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قراءة كتاب Rome
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and Sisto
The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved by the
Hentschel Colourtype Process.
ROME
CHAPTER I
ROME
About seven hundred and fifty years before the Christian era some Latian settlers founded a town on the banks of the Tiber and became the Roman people. Where did they come from? Had they come across what was later to be known as the ager romanus from the Latin stronghold of Alba Longa, or were they a mixed people, partly composed of those men from Etruria who were already settled in the country round? In the confused pictures which tradition has handed down to us we see Latins in conflict with Etruscans, and Romulus relegating the latter to a special quarter of the city; but we also see one of the three tribes into which he divided the people bearing an Etruscan name, an Etruscan chief as his ally, and we know that while two at least of her six kings belonged to this race, the religion, the art, and the political institutions of early Rome were borrowed from that Etruscan civilisation which was at this epoch the most advanced on Latin soil.
However this may be, four legends cling round the mighty founders of Rome—the Latian, the Aenean, the Arcadian, the Etruscan. The Arcadian Evander had brought with him a colony of the indigenous people of Greece, and founded a town at the foot of the Palatine sixty years before the Trojan war. But at Alba Longa there also reigned kings descended from Aeneas, who had come to Latium after the capture of Troy bringing with him the Palladium, the sacred image of Pallas. His descendant, the vestal Rhea Silvia, becomes the mother of the twins Romulus and Remus by Mars. The babes of the guilty priestess are cast adrift, but their cradle is carried down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine, where they are suckled by a wolf, and brought up by the shepherd community already established there.
In the dim twilight of origins we recognise that Romulus is the type of the Roman people, whom he symbolises, who are found fighting the Sabine, the Etruscan, even the Latin, for existence as a nation. In the dim twilight we see all Roman things coming down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine—the original Roma Quadrata—and we see that the nucleus of the settlement there was the cave of Lupercus, the Italian shepherds' god, identified later with the Arcadian Pan. This cave was just above the site of the present church of Santa Anastasia; here grew the wild fig-tree in whose roots the cradle of Rhea Silvia's babes became entangled, and here was the hut of Faustulus their foster-father.
The Grotto of Lupercus is the oldest sanctuary of kingly Rome. For the people were shepherds. Other nations had risen under shepherd kings who led their people to war, but no other people had become world conquerors; no other people had been equally skilled in the arts of war and the arts of peace, the arts of the plough and the arts of the spear, in the self-discipline, the heroic devotion, the unity of purpose, of the men who once carried in their breast the destinies of the known world.
The story is aptly figured in the person of the god Mars, who was the reputed father of Romulus and Remus. The Roman god was at first an agricultural divinity—the "spears of Mars" were the rods with which the shepherd owner marked his boundaries. When, under the influence of Greece, Mars became the god of battles, the boundary marker of the fields became his war weapons. But if the Roman knew how to beat his ploughshare into a sword, he also knew how to return from the sword to the plough. The one was never far from the other—they put him in possession of those two ways of inheriting the earth, multiplying and subduing, producing and combating. Thus the pastoral legend never died out from the land of Saturn, and in the proudest flush of victory, when the relics of the hastae martis were shown to the triumphant followers of Mars, there was present to the soul of the Roman the image of the father of Romulus covering the land with gigantic strides to strike these same hastae into the soil as a sign of possession, the emblem of primitive law.
THE FORUM FROM THE ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS
In the left corner is the lapis niger, the traditional tomb of Romulus. Facing us is the Arch of Titus, and to the right is the Palatine.
Two hills in Central Italy and a swamp between them provided the theatre of perhaps the greatest millennium in human history. On the one hill were the Latins—or let us call them the Roman people—the site of Roma Quadrata the foster-land of Romulus, the birthplace of Augustus, the hill which has given its name to the imperial palaces of the earth. On the other were the Quirites and the site of the Sabine arx, that Capitolium so-called, says Montfaucon, "because it was the head of the world, from which the consuls and senators governed the universe." Whenever the marshy ground between them was passable, the Latins and Sabines descended the steep declivities of their hills and transformed it into a battlefield. But even in these early days they felt the need of a comitium where the rival chiefs could meet to decide upon terms; and in no long space this battle-ground became the nucleus and pledge of the political greatness of Rome.
For the Forum symbolises all human civilisation. It is the symbol of the common meeting ground—the common sentiments and needs—of human beings, where rancours are laid aside for the business of life—its common but its noblest business, civic, "civilised," pursuits. It is the symbol of human greatness also, for the Roman never suffered the common necessities to force upon him an ignoble peace. The battle-ground became the centre of civic life, but only on condition that the interests for which men should combat were never sacrificed to the interests for