heraldry, universally traced back to illustrious ancestors. The
Aemilii, for instance, Calpurnii, Pinarii, and Pomponii professed to
be descended from the four sons of Numa, Mamercus, Calpus, Pinus, and
Pompo; and the Aemilii, yet further, from Mamercus, the son of
Pythagoras, who was named the "winning speaker" (--aimulos--)

But, notwithstanding the Hellenic reminiscences that are everywhere
apparent, these prehistoric annals of the community and of the leading
houses may be designated at least relatively as national, partly
because they originated in Rome, partly because they tended primarily
to form links of connection not between Rome and Greece, but between
Rome and Latium.

Hellenic Early History of Rome

It was Hellenic story and fiction that undertook the task of
connecting Rome and Greece. Hellenic legend exhibits throughout an
endeavour to keep pace with the gradual extension of geographical
knowledge, and to form a dramatized geography by the aid of its
numerous stories of voyagers and emigrants. In this, however, it
seldom follows a simple course. An account like that of the earliest
Greek historical work which mentions Rome, the "Sicilian History" of
Antiochus of Syracuse (which ended in 330)--that a man named Sikelos
had migrated from Rome to Italia, that is, to the Bruttian peninsula
--such an account, simply giving a historical form to the family
affinity between the Romans, Siculi, and Bruttians, and free from all
Hellenizing colouring, is a rare phenomenon. Greek legend as a whole
is pervaded--and the more so, the later its rise--by a tendency to
represent the whole barbarian world as having either issued from the
Greeks or having been subdued by them; and it early in this sense spun
its threads also around the west. For Italy the legends of Herakles
and of the Argonauts were of less importance--although Hecataeus
(after 257) is already acquainted with the Pillars of Herakles, and
carries the Argo from the Black Sea into the Atlantic Ocean, from the
latter into the Nile, and thus back to the Mediterranean--than were
the homeward voyages connected with the fall of Ilion. With the first
dawn of information as to Italy Diomedes begins to wander in the
Adriatic, and Odysseus in the Tyrrhene Sea;(18) as indeed the
latter localization at least was naturally suggested by the Homeric
conception of the legend. Down to the times of Alexander the countries
on the Tyrrhene Sea belonged in Hellenic fab