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The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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Then Marcus Valerius, the brother of Publius, levelled his lance and rode fiercely against Titus Tarquinius, who was the leader of the band of the Tarquinii. But Titus drew back, and sheltered himself amidst his band: and Marcus rode after him in his fury, and plunged into the midst of the enemy, and a Latin ran his lance into his side as he was rushing on; but his horse stayed not in his career, till Marcus dropped from him dead upon the ground. Then the Romans feared yet more, and the Tarquinii charged yet more vehemently, till Aulus, the leader of the Romans, rode up with his own chosen band; and he bade them level their lances, and slay all whose faces were towards them, whether they were friends or foes. So the Romans turned from their flight, and Aulus and his chosen band fell upon the Tarquinii; and Aulus prayed, and vowed that he would raise a temple to Castor and to Pollux, the twin heroes, if they would aid him to win the battle; and he promised to his soldiers that the two who should be the first to break into the camp of the enemy should receive a rich reward. When behold there rode two horsemen at the head of his chosen band, and they were taller and fairer than after the stature and beauty of men, and they were in the first bloom of youth, and their horses were white as snow. Then there was a fierce battle, when Octavius, the leader of the Latins, came up with aid to rescue the Tarquinii; for Titus Herminius rode against him, and ran his spear through his body, and slew him at one blow; but as he was spoiling him of his arms, he himself was struck by a javelin, and he was borne out of the fight and died. And the two horsemen on white horses rode before the Romans; and the enemy fled before them, and the Tarquinii were beaten down and slain, and Titus Tarquinius was slain among them; and the Latins fled, and the Romans followed them to their camp, and the two horsemen on white horses were the first who broke into the camp. But when the camp was taken, and the battle was fully won, Aulus sought for the two horsemen to give them the rewards which he had promised; and they were not found either amongst the living or amongst the dead, only there was seen imprinted on the hard black rock, the mark of a horse’s hoof, which no earthly horse had ever made; and the mark was there to be seen in after ages. And the battle was ended, and the sun went down.
Now they knew at Rome that the armies had joined battle, and as the day wore away all men longed for tidings. And the sun went down, and suddenly there were seen in the Forum two horsemen, taller and fairer than the tallest and fairest of men, and they rode on white horses, and they were as men just come from the battle, and their horses were all bathed in foam. They alighted by the temple of Vesta, where a spring of water bubbles up from the ground and fills a small deep pool. There they washed away the stains of the battle, and when men crowded round them, and asked for tidings, they told them how the battle had been fought, and how it was won. And they mounted their horses, and rode from the Forum, and were seen no more; and men sought for them in every place, but they were not found.
Then Aulus and all the Romans knew how Castor and Pollux, the twin heroes, had heard his prayer, and had fought for the Romans, and had vanquished their enemies, and had been the first to break into the enemies’ camp, and had themselves, with more than mortal speed, borne the tidings of their victory to Rome. So Aulus built a temple according to his vow to Castor and Pollux, and gave rich offerings, for he said, “These are the rewards which I promised to the two who should first break into the enemies’ camp; and the twin heroes have won them, and they and no mortal men have won the battle for Rome this day.”
So perished the house of the Tarquinii, in the great battle by the lake Regillus, and all the sons of King Tarquinius, and his son-in-law Octavius Mamilius, were slain on that battle-field. Thus King Tarquinius saw the ruin of all his family and of all his house, and he was left alone, utterly without hope. So he went to Cumæ, a city of the Greeks, and there he died. And thus the deeds of Tarquinius and of the wicked Tullia, and of Sextus their son, were visited upon their own heads; and the Romans lived in peace, and none threatened their freedom any more.b
Before leaving the Roman monarchy it is necessary to give a critical discussion of the myths of the kings as well as an estimate of their historical value. To do this we draw upon two of the most famous students of this period, Schweglerc and Otto Gilbert.d
THE MYTHS OF THE ROMAN KINGS CRITICALLY EXAMINED
Against Schlegelh we have maintained the position that, in the first place, the traditional history of primitive Rome was not the work of a Greek but an indigenous product of Roman national life,[8] in the second, that in its original form it was not the product of any literary activity whatever; against Niebuhrf that it is not a creation of popular poetry but a result of deliberate reflection. The process by which it came into being we may conclude—conjecturally, of course—to have been as follows.
The genuine and veracious tradition of the foundation and earliest fortunes of Rome seems to have soon perished—if indeed it ever existed. This could hardly have been otherwise. It had neither been safeguarded against destruction or travesty by written records, nor cast into fixed traditional form, in song at least, by becoming the subject of popular poetry; and it was therefore in the nature of things that during the course of generations it should pass into silence and oblivion.
It is possible—it is even probable—that as far back as the decemvirate the Romans had no trustworthy information concerning the origin of their city. But they did not rest content in their ignorance. They felt the need of affirming something definite about that period and those events none the less strongly for their lack of historical knowledge, and on the foundation of dim memories and isolated legends that had survived, of proper names, monuments, institutions, and customs, they therefore elaborated a superstructure of history to supply the gaps of tradition. There is not the slightest suggestion of conscious deceit or deliberate falsification of history in this; on the contrary they held in good faith that in these tales they had made successful guesses at the actual facts and thus reconstructed the original story—a naïve proceeding characteristic of myth-invention in general.
It is obvious that a history made up in this artificial fashion would not start as the connected whole presented to us in Roman historical works; this whole, in which the legend of the settlement of Æneas is brought into circumstantial relation with the founding and history of Alba Longa, and the dynasty of the Alban kings with the founding of Rome, so that the history of Rome and that of the antecedent period from the landing of Æneas to the fall of the younger Tarquin are held together by an unbroken thread of continuous historical narrative—this systematised whole must naturally have come into existence by a process of linking and welding together, the result, in part no doubt, of literary effort and reflection.
A Roman Officer
(After Vecellio)
If we resolve this history into its component parts and examine each of these parts separately as to its origin and genetic motive, we perceive that the Roman legends and traditions take origin from very diverse sources and demand very diverse explanations.
First of all, we cannot but recognise that certain fundamental facts in the traditional history of the monarchy are historically true and derived from historical reminiscence. The memory of the most vital moments in the development of the Roman constitution survived, though much confused, down to the age of written records. Hence we cannot refuse a certain amount of credence to traditions relating to public law. The double state formed by the union of Romans and Sabines, the three original tribes, the succession in which they originated, the three centuries of knights, the successive augmentations of the senate till it reached the number of three hundred, the rise of a plebeian class,[9] the creation of the inferior gentes, the introduction of the censorship, the fall of the monarchy, and the establishment of the republic—these fundamental facts of early constitutional history are in all likelihood historical in essence, even though the circumstantial details (more particularly the estimates of numbers) with which they are adorned and the relation of cause and effect in which they are placed by the historian may be due to the ingenuity, or construed according to the opinion, of posterity. Round this stock of fact, however, has twined a luxuriant growth of fiction, a garland of legend, the origin of which we will forthwith proceed to examine, and so exhibit it in the germ.