When Fabius began to write the Roman history, his materials consisted
of the _Annales Pontificum_; the Fasti; the _Libri Pontificum_, and
_Augurales_ for the time nearer his own; of the _Laudationes_, and of
lays. Of the scantiness of these sources we have already convinced
ourselves, but what were their contents? They cannot have been less
worthy of belief than our Merovingian and other ancient annals. As
the _Annales Pontificum_ commenced _ab initio rerum Romanarum_, or at
least from Numa, they might have been very authentic. The pontiffs, as
Dionysius informs us, had with the greatest accuracy recorded in them
year by year from the era of the kings; in the _Fasti Triumphales_ it
was even entered on what days the kings had triumphed over their foes.
The consideration, however, that the ancient history, as it lies before
us, is impossible, must lead us to the question of the credibility of
the oldest annals. Our task therefore is that of now showing that the
earliest history contains impossibilities; that it is poetical, and
that every thing in it which does not bear the impress of a poetical
character is a forgery; that thence it follows that the history must be
reduced to ancient songs, and to a later invented chronology, which was
adapted to those lays.
The accounts of the earliest times are materially different in Livy
and Dionysius. Livy wrote his first book without any division of
years, and with extraordinary fairness; he also had evidently Ennius
before his eyes, as one may see from a comparison of the fragments of
that poet with Livy;--e. g. Lib. II, 10. with _Fragm. Ennii_, _Teque
pater Tiberine tuo cum numine sancto_. Dionysius tries to make out
a true history. He takes it for granted that the Roman history must
be capable of being restored in its details; that a truly historical
groundwork was built over with fabulous legends; and so he endeavours
to reconstruct it according to his notions; in doing which he sometimes
makes himself really ridiculous by his pragmatical speeches in the
mythic ages. Livy, on the contrary, writes history, as he found it in
the oldest books, and as it appeared to him most beautiful, giving
what was the old narrative before it was spoiled by too much art; and
for this reason his account is the most unadulterated source for those
times.
The history of the wondrous birth of Romulus is an historical
impossibility, although it was historicised by the school of Piso. This
is also the case with the rape of the Sabine women, of whom, according
to the original tale, there were thirty; with the removal of Romulus
from the earth during an eclipse of the sun;[34] and likewise with the
long reign of Numa in unbroken peace, and that marriage of his with
the goddess Egeria, which in the belief of Scipio’s contemporaries was
held to be quite as historical as the Punic wars. There is a poetical
impress of hoar antiquity in the story of the combat between the
Horatii and the Curiatii, who were born by two sisters in one day, the
effect of which is already somewhat marred in Livy. We next arrive at
Tarquinius Priscus, who, with Tanaquil his wife came to Rome in the
eighth year of the reign of Ancus (which lasted twenty-three years),
then reigned himself thirty-eight more, and being at his death upwards
of eighty, left infants behind him, who were brought up during the
forty-three years’ reign of Servius; so that Tarquin the Proud must
have been at least fifty years old, when he killed his father-in-law.
Tanaquil, who lives to see this, and exacts an oath from Servius not
to resign the crown, must at that time have been a hundred and fifteen
years old. One of the first things told us of Servius is this, that
a flame burns round his head, for the natural explanation of which
Dionysius wishes to give hints. Collatinus is stated to have been the
son of a brother of Tarquinius Priscus; this brother, it is said, was
born before the removal of Tarquinius Priscus to Rome, a hundred and
thirty-five years previous to the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud,
and his son is now, more than a hundred and twenty years after his
father’s birth, a young man of thirty. Brutus is described as a
_tribunus celerum_, which was the highest office attainable by one
of the equestrian body, by virtue of which he represents the king,
assembles the senate, and is called upon to officiate at the highest
sacrifices; and this office the king is declared to have given to a
man whom he considered as half-witted and therefore deprived of the
management of his own property, while Brutus, on the other hand, is
said to have feigned imbecility that he might ward off the envy and
covetousness of the king. He is stated to have been the son of a
daughter of Tarquinius Priscus, and to have been afraid of rousing the
anger of the king by taking upon himself the administration of his own
possessions; yet Tarquin was not even of the same _gens_ as himself. In
the beginning of Tarquin’s reign, Brutus was a child; but immediately
after the king’s expulsion, he has sons who are grown up youths.
