Fraccaro - History of Rome in the Regal Period

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The History of Rome in the Regal Period

Author(s): Plinio FraccaroSource: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1/2 (1957), pp. 59-65Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/298566.

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THE HISTORY OF ROME IN THE REGAL PERIODBy PLINIO FRACCARO *

When we consider the information concerning the history of the earliest days ofRome which ancient authors have handed down to us, we have to ask ourselves: whichparts of it are acceptable and which are not ? What, after all, do we really know aboutearly Roman history ?Modern scholars view these problems from very different psychological standpoints.Some of them ask why we should refuse credence to a venerable tradition which hasbeen given an artistic form of great beauty by writers of genius, and which is full oflessons of political and moral importance. Others, however, seized with the full frenzyof the critic, and with uncompromising devotion to logic, discard all, or practically all,the tradition. Whatever the cost, they intend to reach the truth. These two conflictingtendencies prevail turn and turn about in accordance with the views dominating indifferent periods or with the different temperaments or ages of individual scholars. Thesituation becomes an almost painful one when a scholar has to take up a position in public,and in particular when he wishes to narrate, rather than to discuss, the early history ofRome. In these circumstances the better procedure is that of those historians who chooseto recount the tradition first, to follow this with criticism of the tradition, and after suchcriticism, possibly ruthless, to build a reconstruction on the few elements which havebeen salvaged, as Ettore Pais did, especially in the first edition of his Storia di Roma.In this way the tradition does not disappear altogether; it is at least recounted before itis rejected. More difficult decisions have to be taken by one who intends to tell the storywithout first offering an exposition and critical analysis of the tradition. For example, inhis RJmische Geschichte Mommsen displays remarkable scepticism and takes no accountat all of the traditional stories of the individual Roman kings, although he deals fullywith the monarchy as an institution, attributes the Servian constitution to the regalperiod, and accepts the fact of the expulsion of the kings, which has been ' spun outinto a legend ' in our sources. The detailed accounts of the kings are for Mommsen all' fables ', ' die Sage, die fur alles einen Ursprung weiss ' (p. 47), ' quasi Historie.' In thefirst volume of his work the development and the civilization of early Rome and of thepeoples who were in contact with her have been reconstructed with the help of elementsfrom other sources, differing from those derived from the historiographical tradition.The distrust with which the Romans' own account of the earliest years of their cityis viewed stems from the obviously legendary character of much of its contents and fromthe impression which other parts give of being explanations, worked up some time later,of rites, ceremonies, and monuments of which the origin had been forgotten. This distrust,however, comes also from a failure to see how detailed accounts of events which happenedbefore the third century could have been handed down to the end of that century, whenthe Romans first began to write annales, began, that is, to arrange the information at theirdisposal year by year, with the help of the list of magistrates. To counter this secondreason for scepticism, or to weaken its force, people have tried to think of some meansor other by which information about the period of the monarchy or the early Republiccould have reached the annalists of the end of the third century.One possible vehicle was the subject of the well-known theory of Niebuhr, whothought of going back to the carmina which used to be sung to the accompaniment offlutes, in accordance with an ancient mos epularum recorded by Cato in the Origines, andwhich celebrated ' clarorum virorum laudes et virtutes'. This practice dated to a periodsome centuries before the time of Cato himself (Cic., Br. 75 : ' multis saeculis ante suamaetatem ') and therefore these carmina were not known to Cato, nor, it would seem, tothe oldest annalists. Although Niebuhr's theory was not well-received, it was taken upby De Sanctis. For example, in discussing the story of Verginia he says: ' the purestrain of popular poetry is apparent in the story of Verginia ' (Storia dei Romani II, 47).He is obviously using a very subjective standard of criticism. No one knows what thesesongs sung by Roman aristocrats at their banquets were like; but they were certainly in

* Miss Ursula Ewins, Lecturer in Ancient History,St. Andrews University, is to be thanked for kindly undertaking the translation of Professor Fraccaro'sarticle. (Ed.)


