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 ashamed to work
with his hands. They build their own houses and their own walls; they
breed their own cattle. If there should be a sheep gone from the flock, or
a heifer strayed from the herd, they would know it and search until the
thief was found.”
“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 if his people had anything whatever that the strangers wanted.
“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 had a
very unhappy time. They discovered that too much water is almost if not
quite as much a nuisance as too little. In a dry time it is sometimes
possible to carry water from a distance, but in a wet time there is
nowhere to put the water that is not wanted, and many of their ditches
were choked up with débris, and their grain was washed away.
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 vineyards. But he saw no signs that these men in their
building made any use of arches. He jumped ashore and splashed through the
pools, which were almost waist-deep in some places, up to where the ox was
standing panting, wild-eyed and nearly exhausted with fright and struggle.
Canial squatted down by a rivulet. He did not know the language of the
colonists and they did not know his, but no words were needed for what he
wanted to explain. He made a miniature drain rudely arched over with
mud-plastered stones while they stood there watching. That could be done,
as well with, a six-inch brook as with a river. It did not take the Romans
ten minutes to see that he knew more about such matters than they did.
“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 honesty and
ability. His reason for leaving his own country was a personal one; he had
had a quarrel with the head priest of his village because the priest
wished to interfere in his family affairs and make Canial’s daughter the
wife of his nephew, against her will. There was no safety or comfort in
his part of the country when the priesthood had a grudge against a man.
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, if they continued to live on the Seven
Hills. They must have grain for the cattle and themselves, and pasturage
for the beasts, room for orchards and gardens, room for the villages of
those who tilled their fields. Canial seemed to think that it would be
quite possible to prevent the plain from being flooded, with proper
stonework and drains, but it would need a man thoroughly used to the work
to direct it. Colonus could see that Canial was probably that man. Every
suggestion he made was practical and good, and he knew things about
masonry that it had taken his ancestors generations to learn. Colonus
finally said that he would talk it over with the other men of the city and
give him an answer on a certain day.
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 to let in strange ceremonies would
be to defile that home.
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 they regarded with great horror when they first came.
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 not object to
teaching any man who wished to learn all he could.
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 resting on solid arches; and they made one great drain which
carried off so much of the overflow water that it made the Square Hill and
most of the land around it safe. In fact, a part of every year thereafter
was given to the improvement and protection of newly cleared farmlands by
stonework. People came from a great distance to see the dyke they built,
for nothing like it had been done on that side of the river. The people in
the lowlands villages, relieved from the fear of floods, were proud to
call themselves the servants of the Romans. In those early years a
beginning was made of the great engineering work that was to endure for
centuries. The people of the Square Hill were doing on a very small scale
what nobody had done before them in that part of the world. In their
masonry and their farming they gave all their poorer neighbors reason to
be glad they were located where they were. It was a peaceful conquering of
village after village.