Whether Rome “was founded by the common resolve of a Latin confederacy or
by the enterprise of an individual chief, is beyond the reach even of
conjecture. The date fixed upon for the commencement of the city is, of
course, perfectly valueless in its precision” (Chambers’ Encyclopædia).
“According to Varro the city of Rome was founded B.C. 753, but Cato places
the event four years later.... The day of its foundation was the 21st of
April, which was sacred to the rural goddess Pales. There seems to be some
uncertainty whether Romulus gave his name to the city or derived his own
from it, but those who ascribe to the city a Grecian origin ... assert
that Romulus and Roma are both derived from the Greek word for ‘strength.’
The city, we are assured, had another name which the priests were
forbidden to divulge; but what that was it is now impossible to
discover.(124) There is, however, some plausibility in the conjecture that
it was Pallanteum, and from the great care with which the Palladium, or
image of Pallas, was preserved, it seems probable that the city was
supposed to be under the care of that deity. If this conjecture be
correct, the Pelasgic origin of Rome cannot be doubted, for Pallas was a
Pelasgic deity....
“The institution of the vestal virgins was older than the city itself and
was regarded by the Romans as the most sacred part of their religious
system. In the time of Numa there were but four ... their duty was to keep
the sacred fire on the altar in the temple of Vesta from being
extinguished and to preserve a certain sacred pledge on which the very
existence of Rome was supposed to depend.(125) What this pledge was we
have no means of discovering; some supposed that it was the Trojan
Palladium; others, some traditional mystery brought by the Pelasgi from
Samothrace. One fact is certain: that the Palatine is regarded as the
oldest portion of the city and the original site and centre of the embryo
mistress of the world and mother of cities, the _Roma quadrata_, fragments
of whose walls have been brought to light.(126)
“Tradition relates that it was on the Palatine that Romulus marked out the
Pomœrium, a space around the walls of the city, on which it was unlawful
to erect buildings.... The next ceremony was the consecration of the
comitium, or place of public assembly. A vault was built under ground and
filled with the firstlings of all the natural productions that sustain
human life and with earth which each foreign settler had brought from his
home. This place was called _Mundus_” (History of Rome, Goldsmith’s
abridgment, 21st edition, by W. C. Taylor, p. 13).
This fact furnishes evidence that the sacred central cosmical vault over
which a mound may have been formed by the earth contributed from different
quarters, was regarded as a synopsis of all, and that sanctity was also
attached to the central place of assembly where justice was administered
at regular intervals, weekly markets were held and religious rites were
celebrated.(127)
Tradition relates that, after the foundation of the central “Mundus,” the
founder of Rome established the Sabine town which occupied the Quirinal
and part of the Capitoline hills. “The name of this town most probably was
Quirium ... the two cities were united on terms of equality and the
double-faced Janus, stamped on the earliest Roman coins was probably a
symbol of the double state.” It is significant to find not only that Janus
was sometimes depicted with four faces instead of two, in which case he
was called Janus Quadrifrontis, but that references are also made to the
female form of Janus=Jana, the latter being identified with Diana.
Considering that it was from Quirium that the Roman youths obtained Sabine
wives by force, which had been refused to their entreaties, it would seem
as though, originally, as elsewhere, the men and women of the community
resided separately and that stringent laws regulated their intercourse. In
other ancient communities it has been shown how the separation of the
sexes created in time an upper and lower class, and to the same origin may
perhaps be assigned the most remarkable feature of the Roman constitution,
_i. e._ the two-fold division of the people into patricians and plebeians.
While the foregoing statements throw light upon the ideas associated with
the Middle and show that Rome was originally a dual state, the following
facts furnish indications of a quadruplicate division. At an early period
Rome was laid out and enclosed in a square, the population _was divided
into four tribes_ and mention is made of “the state, under Servius
Tullius, being an entity divided into _four cities_ and twenty-six tribes
... this being strictly a geographical division analogous to our parishes.
The division of the city into four tribes continued until the reign of
Augustus (B.C. 29)....”(128)
The four chief religious corporations of ancient Rome, mentioned in the
Century Dictionary, evidently correspond to this fourfold division and it
is specially stated of one of these corporations that it was represented
and governed by a group consisting of seven “septemvir epulones” who
formed a “septemvirate.”
The number of septemvirs corresponded to the “seven hills” which were
enclosed by Tullus Hostilius, and it is stated that there were seven
places of worship in ancient Rome. It is interesting to find that between
A.D. 193 and 211, Septimius Severus, a native of an ancient Punic colony
in Africa, erected a Septizonium (an edifice consisting, like the
Babylonian zikkurat, of seven stories) on the Palatine, where a large
temple of Apollo had previously been built.(129)
Although it is thus evident that, at different periods, seven-fold
division was carried out in ancient Rome, it was not until after the reign
of Theodosius, according to some authors, that the seven-day period was
imported from Alexandria and the term “septimana” adopted in Rome.
“Previously to this Rome had counted her periods by eight days, the eighth
day itself being originally called Nundinæ—a term later applied to the
whole cycle” (Chambers’ Encyclopædia). Noting that the period of eight
(=2×4) days accords with the quadruplicate system applied to the primitive
state, I draw attention to the numerical classification of the citizens of
Rome employed during centuries, which so curiously agrees with the system
carried out in Peru at a widely sundered period (see p. 141).
Ten households formed a gens (clan or family); ten clans or one hundred
households formed a curia or wardship; and ten wardships, or one hundred
clans, or one thousand households formed a populus, civitas or community.