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6o P. FRACCAROcelebration of feats of war, not tragedies like that of Verginia, and they were based onsimple themes that were easy to take up again. But recently this theory has been revivedby the pupil of De Sanctis, Luigi Pareti (see also below, pp. 104 f.).Pareti, a student of ancient history who has won wide renown, has been publishingin the last few years (I95z and later) a full Storia di Roma, of which four volumes havealready appeared, taking the account down to the accession of Vespasian. In Athenaeumxxx (I952), I42, I published a lengthy review of the first two volumes of the work. Paretireplied indirectly to the points I had made when, in a supplement to the Roman weekly,Idea, Of 25th November, 1956, he discussed the paper entitled ' La storia romanaarcaica' which I read at the inaugural meeting of the Istituto Lombardo di Scienzee Lettere in I952.There are two points of disagreement between Pareti and myself. One concerns the' ancient heroic verse ', which I did not mention in my paper, 'probably,' says Pareti,' because he discounts it.' I do not either discount or value something about whichnothing is known. Pareti thinks that 'the plots of such carmina could later have beenhanded down in writing, as well as orally'. Cicero says, however, utinam extarent, thatis, he only knew of such songs from Cato. ' Even to-day,' writes Pareti, 'when we re-readthe first books of Livy's History in which is collected the material of the annalists, wecertainly find ourselves again and again in the presence of stories of poetical colour andpower, overflowing with love of country and greatness of spirit. The obvious explanationof this undeniable fact is that the earliest serious epic poets, Naevius and Ennius, and theearliest annalists who were their contemporaries used material which was derived fromthe ancient popular heroic verse.'I have quoted the words of Pareti in full, but I do not think that there is any pointin discussing the matter further, since I believe that the vast majority of scholars are inagreement that this theory of Niebuhr, De Sanctis, and Pareti has no solid basis. A fullerexamination, on the other hand, should be given to Pareti's other theory, concerning theAnnales Maximi. According to Pareti the Roman annalistic tradition did not begin at theend of the third century. This, he maintains, is a false assumption, ' although it has beenaccepted as self-evident by those scholars to whom it should have appeared mostawkward '. The tradition, he thinks, goes back to the tabulae dealbatae on which thePontifices 'from the very beginning of the Republic noted everything of importance,whatever its nature, which happened in the course of the year, and which, after thedestruction of the first set in the sack of Rome by the Gauls, were at once afterwardsreconstructed by the Pontifices in their main outlines and were published in annalisticform, as Annales Maximi, with a preface concerning the regal period'.The elder Cato does not seem to have had the same opinion as Pareti about therecords made by the Pontifices; for he says that he does not wish to put into his Originesmatters of no interest, like the price of corn or the changes in the heavenly bodies notedin the records of the Pontifices: ' Non lubet scribere, quod in tabula apud pontificemmaximum est, quotiens annona cara, quotiens lunae aut solis lumine caligo aut quidobstiterit ' (Gellius II, 28, 6). It is indeed probable that on the tabula there was recordedabove all information of practical importance, for the benefit especially of Roman farmers,and this would include notes of the phases of the moon and eclipses.We gain a somewhat different impression of the records of the Pontifices from thefamous passage of Cicero, De Or. II, 52. It appears that in the time of Cicero the tabula,dealbata was no longer displayed. According to Cicero the Pontifex used to write on theboards res omnes singulorumannorum and used to expose these in public so that whoeverwanted to might gain information from them. Servius Auctus on Aen. I, 373, gives us amore detailed account: on the tabula there were put first the names of the consuls andof the other magistrates and afterwards ' digna memoratu . . . domi militiaeque terramarique gesta ', and these ' per singulos dies', that is, with a precise date.It is difficult to explain why, if it contained all this, Cato spoke so slightingly of thetabula of the Pontifices and of its humdrum contents. Cicero continues by saying thatthe first Roman annalists followed the similitudo scribendi of the tabulae pontificales,recording ' sine ullis ornamentis monumenta solum temporum, hominum, locorumgestarumque rerum''; that is, the annals of the earliest historians were nlot very differenlt


