XX

[pg 233]XXTHE THREE TRIBESThe hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,—the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government ofRome.Any open place for public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level space that was used[pg 234]for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards. He was like his mother’s people, a born gardener. The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached to a team of mice, but he had to play with that out of doors, because his mother would not have[pg 237]the mice in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little sling.Illustration: His mother molded for him men and animalsHis mother molded for him men and animals.He heard many stories,—some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father’s pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.The city was now ruled by three different groups of elders, from the three different races of settlers. They were generally known as the three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers was called the tribunal. The oldest tribe, of course, was the Ramnian, the people who had come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The Tities were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities—the Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine, the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of[pg 238]the same worship, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge. These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old worship, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.There was one danger, however, which nobody realized in the least. In the great change from[pg 239]farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left alone.Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever passed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.[pg 240]Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths. He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition;[pg 241]he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and worship, but they took good care to do also everything that they[pg 242]had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.[pg 243]XXIUNDER THE YOKEMany years had passed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.When the children of Mars first came to this part of the world, people called them very often the“cattle-men,”because cattle were not at all common there. Many of the customs both of the Romans and the Sabines came about because they kept cattle and used them. This made it possible for them to cultivate much more land than they[pg 244]could have farmed without the oxen, and it also rather tied them down to one place, for after cultivating land to the point where it would grow a good crop of grain, nobody of course would wish to abandon it. They had a god called Pales who protected the herds and was said to have taught the people in the beginning how to yoke and use cattle, and the long-horned skulls were hung up around the walls of the early temples and served to hang garlands from on a feast day. When the“outfit vault”was filled at the founding of the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;—but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.The use of the yoke was the one great thing in which the Roman farmer differed from these pagans and peasants, and he could teach them that. It was the thing which would make the most difference in their lives, in comfort and[pg 245]plenty and skill. A man must be more intelligent to work with animals and control them than to dig up a plot of ground with his own hands. It struck Romulus, therefore, that the yoke would be a good symbol to use when Rome took possession of such a village. A great deal of the ceremony used in the daily life of the ancient people was a sort of sign language. When something important changed hands, the buyer and the seller shook hands on it in public. When a man was not a slave nor exactly a servant, but a member of the household who did something for which he was paid, he was paid in salt, because he could be invited to eat salt with his master, and this pay was calledsalarium,—salary. When Rome took formal possession of a place, the men passed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged to the men who used oxen, and worked as they did and for them.Whenever it was possible, some Roman families were sent to such places to live among the people and show them Roman ways. There were always some who were willing to do this, because they could have more land and better houses in that way than in the older town, which was getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by Rome became more or less Roman in a much[pg 246]shorter time than they would if they had been left to themselves.Life in such a growing country, made up of a great many different sorts and conditions of people, is not by any means simple. The Romans themselves were aware of this before the first settlers were old men. As the sons of these colonists became men, they were proud to call themselves“the sons of the fathers.”The word“father”was used in the old way, which meant that every father of a family in a village was the head of that family. The head of the house was a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative of his race. In the same way the houses built by the first families within the palisade, on the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The families of those first colonists were known, after a while, as the“patricians.”After the Sabines came, there were two groups of settlers of the same race, one on the Square Hill and the other on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others the Hill Romans. The people who had settled in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived among groves of trees, and they were called the People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these[pg 247]citizens of Rome itself considered themselves superior to the outsiders, who had sometimes been conquered and sometimes been glad to join Rome for protection. The Romans were beginning to be very proud of the town they had made.The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the idea of Tuscans being“under the yoke”of these strangers. When the Romans took the town of Fidenæ, the Veientines were very indignant, though they did not come to the help of their neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenæ was a town of their own and set out to make war against the Romans. Romulus promptly took the field and won the war. Although he was now growing old, and his hair was white as silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity, and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They offered to make peace for a hundred years, but that was not quite enough for Romulus. They had begun the war, and he meant to make them pay for it. When the matter was finally settled, they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on the river and a large tract of land. While the talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.There was a great sensation in Rome when the[pg 248]news of the peace was made known. The army paraded through the streets, with the prisoners and the spoils of various kinds, and there was great rejoicing. It was the first celebration of a victory by a“triumph”—called by that name because many of those who took part in the parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the land he had taken from the Tuscans among the soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent the Tuscan hostages home to their people.Without intending to do it, Romulus aroused a great deal of ill feeling by these two things that he did. The patricians formed a sort of senate—a body of elders—for the government of Rome, and it seemed to them that they should have been consulted about the hostages and the division of land. No one knew but the Tuscans might rise up again against Rome, and in that case these men ought to be here to serve as a pledge. Moreover, the land belonged not to Romulus personally but to the city, and the senate ought to have had the dividing of it. It was time to settle whether Rome was to be governed by one man, or by the elders of the people, as in the days of old. It was not fit that men should hold land who were not descended from land-holders.[pg 249]Not all the elders, or senators, took this view. It really never had been decided how far a general who took command in a war had a right to dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking, in a war, the men who fought took whatever they could lay their hands on. They plundered a city when they took it, and each man had what he could carry away. In this case the city of the Veientines had not been plundered, because the rulers surrendered and asked for peace before Romulus had a chance to take it. The land which had been given up was a kind of plunder, and the general had a right to divide it. This was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus and his brother, and some of the others in the senate. But Naso—who never had enough land—and some of his friends, who never were satisfied unless they had their own way, had a great deal to say about the high-handed methods of the veteran general, the founder of the city. They said that he treated them all as if they were under the yoke, and that this was insulting to free-born Romans. In short, the time had come when all of the men who wished for more power than they had were ready to declare that Romulus was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the only man strong enough to stand in their way if he chose. It was also true that he was the only[pg 250]man who was disposed to consider the rights of theplebsand the outsiders who were not citizens, and had according to ancient custom no right to share in the governing of the city at all.[pg 251]XXIITHE GOAT’S MARSHPublic opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.What Romulus did was to visit him one night at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange this, and when some hours later a tall man in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate, the old porter admitted him without question, and there was no one in the way. The two sat[pg 252]and talked in the solar chamber, with no witnesses but the stars.“They do not understand,”Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end.“They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,”said Calvo dryly.