was
done. The people who came in from various
plebs, the men who helped to fill the town. There
was so much to do, and so little time to do it, that
every pair of hands was of value. It would not
do to let every one who came become a citizen, an
inhabitant of the city, because that might destroy
all comfort and order within the walls. But the
town grew much faster when it became known
that any man not a criminal could get a living
there.
Another circumstance that made it grow was that the country people and the villagers from farther up the river began to bring down what they had to sell. Sometimes the Etruscans bought of them, and sometimes the Romans did. It was the last riverside settlement before the boats went down to the sea, and it began to be a trading as well as a farming place not many years after the colonists settled there.
Trading was favored because farming did not
altogether supply the needs of the people. Now
and then the river rose and flooded their land.
The only part of the country they could absolutely
depend on as yet was the group of seven
hills, where they kept their herds and flocks.
One year, when their grain was ruined, they had
At the end of ten years the town on the Square
Hill had spread out into a collection of villages
and huts in which almost every kind of human
being to be found in that region might have been
seen, somewhere. On the Palatine Hill lived the
original ten families and some of their kindred
who had joined them. On the Aventine were
barracks for the soldiers, and also on the steep
The children who had come to the Square
Hill learned to know one another very
well in those first years of the colony.
There were about a dozen of the older ones who
were nearly the same age, and they shared more
responsibility than children do in a more settled
community. When the river rose suddenly, and
It was a wild and lonely scene. The rising of the flood had covered the plain for miles, although in many places the waters were not deep. The seven hills stood up like seven islands in an ocean, and although neither of the boys had ever seen an ocean, they knew that it must be something like this. The hill where they had driven their scrambling goats was high and steep and rocky and had been partly fortified. It was a natural stronghold, standing up above the group as the head of a crouching animal rises above the body. All the hills were crowned with circles of twinkling fires, and on the highest point of each was a beacon fire which was used for signals. Each had signaled to the others that all was right, and now there was nothing to do but wait for the morning.
The smaller boys who had helped were very
These two boys had always been good friends,
for they were just unlike enough for each to do
some things the other admired. Marcs was like
his father, square-set and strong and rather silent.
Mamurius was a little taller and slenderer,
and very clever with his hands. He could invent
new ways to do things when it was necessary and
when the old ways were impossible. He had
The girls also had their responsibilities, which
made them rather more capable and sure of
themselves than they might have been if they
were not the children of colonists. After the
flood went down it left things wet and unwholesome
for some weeks, and a fever broke out, of
which some of the people died. Mamurius’
mother, and Marcia’s two little brothers, and
two girls in the family of Cossus died of it, and
at one time hardly a family had more than one
or two well persons. Marcia was watching over
her mother, who was very ill, when Mamurius
came to the door with a basket of herbs and
gave her a handful. He said that he had asked
Faustulus whether he did not know of some medicine
for the fever. Faustulus told him that there
were certain herbs in his hut which his wife used
to prepare in a drink, and this drink helped the
fever. Mamurius had brewed the drink and
given it to his father, and taken some himself,
One night Muraena the metal worker came to the house of Colonus, and sat down with the head of the house under a fig tree by the door and talked with him. The two had been friends for many years, and now, he said, the time had come to make the friendship even closer by an alliance between the two houses. He had long observed the goodness and dutiful kindness of Colonus’s daughter Marcia, and it was his wish that now she was come to an age to be married, she might be his own daughter. He had reason to believe that his son would be glad to marry her. What did Colonus think about it?
Colonus had no objection whatever. That night he went in and called Marcia to him, and told her kindly that Mamurius the metal worker’s son had been proposed for her husband, and that it would be most pleasing to both families if the marriage could be arranged. It was a surprise to Marcia, but not at all an unpleasant one, and she went to sleep that night a very happy girl.
This was the first wedding in the colony, and
as the preparations went forward, everybody, old
confarreatio; as it was called, the wedding
ceremony, the eating of bread. Like the
other ceremonies in the religion of the people,
this was very old, so old that the beginning of
it was not known. The reason of some of the
things that were done had been forgotten.
Marcia could just remember going to one wedding
when she was a little girl before they left
the Mountain of Fire. All the colonists who
went out were already married and had children,
and until now none of the children were old
enough to begin a new home.
There was always a certain meaning in the
eating of salt together; it is so in all the ancient
races. Salt was not like food that any two men
might eat together, like animals, where they
found it. It was part of the household stores;
When a bride left her own home to go to that
of her husband, it was a very solemn proceeding,
because she said farewell to her own family, the
spirits of her ancestors, and the gods of her
father’s hearth, and became one of her husband’s
family, a daughter of his father. All that was
done was based more or less on this idea. A girl
who ran away from home without her father’s
knowledge could not expect to be blessed by her
ancestors, the unseen dwellers by the fireside.
A woman who came into another home without
the permission of the spirits who dwelt there
could not hope to be happy; bad luck would certainly
follow. The wedding ceremonies were
The day was chosen by Tullius the priest, and was a bright and beautiful day, not long after the feast of Maia. The ceremonies began at dawn. Before sunrise Tullius was scanning the sky to make sure that the day would be fair and that no evil omen was in sight. Felic’la, who hovered around her sister with adoring eyes, thought she had never seen Marcia look so beautiful. She was in white, with a flame-colored veil over her head, and her hair had been, according to the old custom, parted with a spear point into six locks, arranged with ribbons tied in a certain way to keep it in place. Her tall and graceful figure was even more stately than usual in the white robe she wore, and her great dark eyes were like stars.
When the guests were all at the house, Marcus
Colonus offered a sacrifice at the family altar and
pronounced certain ancient words, explaining
that he now gave his daughter to the young
Mamurius and set her free from every obligation
that kept her at home. When the sacrifice was
over, the guests wished the young couple happiness,
and the marriage feast began. There
was no one in the whole village who did not have
reason to remember the rejoicings on the day
At last the rejoicings at the home of Colonus
were over, and it was time for the wedding procession.
Attended by the young girls near her
own age, the bride was taken from her mother’s
arms by the bridegroom, and the whole party
moved in procession toward the new home. In
advance went torch bearers, and the children
scattered flowers for her feet to tread upon as
she passed. Every one was singing or shouting
Talassio! Talassio!
The flute players were
making music, and the bridegroom scattered
handfuls of nuts for which the boys scrambled.
When they reached the door of the new house
Exactly why this was part of the marriage
ceremony is not known. Some think it was because
a bride must not be allowed to stumble on
the threshold, for that would be unlucky. But
it was more likely to mean that she was brought
by her husband into the house to join in the worship
of the spirits of the home, and so did not
come in without an invitation. As she stood in
the atrium, the middle room where the altar and
libation
to the gods of her new home.
This was the confarreatio. They felt as if the
silent, burning fire that lighted the dusky little
room were trying to tell them that their simple
meal was shared by the gods themselves, and
that the blessing of all Mamurius’ forefathers
was on the bride that he had brought home to be
the joy of his house.
On the next day there was another feast, to celebrate the beginning of the new home, and the wedding was over.
I am glad,
said Marcia’s mother to her husband
when they went home that night, leaving
their daughter and young Mamurius standing
together at their own door, that everything
went so well, without a single unlucky or unhappy
thing to spoil the good fortune. Marcia
well deserves to be happy,—but I shall miss her
every day I live.