All these details connected with dates, the list of which, down to
the times of Camillus, might be vastly swelled, are so characterised
by marks of inconsistency and historical impossibility, that it may
safely be concluded that here we are entitled to the exercise of
criticism. Let us now call to mind the twofold sources of the earliest
Roman history,--the chronological ones, the Fasti, the _Annales
Pontificum_; and the unchronological ones, the lays, _Laudationes_, the
_Libri Pontificum_ and _Augurales_. With regard to the chronological
ones, we see that in the oldest accounts of Fabius, from the building
of Rome to its destruction by the Gauls, 360 years are reckoned;
precisely the number of the γένη in Attica, which number the Greeks
already (especially Aristotle, from whom the grammarians Pollux,
Harpocration, and others borrowed) declared to have been in imitation
of the solar year. If we look more closely into it, 360 is the middle
number between those of the days of the solar and lunar year, and the
nearest to either of these capable of being conveniently divided.
The time assigned for the kings, according to the older reckoning,
was 240 years; that for the republic, 120. This number has the same
mathematical character as those of the Indian ages of the world,
the Babylonian, and other eastern numbers. The 120 years for the
republic are received also by those who deem the whole period to have
been 365 years. Whether these 120 years are correct, remains indeed
to be decided according to one’s views with regard to the epoch of
the dedication of the Capitol. That the annals of the pontiffs were
destroyed when the city was burned by the Gauls, is strongly confirmed
by Claudius (without doubt Claudius Quadrigarius) in Plutarch, and
indirectly by Livy, who cannot state it in a direct manner, or else
he would have declared his first books to be worthless. An additional
proof of it is the fact, that the eclipse of the sun in the year
350 was the first one really observed which occurred in the annals;
whereas all the earlier ones were calculated afterwards, and of
course incorrectly, with the aid of the scientific means which then
existed. For the first 240 years we have seven kings, who reigned for
an immense time, most of them about forty years. Newton has already
pointed out how improbable it was, that a succession of princes should
have all ruled for so long a period, and he has assigned seventeen
years as an average for each. The most exact parallel, however, is to
be found among the doges of Venice, who also were elective princes
like the Roman kings. There have been forty doges within the space of
five centuries (800 to 1300), so that there were eight of these to a
century. When we now look more closely at the numbers of the Roman
kings, we find in them a play upon numbers, as among the eastern
nations. To understand this, we must premise the following remarks.
The Etruscans had as the basis of their chronology two sorts of
_sæcula_, physical and astronomical, of which the latter consisted of a
hundred and ten years, as the received average number of the physical
one. By a twofold intercalation, the calendar was rectified to within
a wonderfully small fractional difference, a hundred and ten of these
years very nearly corresponding to a hundred and thirty-two years of
ten months; and thus an astronomical period was constituted. The length
of the physical _sæculum_ was thus fixed. The life of him who outlived
all those who had been alive at the foundation of a state, marked the
first _sæculum_; the second was determined by the longest life among
those who were alive at the conclusion of the first, and so on. Now
there is an old tradition in Plutarch and Dio Cassius, and in Dionysius
at least an allusion to it, that Numa was born on the day of the
foundation of Rome, and therefore the first _sæculum_ at Rome probably
ended with his death in the year 77.[35] If this was the case, we then
see the reason why Romulus was made to reign thirty-eight years (the
number of the weeks of the year of ten months), and Numa thirty-nine.