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THE HIISTORY OF ROME IN THE REGAL PERIOD 6Ifrom the annales of the Pontifices, about which Cicero himself says (De Leg. I, 2, 5):' nihil potest esse ieiunius ' (considering them from the point of view of history as thework of the literary artist). There are two other pieces of information. Cicero, in thepassage of the De Oratore already referred to, says that the record-keeping of the Pontificesran ' ab initio rerum Romanarum usque ad P. Mucium pontificem maximum' (Pontifexfrom I30, Consul in I33 B.C.), and Servius, after the passage already referred to describingwhat the Pontifex Maximus did, continues 'cuius diligentiae annuos commentarios inoctoginta libros veteres rettulerunt ' and says that these were called Annales Maximi.This information is taken to mean that Scaevola stopped the publication of the tabulaeand filled eighty books with a transcription of the tabulae down to that date.Pareti, however, thinks that the publication did not take place on one single occasion,on the initiative of Scaevola, but at different periods. Ennius and Cato would thereforehave known the work. But Cato speaks of the tabula, not of the Annales Maximi, andCicero, De re p. I, i6, 25, says that the eclipse which Ennius mentioned as happening350 years post Romam conditam was recorded also in the Annales Maximi; which doesnot prove that Ennius himself took it from tabulae already published in book form.The idea which we have been able to form of this publication of the tabulae is notin harmony with the statement of Servius that it comprised eighty books. Even allowingfor considerable variation, one book muist have had a certain length, and an enormousamount of material must have been needed to fill eighty books. (Livy reached the periodof Scaevola, which is roughly that of the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, in fifty-ninebooks.) We cannot, therefore, have to deal with a simple collection of tabulae, even oneof several hundred of yearly tabulae.In this connection it would be interesting if we could discover how in practice thesetabulae were used by the Pontifices. Originally their pronouncements must have beenmade orally, as we see from Varro (De L. L. v, 27) was the case with the proclamation ofthe Nones. When the change was made to written notification (we do not know the dateof this change and it may have been a gradual one) a really large whitened board wascertainly needed for an indication in legible characters of a considerable amount ofmaterial. I do not think it likely that at the end of a year a new whitened board wasprepared for the following year while the old one was stored in the Regia. Some peopleseem to believe that at the time of Scaevola there were preserved hundreds of tabulae;even Pareti speaks of the ' first set of the tabulae ' destroyed in the sack by the Gauls.But the Regia still exists, a tiny building which could never have contained such a massof material. We may therefore suppose that from a certain date the Pontifices beforerewhitening the tabula began to note on a codex such information from the record of thepreceding year as they thought should be preserved. They did not, as we might think,do this primarily in order to store the information for historical purposes, but above allto preserve the memory of particular matters which had a bearing on the duties of thePontifices, which were complicated and often obscure. This would explain why the fewquotations which we have from the Annales Maximi refer to matters of religious orconstitutional importance. For example, the story which Gellius IV, 5, obtained fromVerrius Flaccus, and which came from the eleventh book of the Annales Maximi (ofwhich it is the longest fragment preserved for us), deals with the expiation of a prodigium,for which Etruscan aruspices were summoned. As Beloch observed (Rom. Gesch. 103),this must have happened at a time when the Etruscan cities were, in general, underRoman control; that is, after 300 B.c. This would suggest that the books of the AnnalesMaximi later than the tenth contained material from about 300 B.C. This little story couldnot have appeared in the tabula, but must have been contained among the notes whichthe Pontifices added to particular incidents, notes which could have been extendedwithout limit and go back to the most remote past. Vopiscus, Vita Taciti I, i, tells usthat the Pontifices ' penes quos scribendae historiae potestas fuit ' had written that at thedeath of Romulus, the good king, the interregnumwas instituted, in order to find anothergood king. If, as appears probable, we ought to read apXi8pEsiY in the text of DionysiusI, 74, then in the records (ricvaQ) of the Pontifices the foundation of Rome was placedin the second year of the seventh Olympiad, and naturally this had never been recordedon the tabula dealbata.


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62 P. FRACCAROIf the quotations in the Origo gentis -Romanaeare to be considered genuine,' as Paretiseems to believe, the legends of Alba and the Alban kings were told in the fourth bookof the Annales Maximi, and with particular attention to the miraculous. We are dealing,therefore, with material of late date.This also explains why the collection of pontifical records, chronologically arranged,

