The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic | Page 6

now been read and re-read
for nearly two thousand years, by all who have wished to call
themselves educated; generations of school-boys, and schoolgirls too,
have slowly made their way through the Latin of its twelve books. This
was another evidence of the strong hold that the story of Troy had upon
men, as well as of the honor in which the heroes, and descent from
them, were held.
In the generation after Virgil there arose a graphic writer named Livy,

who wrote a long history of Rome, a large portion of which has been
preserved to our own day. Like Virgil, Livy traced the origin of the
Latin people to Æneas, and like Milton, he re-told the ancient stories,
saying that he had no intention of affirming or refuting the traditions
that had come down to his time of what had occurred before the
building of the city, though he thought them rather suitable for the
fictions of poetry than for the genuine records of the historian. He
added, that it was an indulgence conceded to antiquity to blend human
things with things divine, in such a way as to make the origin of cities
appear more venerable. This principle is much the same as that on
which Milton wrote his history, and it seems a very good one. Let us,
therefore, follow it.
In the narrative of events for several hundred years after the city of
Rome was founded, according to the early traditions, it is difficult to
distinguish truth from fiction, though a skilful historian (and many such
there have been) is able, by reading history backwards, to make up his
mind as to what is probable and what seems to belong only to the realm
of myth. It does not, for example, seem probable that Æneas was the
son of the goddess Venus; and it seems clear that a great many of the
stories that are mixed with the early history of Rome were written long
after the events they pretend to record, in order to account for customs
and observances of the later days. Some of these we shall notice as we
go on with our pleasant story.
We must now return to Æneas. After long wanderings and many
marvellous adventures, he arrived, as has been said, on the shores of
Italy. He was not able to go rapidly about the whole country, as we are
in these days by means of our good roads and other modes of
communication, but if he could have done this, he would have found
that he had fallen upon a land in which the inhabitants had come, as he
had, from foreign shores. Some of them were of Greek origin, and
others had emigrated from countries just north of Italy, though, as we
now know that Asia was the cradle of our race, and especially of that
portion of it that has peopled Europe, we suppose that all the dwellers
on the boot-shaped peninsula had their origin on that mysterious
continent at some early period.
If Æneas could have gone to the southern part of Italy,--to that part
from which travellers now take the steamships for the East at Brindisi,

he would have found some of the emigrants from the North. If he had
gone to the north of the river Tiber, he would have seen a mixed
population enjoying a greater civilization than the others, the
aristocracy of which had come also from the northern mountains,
though the common people were from Greece or its colonies. These
people of Greek descent were called Etruscans, and it has been
discovered that they had advanced so far in civilization, that they
afterwards gave many of their customs to the city of Rome when it
came to power. A confederacy known as the "Twelve Cities of Etruria"
became famous afterwards, though no one knows exactly which the
twelve were. Probably they changed from time to time; some that
belonged to the union at one period, being out of it at another. It will be
enough for us to remember that Veii, Clusium, Fidenæ, Volsinii, and
Tarquinii were of the group of Etruscan cities at a later date.
The central portion of the country to which Æneas came is that known
as Italia, the inhabitants of which were of the same origin as the Greeks.
It is said that about sixty years before the Trojan war, King Evander
(whose name meant good man and true) brought a company from the
land of Arcadia, where the people were supposed to live in a state of
ideal innocence and virtue, to Italia, and began a city on the banks of
the Tiber, at the foot of the Palatine Hill. Evander was a son of Mercury,
and he found that the king of the country he