“The people are with me—I believe,”said Romulus,“the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”“I have always believed so,”nodded Calvo.“When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does not make it for the strong and powerful alone; it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and those who cannot work for themselves. If the gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give rain only to those whom they favor, and good water only to the chosen of the gods. But the[pg 253]world is not made in that way. Therefore we who are the chosen of the gods to do their will on earth should be of equal mind toward all—men, women and children.”Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.“Whether men are high or low, Romulus, founder of the city, they have minds and they think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls, hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours. Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe in a man, for their belief, like a river, will grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this happen when a good man whom all men loved came to die. He was greater after his death than when he was alive, for the grief and the love of the poor encompassed his spirit and made it strong.”Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was thinking more than he meant to say.“I shall be very strong when I am dead,”was his only comment. And Calvo knew that it was the truth.Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were thinking that it would not be many years when they would both, perhaps, be talking together in the world of shadows as they were talking now.[pg 254]Then Romulus told Calvo what he was going to do.This talk took place a little after the beginning of the fifth month, which the Romans called Quintilis, but which we call July. In this month the sun is hot and the air is sluggish and damp, and in the year when these things happened it was more so than usual. The heralds announced in the market place, one sultry morning, that there would be a meeting of all the people at a place called the Goat’s Marsh some miles outside the city. Romulus would there tell publicly why he sent back their hostages to the Tuscans and how the lands were to be divided among the soldiers. No longer would the people have to depend on what was said by one and another, he would tell them himself. Partly out of curiosity, partly with the determination that they too would speak, the greater part of the patricians also went to hear.The Goat’s Marsh was no longer a marsh, but it had kept its name partly because of the fig orchards, which bore the little fruits called the goat figs. There was a plain at the foot of a little hill, which made it a good place for any public meeting, and the country people for miles around crowded in to see Romulus and to hear him speak.[pg 255]They raised a shout as his tall figure appeared but he waved them to silence.“I have not much to say,”he began, and in the still air the intense interest of his listeners seemed to tingle like lightning before a storm,“but much has been said which was not true. I will not waste time in repeating lies.“Ye know that the Tuscan cities were here before we came, and that their people are many. We cannot kill them or drive them away, if we would. They are our neighbors.“We made war against them and we beat them, and took their city Fidenæ and their city Veii. Before we made peace they had to pay us certain lands. Before peace was made and the price paid, there were sons of their blood in our power, whom we kept as a pledge that they were willing to pay the price. That was all. They were not guilty of any crime against us. They were here to show that their people meant to keep faith. When peace was made I sent them back.“If we had kept them, if we had slain them, if harm had come to them, then the wrong would have been on our side, and we should have had another war. Why should there be war between neighbors? Is not friendship better than hatred?“Some are angry because I divided the lands, which they gave us as a price, among the soldiers.[pg 256]Yet who has better right than the men who fight the battles? This is all of my story. Ye believe?”Then a shout arose to the very skies,—“Romulus! Romulus! Romulus!”Suddenly the clouds grew black, and lightnings flashed through them. Just as Naso was rising to speak, a tremendous clap of thunder shook the earth, or so it seemed. Winds swept suddenly down from the mountains and howled across the plains, carrying away mantles and curtains and boughs of trees in their flight. The crowd broke up in confusion, and the patricians were heard calling in distress,“Marcus!”“Caius!”“Aulus!”for in the darkness they could not see their friends a rod away. They hastened to whatever shelter they could find, and sheets of rain poured from the clouds. It was one of the most terrific tempests any one there present had ever known. It did not last long—perhaps an hour—but when it was over Romulus was nowhere to be seen.The people had scattered in all directions, but the patricians had managed to keep together. When the storm was over, they did not know at first that Romulus had disappeared, but presently one after another of the common people was heard asking where he was, and no one could be found who knew. The people searched every[pg 257]where without finding so much as the hem of his mantle. It began to be whispered that he had been killed and his body hidden away, and black looks were cast upon the public men in their white robes.They themselves were perhaps more perplexed and worried than any one else, for they saw what the people thought. It began to dawn upon them that the united opinion of hundreds of men, even though of the despisedplebs, or peasants, was not exactly a thing to be overlooked. That night was a black and anxious one.On the following morning, Naso, Caius Cossus, and some other leaders came to see Calvo and ask his opinion of the mystery. He had not been at the Goat’s Marsh the day before, nor had Cossus and others of the friends of the vanished chief. All the men who had been there, of the upper class, were enemies of Romulus. It was a most unpleasant position for them.Calvo heard the story gravely, without making any comment.The storm had not been nearly so severe in Rome; in fact it was not much more than an ordinary summer storm. But when Naso told of it he described it as something beyond anything that could be natural.“Do you think,”asked Calvo coolly at last,[pg 258]“that the gods had anything to do with these strange appearances?”Naso could not say.“There have always been strange happenings about this man,”said Calvo thoughtfully.“His very birth was strange; his appearance among us was sudden and unexpected. What the gods send they can also take away.”“Do you think then,”asked Cossus,“that he was taken by the gods to heaven?”“I do not know,”said Calvo.“You say you found no trace of him? But even a man struck by lightning is not destroyed.”The frightened men looked at each other.Fabius the priest was the first to speak.“It is at any rate not true that we have murdered him,”he said boldly,“and that is what men are saying in the streets.”“And it may be true that he has been taken by the gods,”said Naso eagerly. They went out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself. He did not know just what had happened, but Romulus had told him that after this last appearance to the people he was going away, never to come back. Apparently that was what he had done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius had made a speech and told the people that Romulus had been taken bodily to the skies, in the[pg 259]midst of the crashing and flaring of the thunder and lightning, and that he would no more be seen on earth. There were some unbelievers, but after a time this was quite generally thought to be true.Illustration: Far away, in a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherdIt had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.He never returned to Rome, but far away, in[pg 260]a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd who became very dear to the simple people around him. He had a servant named Peppo who loved him well and whom he treated more as a son than as a slave. He had a little plot of ground which he cultivated, with nine bean-rows and various kinds of herbs, and a row of beehives stood near the entrance to his cave. There was nothing he could not do with animals, and the birds used to come and perch on his fingers and his shoulders and head, and sing. Even the wolves would not harm him, and one year a mother fox brought up a litter of four cubs within a few yards of his door. The young people used to come to him to get him to tell their fortunes, and if he advised against a thing they never went contrary to what he said. When he died and was buried, his servant returned to the place from which he came, and then Tertius Calvo, who was by that time a very old man, learned certainly where Romulus the founder of Rome had gone. But he kept the story to himself.[pg 261]A ROMAN ROADOnce along the Roman road with measured, rhythmic strideMarched the Roman legionaries in their valiant pride.Men of petty towns and tribes, under Caesar’s hand,Welded into Empire then their people and their land.Now along that ancient road the silent motors run,Driven by every ancient race that lives beneath the sun.Swarming from their barren plains, wild barbarian hordesWasted all the fruitful soil—then the Roman swordsLeagued with Gallic pike and sling, held the red frontier,Saved the cradle of our folk, all that we hold dear.Now above the towers that rise where Rome’s great eagles flew,Circle dauntless aeroplanes to guard their folk anew.Gods who loved the sons of Mars found in field and woodAltars built with reverent care—saw the work was good.Simple, brave and generous, quick to speech and mirth;Loving all the pleasant ways of the kindly earth;[pg 262]Thus they built the stately walls that still unfallen stand.Guarding for their ancient faith the dear, unchanging land!Winds and waves and leaping flames all have served our race.Flint and bronze and steel had each their little day of grace.But the lightning fleets to-day along our singing wires,And the harnessed floods to-day are fuel for our fires.Armored through the clouds we glide on swift electric wings.Through the trenches of the hills a joyous giant sings.Light and Flame and Power and Steel are welded into oneTo serve the task set long ago,—when roads were first begun!THE END