came to grow beyond all measure, and reached eighty books by about 130 B.C. The storyof the Etruscan arutspicesallows us to see with what material it grew. We can also seewhy this history of histories, which modern writers so often invoke, was used so little bythe ancient historians. Neither Livy nor Dionysius, if we except the passage alreadyreferred to where the text is not quite certain, mentions them; nor do the grammariansand antiquarians whose works survive, except for Verrius Flaccus ; the one historianwho does quote them, three times, is the author of the Origo gentis Romanae.When did this record-keeping begin ? We do not know. 'Ab initio rerumRomanarum,' says Cicero, and the Origo would confirm this in making the accounts inthe Annales Maximi go back to the foundation of Alba.The one piece of evidence with which a date is associated is the well-known passageof De re p. i, i6, 25, on eclipses. Ennius (Ann. fr. I63, Vahlen) recorded thatanno quinquagesimoCCC fere post Romam conditamNonis lunis soli luna obstitit et nox.Atque hac in re tanta inest ratio atque sollertia, ut ex hoc die, quem apud Ennium et inmaximis annalibusconsignatum videmus, superiores solis defectionesreputataesint usque adillam, quae Nonis Quinctilibus fuit regnanteRomulo.According to the manuscript of the De re p., Ennius dated the eclipse about350 years ab urbe condita; that is, about 404 B.C. Beloch therefore suggested the readingCCCCL and the identification with the eclipse of 13th June (5th June in the Romancalendar) of 288, certainly visible from Rome (Hermes LVII, 1922, I23 ; R6m. Gesch. 92).Since this eclipse came to be used as a point of departure for the calculation of othereclipses, going back to the time of Romulus, Beloch thought it must have been the first

recorded in the Annales Maximi (cf. Stuart Jones in CAH VII, 320). This is borne out bythe fact that Livy only occasionally mentions prodigies in his first nine books, while in thetenth he records them in chapters 23 and 3I for 296 and 295 B.C.The records of the Pontifices, therefore, had their beginning about 300 B.C., as aconsequence, according to Beloch, of the reorganization of the college of Pontifices afterthe Lex Ogulnia of 300, which opened it and the college of augurs to the Plebs.Beloch reached the same result in investigating the reliability of the dates of triumphs(Rom. Gesch. 88), which are fixed from the end of the fourth century. The consular Fastithemselves are reliable from 300 B.C. The genuine records of the Pontifices must go backto this period.Whatever value we wish to give to these acute observations of Beloch, it is certainin any case that we do not know when the tabula dealbata was first displayed.When Pareti says that the tabulae dealbatae were destroyed in the sack of Rome bythe Gauls but were at once afterwards reconstructed by the Pontifices in their mainoutlines, and so on, he is saying something for which there is not the slightest evidence.The unknown annalist Clodius, quoted by Plutarch, Numna I, said that the ancientavaypacac had disappeared in the Gallic sack and that their place had been taken byothers containing falsifications in favour of individuals who were later of importanceLivy vi, i, 9, thought that after the Gallic disaster an attempt was made to search outlaws and treaties while the Pontifices, on the other hand, kept private even such prescrip-tions as had been preserved in order to conduct the rites as they pleased in the future.But no author mentions historical works.Pareti accuses me of having too much confidence in a tradition which, in my view,was first put into writing from three to five centuries after the events it describes took

place. This is not quite how things stand. Leaving aside the five-century interval andthe events of the earlier part of the regal period, the events of the first years of the1 The Origo twice quotes ' annales pontificumlibro IV' (17, 3 ; 5), and once 'annales libro IV' (i8, 4), where it is obvious that 'pontificum' hasbeen left out.


