a people which has exhibited
in language, polity, and religion, a pure and national development
such as few have equalled, into a confused aggregate of Etruscan
and Sabine, Hellenic and, forsooth! even Pelasgian fragments.

Setting aside self-contradictory and unfounded hypotheses, we may
sum up in a few words all that can be said respecting the nationality
of the component elements of the primitive Roman commonwealth.
That the Ramnians were a Latin stock cannot be doubted, for they
gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth and therefore must have
substantially determined the nationality of the united community.
Respecting the origin of the Luceres nothing can be affirmed, except
that there is no difficulty in the way of our assigning them, like
the Ramnians, to the Latin stock. The second of these communities,
on the other hand, is with one consent derived from Sabina; and
this view can at least be traced to a tradition preserved in the
Titian brotherhood, which represented that priestly college as
having been instituted, on occasion of the Tities being admitted
into the collective community, for the preservation of their
distinctive Sabine ritual. It may be, therefore, that at a period
very remote, when the Latin and Sabellian stocks were beyond question
far less sharply contrasted in language, manners, and customs than
were the Roman and the Samnite of a later age, a Sabellian community
entered into a Latin canton-union; and, as in the older and more
credible traditions without exception the Tities take precedence
of the Ramnians, it is probable that the intruding Tities compelled
the older Ramnians to accept the --synoikismos--. A mixture
of different nationalities certainly therefore took place; but
it hardly exercised an influence greater than the migration, for
example, which occurred some centuries afterwards of the Sabine
Attus Clauzus or Appius Claudius and his clansmen and clients to
Rome. The earlier admission of the Tities among the Ramnians does
not entitle us to class the community among mongrel peoples any
more than does that subsequent reception of the Claudii among the
Romans. With the exception, perhaps, of isolated national institutions
handed down in connection with ritual, the existence of Sabellian
elements can nowhere be pointed out in Rome; and the Latin
language in particular furnishes absolutely no support to any such
hypothesis.(4) It would in fact be more than surprising, if the
L