She sighed, and Felic’la looked rather sober. She knew very well that they would all miss Marcia, but she determined in her careless little heart to be a better girl and do so much for her mother and brothers that when her turn came, they would all be sorry to see her go.
I am glad,
said Colonus, for more than one
reason. I have been rather anxious for fear that
in this new place our young people would not
remember the old ways as they might if they had
grown up in our old home. It was important
to have the first wedding one that they would
all remember with pleasure, and wish to follow
as an example. I am very glad Marcia has so
good a husband. Mamurius is a youth who will
go far and be a leader among the young men.
I suppose that now they will all be thinking of
marriage.
There were, in fact, several other marriages in
the colony within a year or two, but nobody who
was at that first wedding ever forgot it. Marcia
was often called upon to tell how the garlands
were made, and just how much honey they put
in the cakes for the feast, and how the other little
matters were arranged that all seemed to be
managed exactly right. In fact, that wedding
set a fashion and a standard, and as Marcia’s
father was shrewd enough to see, it is a good thing
One autumn day a little while after the
harvest, a squat, brown man with large
black eyes under great arched eyebrows
set in a large head, and with unusually muscular
shoulders and arms, was paddling slowly in a
small boat across the yellow river. As he crossed
he looked up attentively at the range of hills near
the riverside, now partly covered with wooden
huts. It was his experience that villages were
good places to trade. They were especially so
when, as now, pipes were sounding and the people
were keeping holiday in honor of some god.
He had gone to many places with his wares, but
he had not as yet visited the town by the river.
He was not even quite sure of its name. Some
called it Rumon and some Roma. The people
of his race were not very quick of ear, and often
pronounced letters alike or confused them when
they sounded alike,—as o and u, or b and p, or
t and d. He himself was called Utuze, Otuz, or
He had landed on this bank when he went up the river and approached the men from the settlement when they were working on their lands outside the walls, but they did not pay much attention to him. He could not tell whether they did not want his wares, or were suspicious, or simply did not understand what he was talking about. Now he was going to find out,—for he was of a persistent nature. Perhaps there would be some one at the festival who could speak both his language and theirs and tell them what he wanted to say. Then it would be easy.
On a glittering chain around his neck he carried
a metal whistle, or trumpet, that could be
heard a long distance and would pierce through
most other noises as a needle pierces wool. On
his back he carried in a sack a great variety of
small things likely to please women and girls and
children. He had learned a very long time ago
that however shrewd a man may be, he will buy
very silly things and pay any price you like for
them when he is persuaded that they will please
a girl. He also knew that men will buy things
for their wives that no sensible woman ever buys
for herself, and that if children cry for a toy long
The squealing of the peddler’s trumpet reached
the ears of the soldiers, who were having a good
time in their own way. They had their own
games and frolics and feats of strength, and
some of the young men from the town were there
to look on and perhaps to join. Urso the
hunter’s son, and Marcus and Bruno the sons of
Colonus, and little Pollio the son of the sandal
maker, were all there, and when they heard the
trumpet they sprang to their feet. But Ruffo
the captain of the guard laughed, and the others
By Jove, there’s
Toto!
was the general name for Diovithe gods,
and when it is pronounced quickly it sounds like
Jove.
The father of the gods was Diovis-Pater
—which
in course of time became Jupiter.
The peddler had been in their camp in the days before the town by the river was thought of, and when he saw them, he came up the path grinning broadly, and they grinned back. They explained to the boys of the colony that he came from across the river and dealt in all sorts of things that were not made at all on this side, and some that were brought from the seashore. Toto spread out his gay cloth on the ground and began to lay out his wares.
Through long practice he knew just how to place them so that they would show most effectively, and many a customer wondered why the trinket did not look as well when he got it home as it had before he bought it. The colors in the painted cloth were combined in old, old patterns worked out according to laws as certain as the laws of music, and everywhere was the gilding that set off the colors and seemed to make them brighter and richer.
There were scarfs such as women wore on their
The Roman boys had never seen anything like this before, but they did not show any great curiosity. One of the things that the people of Mars taught their children, without ever saying it in so many words, was not to be in a hurry to talk too much in strange company. They were brought up to feel that they were the equals of any one they were likely to meet and need not be in haste to make new friends. This feeling gave them a certain dignity not easily upset. In fact, dignity is merely the result of respecting yourself as a person quite worthy of respect, and not feeling obliged to insist on it from other people. The colonists had it.
Pollio picked up one of the sandals and smiled.
My father would not think this leather fit
to use,
he said in a low tone to Bruno.
Marcus was looking at a pin of a rather pretty design and wondering how Flavia, his betrothed, would like it, when it bent in his fingers. That pin had not been made for the handling of young men with hands so muscular as his. Marcus paid for the pin and tossed it into the river. He had no intention of making a gift like that to any one.
When they handled the charm necklaces they saw from the lightness that what looked like gold was not gold. It was so with all the peddler’s stock. The soldiers, seeing that the boys from the colony did not think the stuff worth buying, did not buy much themselves, nor did they drink much of his wine.
Ruffo said after Toto had gone that he did not always carry such a collection of trash as he had to-day. Sometimes he sold excellent fish-hooks and small tools. Marcus said that if he bought anything, he wanted a thing that was worth buying, and they began to throw quoits at a mark.
Marcus had seen traders before and dealt with
them, but for some reason this peddler’s pack
set him thinking. In their way of living a farmer
made most of his own tools, and wishing them to
last as long as possible, he made them well. It
was the same with the baskets, the linen, the wool
and the leather work, and the other things made
at home. It was the same with the work done in
the smithy of Muraena. He wished to have a
reputation among his neighbors for making fine
weapons. The men always put the greater part
of their time on their farms, and since they had
been in this new country, their planning and contriving
how to make the soil produce more and
In view of these great thoughts of the future,
the glittering trinkets of the man with the
trumpet looked small and worthless. Marcus
began to see what was meant by the elders when
they spoke of gravity
as a virtue and levity
as a rather foolish vice. Life depended very
much on the way one took things; to take important
things lightly, or give valuable time and
thought to worthless objects left a man with the
chaff on his hands instead of the good grain.
Something his father had told him a long time ago, when he was a little boy, came into Marcus’s mind. It was when he wanted something very much, and being little, cried because he could not have it and made himself quite miserable. His father came in just then and watched him for a minute or two. Then he said,
My son, do you wish to be a strong man,
when you grow big?
Y-yes,
sniffed the little fellow dolefully.
You wish to be strong of soul and heart as
you are in your body, so that no one can make
Yes, Father,
said the boy, with his puzzled
dark eyes searching his father’s face.
Then, my son, remember this: the strong
man is the man who can go without what he
wants. If you cannot do without a thing you
want, without being unhappy, you are like a boy
who cannot walk without a crutch. If you can
give up, without making a ridiculous ado about
it, whatever it is not wise for you to have—if
you can be happy in yourself and by yourself
and stand on your own feet—then you are
strong. In the end you will be strong enough
to get what you really want. The gods hate a
coward.
