f an official record of
these assumed facts--probably took place already in this epoch. The
outlines of the narrative, and in particular its quasi-chronology,
make their appearance in the later tradition so unalterably fixed,
that for that very reason the fixing of them must be placed not in,
but previous to, the literary epoch of Rome. If a bronze casting of
the twins Romulus and Remus sucking the teats of the she-wolf was
already placed beside the sacred fig-tree in 458, the Romans who
subdued Latium and Samnium must have heard the history of the origin
of their ancestral city in a form not greatly differing from what
we read in Livy. Even the Aborigines--i. e. "those from the very
beginning"--that simple rudimental form of historical speculation as
to the Latin race--are met with about 465 in the Sicilian author
Callias. It is of the very nature of a chronicle that it should attach
prehistoric speculation to history and endeavour to go back, if not
to the origin of heaven and earth, at least to the origin of the
community; and there is express testimony that the table of the
pontifices specified the year of the foundation of Rome. Accordingly
it may be assumed that, when the pontifical college in the first half
of the fifth century proceeded to substitute for the former scanty
records--ordinarily, doubtless, confined to the names of the
magistrates--the scheme of a formal yearly chronicle, it also added
what was wanting at the beginning, the history of the kings of Rome
and of their fall, and, by placing the institution of the republic on
the day of the consecration of the Capitoline temple, the 13th of
Sept. 245, furnished a semblance of connection between the dateless
and the annalistic narrative. That in this earliest record of the
origin of Rome the hand of Hellenism was at work, can scarcely
be doubted. The speculations as to the primitive and subsequent
population, as to the priority of pastoral life over agriculture, and
the transformation of the man Romulus into the god Quirinus,(17) have
quite a Greek aspect, and even the obscuring of the genuinely national
forms of the pious Numa and the wise Egeria by the admixture of alien
elements of Pythagorean primitive wisdom appears by no means to be
one of the most recent ingredients in the Roman prehistoric annals.

The pedigrees of the noble clans were completed in a manner analogous
to these -origines- of the community, and were, in the favourite style
of