For the last five kings one had historical traditions; yet they did
not extend through the whole of the regal period. Rome has surely had
by far more than five kings; but as a founder was wanted besides for
the Ramnes, and another for the Tities, the number was chosen which
had a sacred meaning, that of the planets, &c. The middle point in two
hundred and forty years is the end of the hundred and twentieth, just
the middle of the reign of the fourth king out of seven, evidently an
artificial arrangement. Twenty-three years were given him, so that
people might be able to begin to date them from the year 110, as they
always wished for the beginning some distinguished number, and a
hundred and ten was the sæcula number. The old year had ten months,
and a hundred and thirty of those years are equal to a hundred and ten
of the later ones. The reign of Ancus must therefore have been placed
between 110 and 132. What is between 77 and 110, namely, thirty-two
years, is now of course to be assigned to Tullus Hostilius. Tarquinius
Priscus reigns until 170, half a century being added to the middle of
the regal period; his reign therefore lasted thirty-eight years. The
twenty-five years of the last king may be historical, or a quarter of
a century may have been assigned to him in round numbers. For Servius
Tullius there now remains the time from 170 to 215. But let us now
suppose that the two reigns of Tarquinius Priscus and of Servius
Tullius did not last so long, then every inconsistency vanishes, and
the old unanimous account that Tarquinius Superbus was the son of
Tarquinius Priscus reasserts its claims. We thus see how the greatest
absurdities may arise from chronological restorations, as in this case
there is a palpable forgery.
Although the other sources of the earliest history, the old lays,
may not also have been tampered with, they are nevertheless
altogether insufficient. We have a parallel case to this in our own
Nibelungenlied, the poets of which likewise did not wish to deceive,
nor did they make any pretensions whatever to be annalists. Historical
characters appear in it,--Theodoric, Attila, the Burgundians; and yet
of the whole poem nothing belongs to history. Nor has history any part
in Romulus and Numa. They belong to the cycle of the gods, Romulus
as the son of Mars, and Numa as the husband of Egeria; Romulus is
merely a personification of Rome. Other poems have more historical
matter in them; for instance, the Spanish romances of the Cid. Here
the outlines are undoubtedly historical; but they form as it were a
line only, whilst the description as given in the poem is a plane.
There is also much of this in Roman history. He who utterly rejects
the whole of the early Roman history, does not know what he is saying.
Romulus and Numa are included within the first sæculum, because they
do not at all belong to history; and therefore they form a sæculum of
their own, and as it were quite a different era. From thence whatever
was discovered of old traditions concerning the kings and their time,
much of which was in circulation, had now its place assigned to it
in the chronological cycle. Those who think this criticism doubtful,
would not do so if they were more familiar with what is nearer our
own times. It is well known how the romances of the middle ages about
Charlemagne and his Paladins, refer to Latin chronicles the authorship
of which is ascribed to the Archbishop Turpin. These are now allowed
to figure as romances by the side of history; but who would believe
that not a hundred and fifty years after Charlemagne, in the reign of
Otho the Great, at a time therefore when the crusades were not yet in
the remotest manner thought of, there appears already in the Chronicle
of Benedict of Soracte a most detailed account of an expedition of
Charlemagne to Jerusalem, and that without any consciousness of its
falsehood. Before the extinction of the Carlovingian race, utterly
fictitious expeditions across the Alps, &c., taken from the history of
Charlemagne, are related at large in the Chronicles as positive facts.