As it is stated that, at one time, Rome consisted of four cities, it is
obvious that the above numbers, quadrupled, constituted the state which
thus included forty wardships, four hundred gentes and four thousand
households. As each gens possessed a chieftain, endowed with paternal
authority over its members, there must, at one time, have been four
hundred of these “patricians,” whose number is thus found to correspond to
the Greek “Council of 400” and curiously enough to the “four hundred
Tochtli” or governors of the ancient Mexican commonwealth.
A noteworthy feature of the attempt to institute the Decemvirate in Rome
(5th century B.C.) was the arrangement that the ten chosen men exercised
office in prescribed rotation for one day, each ruling, in consequence,
for thirty-six days in the year which, like the Egyptian, then consisted
of three hundred and sixty days and of an epact of five days. The
assignment of a day to each chieftain finds its parallel not only in
Assyria but also in ancient America (see p. 181).
In connection with the Roman communal organization, attention is drawn to
what appears to be a remarkable survival of an extremely ancient and
natural mode of distinguishing the wardships. It is well known that,
according to tradition, the republic of Siena, Italy, was founded at a
remote period “by the sons of Remus, the twin brother of Romulus.” The
following facts prove that, to this day, certain features of its social
organization exhibit an affinity to that of primitive Rome. “Siena, from
the earliest day, has been divided into contrade or parishes. Each
contrada has its special church, generally of great antiquity, and each
contrada is named after some animal, or natural object, these names being
symbolical of certain trades or customs. There are now the wolf, giraffe,
owl, snail, tower, wave, goose, tortoise, etc., in all seventeen. Each has
its colors, heralds, pages, music, flags; all the mediæval paraphernalia
of republican subdivision” (Frances Eliot, Diary of an idle woman in Italy
I, p. 19).
The employment of the names of animals and natural objects as distinctive
marks for a wardship offers a curious analogy to the American institution
of tribal names and totems.
The circumstance that, in remotest times, the king of Rome, the
acknowledged metropolis or mother city, was accompanied, on public
occasions, by _twelve_ lictors or administrators of justice, each carrying
the axe tied in a bundle of rods, shows that, at one time, the government
was administered by thirteen individuals—a method we shall find again in
ancient Ireland and Scandinavia. The history of Rome reveals that the
different variants of governmental scheme adopted, one after the other,
under influences emanating from Greece and Egypt, were reared upon the
familiar universal plan. The most striking instance of this is, however,
furnished by the details preserved of the groundwork on which Constantine
founded (A.D. 330) the city he intended to be the capital of a universal
empire, and named the New or Second Rome.
Historians relate that the peninsula of Byzantium offered striking
resemblances to the sites of Carthage and Rome. The design of Constantine
embraced the entire peninsula with the seven hills upon it. “On foot, with
a lance in his hand, professing to be under the guidance of divine
inspiration, the emperor directed the line which was traced as the
boundary of the destined capital.” ... “In imitation of Rome at that
period, the city was divided into 2×7=fourteen wards (regiones).... Its
centre was marked by a column ... surmounted by a bronze colossus of
Apollo. The church of S. Sophia, built on the site of an ancient temple of
Wisdom, was subsequently dedicated to ’the Holy Eternal Wisdom’ by
Justinian. In the court called the Forum Augusteum, one side of which was
formed by the palace and the other by the church, stood the Milliarium
Aureum, not, as at Rome, a gilt marble pillar, but a spacious edifice, the
centre from which all the roads of the empire were measured and on the
walls of which the distances to all the chief places were inscribed.... In
the new reunited empire quadruple division was maintained, _the __ empire
being divided into four parts_, each forming a prætorian prefecture under
a prætorian prefect, who, being the lieutenant of the emperor, ruled over
the governors and people of the province with absolute power. The four
prefectures were subdivided into thirteen dioceses, each governed by a
vice-prefect named vicarius, the total number of dioceses being
fifty-two.”
This system of numeration is of particular interest as it is not only
identical with the system of a modern pack of cards, the origin of which
is unknown, but is also the same as the Mexican year cycle (see p. 297).
Vestiges of sevenfold organization are traceable in the appointment by
Constantine, of “seven ministers of the palace” who exercised “sacred”
functions about the person of the emperor, and the division of all Gaul
into seven provinces placed under the governorship of the Vicar of the
Seven Provinces. In conclusion I venture to point out that the
four-storied amphitheatre of Vespasian (A.D. 71), the Pantheon of Agrippa
(A.D. 23) and the Mausoleum of Hadrian (A.D. 138) appear to have a
cosmical character, the first having been planned to hold the entire
population of Rome, around a central space in which, originally, the
circling chariot simulated the circuit of the celestial “plaustrum” or
“carro”=chariot, the Latin name given to Ursa Major.
While, on public festivals, the amphitheatre must have appeared as a
synopsis of the whole empire and may also have been originally used for
nocturnal, religious or political assemblages, the great Pantheon
enclosing the images of twelve deities, may well have been a conscious
attempt to represent the all-embracing Cosmos of Egyptian and Greek
philosophy, the framed view of the heaven, seen through the central
opening in the dome, being the symbol of the “hidden and invisible god,”
of the initiated. To Hadrian, who visited Egypt twice and was undoubtedly
acquainted with the idea of Plato’s Cosmos or Theos, the idea of building
a great circular structure in the centre of which he would be laid to
rest, would naturally have suggested itself. Passing from a consideration
of the buildings which, with the pyramids, appear to be among the grandest
exponents of natural philosophy and religion ever reared by the hand of
man, and clearly appear to have been planned under the direct influence of
Egyptian and Greek philosophy, let us briefly glance at the mode in which
the identical fundamental scheme was perpetuated among some northern
peoples.