Now in the long shadows of the fading day, as
he heard the far sound of the peddler’s trumpet
down the river, Marcus found a new meaning
in his father’s words. He saw that those who
wasted what they had earned by hard work on
that rubbish would end by having nothing at all,
because they were caught by the color and the
shine of things made to tempt them. What was
there in all that collection that was half as beautiful
as a golden wheat field? What ornament
that could be worn out or broken was equal to
the land itself, with its treasure of fleecy flocks
and sleek cattle, and roof trees under which happy
Although Toto did not find his first visit to the Seven Hills very profitable, he had much that was interesting to tell Mastarna when he returned. The two had a long talk in their strange rugged language with its few vowel sounds. Mastarna was most interested in the gods of these strangers. If he could find out what they did to bring good luck and ward off misfortune, he could have charms and lucky stones made to sell to them. If he knew what their gods were like, he could have images of these carved in wood or molded in clay or cast in metal. But Toto could tell him very little about these questions. The soldiers at the camp had no altars and no regular worship at all, and they moved from place to place and did not keep any place sacred. But these people on the Square Hill seemed very religious. They behaved as if they had settled down there to stay forever.
What are they like?
asked the old man.
They are like no other townspeople in this
valley,
said Toto decidedly. They are not
like the herdsmen who wander from place to place
and sleep in tents, or the hunters who live alone
in huts, or the fishermen by the river or the
sailors by the seashore. They are tall and
straight and strong and very active, because they
work all the time. They work mostly on their
land. When they are not plowing, or digging,
or cutting grain, or cutting wood, or making
things, they are working to make themselves
stronger. They run and leap and throw heavy
weights; they hurl the spear and shoot arrows at
a mark. They stand in rows and go through
motions all together, and march to and fro, and
play at ball. They do everything that is possible
to make themselves good soldiers; even the boys
begin when they are small to play at these games.
And that is not all. The women work also,
but not as slaves. The matrons go here and there
as they choose, and see eye to eye with their husbands,
and manage the household as the men
manage the farm. The men sit in council, but
each man speaks of his work in private to his
wife, and she advises with him. They do not
have slaves to wait on them; even their great men
work with the others in the field. No one is
Hum,
said the old man thoughtfully. He
was thinking that this must be a strong and valiant
people, and that if they increased in the
valley of the yellow river they might become very
powerful. And what are their priests?
They have no priesthood dwelling in the
temples,
said Toto. Their elders are their
priests and pretend to no magical powers. They
are chosen for their wisdom. Their gods are
invisible.
Hum,
said Mastarna again.
The people to whom he and Toto belonged
were called at one time and another Tuscans or
Etruscans by others, but they called themselves
the Ras, or Rasennae. They had some towns
in the mountains beyond the plain where these
strangers were. They held most of the country
on their side of the rivers, as far north as the river
Arno, and they had always lived there, so far
as they knew themselves or any one else could
say. They were different in almost every way
from these strangers of the hills. He wondered
You say that they build walls,
he said to
Toto. Do they build good ones?
Toto grinned. He was nothing of a builder
himself, but even he could see the difference between
the rude stone laying and fencing of the
strangers, and the scientific, massive masonry
and arched drains of his own country. They
will find out how good they are,
he said, after
twenty years of flood and drought.
In fact, the worst enemy the colonists had met
thus far was water. They were used to mountain
slopes with good drainage. They knew how
to keep a field from being gutted by mountain
freshets, and how to repair roadways and build
drains that would carry off the water. They
were strong and clever at fitting stones into the
right place for walls, and they could dam up a
stream for a fishpool or a bathing place. But
this sort of country was all new to them. It
was not exactly a marsh and not so swampy as
it became in later centuries, but at any time it
might become a marsh full of ponds and stagnant
streams, and remain so for weeks at a time.
This was bad for the grain and worse for sheep,
and unhealthy for human beings. During the
next rainy season after Toto’s visit, the farmers
Mastarna was full of patience. He let them toil and soak and chill and sweat until he thought they would welcome a suggestion from almost any quarter. Then he and a man he knew, a stone worker called Canial, took a boat and went across the river to a point where three or four of the colonists were prying an unhappy ox out of the mire. The strength, determination and skill with which they conducted the work were worthy of all admiration. But it would have been far better if the land could have been drained and protected by a solid dyke.
Canial looked the bank over with a shrewd,
experienced eye, and said that if he had the work
to do, he would dig a ditch there, and there, and
there; here he would build a covered drain lined
with tilework; and in a certain hollow under the
hill he would have an arched waterway, so that
flood water would run through instead of tearing
at the foundation of the terrace below the
vine
Caius,
said Colonus to young Cossus, go
over to the camp and find Ruffo, and ask him
to come and talk to this fellow.
He knew that Ruffo understood several languages and dialects, and whatever it was that this man had come for, he wished to know it.
Ruffo knew enough of the language Canial
spoke to be able to make out his meaning, and
he told Colonus that the stone worker wished to
come and live in Rome. He would show them
how to drain their land and bridge their streams.
Mastarna would tell them that he was a man of
There were others in the Roman settlement who had fled there for reasons of much the same kind as Canial’s—men who had been robbed of their inheritance, slaves escaped from cruel masters, homeless men, and men who for one reason or another had found themselves unsafe where they lived before. But this was the first family which had wished to come from beyond the river. The others all came from places where the public worship was not entirely unlike that of the Romans themselves and the people were of the same race in the beginning. This was a departure from that rule.
If it had not been for the dyke-building problem,
Colonus would probably have said no at
once. But that would have to be settled before
the town grew much larger than it was, or they
would have to change their way of life altogether.
They were a people who hated to be crowded.
They would need land, and land, and more land,
Ruffo did not know anything of the gods the people of Canial worshiped, except that they were unlike the Roman gods and seemed to be very much feared. They had a god Turms, who was rather like the Roman Terminus, who protected traders and kept boundaries. They had a smith of the gods, called Sethlans, and a god of wine and drunkenness called Fuffluns.
No person, of course, could be allowed to
bring the worship of strange gods into the sacred
city. The very reason of the founding of the
city was to make a home for their own gods, and
It was finally decided that Canial and some of his countrymen who wished to come with him should have a place of their own, which was afterward known as the Street of the Tuscans. It was a place which no one had wished to occupy before, because it was so wet, but Canial and his friends had no difficulty in draining it. The only condition he made was that traders should be allowed to come and go and supply his family and friends with whatever they needed. Women, he said, did not like a strange place much as it was, and he should have no peace at home if his wife were obliged to learn new methods of housekeeping.
The only condition that Marcus Colonus and his friends made was that the strangers should do nothing against the law of the settlement, or against the Roman gods, and this they readily agreed to. Canial said that the priests in his country demanded so much in offerings that a man was no better than a slave, working for them.
All this happened while Romulus was away,
but when he returned he said that the decision
was a wise one. It privately rather amused him
to see how in this new country the colonists were
led to allow the beginning of new customs which
Before another rainy season, the Etruscans
and the Romans, working together, had made a
very fair beginning on the dyking and draining
of the worst of the marshes and the bridging of
bad places. Canial understood how to mix
burned lumps of clay containing lime and iron,
and lime and sand, and water, in such a way
that when the muddy paste hardened it was like
stone itself. Tertius Calvo, who happened to
be there when this was done, tried it by himself.
Although what he made was not entirely a failure,
it did not behave as it did under the hands of
Canial. Without saying anything—indeed, he
could say nothing, for he knew not a word of the
strangers’ language—Tertius watched and
measured and experimented with small quantities
until he found out the exact proportions and
methods Canial used. The bit of wall he built
finally was very nearly as good as Canial’s own
work. Calvo was good at laying stones, and had
very little to learn in that line from any stranger.
