w his sons, and slew also his daughter, loved of Mars,
mother of twin sons left to die in the forest, like Oedipus,
father-slayers, as Oedipus was, wolf-suckled, of whom one was born to
kill the other and be the first King, and be taken up to Jupiter in
storm and lightning at the last. The legend of wise Numa, next, taught
by Egeria; her stony image still weeps trickling tears for her royal
adept, and his earthen cup, jealously guarded, was worshipped for more
than a thousand years; legends of the first Arval brotherhood, dim as
the story of Melchisedec, King and priest, but lasting as Rome itself.
Tales of King Tullus, when the three Horatii fought for Rome against
the three Curiatii, who smote for Alba and lost the day--Tullus
Hostilius, grandson of that first Hostus who had fought against the
Sabines; and always more legend, and more, and more, sometimes misty,
sometimes clear and direct in action as a Greek tragedy. They hover upon
the threshold of history, with faces of beauty or of terror, sublime,
ridiculous, insignificant, some born of desperate, real deeds, many
another, perhaps, first told by some black-haired shepherd mother to her
wondering boys at evening, when the brazen pot simmered on the
smouldering fire, and the father had not yet come home.

But down beneath the legend lies the fact, in hewn stones already far in
the third thousand of their years. Digging for truth, searchers have
come here and there upon the first walls and gates of the Palatine
village, straight, strong and deeply founded. The men who made them
meant to hold their own, and their own was whatsoever they were able to
take from others by force. They built their walls round a four-sided
space, wide enough for them, scarcely big enough a thousand years later
for the houses of their children's rulers, the palaces of the Caesars of
which so much still stands today.

Then came the man who built the first bridge across the river, of wooden
piles and beams, bolted with bronze, because the Romans had no iron yet,
and ever afterwards repaired with wood and bronze, for its sanctity, in
perpetual veneration of Ancus Martius, fourth King of Rome. That was the
bridge Horatius kept against Porsena of Clusium, while the fathers hewed
it down behind him.

[Illustration: WALL OF ROMULUS]

Tarquin the first came next, a stranger of Greek blood, chosen, perhaps,
because the factions in Rome could not agree. Then Servius, great and
good, built his tre