[pg 233]XXTHE THREE TRIBESThe hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,—the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government ofRome.Any open place for public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level space that was used[pg 234]for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards. He was like his mother’s people, a born gardener. The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached to a team of mice, but he had to play with that out of doors, because his mother would not have[pg 237]the mice in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little sling.Illustration: His mother molded for him men and animalsHis mother molded for him men and animals.He heard many stories,—some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father’s pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.The city was now ruled by three different groups of elders, from the three different races of settlers. They were generally known as the three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers was called the tribunal. The oldest tribe, of course, was the Ramnian, the people who had come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The Tities were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities—the Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine, the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of[pg 238]the same worship, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge. These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old worship, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.There was one danger, however, which nobody realized in the least. In the great change from[pg 239]farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left alone.Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever passed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.[pg 240]Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths. He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition;[pg 241]he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and worship, but they took good care to do also everything that they[pg 242]had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.[pg 243]XXIUNDER THE YOKEMany years had passed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.When the children of Mars first came to this part of the world, people called them very often the“cattle-men,”because cattle were not at all common there. Many of the customs both of the Romans and the Sabines came about because they kept cattle and used them. This made it possible for them to cultivate much more land than they[pg 244]could have farmed without the oxen, and it also rather tied them down to one place, for after cultivating land to the point where it would grow a good crop of grain, nobody of course would wish to abandon it. They had a god called Pales who protected the herds and was said to have taught the people in the beginning how to yoke and use cattle, and the long-horned skulls were hung up around the walls of the early temples and served to hang garlands from on a feast day. When the“outfit vault”was filled at the founding of the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;—but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.The use of the yoke was the one great thing in which the Roman farmer differed from these pagans and peasants, and he could teach them that. It was the thing which would make the most difference in their lives, in comfort and[pg 245]plenty and skill. A man must be more intelligent to work with animals and control them than to dig up a plot of ground with his own hands. It struck Romulus, therefore, that the yoke would be a good symbol to use when Rome took possession of such a village. A great deal of the ceremony used in the daily life of the ancient people was a sort of sign language. When something important changed hands, the buyer and the seller shook hands on it in public. When a man was not a slave nor exactly a servant, but a member of the household who did something for which he was paid, he was paid in salt, because he could be invited to eat salt with his master, and this pay was calledsalarium,—salary. When Rome took formal possession of a place, the men passed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged to the men who used oxen, and worked as they did and for them.Whenever it was possible, some Roman families were sent to such places to live among the people and show them Roman ways. There were always some who were willing to do this, because they could have more land and better houses in that way than in the older town, which was getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by Rome became more or less Roman in a much[pg 246]shorter time than they would if they had been left to themselves.Life in such a growing country, made up of a great many different sorts and conditions of people, is not by any means simple. The Romans themselves were aware of this before the first settlers were old men. As the sons of these colonists became men, they were proud to call themselves“the sons of the fathers.”The word“father”was used in the old way, which meant that every father of a family in a village was the head of that family. The head of the house was a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative of his race. In the same way the houses built by the first families within the palisade, on the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The families of those first colonists were known, after a while, as the“patricians.”After the Sabines came, there were two groups of settlers of the same race, one on the Square Hill and the other on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others the Hill Romans. The people who had settled in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived among groves of trees, and they were called the People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these[pg 247]citizens of Rome itself considered themselves superior to the outsiders, who had sometimes been conquered and sometimes been glad to join Rome for protection. The Romans were beginning to be very proud of the town they had made.The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the idea of Tuscans being“under the yoke”of these strangers. When the Romans took the town of Fidenæ, the Veientines were very indignant, though they did not come to the help of their neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenæ was a town of their own and set out to make war against the Romans. Romulus promptly took the field and won the war. Although he was now growing old, and his hair was white as silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity, and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They offered to make peace for a hundred years, but that was not quite enough for Romulus. They had begun the war, and he meant to make them pay for it. When the matter was finally settled, they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on the river and a large tract of land. While the talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.There was a great sensation in Rome when the[pg 248]news of the peace was made known. The army paraded through the streets, with the prisoners and the spoils of various kinds, and there was great rejoicing. It was the first celebration of a victory by a“triumph”—called by that name because many of those who took part in the parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the land he had taken from the Tuscans among the soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent the Tuscan hostages home to their people.Without intending to do it, Romulus aroused a great deal of ill feeling by these two things that he did. The patricians formed a sort of senate—a body of elders—for the government of Rome, and it seemed to them that they should have been consulted about the hostages and the division of land. No one knew but the Tuscans might rise up again against Rome, and in that case these men ought to be here to serve as a pledge. Moreover, the land belonged not to Romulus personally but to the city, and the senate ought to have had the dividing of it. It was time to settle whether Rome was to be governed by one man, or by the elders of the people, as in the days of old. It was not fit that men should hold land who were not descended from land-holders.[pg 249]Not all the elders, or senators, took this view. It really never had been decided how far a general who took command in a war had a right to dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking, in a war, the men who fought took whatever they could lay their hands on. They plundered a city when they took it, and each man had what he could carry away. In this case the city of the Veientines had not been plundered, because the rulers surrendered and asked for peace before Romulus had a chance to take it. The land which had been given up was a kind of plunder, and the general had a right to divide it. This was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus and his brother, and some of the others in the senate. But Naso—who never had enough land—and some of his friends, who never were satisfied unless they had their own way, had a great deal to say about the high-handed methods of the veteran general, the founder of the city. They said that he treated them all as if they were under the yoke, and that this was insulting to free-born Romans. In short, the time had come when all of the men who wished for more power than they had were ready to declare that Romulus was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the only man strong enough to stand in their way if he chose. It was also true that he was the only[pg 250]man who was disposed to consider the rights of theplebsand the outsiders who were not citizens, and had according to ancient custom no right to share in the governing of the city at all.[pg 251]XXIITHE GOAT’S MARSHPublic opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.What Romulus did was to visit him one night at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange this, and when some hours later a tall man in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate, the old porter admitted him without question, and there was no one in the way. The two sat[pg 252]and talked in the solar chamber, with no witnesses but the stars.“They do not understand,”Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end.“They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,”said Calvo dryly.