ect Rome with
Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy; in the former
accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king,
in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch,
probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amalgamation of
the two stories. The Alban prince Romulus remains the founder of
Rome, but becomes at the same time the grandson of Aeneas; Aeneas does
not found Rome, but is represented as bringing the Roman Penates to
Italy and building Lavinium as their shrine, while his son Ascanius
founds Alba Longa, the mother-city of Rome and the ancient metropolis
of Latium. All this was a sorry and unskilful patchwork. The view
that the original Penates of Rome were preserved not, as had hitherto
been believed, in their temple in the Roman Forum, but in the shrine
at Lavinium, could not but be offensive to the Romans; and the Greek
fiction was a still worse expedient, inasmuch as under it the gods
only bestowed on the grandson what they had adjudged to the grandsire.
But the redaction served its object: without exactly denying the
national origin of Rome, it yet deferred to the Hellenizing tendency,
and legalized in some degree that desire to claim kindred with Aeneas
and his descendants which was already at this epoch greatly in
vogue;(60) and thus it became the stereotyped, and was soon accepted
as the official, account of the origin of the mighty community.

Apart from the fable of the origin of the city, the Greek
historiographers had otherwise given themselves little or no concern
as to the Roman commonwealth; so that the presentation of the further
course of the national history must have been chiefly derived from
native sources. But the scanty information that has reached us does
not enable us to discern distinctly what sort of traditions, in
addition to the book of Annals, were at the command of the earliest
chroniclers, and what they may possibly have added of their own.
The anecdotes inserted from Herodotus(61) were probably still foreign
to these earliest annalists, and a direct borrowing of Greek materials
in this section cannot be proved. The more remarkable, therefore, is
the tendency, which is everywhere, even in the case of Cato the enemy
of the Greeks, very distinctly apparent, not only to connect Rome with
Hellas, but to represent the Italian and Greek nations as having been
originally identical. To this tendency we owe the primitive-Italians
o