This mortar, as they found in course of time,
would stand heat and cold and water and seemed
to become harder with exposure. By using the
best quality of material the work was improved.
There was no secret about it; indeed, Canial did
The greatest debt they owed to their new
settlers was the low round arch, built with stones
set in mortar in such a way that the greater the
weight, the firmer the arch would be. Another
Etruscan trick was plastering over the side of a
drain or a bank with a mixture of small stones
stirred thickly into mortar like plums in a pudding.
The best of this new way of working was
that it could be done so quickly. A great deal
of the work could be done by stupid and ignorant
laborers under the direction of those who knew
how to direct. Men whom they could not employ
in any sort of skilled labor could help here.
Such men were glad enough to come for an
allowance of food and drink. A certain task was
set them, and they had their living for that; if
they did more, they had an extra allowance. The
task was called moenia, and since it was the
lowest and least skilled labor, work of that kind
later came to be known as menial, the work of
slaves and servants.
The change in the face of the plain in the
following years was almost like magic. The
colonists built dykes to keep the river from overflowing;
they built drains to carry off the heavy
rains; they built culverts; they built bridges
rest
When the country had grown peaceful, and there was no more need, for the time, of sending out warlike expeditions, it began to be seen that the soldiers who had come in with Romulus or had joined the troops later must have something to do. Romulus talked the matter over seriously with the fathers of the colony. If these men were to settle down as citizens, taking part in the life of the city—and some of them wished to do so—they ought to have homes; they needed wives. The family life of this people was the very heart of their religion and their society. The father was high priest in his family. The public worship was only a greater family worship, in which all had a part, old and young, living and dead. The gods themselves were often present unseen to receive prayers and offerings,—so the people believed.
The question of wives for these men was a
serious one. Girls were growing up within the
Here and there a soldier found a wife among
the country people, but this did not usually turn
out very well. The daughters of herdsmen and
hut dwellers were not trained in the arts which
Another possibility was in sight, and it was
too nearly a probability to look very pleasant.
The soldiers could get wives across the river
among the Rasennae. But that would be a
dangerous plan—dangerous perhaps to the men
themselves and certainly to the colony. Women
of a strange land, of a race so old and strong
as the dark people seemed to be—a country
where there was a secret council of priests who
knew all sorts of things that the people did not—such
women, married to settlers in the colony,
would be a constant danger. They would learn
from their husbands all that went on; they might
persuade them to worship the strange gods; they
Romulus sat listening and thinking, with his chin on his strong, brown hand, and his bright dark eyes gazing straight at the altar fire. When the others had said what they thought, he spoke. That was his way. He had perhaps begun in that way because he was not sure he knew all the proper forms of speech or all the matters that ought to be considered in ruling the affairs of this people. Now that he was well acquainted with all these, he still wanted to hear what every one else had to say, before speaking himself. This was becoming in a man still so young, and it was also wise.
There is a plan, my fathers,
he said, but
I do not know whether you will think that it is
the right one. Very long ago, I have heard, our
people used to take their wives by capture. In
those days a man never went openly to ask for
his bride. He stole into the village by night
with an armed guard, choosing his closest friends
to go with him. Then suddenly seizing upon the
maid he carried her off, and she became dead to
her own family, and one of his people.
Now this I do not commend, since it is not
our wish to war with the people around us. To
In the villages on the heights—in the lower
valleys of the mountain range that lies
he waved a brown arm toward the far blue hills,
there—the people who dwell there are worshippers of
our gods, and their ways are as the ways of this
colony, O my fathers. Their women spin, they
weave, they grind grain, they tend bees, they keep
the household fire alive and bright, they are fair
and pure. These are fit wives for our soldiers—or
for any man.
In some of these villages were we known,
for we were there in the old days. They are not
walled villages, they are scattered among the
valleys, and they have little to do with one another
or with strangers. It is in my mind that
if their women were married here, we and they
might be one people. Then all the Seven Hills
would be ours, and we and they together would
be a strong nation. But well I know that they
would never consent to give their daughters to
strangers.
This therefore is my thought. I have seen,
the young chief’s dark face was lighted by a
that sometimes the will of a
young maid is not wholly that of the old men
and women of her people. Forgive me, O ye
elders, if I speak foolishly, but I think that some
of these Sabine girls might not themselves be
unwilling to mate with my men. Would it be
so great a crime to take wives from those villages
despite the will of the priests and elders, if the
maidens themselves became in time content?
Suppose now that I send my men as messengers,
to invite these people to a festival on the day
when the Salii, the Leapers, have their games
and their feast. They also have fraternities like
ours; there is a fraternity of the Luperci, and the
Salii, and others, among the Sabines. Let their
young men contend with ours in the games, and
their people join with ours for the day. They
are not compelled to come. If they dislike and
distrust us, they will stay in their villages. But
if it is as I think, many will come.
Then when all are gathered together, and
weapons are laid for the games, let our young
men, at a given signal, seize each his chosen
maiden and bring her back within our walls to
be his wife. In token that they are not to be
slaves but honorable wives, whose work is to spin,
let our young men shout as they go,
Talassa!
Talassa!
Have I spoken well, my father?
He
looked straight at Colonus. If ye have a better
plan, let no more be said of this.
But there was no better plan; in fact, there seemed to be no other plan at all. Romulus knew this very well. There was nothing in this idea that was offensive to the general opinion in those days. It was not so very long since marriage by capture was the usual way of getting wives. If the Sabine girls were brought into the colony the soldiers would be sure of having wives with the customs and the same gods of the other matrons. If they were brought in a company and lived in the same quarter of the town, they would form a little society of their own. It would not be a life entirely new and strange.
It was decided that the plan should be tried. If any of the messengers did a little courting in the villages, nothing was said of it.
The place chosen for the festival was a plain
where there would be room for all the games and
the feasting and the ceremonies. Romulus and
some of the young men went out there a few
days before the appointed date to level off the
ground, arrange seats for the public men, and
make ready. In removing a bowlder which
would be in the way of racers, and smoothing the
ground, Tertius Calvo found his pick striking
Jove!
said Mamurius, a few minutes later,
Here’s something else!
There was a gleam
of bright metal in the hole they were digging.
The altar, a small square one of a whitish stone,
was lifted out, and then something struck with
a muffled clang against Mamurius’ spade. They
were all excitedly gazing by that time, and when
the round metal thing was lifted out, and the
Where it had come from, no human creature knew. Nothing else like it was ever found in that neighborhood. It may have belonged to some Etruscan nobleman in far-off days, when a battle was fought on that plain; it may have been part of the plunder of some city; but there it was, and the decoration showed that it was made by a smith who worshiped Mars. Reverently the young men carried it back to Rome, after they had set up the altar on the field where they found it. It seemed like a sign that the gods approved what they were doing. It was hung up in the temple, and was considered the especial property of the Salii, or Leapers, the young men who danced the war dance, for it was they who had found it. But Romulus told none of them of the witch’s prophecy that he would find an altar and a shield in just this place.
The day appointed for the feast was fair, and early in the morning the mountain people could be seen coming across the plain or camped near the field.