“The people are with me—I believe,”said Romulus,“the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”“I have always believed so,”nodded Calvo.“When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does not make it for the strong and powerful alone; it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and those who cannot work for themselves. If the gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give rain only to those whom they favor, and good water only to the chosen of the gods. But the[pg 253]world is not made in that way. Therefore we who are the chosen of the gods to do their will on earth should be of equal mind toward all—men, women and children.”Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.“Whether men are high or low, Romulus, founder of the city, they have minds and they think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls, hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours. Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe in a man, for their belief, like a river, will grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this happen when a good man whom all men loved came to die. He was greater after his death than when he was alive, for the grief and the love of the poor encompassed his spirit and made it strong.”Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was thinking more than he meant to say.“I shall be very strong when I am dead,”was his only comment. And Calvo knew that it was the truth.Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were thinking that it would not be many years when they would both, perhaps, be talking together in the world of shadows as they were talking now.[pg 254]Then Romulus told Calvo what he was going to do.This talk took place a little after the beginning of the fifth month, which the Romans called Quintilis, but which we call July. In this month the sun is hot and the air is sluggish and damp, and in the year when these things happened it was more so than usual. The heralds announced in the market place, one sultry morning, that there would be a meeting of all the people at a place called the Goat’s Marsh some miles outside the city. Romulus would there tell publicly why he sent back their hostages to the Tuscans and how the lands were to be divided among the soldiers. No longer would the people have to depend on what was said by one and another, he would tell them himself. Partly out of curiosity, partly with the determination that they too would speak, the greater part of the patricians also went to hear.The Goat’s Marsh was no longer a marsh, but it had kept its name partly because of the fig orchards, which bore the little fruits called the goat figs. There was a plain at the foot of a little hill, which made it a good place for any public meeting, and the country people for miles around crowded in to see Romulus and to hear him speak.[pg 255]They raised a shout as his tall figure appeared but he waved them to silence.“I have not much to say,”he began, and in the still air the intense interest of his listeners seemed to tingle like lightning before a storm,“but much has been said which was not true. I will not waste time in repeating lies.“Ye know that the Tuscan cities were here before we came, and that their people are many. We cannot kill them or drive them away, if we would. They are our neighbors.“We made war against them and we beat them, and took their city Fidenæ and their city Veii. Before we made peace they had to pay us certain lands. Before peace was made and the price paid, there were sons of their blood in our power, whom we kept as a pledge that they were willing to pay the price. That was all. They were not guilty of any crime against us. They were here to show that their people meant to keep faith. When peace was made I sent them back.“If we had kept them, if we had slain them, if harm had come to them, then the wrong would have been on our side, and we should have had another war. Why should there be war between neighbors? Is not friendship better than hatred?“Some are angry because I divided the lands, which they gave us as a price, among the soldiers.[pg 256]Yet who has better right than the men who fight the battles? This is all of my story. Ye believe?”Then a shout arose to the very skies,—“Romulus! Romulus! Romulus!”Suddenly the clouds grew black, and lightnings flashed through them. Just as Naso was rising to speak, a tremendous clap of thunder shook the earth, or so it seemed. Winds swept suddenly down from the mountains and howled across the plains, carrying away mantles and curtains and boughs of trees in their flight. The crowd broke up in confusion, and the patricians were heard calling in distress,“Marcus!”“Caius!”“Aulus!”for in the darkness they could not see their friends a rod away. They hastened to whatever shelter they could find, and sheets of rain poured from the clouds. It was one of the most terrific tempests any one there present had ever known. It did not last long—perhaps an hour—but when it was over Romulus was nowhere to be seen.The people had scattered in all directions, but the patricians had managed to keep together. When the storm was over, they did not know at first that Romulus had disappeared, but presently one after another of the common people was heard asking where he was, and no one could be found who knew. The people searched every[pg 257]where without finding so much as the hem of his mantle. It began to be whispered that he had been killed and his body hidden away, and black looks were cast upon the public men in their white robes.They themselves were perhaps more perplexed and worried than any one else, for they saw what the people thought. It began to dawn upon them that the united opinion of hundreds of men, even though of the despisedplebs, or peasants, was not exactly a thing to be overlooked. That night was a black and anxious one.On the following morning, Naso, Caius Cossus, and some other leaders came to see Calvo and ask his opinion of the mystery. He had not been at the Goat’s Marsh the day before, nor had Cossus and others of the friends of the vanished chief. All the men who had been there, of the upper class, were enemies of Romulus. It was a most unpleasant position for them.Calvo heard the story gravely, without making any comment.The storm had not been nearly so severe in Rome; in fact it was not much more than an ordinary summer storm. But when Naso told of it he described it as something beyond anything that could be natural.“Do you think,”asked Calvo coolly at last,[pg 258]“that the gods had anything to do with these strange appearances?”Naso could not say.“There have always been strange happenings about this man,”said Calvo thoughtfully.“His very birth was strange; his appearance among us was sudden and unexpected. What the gods send they can also take away.”“Do you think then,”asked Cossus,“that he was taken by the gods to heaven?”“I do not know,”said Calvo.“You say you found no trace of him? But even a man struck by lightning is not destroyed.”The frightened men looked at each other.Fabius the priest was the first to speak.“It is at any rate not true that we have murdered him,”he said boldly,“and that is what men are saying in the streets.”“And it may be true that he has been taken by the gods,”said Naso eagerly. They went out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself. He did not know just what had happened, but Romulus had told him that after this last appearance to the people he was going away, never to come back. Apparently that was what he had done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius had made a speech and told the people that Romulus had been taken bodily to the skies, in the[pg 259]midst of the crashing and flaring of the thunder and lightning, and that he would no more be seen on earth. There were some unbelievers, but after a time this was quite generally thought to be true.Illustration: Far away, in a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherdIt had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.He never returned to Rome, but far away, in[pg 260]a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd who became very dear to the simple people around him. He had a servant named Peppo who loved him well and whom he treated more as a son than as a slave. He had a little plot of ground which he cultivated, with nine bean-rows and various kinds of herbs, and a row of beehives stood near the entrance to his cave. There was nothing he could not do with animals, and the birds used to come and perch on his fingers and his shoulders and head, and sing. Even the wolves would not harm him, and one year a mother fox brought up a litter of four cubs within a few yards of his door. The young people used to come to him to get him to tell their fortunes, and if he advised against a thing they never went contrary to what he said. When he died and was buried, his servant returned to the place from which he came, and then Tertius Calvo, who was by that time a very old man, learned certainly where Romulus the founder of Rome had gone. But he kept the story to himself.[pg 261]A ROMAN ROADOnce along the Roman road with measured, rhythmic strideMarched the Roman legionaries in their valiant pride.Men of petty towns and tribes, under Caesar’s hand,Welded into Empire then their people and their land.Now along that ancient road the silent motors run,Driven by every ancient race that lives beneath the sun.Swarming from their barren plains, wild barbarian hordesWasted all the fruitful soil—then the Roman swordsLeagued with Gallic pike and sling, held the red frontier,Saved the cradle of our folk, all that we hold dear.Now above the towers that rise where Rome’s great eagles flew,Circle dauntless aeroplanes to guard their folk anew.Gods who loved the sons of Mars found in field and woodAltars built with reverent care—saw the work was good.Simple, brave and generous, quick to speech and mirth;Loving all the pleasant ways of the kindly earth;[pg 262]Thus they built the stately walls that still unfallen stand.Guarding for their ancient faith the dear, unchanging land!Winds and waves and leaping flames all have served our race.Flint and bronze and steel had each their little day of grace.But the lightning fleets to-day along our singing wires,And the harnessed floods to-day are fuel for our fires.Armored through the clouds we glide on swift electric wings.Through the trenches of the hills a joyous giant sings.Light and Flame and Power and Steel are welded into oneTo serve the task set long ago,—when roads were first begun!THE END