We are now able to disprove them, because we have contemporary annals,
and the history of Eginhard; and as for the expedition to Jerusalem,
even without these we may also disprove it from eastern annals.--The
same thing occurs in Ireland. There also, pretended annals exist in
which a succession of kings are found, among whom Niall the Great,
about the time of the emperor Theodosius, conquers Britain, Gaul, and
Spain, crosses the Alps, and threatens the emperor in Rome. The most
decisive proof can be brought against this completely fabulous tale,
as the authentic history in this case is generally known.[36] Had we
likewise older books of history to check the Roman legends with, we
might just as easily get the proof of the want of authenticity of the
early Roman history. In the meanwhile where shall we find them? The
Greeks had no intercourse with Rome, and although they knew of the
Romans at a much earlier period than is generally supposed, yet they
did not trouble themselves about them, precisely because they never
came into contact with them. The case would be quite different with the
Greeks of Southern Italy, and the Siceliotes, of whom we have, however,
no more authors left. Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides can mention the
Romans. There nevertheless exists a notice which gives one a sample
of Roman history as it was told among other nations, quite a detached
fragment of Etruscan history. The case is as follows,--Claudius,
afterwards emperor, who was so unfortunate in his youth, who was
disowned by his mother, and whose feeble understanding, in spite of his
other good qualities, was entirely spoiled by ill-treatment, seems to
have excited Livy’s pity, who gave him instruction and encouragement
for writing history. Thus he wrote several works, Καρχηδονιακά, in
eight, and Tυῤῥηνικά, in twenty books, certainly in Greek, the loss of
which we have very much to regret. Even Pliny does no more quote this
latter work. But in the sixteenth century two tablets were discovered,
on which fragments of an oration of the emperor Claudius are found,
wherein he proposes in the senate to give the Lugdunensian Gauls the
full citizenship, and to admit them into the senate, as had long been
the case already in the _Provincia Romana_. The inhabitants of Gaul
were Roman citizens, had Roman names, yet they had not the right
of admission into the senate. With this right the emperor Claudius
presented Lugdunensian Gaul. The two brazen tablets are still left,
out of several which contained the speech mentioned by Tacitus; and
they either do not immediately join each other, or a considerable
piece must be wanting at the bottom. Before the French Revolution they
were still in the town hall at Lyons; whether they be still there, I
know not. Lipsius had them printed in his edition of Tacitus, Gruter
in the Corpus Inscriptionum; but yet they have been little read. They
give us an idea of the stupidity of Claudius, so that we feel assured
that the ancients have not done him injustice. In this harangue he
says at full length what Tacitus very summarily condensed, that we
ought not to say that this was an innovation. Innovations had been made
from the beginning of the state; foreigners had ever been received,
as for instance the Sabines of Titus Tatius. Even foreigners had been
made kings--Numa; Tarquin the Etruscan, a descendant of the Greeks;
Servius Tullius, who, according to our annals, was a Corniculensian,
but according to the Tuscan ones was a Tuscan of the name of Mastarna,
a follower of Cæles Vibenna. He emigrated and settled on the Mons
Cælius, which was so called by him after the name of his leader, and
now called himself Servius Tullius. This is therefore a direct proof
of how matters stood at that time with regard to the Roman annals; for
there is nothing whatever in which we can make this Etruscan Mastarna
and Servius Tullius, the son of a bondwoman, tally with each other.
Undoubtedly therefore the earliest Roman history has sprung from lays.
Perizonius quotes examples from other nations; even in the historical
books of the Old Testament, there are such lays. With regard to the
Romans, he cites the testimony of Cato, to which Cicero refers in two
passages. “Would that the lays were still in existence;” Cicero writes,
“for as Cato says, they were sung at table by the guests in praise of
deceased men!” A third mention we find in Nonius Marcellus from Varro,
that at banquets _pueri honesti_ sang lays in praise of departed great
men, either to the flute, or without any accompaniment. This evidence
every one must acknowledge as authentic. Among all the nations of
whose peculiar original early literature we can form any judgment,
there are found either longer historical poems of the epic class, or
else very short ones in praise of individual men. In order to pave the
way for the assertion that we have still pieces left of both from the
Romans, we must first premise some remarks on their most ancient metres.
The ancient Romans, before they adopted the Greek poetic system, made
use of the Saturnian verse. Horace says of it,
Horridus ille
Defluxit numerus Saturnius
and several old grammarians have given accounts of it. Atilius
Fortunatianus and others among them, who knew nothing about its
structure, stuck to a couple of verses which had been preserved;
particularly to the following, in which, according to the views which
then prevailed, a hypercatalectical Senarius makes its appearance:
Malum dabunt Metelli Nævio Poëtæ.