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THE HISTORY OF ROME IN THE REGAL PERIOD 63Republic would have been put into writing 300 years later. Now the first thing to bearin mind is that we are considering a trustworthiness which is admittedly only relative.For example, I accept as approximately right the Polybian dating of the first treatybetween Rome and Carthage, but neither I nor others would stake a penny to back thisopinion. A number of considerations makes us think that this dating is tenable andprobable, but nothing more. Besides this, a number of facts have been associated withnames in the list of eponymous magistrates and their dating is therefore almost certain:for example, the laws of the Twelve Tables, the capture of Veii, the sack of Rome bythe Gauls. Several public and private documents which recorded events in the earliestperiod must have escaped destruction by the Gauls, and we have examples of these.But these are only isolated facts, furnishing evidence of a very scanty nature. Nowon the other hand, an attempt is being made to find in the Annales Maximi the historicalbasis of our accounts and this is not likely. At the centre of accretions of legend lie somehistorical facts of the fifth century B.C. of great importance, and the legends themselvesare certainly often ancient and revealing, but the rest of the story was embroidered bythe annalists in order to form a continuous and readable narrative. The earliest annalswere, as Cicero says, exiliter scripti, and we are made aware of this whenever quotationsare given with an indication of the book from which they come. This allows us to seethe length to which the account ran. On this point Beloch's excellent discussion (Rom.Gesch. 95) should be consulted. The fuller treatment of the material of the annals is foundfor the first time in Cn. Gellius, who seems to have been writing about IOO B.C. Theenrichment of material did not depend on the publication of the Annales Maximi but onthe new tendency in historical writing to give a literary form and a richness of detail tothe events narrated.Anyone who wishes may believe with Pareti (I take my example from his Storia, p. 373)that Coriolanus was condemned by eleven tribes and acquitted by nine. I am convincedthat Spurius Cassius fell for reasons of internal politics ; it is very likely that, as Diodorussays, he was accused of aiming at tyranny, but we know nothing more about it. Livyhimself, II, 41, iO, says so: 'ubi primum magistratu abiit, damnatum necatumqueconstat.' Everything else in Livy is obviously a later addition, and the opposing con-jectures which he gives show that he knew nothing about the end of Spurius Cassiusbeyond the simple fact of his violent death.Let us now turn to the period of the kings. Pareti, as we have seen, holds that, whenthe tabulae were reconstructed after the Gallic invasion, the Pontifices prefaced to theman account of the regal period, which had come to an end little more than a centuryearlier. If we are to accept the quotations in the Origo, we have to think of a preface ofhuge dimensions, since in the fourth book the subject was still the Alban kings.It is a long time since Luigi Pareti and I read, in amazement, and, at least for mypart, in admiration, in the first edition of Pais' historical work, that the kings were eitherthe gods of the Roman hills or doubles one of another. (There are several cases in ancienthistory of local deities who have been made into kings ; the difficulty consisted in givingproof of such transformations.) We have devoted many years to scholarship and nowgood sense finally gains the day, not over the critical spirit, but in it, for the moderationand detachment which grow stronger in us with maturity and age bring restraint eveninto our critical activity as scholars.It is certain that from very early times not a few legends about the Roman kingswere in existence, and we can see this from the fragments of the oldest annalists. We cantell that there was quite a full treatment of the period of the kings compared with thatof the early Republic. It is more than likely that the Pontifices elaborated considerablythe accounts of the regal period, to trace there the origins of the religious, social, andpolitical life of the city. But in doing this they were not contributing to history: if anythingthey were inventing it. For this reason I consider the view that the Pontifices of theperiod of the Gallic invasion wrote a preface, of a historical nature, on the period of thekings a mere fantasy (though one may adopt it in order to salvage information whichone is sorry to have to abandon). It is hard to believe that in those days there existed atRome a historical sense like that which developed in Greece, and in Rome later on, andin modern times. For the study of the earliest Roman history there are few books as


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64 P. FRACCAROinstructive as Jacoby's Atthis, on the chronicles of early Athens. Jacoby has shown thatthe pre-literary chronicles of Ionia and of Athens and the chronicle of the exegetaiimagined by Wilamowitz are modern fantasies; apart from a few documents there existedonly an oral tradition, first put into written form by Herodotus.2The history of the kings of Rome has to be considered with a certain scepticism,but at the same time with a degree of optimism. We have the names of seven or eightkings. Are these all who reigned at Rome ? We shall never know. Romulus is generallyconsidered to be the eponym of the city; but Romulii existed at Rome from the veryearliest times, and we are at liberty to believe that even Romulus may have been ahistorical personage. The other names I consider 'some at least of those who did in factrule at Rome '. This is the way Pareti expresses my views, and it is substantially correct.But it must be understood in this sense: we have no means of proving (at least it hasnot so far been proved) that these kings were not real human kings, and that the Tarquinswere one and not two. We should, therefore, allow these kings to keep their place in thehistory which we recount.The same thing has to be said about the acts attributed to some of the kings by thetradition. We do not know how and why the name of Tullus Hostilius was associatedwith the destruction of Alba, but there is no reason for us to deny the association, andtherefore, though we retain some doubts, we accept it. The archaeologists, who now andagain refuse to accept the traditional account, have uncovered at Ostia the walls of theoppidum of the fourth century, but we cannot prove that these walls were those of the firstRoman fortification placed to guard the port at the mouth of the Tiber, so that there isno reason to deny the connection between Ancus Martius and Ostia recorded in thetradition. The tradition does not tell us who, and at what point in the history of theRepublic, gave to the Roman state its organization by classes and centuries, an organiza-tion which, on the other hand, seems to be presupposed in the Twelve Tables. It doesnot seem likely that such an important fact would have been lost from the tradition of theRepublican age to be carried back into the period of the monarchy. Therefore, I havemaintained that this organization could very well go back to one of the last kings, perhapseven to Servius Tullius, in some primitive form which we can no longer discern.Similarly, we may accept the statements about the building in the regal period of theCapitoline temple, the temple of Diana (marking the supremacy of Rome in Latium),of some stretches of the Cloaca Maxima, of a wall in tufa built around the enlarged citytowards the end of the monarchical period, and so on. Also, since by the beginning ofthe Republican period the territory of Rome was that of the sixteen rustic tribes, andmuch more extensive than it had been originally, it is evident that this land was acquiredfor Rome by the kings. When, however, I read in our sources that individual kingsconquered, once or several times, the individual cities near Rome, then I do not placereliance on the individual statements, since I am not convinced that these statementshad, even in antiquity, any foundation.