The soldiers who were to take part in the festival
in this unexpected and startling way were
The games went on, and at the height of the
gayety and excitement there was a sudden
trumpet call, and all was in confusion. Each
soldier seized a Sabine maiden and carried her off
as if she were a child. The men who were not so
burdened formed a rear guard. The older
people were already on their way home. Some
of them did not know what had happened. Before
anything could be done by the startled and
angry Sabine men, the soldiers were inside the
walls of the city and the shout of Talassa!
Talassa!
revealed that this was a revival of the
ancient custom of marriage by capture.
The Sabines were angry enough to go to war, But they could do nothing that night, for a successful war would need preparations. There was a parley, and Romulus himself informed the commissioners that the weddings would take place with all due ceremony, and that in the meantime the girls were in the city, under the care of matrons of the best families, and would be given the best of care and provided with all things necessary for a bride. Let there be no mistake about this: if any attempt were made to recapture the Sabine girls the soldiers would fight. They had got their brides, and they meant to keep them. It was a sleepless night in the town by the riverside, but in the morning the Sabines were seen returning to their mountains.
It is not to be understood that all the people
on the Square Hill approved of the capture
of the Sabine girls. It did not seem to
them, of course, as it would to the society of
to-day, because they considered that a girl ought
to marry, in any case, as her elders thought best
that she should. But Tullius the priest, and
three or four of the other older men, were very
doubtful about the wisdom of angering the Sabine
men by such a proceeding. Naso and his
brother objected to the capture because they had
never heard of such a thing. They were men
whose minds never took kindly to any sort of
new idea. When they made their great move
and left their old home, they seemed to have
exhausted all the ability to change that they had.
They held to every old custom they had ever
heard of, as a limpet holds to a rock. But the
thing was done, and there was nothing they could
The women of the colony were curious to know how far the Sabine marriage customs were like their own, and whether the wedding would mean to these girls what it would to a Roman wife. Marcia asked her husband about it on the night of the festival, when the confusion had quieted somewhat. The watch-fires of the Sabines could be seen far away on the plain, and in the stronghold on the Capitoline Hill the sentinels were keeping watch against any sudden attack.
Ruffo says,
answered Mamurius, that they
have the same customs as ours, in the main. The
girls are taking it very quietly. I think they
stopped being frightened when they found they
were to be in the care of your mother and the
other matrons in the guest house. You know
Romulus has ordered that no maiden shall be
married against her will. If she remains here
until after the Saturnalia without making any
choice, she shall be sent back in all honor to her
own people. There are none among the girls
who are betrothed to men of their villages.
Marcia was glad to hear that. During the
following days she and the other young matrons
of the colony visited the captive girls and took
care that they lacked nothing in clothing and
After two or three days the scouts came in to report that the Sabines had gone back to their villages to gather their forces. It would take time to do this, and meanwhile the wedding preparations went forward.
The town on the Square Hill was larger and
finer than any of the mountain villages, and after
the first shock and fright of their capture passed,
many of the girls began to think that what had
The public square was swept and made clean, and the walls of all the houses hung with garlands. The Roman matrons, old and young, had taken from their thrifty stores of home-woven linen and wool, robes and veils and mantles for the strangers, and provided the wedding feast with as much care as if each one of them had a daughter who was going to be married. In fact, according to Roman faith and law, these girls were daughters of Rome as soon as they became wives of Roman men, and had as much right in all public worship and festivals as if they had been born on the Palatine Hill. Since they could not be given away by their own fathers, it had been decided that they should be treated as daughters of the city, and the ten original fathers of the colony should be as their fathers.
The procession came out into the square a little
after daybreak, and here the wedding feast was
set forth. The maidens were veiled and dressed
in white, and attended by the young Roman girls
as bridesmaids, and the soldiers were drawn up
in military order. The feasting and singing and
dancing went on in the usual way, and toward
There was only one girl who refused to have any part in the ceremonies. When the rest of the Sabine maidens left the guest house, she remained. She was still there when a little before sunset Romulus came back to the square and entered the room where she sat.
She was a tall and lovely creature, the daughter of the priest Emilius, and Ruffo the captain had carried her off, but she would have nothing to say to him. He had consoled himself with the daughter of one of his old comrades. Her great eyes blazed as she met the look of the young chief, and she held her head high, but she did not speak.
You are the daughter of a great man,
said
Romulus. You are Emilia.
It was surprising that he should know her name, but his knowing who she was made it all the greater insult that she should have been carried off by force.
Long ago,
he went on, I saw you, a little
maid, when I was a poor shepherd boy. Your
mother was kind to me and gave me meat and
wine. Your father reproved me when I in my
ignorance would have offended the gods. As
you were then, so you are now,—beautiful as
a flower, fierce as a wolf, Herpilia, the wolf-maiden.
You are the mate for me, and when I
saw you at the festival, I knew it.
You! An outcast!
the girl cried, her eyes
flashing in scorn.
I am of good blood, and now I rule this city.
You shall rule it with me when you will,
said
the chief coolly.
I would rather be a slave and grind at the
mill!
Romulus smiled. What did this girl know of a slave’s life?
You had better not,
he said. But you
need not do either. If after the Saturnalia you
wish to go back to your father’s house, you shall
go. But you cannot know much about us until
you have seen how we live.
And he turned and
went out.
Emilia did not know exactly what to make of
this behavior. She had made up her mind that
if they tried to make her the wife of one of these
strangers, she would stab herself with the knife
The young girls who tended the sacred fire now formed a kind of society by themselves, like the fraternities of the men. Emilia was allowed to sit with them and spin and sew, and she lived in the house of Marcus Colonus, all of whose children were now married. She heard a great deal about Romulus from time to time, but he never came near her. Sometimes she saw him marching at the head of his men, or sitting with the elders of the people on some public occasion. But he never looked her way, or sent her any word beyond what he had already said.
At first she hoped fiercely that her people
The settlement was now so large that it covered
several of the hills, and the high steep hill that
stood up like the head of a crouching animal, the
Capitoline, had been strongly fortified. On one
side it descended almost straight like a precipice,
The captain of the guard there was one of Romulus’s old comrades, Tarpeius by name. He had a daughter who often spent some hours with the other maidens, on the Palatine, spinning and gossiping, and singing old songs. She was very curious about Emilia’s people and said that her mother had been a Sabine girl. She expressed great admiration for everything about Emilia—her bright abundant hair, her beautiful eyes, her clear white skin, her graceful hands and feet, and her clothes. Especially she admired the band of gold Emilia wore on her left wrist. She was like an inquisitive and rather impertinent child.
The bracelet was a gift from Emilia’s father; he had ordered it from an Etruscan trader; it had been made especially for her. Whenever she looked at it, she felt as if it were a pledge that some day she should see him again and visit her old home.
One day late in the autumn there was a commotion in the town, and the sound of many marching feet. From the plain below came shouting, and the far-off sound of drums and pipes. Emilia’s heart jumped. The Sabine army was on the way!
Villagers came flying from a distance, wild with fright, and begging to be protected within the walls. Some had taken time, scared as they were, to drive in their beasts and bring the grain they had just finished threshing. Their men joined the defenders, and the women and children were sheltered among the townspeople, many of whom were relatives.
The Sabines spread their army all around the Roman settlement. They took possession of a hill near by, almost as great as the Palatine.