Terentianus Maurus, who belongs to the end of the third century,
speaks of it when treating of the Anacreontic verse, because the first
division of the Saturnian bears some resemblance to it. But the real
Saturnian verse is quite a different one, which I intend shortly to
prove in a detailed treatise. It has many forms, and is altogether
distinct from Greek metres. The Latin term for Rhythmus, which in later
times only was applied to Greek metres, is _numeri_. But the Greek
metre is based on music and quantity, while in theirs the Romans really
_counted_, the syllables being little measured, or rather not at all:
a certain degree of rhythm was, however, kept. Our ancestors, in the
same way, had no idea of short and long syllables in the Greek manner;
and in the old Latin church hymns likewise short syllables are made
long, and _vice versa_. Plautus and Terence also, in their iambic and
trochaic verses, really observed the ryhthmical measure only, and not
the quantity. This is the case with all northern people. The pervading
characteristic of the Saturnian verse is this, that it must consist of
a fixed number of trisyllabic feet. Generally speaking there are four
of them, in which either Bacchics or Cretics interchange with Spondees.
Sometimes the Cretics and sometimes the Bacchics predominate. When kept
distinct they have a very fine movement; but they are usually very much
mingled together, so that it is difficult to make them out.
These verses, found from the very earliest times, are quite analogous
to the Persian, Arabian, and to our own old German and northern ones,
and also to those of the Anglo-Saxon, and to all in which alliteration
prevails. The old German verse is divided into two halves, in the first
of which two words begin with the same consonant, which once more
occurs again in the second, and it has four beats. In the old Saxon
Harmony of the Gospels there is this quadruple measure, and likewise
in Otfrid and others; but five or six measures may also be found.
In Persian poetry there are uniformly four feet of three syllables
each; in Arabic this is often the case, but not unseldom there are
quadrisyllabic ones also. Exactly agreeing with these are the Spanish
_coplas de arte major_, which were in use before the introduction
of the Alexandrine, and have also passed into the Flemish. In all
probability this metre was also used in the longer poems of the
Provençal. This old Roman syllabic measure is universal in the Roman
poems down to the seventh century. I have found a long string of them,
and a chapter of an old grammarian with fragments of wonderful beauty,
principally from Nævius. This important treatise on the Saturnian
verse I shall publish. For this grammarian has really understood that
metre,[37] which in Plautus is worked up to a high degree of beauty.
There are also shorter old poems in this measure. At the funerals of
the Romans, _Neniæ_, as they were called, were sung to the flute,
which were not doleful sentimental songs, but must have been of the
same character as the _Laudationes_. The dead had now passed over to
their illustrious ancestors; their glory was made the theme of pride
and exultation; and therefore in these Neniæ praise was simply given
them. When Horace says, _absint inani funere neniæ_, &c. this refers,
if there was any singing at all at funerals, to the dirges of the later
age. The Romans were not originally tender-hearted. They made even the
dead man of use to the State, and from the grave itself he exhorted
others to follow him in his deeds. Neniæ and Laudationes were therefore
quite plain and simple, in that old style which did not yet know of
any construction of periods, and they are no way to be compared to the
λόγοι ἐπιτάφιοι in Thucydides and the later Greeks. Two such poems are
evidently still preserved to us, in the tombs of the Scipios, which
were discovered in 1780, by the Appian road. The upper story, where
the sarcophagus of the younger Africanus and the statue of Ennius
were, is wanting; but the lower one, which was scooped out of the hill
side, was found choked up with rubbish. Here was the sarcophagus of
L. Scipio Barbatus, who had been a consul in the fifth century (454).
At an earlier period,[38] this tomb had been already entered from the
top, and a tablet taken out, which is now built into the wall of the
Barberini palace; yet this had fallen into oblivion. The bodies of
the Cornelii down to Sylla were not burned in the Pelasgian, or Greek
manner, but buried in coffins. On these noble sarcophagi there are
verses, written indeed like prose, but divided by dashes; and on the
sarcophagus of the son the verses are even arranged in lines. That
they are verses is to be seen from their unequal length, as otherwise
the Romans always wrote every line to its full length. These are quite
plain and simple verses, yet there is still some metre in them.