[pg 233]XXTHE THREE TRIBESThe hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,—the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government ofRome.Any open place for public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level space that was used[pg 234]for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards. He was like his mother’s people, a born gardener. The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached to a team of mice, but he had to play with that out of doors, because his mother would not have[pg 237]the mice in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little sling.Illustration: His mother molded for him men and animalsHis mother molded for him men and animals.He heard many stories,—some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father’s pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.The city was now ruled by three different groups of elders, from the three different races of settlers. They were generally known as the three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers was called the tribunal. The oldest tribe, of course, was the Ramnian, the people who had come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The Tities were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities—the Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine, the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of[pg 238]the same worship, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge. These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old worship, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.There was one danger, however, which nobody realized in the least. In the great change from[pg 239]farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left alone.Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever passed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.[pg 240]Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths. He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition;[pg 241]he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and worship, but they took good care to do also everything that they[pg 242]had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.

The hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,—the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government ofRome.Any open place for public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.

Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level space that was used[pg 234]for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.

Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.

Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards. He was like his mother’s people, a born gardener. The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached to a team of mice, but he had to play with that out of doors, because his mother would not have[pg 237]the mice in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little sling.

Illustration: His mother molded for him men and animalsHis mother molded for him men and animals.

His mother molded for him men and animals.

He heard many stories,—some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father’s pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.

The city was now ruled by three different groups of elders, from the three different races of settlers. They were generally known as the three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers was called the tribunal. The oldest tribe, of course, was the Ramnian, the people who had come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The Tities were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities—the Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine, the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of[pg 238]the same worship, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.

Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge. These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.

Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.

Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old worship, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.

There was one danger, however, which nobody realized in the least. In the great change from[pg 239]farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left alone.

Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever passed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.

He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.

Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.

Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.

Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.

Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.

After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths. He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition;[pg 241]he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.

None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and worship, but they took good care to do also everything that they[pg 242]had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.

[pg 243]XXIUNDER THE YOKEMany years had passed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.When the children of Mars first came to this part of the world, people called them very often the“cattle-men,”because cattle were not at all common there. Many of the customs both of the Romans and the Sabines came about because they kept cattle and used them. This made it possible for them to cultivate much more land than they[pg 244]could have farmed without the oxen, and it also rather tied them down to one place, for after cultivating land to the point where it would grow a good crop of grain, nobody of course would wish to abandon it. They had a god called Pales who protected the herds and was said to have taught the people in the beginning how to yoke and use cattle, and the long-horned skulls were hung up around the walls of the early temples and served to hang garlands from on a feast day. When the“outfit vault”was filled at the founding of the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;—but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.The use of the yoke was the one great thing in which the Roman farmer differed from these pagans and peasants, and he could teach them that. It was the thing which would make the most difference in their lives, in comfort and[pg 245]plenty and skill. A man must be more intelligent to work with animals and control them than to dig up a plot of ground with his own hands. It struck Romulus, therefore, that the yoke would be a good symbol to use when Rome took possession of such a village. A great deal of the ceremony used in the daily life of the ancient people was a sort of sign language. When something important changed hands, the buyer and the seller shook hands on it in public. When a man was not a slave nor exactly a servant, but a member of the household who did something for which he was paid, he was paid in salt, because he could be invited to eat salt with his master, and this pay was calledsalarium,—salary. When Rome took formal possession of a place, the men passed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged to the men who used oxen, and worked as they did and for them.Whenever it was possible, some Roman families were sent to such places to live among the people and show them Roman ways. There were always some who were willing to do this, because they could have more land and better houses in that way than in the older town, which was getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by Rome became more or less Roman in a much[pg 246]shorter time than they would if they had been left to themselves.Life in such a growing country, made up of a great many different sorts and conditions of people, is not by any means simple. The Romans themselves were aware of this before the first settlers were old men. As the sons of these colonists became men, they were proud to call themselves“the sons of the fathers.”The word“father”was used in the old way, which meant that every father of a family in a village was the head of that family. The head of the house was a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative of his race. In the same way the houses built by the first families within the palisade, on the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The families of those first colonists were known, after a while, as the“patricians.”After the Sabines came, there were two groups of settlers of the same race, one on the Square Hill and the other on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others the Hill Romans. The people who had settled in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived among groves of trees, and they were called the People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these[pg 247]citizens of Rome itself considered themselves superior to the outsiders, who had sometimes been conquered and sometimes been glad to join Rome for protection. The Romans were beginning to be very proud of the town they had made.The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the idea of Tuscans being“under the yoke”of these strangers. When the Romans took the town of Fidenæ, the Veientines were very indignant, though they did not come to the help of their neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenæ was a town of their own and set out to make war against the Romans. Romulus promptly took the field and won the war. Although he was now growing old, and his hair was white as silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity, and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They offered to make peace for a hundred years, but that was not quite enough for Romulus. They had begun the war, and he meant to make them pay for it. When the matter was finally settled, they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on the river and a large tract of land. While the talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.There was a great sensation in Rome when the[pg 248]news of the peace was made known. The army paraded through the streets, with the prisoners and the spoils of various kinds, and there was great rejoicing. It was the first celebration of a victory by a“triumph”—called by that name because many of those who took part in the parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the land he had taken from the Tuscans among the soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent the Tuscan hostages home to their people.Without intending to do it, Romulus aroused a great deal of ill feeling by these two things that he did. The patricians formed a sort of senate—a body of elders—for the government of Rome, and it seemed to them that they should have been consulted about the hostages and the division of land. No one knew but the Tuscans might rise up again against Rome, and in that case these men ought to be here to serve as a pledge. Moreover, the land belonged not to Romulus personally but to the city, and the senate ought to have had the dividing of it. It was time to settle whether Rome was to be governed by one man, or by the elders of the people, as in the days of old. It was not fit that men should hold land who were not descended from land-holders.[pg 249]Not all the elders, or senators, took this view. It really never had been decided how far a general who took command in a war had a right to dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking, in a war, the men who fought took whatever they could lay their hands on. They plundered a city when they took it, and each man had what he could carry away. In this case the city of the Veientines had not been plundered, because the rulers surrendered and asked for peace before Romulus had a chance to take it. The land which had been given up was a kind of plunder, and the general had a right to divide it. This was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus and his brother, and some of the others in the senate. But Naso—who never had enough land—and some of his friends, who never were satisfied unless they had their own way, had a great deal to say about the high-handed methods of the veteran general, the founder of the city. They said that he treated them all as if they were under the yoke, and that this was insulting to free-born Romans. In short, the time had come when all of the men who wished for more power than they had were ready to declare that Romulus was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the only man strong enough to stand in their way if he chose. It was also true that he was the only[pg 250]man who was disposed to consider the rights of theplebsand the outsiders who were not citizens, and had according to ancient custom no right to share in the governing of the city at all.

Many years had passed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.

When the children of Mars first came to this part of the world, people called them very often the“cattle-men,”because cattle were not at all common there. Many of the customs both of the Romans and the Sabines came about because they kept cattle and used them. This made it possible for them to cultivate much more land than they[pg 244]could have farmed without the oxen, and it also rather tied them down to one place, for after cultivating land to the point where it would grow a good crop of grain, nobody of course would wish to abandon it. They had a god called Pales who protected the herds and was said to have taught the people in the beginning how to yoke and use cattle, and the long-horned skulls were hung up around the walls of the early temples and served to hang garlands from on a feast day. When the“outfit vault”was filled at the founding of the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.

In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;—but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.