It began to seem after a time as if the siege might last indefinitely. The Roman fortifications were strong and well manned, and they had plenty of provision. Now that the marsh was drained, only a most unusual flood would drive away the enemy, and they did not seem inclined to storm the hills, even if they could. Matters might have gone on so much longer but for the thoughts in the head of a girl.
Tarpeia, the daughter of the captain of the
guard, watched eagerly the Sabine captains, and
saw the gleam of the ornaments they wore. One
night she slipped out by a way she knew and
crept past the Roman guards into the Sabine
camp. She had learned something of their talk
from Emilia and easily made herself understood.
She told Tatius the Sabine general, when they
what they
wore on their left arms.
Tatius looked at the willowy figure and the common, rather pretty face with its greedy eyes and eager smile, and agreed, with a laugh. Tarpeia returned to the stronghold, and that night, when the darkness was thickest, she slid past the sleepy guard and unbarred the gates, and waited.
Tatius had no respect for traitors, though he
was willing to make use of them when they came
and offered him the chance. He reasoned that
a girl clever and wicked enough for this would
betray him and his own men just as quickly as
she betrayed her father and his people. He told
his men to give her exactly what he had promised
her—what they wore on their left arms, and
all of it! As they rushed past her and she drew
back a little toward a hollow in the hill, Tatius
first and the others after him flung at her not
only their bracelets, but the heavy oval shields
they carried on their left arms, beating her down
as if she had been struck by a shower of stones.
The garrison, taken by surprise, had no chance.
Brave old Tarpeius died fighting, without knowing
what had become of his treacherous daughter.
Now indeed the two armies must join battle, with the odds against the Romans. They met in a level place between the two hills but not so low as the plain, and the fighting was fierce enough. The Sabine and Roman women watched from the walls of the Palatine, and the Sabine girls, some of them with babies in their arms, were crying as if their hearts would break. Whichever army won, they would mourn men who loved them, for their fathers and brothers were fighting against their husbands.
The line of fighting surged to and fro. A stone from a sling struck Romulus on the head, and stunned him. The Romans gave back, fighting every inch of the way. Romulus came to himself and tried to rally them, but in vain. He flung up his arms to heaven and uttered a desperate prayer to Jupiter, Father of the Gods, to save Rome.
Emilia could not bear it any longer. She stood up among the other Sabine women, her eyes bright and her face as white as a lily, and spoke to them quickly.
Come with me!
she called, moving swiftly
toward the door of the temple of Vesta where
they were gathered. We will end this
war—
The women guessed what she meant to do, and with a soft rush like a flock of birds, they went past the guards and out of the gates, down over the hillside, between the armies, which had halted an instant for breath. With tears and soft little outcries they flung themselves into the arms of their fathers and brothers in the Sabine army, and some sought out their husbands begging them to stop the fighting, and not to make them twice captives by taking them away from their homes. A more astonished battle line was probably never seen than the Sabine front. The Romans on the other side of the field were nearly as much taken aback.
There is no denying that most of the men felt
rather silly. There could be no more fighting
without leading the women and babies back to the
town, and they probably would not stay there.
It dawned on the Sabines all at once that if the
women who were now wives of the Romans were
contented where they were, and loved their husbands,
it would be cruel as well as senseless to
force them back to their mountain villages. The
war stopped as soon as the generals on both sides
could frame words of some dignity to express
their feelings. Emilia’s father, when he found
that his daughter was unharmed, and had been
Romulus came toward Emilia and her father about sunset, after the wounded had been made comfortable and the treaty agreed upon. They were in the doorway of the priest’s tent. The Roman general looked very tall and handsome and full of authority. His shining helmet and shield, short sword, and light body armor of metal plates overlapping like plumage were as full of proud and warlike strength as the wings of an eagle. He bowed before the two; then he looked at the maiden.
It is nearly a year. The time has not gone
quickly.
He told me,
explained Emilia, that if
after the Saturnalia I wished to return, he would
send me home.
And do you wish to go home, my daughter?
asked the priest.
Emilia looked up at Romulus.
I will go home,
she said, with my husband.
And the news ran through the camps that Romulus had taken a Sabine bride.
In the customs of the people who founded the
town by the river, there was no act of life
which did not have some ancient rule or tradition
connected with it. There was a right way
and a wrong way to do everything. In all the
important work of life, such as the care of the
sheep and cattle, the sowing of the fields and the
making of wine, certain elders among the men
were chosen to take charge of the management,
decide on what day the work was to commence
and take care that all was done as it ought to be.
In this new life in a strange place the colonists
found that some kinds of work that used not to
be very important became so because things were
changed. This was the case with the priest who
had charge of the public ways,—the gates, the
roads and the walls. In their old home this
was not a very important office, because the walls
almost never needed anything done to them, and
Calvo was a good mason and understood something of what we should call now civil engineering. He had judgment about the best place to lay out a road and the proper stone to choose for masonry. As the town grew, and the farming lands about it were cleared, and more and more persons became interested in the town by the river, Calvo, in his quiet way, was one of the busiest of men.
He got on very well with the miscellaneous
laboring force that he could command, and
partly by signs, partly in a mixture of the two
languages, he learned to talk with the stonemason
Canial quite comfortably. Gradually, as they
were needed, roads were made in different directions
over the plain, and always in much the same
way. They were as straight as they could be
without taking altogether more time and labor
than could be given, and they were usually carried
across streams and bogs instead of going
around. Calvo enjoyed working out ways to
do this. If the plain had been really boggy he
might not have been able to do as much as he did,
laid
roads, because they were made by laying,
or spreading, new material on the line of travel.
The new road was a street
built up of
strata.
There was never much trouble in getting men to work on these highways after they saw the convenience of them. They could not have built them for themselves, because they had not Calvo’s eye for the right place or his knowledge of every kind of stone and other road material. The roads led out from Rome like the spokes of a wheel, but Calvo did not build any roads from town to town. He said it was better not to.
There came to be a proverb that all roads lead to Rome. Calvo’s object in roadmaking was to make it easy for outsiders to reach the city and return. He was not concerned about their visiting one another. The natural result was that Rome got all the trade of a growing country.
Another consequence of Calvo’s road-making system was that it would have been very difficult for the outlying settlements to join in any attack against Rome itself, because they could not reach their neighbors half as easily as they could reach Rome. Calvo saw—what most generals have to see if they are to have any success in fighting—that wars are won by the feet as well as the weapons of an army. The quicker they march and the less strength they have to expend on getting from one place to another, the better the soldiers will fight. It came to be almost second nature for any Roman to look out that the roads were in good condition, and a general on the march took care that he did not go too far into an unknown country without leaving a good road over which to come back.
In the course of their wandering about, before
they found a place for their home, the colonists
had not only learned the importance of good
water but had found out where some of the
springs and wells were. Here and there, as he
mansiones,—places
where one might remain for a night or two. The
practical use of these places proved so great that
the plan was never given up, and mansiones were
built at the end of each day’s march, in later ages,
wherever the Roman army went. But in the beginning
there was only a rough shelter like the
khans of Eastern countries,—walls and roofs, to
which men brought their own provisions and bedding,
if they had any. People had these places
of refuge long before there was any such thing as
a tavern or hotel known in the world.
It began to be seen in course of time that the
Priesthood of the Highways, or the bridges—for
about half Calvo’s work here was bridge
building—was one of the most necessary of all.
