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 Rome. Any open place for
public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different
parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where
the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the
people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also
called by the name of Comitium.
Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great
level space that was used for a sort of parade ground, and this was called
the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.
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 the mice
in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played
with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men
and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war
with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little
sling.
[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 the same worship, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose
priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.
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 farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of
people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of
the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the
hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran
out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that
it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her
brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week
Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left
alone.
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; he urged all who could to go out into the country, form
colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to
look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would
affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die,
in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no
safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same
instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough
to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set
himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone
could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that
if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do
for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might
as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of
itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and
the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect
the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.
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 had found by experience produced
results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a
great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to
expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be
expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a
city without civil war.