_Cornéliu’ Lúciu’ Scípio Barbátus,_
_Gnáivo prognátu’, fortis vír sapiénsque--_
_Consúl, censor, aédilis, quí fuit apúd vos, etc._
These are surely the _Neniæ_ which were sung at the time, and then
inscribed on the tomb. The old songs at the banquets, were for the most
part quite as simple.
Now these _Neniæ_, together with the _Laudationes_ kept in the
Atrium, are sources for the earliest history. There were besides some
longer epic poems among the Romans, as well as among other people;
for instance, the Servians, &c. The modern Greek songs are only of a
lyrical description, but those of the Servians are a combination of the
epic with the lyric. A fragment of an heroic poem of this kind on the
combat of the Horatii and Curatii, I think I have discovered in Livy.
Now it is not by any means to be supposed that Livy had still seen
these old heroic poems, and written from them; but he wrote, either
directly or indirectly, through Varro, from the books of the pontiffs
and augurs, in which very many fragments of such ancient epic lays
were preserved; many of them dating even from the time of the taking
of the city. In the passage of Livy alluded to, wherein the appeal to
the people is related, which he had taken from these books, he speaks
of _lex horrendi carminis_. The formulas of that time were, however,
called _carmina_, and were written in the old measure. That Livy has
indirectly or directly borrowed from these books is so much the more
certain, as Cicero asserts, that the formula of the _provocatio ad
populum_ was contained in the _libri augurales_. The formula is
Duúmviri pérduelliónem júdicent, &c.
in which the old metre is still to be recognised.
That Cicero’s assertion, _laudationibus historia nostra facta est
mendosior_, is acknowledged also by Livy, has been already remarked.
For as every thing good may easily be turned to evil, that lofty
feeling of family pride which the Romans had was also liable to be
perverted, and we may well believe that saying.
After the first scanty notices from the earlier times were for the
most part destroyed in the Gallic devastation, they were restored from
outlines taken from the songs of the _Vates_; the poems were changed
in passing from mouth to mouth, and from these combined with the
_Laudationes_ history arose. These are the materials which Fabius found
extant.
If we look at the tenth book of Livy, we find in it a disproportionate
prolixity in the account of the campaigns of Fabius Maximus Rullianus.
Now this is exactly an instance of a story taken from family records.
In fact not a few statements may even be pointed out, which have no
other source than family vanity. People even ventured to interpolate
fictitious consulships and triumphs into the family annals, as Livy
himself tells us.
Again, other falsifications have arisen from national pride. The
forgeries of patriotism manifest themselves among the Romans whenever
they suffered great disasters; and this is particularly the case with
the momentous ones of the earlier time, with the war of Porsena, the
Gallic calamity, and the disgrace at Caudium, in which the whole
account is a lying one. Others have sprung from that spirit of caste,
which in earlier times led to continual struggles. Both parties thus
brought false accusations against each other, which afterwards found
their way into history; or, on the other hand, palliation was also
attempted in order to disguise political or moral crimes. The blame of
the worst events is laid to the people’s charge; yet it is innocent,
and the guilt belongs wholly to its antagonists. Not the people, but
the Curies condemned Manlius to death; these also pronounced the
disgraceful decision between the Ardeates and the people of Aricia;[39]
nay, we may be sure that it was the Curies which compelled Camillus to
go into exile.
Such falsifications accumulate, become involved in each other, and give
rise to this strange confusion. The rich materials, widely scattered
indeed, because the parties did not allow of their being brought
together, we may gather in order to find out by critical research the
organization and the nature of the Roman nation; and on the whole to
carry on their history to that point at which contemporary accounts
from the Greeks begin, to the war with Pyrrhus, and the first Punic
war. Much will indeed remain undecided in these inquiries; but we may
exactly discriminate where this must needs be the case, and where it is
otherwise.