The use of the yoke was the one great thing in which the Roman farmer differed from these pagans and peasants, and he could teach them that. It was the thing which would make the most difference in their lives, in comfort and[pg 245]plenty and skill. A man must be more intelligent to work with animals and control them than to dig up a plot of ground with his own hands. It struck Romulus, therefore, that the yoke would be a good symbol to use when Rome took possession of such a village. A great deal of the ceremony used in the daily life of the ancient people was a sort of sign language. When something important changed hands, the buyer and the seller shook hands on it in public. When a man was not a slave nor exactly a servant, but a member of the household who did something for which he was paid, he was paid in salt, because he could be invited to eat salt with his master, and this pay was calledsalarium,—salary. When Rome took formal possession of a place, the men passed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged to the men who used oxen, and worked as they did and for them.

Whenever it was possible, some Roman families were sent to such places to live among the people and show them Roman ways. There were always some who were willing to do this, because they could have more land and better houses in that way than in the older town, which was getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by Rome became more or less Roman in a much[pg 246]shorter time than they would if they had been left to themselves.

Life in such a growing country, made up of a great many different sorts and conditions of people, is not by any means simple. The Romans themselves were aware of this before the first settlers were old men. As the sons of these colonists became men, they were proud to call themselves“the sons of the fathers.”The word“father”was used in the old way, which meant that every father of a family in a village was the head of that family. The head of the house was a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative of his race. In the same way the houses built by the first families within the palisade, on the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The families of those first colonists were known, after a while, as the“patricians.”After the Sabines came, there were two groups of settlers of the same race, one on the Square Hill and the other on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others the Hill Romans. The people who had settled in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived among groves of trees, and they were called the People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these[pg 247]citizens of Rome itself considered themselves superior to the outsiders, who had sometimes been conquered and sometimes been glad to join Rome for protection. The Romans were beginning to be very proud of the town they had made.

The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the idea of Tuscans being“under the yoke”of these strangers. When the Romans took the town of Fidenæ, the Veientines were very indignant, though they did not come to the help of their neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenæ was a town of their own and set out to make war against the Romans. Romulus promptly took the field and won the war. Although he was now growing old, and his hair was white as silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity, and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They offered to make peace for a hundred years, but that was not quite enough for Romulus. They had begun the war, and he meant to make them pay for it. When the matter was finally settled, they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on the river and a large tract of land. While the talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.

There was a great sensation in Rome when the[pg 248]news of the peace was made known. The army paraded through the streets, with the prisoners and the spoils of various kinds, and there was great rejoicing. It was the first celebration of a victory by a“triumph”—called by that name because many of those who took part in the parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the land he had taken from the Tuscans among the soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent the Tuscan hostages home to their people.

Without intending to do it, Romulus aroused a great deal of ill feeling by these two things that he did. The patricians formed a sort of senate—a body of elders—for the government of Rome, and it seemed to them that they should have been consulted about the hostages and the division of land. No one knew but the Tuscans might rise up again against Rome, and in that case these men ought to be here to serve as a pledge. Moreover, the land belonged not to Romulus personally but to the city, and the senate ought to have had the dividing of it. It was time to settle whether Rome was to be governed by one man, or by the elders of the people, as in the days of old. It was not fit that men should hold land who were not descended from land-holders.

Not all the elders, or senators, took this view. It really never had been decided how far a general who took command in a war had a right to dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking, in a war, the men who fought took whatever they could lay their hands on. They plundered a city when they took it, and each man had what he could carry away. In this case the city of the Veientines had not been plundered, because the rulers surrendered and asked for peace before Romulus had a chance to take it. The land which had been given up was a kind of plunder, and the general had a right to divide it. This was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus and his brother, and some of the others in the senate. But Naso—who never had enough land—and some of his friends, who never were satisfied unless they had their own way, had a great deal to say about the high-handed methods of the veteran general, the founder of the city. They said that he treated them all as if they were under the yoke, and that this was insulting to free-born Romans. In short, the time had come when all of the men who wished for more power than they had were ready to declare that Romulus was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the only man strong enough to stand in their way if he chose. It was also true that he was the only[pg 250]man who was disposed to consider the rights of theplebsand the outsiders who were not citizens, and had according to ancient custom no right to share in the governing of the city at all.