Before he died he had four others to assist him,
and was called the Pontifex Maximus, the high
pontiff, and greatly revered for his wisdom. He
But the greatest work of Tertius Calvo, and the one which perhaps made more difference in the history of his people than any other, was an undertaking which he put through when he and most of the other fathers of the colony were quite old men. It was the bridge across the river.
At the point where the Seven Hills are situated, the river is about three hundred feet wide, but there is an island in it which makes a natural pier. Here Calvo suggested a bridge, to take the traffic from the other side of the river and bring it directly to Rome instead of letting it come across anywhere in boats. Such a bridge, moreover, would make it easier to hold the river, in case of war, against an enemy coming either up stream or down.
It seemed like a stupendous enterprise, and
even those who had seen most of Calvo’s work did
not see how he was going to do it. The river was
twenty feet deep, and that was too deep for any
More or less all the city took part in building that bridge. There were large trees to be cut down and their logs hauled from distant places, and shaped to fit into one another. There was stonework to be done at each end of the span, and on each side of the island. By the time this work was planned, the people were using iron more or less, and found it very convenient for many things; but Calvo set his foot down; not a bit of iron was to be used in his bridge. It was to be all wood, resting on stone foundations. Some of those who had worked with him remembered then that he never did use iron in such work. The younger men thought he must have reason to suppose that the gods were not pleased with iron.
Romulus had known Calvo for a great many years, although they had never been exactly intimate. As they stood together, watching the work go on, Romulus said in a tone that no one but Calvo could hear.
There is no iron in this work?
None,
said Calvo.
The gods do not approve it?
Apparently not,
said Calvo. The fires of
Jove burned two bridges for me before I found
it out.
Also I have found that iron and water are
bad friends, and in a bridge, which hangs above
water, the bolts would rust. Finally, a thing
which is all timber, put together without the use
of anything else, does not grow shaky with time,
but settles together and is firmer. There are
some things a man does not learn until he has
watched the ways of building for fifty years, and
I have done that.
If Calvo had been like some men of his day, he would have thought, when his bridges were burned, that the gods were angry with him for omitting some ceremony. But he was a man who noticed all that he saw and put two and two together; and he noticed in the course of time that lightning was much more likely to strike where iron was. He observed the path of it once when it did strike, and saw that it ripped the wood all to splinters and set it on fire trying to get at the iron, which it melted.
It is of course true that iron expands and
shrinks with heat and cold, and when iron bolts
are used in wood, the iron and the wood do not
fit as well together after a few seasons, on this
account. So Calvo planned his bridges without
iron, and they were all made of dovetailed
wooden timbers, as many old wooden bridges
were which remain to this day. Calvo’s
observa
The way in which the bridge over the Tiber was built was much like the way in which Cæsar built bridges, hundreds of years later. It was so constructed that if necessary it could be removed at short notice. It was never struck by lightning or burned, and it remained until—long after Calvo was dead—another pontiff built a new and greater bridge, using all his knowledge and all else that had been learned in five generations.
The hill on which the Sabines settled
took its name from their word for themselves,
Quirites, the People with the
Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal.
The level place between this hill and the Palatine,
where the treaty was made, was called the
Comitium,—the place where they came together.
Here in after years was the Forum, the place for
public debate on all questions concerning the
government of
Between these two great hills and a big bend
in the river was a great level space that was used
Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.
Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he
planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised
snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards.
He was like his mother’s people, a born gardener.
The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys
for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled
cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached
to a team of mice, but he had to play with that
out of doors, because his mother would not have
[Illustration: His mother molded for him men and animals]
He heard many stories,—some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father’s pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.
The city was now ruled by three different
groups of elders, from the three different races of
settlers. They were generally known as the
three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers
was called the tribunal. The oldest tribe, of
course, was the Ramnian, the people who had
come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The
Tities were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and
the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the
tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled
and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor
Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities—the
Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine,
the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of
Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge. These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.
Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.
Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old worship, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.
There was one danger, however, which nobody
realized in the least. In the great change from
Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever passed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.
He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.
Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.
Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.
Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.
Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.
After the death of his wife and child Romulus
seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of
all his people, more especially of the people who
were outside the ordinary fraternities and families
of the old stock. He set his own servants
and followers at work, under the direction of
Calvo, and with the help of some of the other
citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was
made on a proper water-supply and a system of
public baths. He set the young men to exercising
and racing, keeping themselves in condition;
None of the Romans, in fact, were really great
believers in miracles. They did all they could
in the way of ceremony and worship, but they
took good care to do also everything that they
Many years had passed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.
When the children of Mars first came to this
part of the world, people called them very often
the cattle-men,
because cattle were not at all
common there. Many of the customs both of the
Romans and the Sabines came about because they
kept cattle and used them. This made it possible
for them to cultivate much more land than they
outfit vault
was filled at the founding of
the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.
In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;—but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.
The use of the yoke was the one great thing
in which the Roman farmer differed from these
pagans and peasants, and he could teach them
that. It was the thing which would make the
most difference in their lives, in comfort and
salarium,—salary. When
Rome took formal possession of a place, the men
passed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged
to the men who used oxen, and worked
as they did and for them.
Whenever it was possible, some Roman families
were sent to such places to live among the
people and show them Roman ways. There
were always some who were willing to do this, because
they could have more land and better houses
in that way than in the older town, which was
getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely
scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by
Rome became more or less Roman in a much
Life in such a growing country, made up of a
great many different sorts and conditions of people,
is not by any means simple. The Romans
themselves were aware of this before the first settlers
were old men. As the sons of these colonists
became men, they were proud to call themselves
the sons of the fathers.
The word
father
was used in the old way, which meant
that every father of a family in a village was the
head of that family. The head of the house was
a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative
of his race. In the same way the houses
built by the first families within the palisade, on
the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill
itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The
families of those first colonists were known, after
a while, as the patricians.
After the Sabines
came, there were two groups of settlers of the
same race, one on the Square Hill and the other
on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the
Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called
themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others
the Hill Romans. The people who had settled
in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived
among groves of trees, and they were called the
People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these
The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did
not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The
town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the
idea of Tuscans being under the yoke
of these
strangers. When the Romans took the town of
Fidenæ, the Veientines were very indignant,
though they did not come to the help of their
neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenæ
was a town of their own and set out to make
war against the Romans. Romulus promptly
took the field and won the war. Although he
was now growing old, and his hair was white as
silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity,
and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They
offered to make peace for a hundred years, but
that was not quite enough for Romulus. They
had begun the war, and he meant to make them
pay for it. When the matter was finally settled,
they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on
the river and a large tract of land. While the
talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were
kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.
There was a great sensation in Rome when the
triumph
—called by that name
because many of those who took part in the
parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of
music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the
land he had taken from the Tuscans among the
soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent
the Tuscan hostages home to their people.
Without intending to do it, Romulus aroused a great deal of ill feeling by these two things that he did. The patricians formed a sort of senate—a body of elders—for the government of Rome, and it seemed to them that they should have been consulted about the hostages and the division of land. No one knew but the Tuscans might rise up again against Rome, and in that case these men ought to be here to serve as a pledge. Moreover, the land belonged not to Romulus personally but to the city, and the senate ought to have had the dividing of it. It was time to settle whether Rome was to be governed by one man, or by the elders of the people, as in the days of old. It was not fit that men should hold land who were not descended from land-holders.