Similarly, as I have said, I accept the Polybian dating of the first treaty with Carthage,since it seems that the position of the Roman state in the first years of the Republiccorresponds better with the clauses of the treaty. Polybius says that the Romans attributedit to the first consuls of the Republic, Brutus and M. Horatius. Was the name of Horatiusin the treaty, as it was in documents relating to the Capitoline temple ? The account bythe Greeks of Campania of the struggles with the Etruscans in Campania and Latiumhelps us to envisage what happened at Rome in the transition from the regal to theRepublican period, an event which is seriously obscured in the Roman tradition.It is plain that in these cases we are dealing with state institutions or importanthistorical facts, the memory of which, as I have said, could not have been erased fromthe tradition of the Republican period in order to carry it back to the regal period; or2 The essential point had already been made byBeloch, Gr. Gesch. I, 2, 5 * ' Es mag ja sein, dass eshier und da, namentlich in Ionien, Stadtchronikenschon seit der zweiten Hilfte des VI. Jahrhundertsgegeben hat; aber uiberliefert ist davon nichts, undvon Athen wissen wir, dass es noch im V. Jahr-

hundert nicht der Fall gewesen ist (Thuk. I, 97, 2);was neuere von dem Exegeten zu erzaihlenwissen, der eine solche Chronik seit anno Tobakgefiuhrt habe, sind Phantasien, die ein Blick auf dieBeschaffenheit unserer Uberlieferung wiederlegt.'


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THE HISTORY OF ROME IN THE REGAL PERIOD 65we are dealing with monuments of very great importance, with which the name of a kingwho built them could have remained permanently associated.Pareti says that my confidence is excessive in a tradition which, if the chronicles ofthe Pontifices did not go back to the regal period, must have been put into writing fromthree to five hundred years after the events took place. If we were certain that from6oo to 200 B.C. no one ever wrote at all in Rome, the criticism would be serious:400 years of oral tradition would be too many even for a relatively small city with a limitedand traditionally-minded aristocracy, in which the remembrance of matters of state whichwere of direct importance to the families could have been long preserved. But we cannotbe sure of this. Just as the name of the consul Horatius, the one historical personageamong the legendary figures of the first year of the Republic, was preserved as it wasconnected with the dedication of the Capitoline temple,3 so the names of certain kingscould have been preserved in very old inscriptions relating to certain events or buildingsof which no trace has been preserved for us. Surely, for example, there stood in theForum the column of bronze with the treaty of Spurius Cassius and the Latins inscribedupon it ? (Cic., Balb. 23, 53). Very old documents and records, both public and private,could have been preserved by the families themselves, for it is one thing to feel a historian'sinterest and to write history, and another to preserve the memory of such deeds andevents as are of personal interest. If, therefore, we cannot swear to the historicity ofcertain happenings of the regal period, neither can we deny it just because we cannot besure how the record of them was preserved. Even for the fundamental facts we haveonly a greater or lesser probability, and never absolute certainty. These inquiries of oursinto the very nature of the data we are forced to use cannot lead to more definite results.I would therefore say that the most difficult virtue required by the historian of earlyRome is that of being able to renounce the greater part of the information the ancientshave handed down to us; next comes that of knowing how to interpret and toilluminate the rest.

3 See Beloch, Rom. Gesch. 40; although he does not suppose that the name of Horatius was on the pedimentof the temple.

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