[pg 251]XXIITHE GOAT’S MARSHPublic opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.What Romulus did was to visit him one night at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange this, and when some hours later a tall man in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate, the old porter admitted him without question, and there was no one in the way. The two sat[pg 252]and talked in the solar chamber, with no witnesses but the stars.“They do not understand,”Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end.“They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,”said Calvo dryly.“The people are with me—I believe,”said Romulus,“the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”“I have always believed so,”nodded Calvo.“When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does not make it for the strong and powerful alone; it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and those who cannot work for themselves. If the gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give rain only to those whom they favor, and good water only to the chosen of the gods. But the[pg 253]world is not made in that way. Therefore we who are the chosen of the gods to do their will on earth should be of equal mind toward all—men, women and children.”Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.“Whether men are high or low, Romulus, founder of the city, they have minds and they think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls, hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours. Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe in a man, for their belief, like a river, will grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this happen when a good man whom all men loved came to die. He was greater after his death than when he was alive, for the grief and the love of the poor encompassed his spirit and made it strong.”Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was thinking more than he meant to say.“I shall be very strong when I am dead,”was his only comment. And Calvo knew that it was the truth.Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were thinking that it would not be many years when they would both, perhaps, be talking together in the world of shadows as they were talking now.[pg 254]Then Romulus told Calvo what he was going to do.This talk took place a little after the beginning of the fifth month, which the Romans called Quintilis, but which we call July. In this month the sun is hot and the air is sluggish and damp, and in the year when these things happened it was more so than usual. The heralds announced in the market place, one sultry morning, that there would be a meeting of all the people at a place called the Goat’s Marsh some miles outside the city. Romulus would there tell publicly why he sent back their hostages to the Tuscans and how the lands were to be divided among the soldiers. No longer would the people have to depend on what was said by one and another, he would tell them himself. Partly out of curiosity, partly with the determination that they too would speak, the greater part of the patricians also went to hear.The Goat’s Marsh was no longer a marsh, but it had kept its name partly because of the fig orchards, which bore the little fruits called the goat figs. There was a plain at the foot of a little hill, which made it a good place for any public meeting, and the country people for miles around crowded in to see Romulus and to hear him speak.[pg 255]They raised a shout as his tall figure appeared but he waved them to silence.“I have not much to say,”he began, and in the still air the intense interest of his listeners seemed to tingle like lightning before a storm,“but much has been said which was not true. I will not waste time in repeating lies.“Ye know that the Tuscan cities were here before we came, and that their people are many. We cannot kill them or drive them away, if we would. They are our neighbors.“We made war against them and we beat them, and took their city Fidenæ and their city Veii. Before we made peace they had to pay us certain lands. Before peace was made and the price paid, there were sons of their blood in our power, whom we kept as a pledge that they were willing to pay the price. That was all. They were not guilty of any crime against us. They were here to show that their people meant to keep faith. When peace was made I sent them back.“If we had kept them, if we had slain them, if harm had come to them, then the wrong would have been on our side, and we should have had another war. Why should there be war between neighbors? Is not friendship better than hatred?“Some are angry because I divided the lands, which they gave us as a price, among the soldiers.[pg 256]Yet who has better right than the men who fight the battles? This is all of my story. Ye believe?”Then a shout arose to the very skies,—“Romulus! Romulus! Romulus!”Suddenly the clouds grew black, and lightnings flashed through them. Just as Naso was rising to speak, a tremendous clap of thunder shook the earth, or so it seemed. Winds swept suddenly down from the mountains and howled across the plains, carrying away mantles and curtains and boughs of trees in their flight. The crowd broke up in confusion, and the patricians were heard calling in distress,“Marcus!”“Caius!”“Aulus!”for in the darkness they could not see their friends a rod away. They hastened to whatever shelter they could find, and sheets of rain poured from the clouds. It was one of the most terrific tempests any one there present had ever known. It did not last long—perhaps an hour—but when it was over Romulus was nowhere to be seen.The people had scattered in all directions, but the patricians had managed to keep together. When the storm was over, they did not know at first that Romulus had disappeared, but presently one after another of the common people was heard asking where he was, and no one could be found who knew. The people searched every[pg 257]where without finding so much as the hem of his mantle. It began to be whispered that he had been killed and his body hidden away, and black looks were cast upon the public men in their white robes.They themselves were perhaps more perplexed and worried than any one else, for they saw what the people thought. It began to dawn upon them that the united opinion of hundreds of men, even though of the despisedplebs, or peasants, was not exactly a thing to be overlooked. That night was a black and anxious one.On the following morning, Naso, Caius Cossus, and some other leaders came to see Calvo and ask his opinion of the mystery. He had not been at the Goat’s Marsh the day before, nor had Cossus and others of the friends of the vanished chief. All the men who had been there, of the upper class, were enemies of Romulus. It was a most unpleasant position for them.Calvo heard the story gravely, without making any comment.The storm had not been nearly so severe in Rome; in fact it was not much more than an ordinary summer storm. But when Naso told of it he described it as something beyond anything that could be natural.“Do you think,”asked Calvo coolly at last,[pg 258]“that the gods had anything to do with these strange appearances?”Naso could not say.“There have always been strange happenings about this man,”said Calvo thoughtfully.“His very birth was strange; his appearance among us was sudden and unexpected. What the gods send they can also take away.”“Do you think then,”asked Cossus,“that he was taken by the gods to heaven?”“I do not know,”said Calvo.“You say you found no trace of him? But even a man struck by lightning is not destroyed.”The frightened men looked at each other.Fabius the priest was the first to speak.“It is at any rate not true that we have murdered him,”he said boldly,“and that is what men are saying in the streets.”“And it may be true that he has been taken by the gods,”said Naso eagerly. They went out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself. He did not know just what had happened, but Romulus had told him that after this last appearance to the people he was going away, never to come back. Apparently that was what he had done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius had made a speech and told the people that Romulus had been taken bodily to the skies, in the[pg 259]midst of the crashing and flaring of the thunder and lightning, and that he would no more be seen on earth. There were some unbelievers, but after a time this was quite generally thought to be true.Illustration: Far away, in a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherdIt had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.He never returned to Rome, but far away, in[pg 260]a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd who became very dear to the simple people around him. He had a servant named Peppo who loved him well and whom he treated more as a son than as a slave. He had a little plot of ground which he cultivated, with nine bean-rows and various kinds of herbs, and a row of beehives stood near the entrance to his cave. There was nothing he could not do with animals, and the birds used to come and perch on his fingers and his shoulders and head, and sing. Even the wolves would not harm him, and one year a mother fox brought up a litter of four cubs within a few yards of his door. The young people used to come to him to get him to tell their fortunes, and if he advised against a thing they never went contrary to what he said. When he died and was buried, his servant returned to the place from which he came, and then Tertius Calvo, who was by that time a very old man, learned certainly where Romulus the founder of Rome had gone. But he kept the story to himself.

Public opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.

What Romulus did was to visit him one night at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange this, and when some hours later a tall man in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate, the old porter admitted him without question, and there was no one in the way. The two sat[pg 252]and talked in the solar chamber, with no witnesses but the stars.

“They do not understand,”Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end.“They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”

“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,”said Calvo dryly.

“The people are with me—I believe,”said Romulus,“the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”

“I have always believed so,”nodded Calvo.“When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does not make it for the strong and powerful alone; it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and those who cannot work for themselves. If the gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give rain only to those whom they favor, and good water only to the chosen of the gods. But the[pg 253]world is not made in that way. Therefore we who are the chosen of the gods to do their will on earth should be of equal mind toward all—men, women and children.”

Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.

“Whether men are high or low, Romulus, founder of the city, they have minds and they think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls, hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours. Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe in a man, for their belief, like a river, will grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this happen when a good man whom all men loved came to die. He was greater after his death than when he was alive, for the grief and the love of the poor encompassed his spirit and made it strong.”

Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was thinking more than he meant to say.“I shall be very strong when I am dead,”was his only comment. And Calvo knew that it was the truth.

Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were thinking that it would not be many years when they would both, perhaps, be talking together in the world of shadows as they were talking now.[pg 254]Then Romulus told Calvo what he was going to do.

This talk took place a little after the beginning of the fifth month, which the Romans called Quintilis, but which we call July. In this month the sun is hot and the air is sluggish and damp, and in the year when these things happened it was more so than usual. The heralds announced in the market place, one sultry morning, that there would be a meeting of all the people at a place called the Goat’s Marsh some miles outside the city. Romulus would there tell publicly why he sent back their hostages to the Tuscans and how the lands were to be divided among the soldiers. No longer would the people have to depend on what was said by one and another, he would tell them himself. Partly out of curiosity, partly with the determination that they too would speak, the greater part of the patricians also went to hear.

The Goat’s Marsh was no longer a marsh, but it had kept its name partly because of the fig orchards, which bore the little fruits called the goat figs. There was a plain at the foot of a little hill, which made it a good place for any public meeting, and the country people for miles around crowded in to see Romulus and to hear him speak.

They raised a shout as his tall figure appeared but he waved them to silence.

“I have not much to say,”he began, and in the still air the intense interest of his listeners seemed to tingle like lightning before a storm,“but much has been said which was not true. I will not waste time in repeating lies.

“Ye know that the Tuscan cities were here before we came, and that their people are many. We cannot kill them or drive them away, if we would. They are our neighbors.

“We made war against them and we beat them, and took their city Fidenæ and their city Veii. Before we made peace they had to pay us certain lands. Before peace was made and the price paid, there were sons of their blood in our power, whom we kept as a pledge that they were willing to pay the price. That was all. They were not guilty of any crime against us. They were here to show that their people meant to keep faith. When peace was made I sent them back.

“If we had kept them, if we had slain them, if harm had come to them, then the wrong would have been on our side, and we should have had another war. Why should there be war between neighbors? Is not friendship better than hatred?

“Some are angry because I divided the lands, which they gave us as a price, among the soldiers.[pg 256]Yet who has better right than the men who fight the battles? This is all of my story. Ye believe?”Then a shout arose to the very skies,—“Romulus! Romulus! Romulus!”

Suddenly the clouds grew black, and lightnings flashed through them. Just as Naso was rising to speak, a tremendous clap of thunder shook the earth, or so it seemed. Winds swept suddenly down from the mountains and howled across the plains, carrying away mantles and curtains and boughs of trees in their flight. The crowd broke up in confusion, and the patricians were heard calling in distress,“Marcus!”“Caius!”“Aulus!”for in the darkness they could not see their friends a rod away. They hastened to whatever shelter they could find, and sheets of rain poured from the clouds. It was one of the most terrific tempests any one there present had ever known. It did not last long—perhaps an hour—but when it was over Romulus was nowhere to be seen.