Not all the elders, or senators, took this view.
It really never had been decided how far a general
who took command in a war had a right to
dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking,
in a war, the men who fought took whatever
they could lay their hands on. They plundered
a city when they took it, and each man had what
he could carry away. In this case the city of the
Veientines had not been plundered, because the
rulers surrendered and asked for peace before
Romulus had a chance to take it. The land
which had been given up was a kind of plunder,
and the general had a right to divide it. This
was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus
and his brother, and some of the others in the
senate. But Naso—who never had enough
land—and some of his friends, who never were
satisfied unless they had their own way, had a
great deal to say about the high-handed methods
of the veteran general, the founder of the city.
They said that he treated them all as if they were
under the yoke, and that this was insulting to
free-born Romans. In short, the time had come
when all of the men who wished for more power
than they had were ready to declare that Romulus
was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the
only man strong enough to stand in their way if
he chose. It was also true that he was the only
plebs and the outsiders who were not citizens,
and had according to ancient custom no right to
share in the governing of the city at all.
Public opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.
What Romulus did was to visit him one night
at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his
servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange
this, and when some hours later a tall man
in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate,
the old porter admitted him without question,
and there was no one in the way. The two sat
They do not understand,
Romulus said
thoughtfully, when they had been all over the
struggle between the two parties, from beginning
to end. They do not see that the thing which
must be done is the thing which is right, whether
it be by my will or another’s.
They are ready, some of them, to declare that
a thing is wrong because you saw it before they
did,
said Calvo dryly.
The people are with me—I believe,
said
Romulus, the soldiers, and the common folk—but
they have no voice in the government. Yet
are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them
children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to
do what is right for them, as well as for the
dwellers within the palaces?
I have always believed so,
nodded Calvo.
When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does
not make it for the strong and powerful alone;
it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and
those who cannot work for themselves. If the
gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange
it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and
the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give
rain only to those whom they favor, and good
water only to the chosen of the gods. But the
Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.
Whether men are high or low, Romulus,
founder of the city, they have minds and they
think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls,
hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours.
Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe
in a man, for their belief, like a river, will
grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those
who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this
happen when a good man whom all men loved
came to die. He was greater after his death than
when he was alive, for the grief and the love of
the poor encompassed his spirit and made it
strong.
Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was
thinking more than he meant to say. I shall be
very strong when I am dead,
was his only comment.
And Calvo knew that it was the truth.
Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and
Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were
thinking that it would not be many years when
they would both, perhaps, be talking together in
the world of shadows as they were talking now.
This talk took place a little after the beginning of the fifth month, which the Romans called Quintilis, but which we call July. In this month the sun is hot and the air is sluggish and damp, and in the year when these things happened it was more so than usual. The heralds announced in the market place, one sultry morning, that there would be a meeting of all the people at a place called the Goat’s Marsh some miles outside the city. Romulus would there tell publicly why he sent back their hostages to the Tuscans and how the lands were to be divided among the soldiers. No longer would the people have to depend on what was said by one and another, he would tell them himself. Partly out of curiosity, partly with the determination that they too would speak, the greater part of the patricians also went to hear.
The Goat’s Marsh was no longer a marsh, but it had kept its name partly because of the fig orchards, which bore the little fruits called the goat figs. There was a plain at the foot of a little hill, which made it a good place for any public meeting, and the country people for miles around crowded in to see Romulus and to hear him speak.
They raised a shout as his tall figure appeared but he waved them to silence.
I have not much to say,
he began, and in the
still air the intense interest of his listeners seemed
to tingle like lightning before a storm, but much
has been said which was not true. I will not
waste time in repeating lies.
Ye know that the Tuscan cities were here
before we came, and that their people are many.
We cannot kill them or drive them away, if we
would. They are our neighbors.
We made war against them and we beat
them, and took their city Fidenæ and their city
Veii. Before we made peace they had to pay us
certain lands. Before peace was made and the
price paid, there were sons of their blood in our
power, whom we kept as a pledge that they were
willing to pay the price. That was all. They
were not guilty of any crime against us. They
were here to show that their people meant to keep
faith. When peace was made I sent them back.
If we had kept them, if we had slain them,
if harm had come to them, then the wrong would
have been on our side, and we should have had
another war. Why should there be war between
neighbors? Is not friendship better than hatred?
Some are angry because I divided the lands,
which they gave us as a price, among the soldiers.
Then a shout arose to the very skies,—Romulus!
Romulus! Romulus!
Suddenly the clouds grew black, and lightnings
flashed through them. Just as Naso was
rising to speak, a tremendous clap of thunder
shook the earth, or so it seemed. Winds swept
suddenly down from the mountains and howled
across the plains, carrying away mantles and curtains
and boughs of trees in their flight. The
crowd broke up in confusion, and the patricians
were heard calling in distress, Marcus!
Caius!
Aulus!
for in the darkness they
could not see their friends a rod away. They
hastened to whatever shelter they could find, and
sheets of rain poured from the clouds. It was
one of the most terrific tempests any one there
present had ever known. It did not last long—perhaps
an hour—but when it was over Romulus
was nowhere to be seen.
The people had scattered in all directions, but
the patricians had managed to keep together.
When the storm was over, they did not know at
first that Romulus had disappeared, but presently
one after another of the common people was
heard asking where he was, and no one could be
found who knew. The people searched
every
They themselves were perhaps more perplexed
and worried than any one else, for they saw what
the people thought. It began to dawn upon
them that the united opinion of hundreds of men,
even though of the despised plebs, or peasants,
was not exactly a thing to be overlooked. That
night was a black and anxious one.
On the following morning, Naso, Caius Cossus, and some other leaders came to see Calvo and ask his opinion of the mystery. He had not been at the Goat’s Marsh the day before, nor had Cossus and others of the friends of the vanished chief. All the men who had been there, of the upper class, were enemies of Romulus. It was a most unpleasant position for them.
Calvo heard the story gravely, without making any comment.
The storm had not been nearly so severe in Rome; in fact it was not much more than an ordinary summer storm. But when Naso told of it he described it as something beyond anything that could be natural.
Do you think,
asked Calvo coolly at last,
that the gods had anything to do with these
strange appearances?
Naso could not say.
There have always been strange happenings
about this man,
said Calvo thoughtfully.
His very birth was strange; his appearance
among us was sudden and unexpected. What
the gods send they can also take away.
Do you think then,
asked Cossus, that he
was taken by the gods to heaven?
I do not know,
said Calvo. You say
you found no trace of him? But even a man
struck by lightning is not destroyed.
The frightened men looked at each other.
Fabius the priest was the first to speak.
It is at any rate not true that we have murdered
him,
he said boldly, and that is what men
are saying in the streets.
And it may be true that he has been taken
by the gods,
said Naso eagerly. They went
out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself.
He did not know just what had happened, but
Romulus had told him that after this last appearance
to the people he was going away, never
to come back. Apparently that was what he had
done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all
when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius
had made a speech and told the people that Romulus
had been taken bodily to the skies, in the
It had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.
He never returned to Rome, but far away, in
THE END
The following changes have been made to the text:
Variations in hyphenation (e.g. cattlemen
, cattle-men
;
roadmaking
, road-making
)
and spelling (e.g. Caesar
, Cæsar
)
have not been changed.