he summit of the Capitoline and Esquiline Hills were Sabine
settlements, whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity. To the
green wooded slopes of the Palatine, according to a beautiful
tradition, sixty years before the destruction of Troy, came Evander
and his Arcadians from Greece, and settled there with their flocks and
herds, and led a quiet idyllic life. According to another tradition,
AEneas, after the destruction of Troy, came to this spot, and marrying
the daughter of a neighbouring king, became the ancestor of the twins
Romulus and Remus, the popular founders of Rome, whose romantic
exposure and nourishment by a she-wolf are known to every schoolboy.
Romulus, after slaying his brother, built a stronghold on the
Palatine, which he opened as an asylum for outlaws and runaway slaves,
who supported themselves chiefly by plunder. The community of this
robber-city consisting almost entirely of males, they provided
themselves with wives by the famous stratagem known as the "Rape of
the Sabine women." Seizing the daughters of their neighbours, the
Sabines of the Capitoline and Esquiline Hills, on a festive occasion,
they carried them away with them to their fortress. A number of
sanguinary fights took place in consequence of this rape around the
swampy margin of the lake. In the last of these engagements the
combatants were separated by the Sabine women suddenly rushing in with
their children between their fathers and brothers and the men who had
become their husbands. A mutual reconciliation then ensued, and the
two communities contracted a firm and close alliance. The Palatine,
Capitoline, and Esquiline villages became henceforth one city, to
which from time to time by conquest new accessions were made, until at
last all the different settlements on the seven hills of Rome were
brought under one rule, and surrounded by a common wall of defence.
Mommsen, Niebuhr, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and other critics, have
made sad havoc with these romantic stories of the origin of Rome. But
although much of the fabulous undoubtedly mingles with them--for the
early history of Rome was not written till it had become a powerful
state, and then the historian had no records of days long past save
what were embodied in popular tradition and poetry--there has recently
been a reaction in favour of them, and they must ever be interesting
on account of their own intrinsic charm, the element of truth which
they contain, and the indel