The people had scattered in all directions, but the patricians had managed to keep together. When the storm was over, they did not know at first that Romulus had disappeared, but presently one after another of the common people was heard asking where he was, and no one could be found who knew. The people searched every[pg 257]where without finding so much as the hem of his mantle. It began to be whispered that he had been killed and his body hidden away, and black looks were cast upon the public men in their white robes.

They themselves were perhaps more perplexed and worried than any one else, for they saw what the people thought. It began to dawn upon them that the united opinion of hundreds of men, even though of the despisedplebs, or peasants, was not exactly a thing to be overlooked. That night was a black and anxious one.

On the following morning, Naso, Caius Cossus, and some other leaders came to see Calvo and ask his opinion of the mystery. He had not been at the Goat’s Marsh the day before, nor had Cossus and others of the friends of the vanished chief. All the men who had been there, of the upper class, were enemies of Romulus. It was a most unpleasant position for them.

Calvo heard the story gravely, without making any comment.

The storm had not been nearly so severe in Rome; in fact it was not much more than an ordinary summer storm. But when Naso told of it he described it as something beyond anything that could be natural.

“Do you think,”asked Calvo coolly at last,[pg 258]“that the gods had anything to do with these strange appearances?”Naso could not say.

“There have always been strange happenings about this man,”said Calvo thoughtfully.“His very birth was strange; his appearance among us was sudden and unexpected. What the gods send they can also take away.”

“Do you think then,”asked Cossus,“that he was taken by the gods to heaven?”

“I do not know,”said Calvo.“You say you found no trace of him? But even a man struck by lightning is not destroyed.”

The frightened men looked at each other.

Fabius the priest was the first to speak.

“It is at any rate not true that we have murdered him,”he said boldly,“and that is what men are saying in the streets.”

“And it may be true that he has been taken by the gods,”said Naso eagerly. They went out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself. He did not know just what had happened, but Romulus had told him that after this last appearance to the people he was going away, never to come back. Apparently that was what he had done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius had made a speech and told the people that Romulus had been taken bodily to the skies, in the[pg 259]midst of the crashing and flaring of the thunder and lightning, and that he would no more be seen on earth. There were some unbelievers, but after a time this was quite generally thought to be true.

Illustration: Far away, in a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd

It had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.

He never returned to Rome, but far away, in[pg 260]a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd who became very dear to the simple people around him. He had a servant named Peppo who loved him well and whom he treated more as a son than as a slave. He had a little plot of ground which he cultivated, with nine bean-rows and various kinds of herbs, and a row of beehives stood near the entrance to his cave. There was nothing he could not do with animals, and the birds used to come and perch on his fingers and his shoulders and head, and sing. Even the wolves would not harm him, and one year a mother fox brought up a litter of four cubs within a few yards of his door. The young people used to come to him to get him to tell their fortunes, and if he advised against a thing they never went contrary to what he said. When he died and was buried, his servant returned to the place from which he came, and then Tertius Calvo, who was by that time a very old man, learned certainly where Romulus the founder of Rome had gone. But he kept the story to himself.

[pg 261]A ROMAN ROADOnce along the Roman road with measured, rhythmic strideMarched the Roman legionaries in their valiant pride.Men of petty towns and tribes, under Caesar’s hand,Welded into Empire then their people and their land.Now along that ancient road the silent motors run,Driven by every ancient race that lives beneath the sun.Swarming from their barren plains, wild barbarian hordesWasted all the fruitful soil—then the Roman swordsLeagued with Gallic pike and sling, held the red frontier,Saved the cradle of our folk, all that we hold dear.Now above the towers that rise where Rome’s great eagles flew,Circle dauntless aeroplanes to guard their folk anew.Gods who loved the sons of Mars found in field and woodAltars built with reverent care—saw the work was good.Simple, brave and generous, quick to speech and mirth;Loving all the pleasant ways of the kindly earth;[pg 262]Thus they built the stately walls that still unfallen stand.Guarding for their ancient faith the dear, unchanging land!Winds and waves and leaping flames all have served our race.Flint and bronze and steel had each their little day of grace.But the lightning fleets to-day along our singing wires,And the harnessed floods to-day are fuel for our fires.Armored through the clouds we glide on swift electric wings.Through the trenches of the hills a joyous giant sings.Light and Flame and Power and Steel are welded into oneTo serve the task set long ago,—when roads were first begun!THE END

Once along the Roman road with measured, rhythmic strideMarched the Roman legionaries in their valiant pride.Men of petty towns and tribes, under Caesar’s hand,Welded into Empire then their people and their land.Now along that ancient road the silent motors run,Driven by every ancient race that lives beneath the sun.

Once along the Roman road with measured, rhythmic stride

Marched the Roman legionaries in their valiant pride.

Men of petty towns and tribes, under Caesar’s hand,

Welded into Empire then their people and their land.

Now along that ancient road the silent motors run,

Driven by every ancient race that lives beneath the sun.

Swarming from their barren plains, wild barbarian hordesWasted all the fruitful soil—then the Roman swordsLeagued with Gallic pike and sling, held the red frontier,Saved the cradle of our folk, all that we hold dear.Now above the towers that rise where Rome’s great eagles flew,Circle dauntless aeroplanes to guard their folk anew.

Swarming from their barren plains, wild barbarian hordes

Wasted all the fruitful soil—then the Roman swords

Leagued with Gallic pike and sling, held the red frontier,

Saved the cradle of our folk, all that we hold dear.

Now above the towers that rise where Rome’s great eagles flew,

Circle dauntless aeroplanes to guard their folk anew.

Gods who loved the sons of Mars found in field and woodAltars built with reverent care—saw the work was good.Simple, brave and generous, quick to speech and mirth;Loving all the pleasant ways of the kindly earth;[pg 262]Thus they built the stately walls that still unfallen stand.Guarding for their ancient faith the dear, unchanging land!

Gods who loved the sons of Mars found in field and wood

Altars built with reverent care—saw the work was good.

Simple, brave and generous, quick to speech and mirth;

Loving all the pleasant ways of the kindly earth;

Thus they built the stately walls that still unfallen stand.

Guarding for their ancient faith the dear, unchanging land!

Winds and waves and leaping flames all have served our race.Flint and bronze and steel had each their little day of grace.But the lightning fleets to-day along our singing wires,And the harnessed floods to-day are fuel for our fires.Armored through the clouds we glide on swift electric wings.Through the trenches of the hills a joyous giant sings.Light and Flame and Power and Steel are welded into oneTo serve the task set long ago,—when roads were first begun!

Winds and waves and leaping flames all have served our race.

Flint and bronze and steel had each their little day of grace.

But the lightning fleets to-day along our singing wires,

And the harnessed floods to-day are fuel for our fires.

Armored through the clouds we glide on swift electric wings.

Through the trenches of the hills a joyous giant sings.

Light and Flame and Power and Steel are welded into one

To serve the task set long ago,—when roads were first begun!

THE END

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