Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/138

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THE HEGEMONY OF ROME IN LATIUM.
[Book I.

shops and other traders' stalls were arranged. In the valley between the Palatine and Aventine a space was staked off for races; this became the Circus. The cattle-market was laid out immediately adjoining the river, and this soon became one of the most densely peopled quarters of Eome. Temples and sanctuaries arose on all the summits, above all the federal sanctuary of Diana on the Aventine (P. 111), and on the summit of the stronghold the far-seen temple of father Diovis, who had given to his people all this glory, and who now, when the Romans were triumphing over the surrounding nations, triumphed along with them over the subject gods of the vanquished.

The names of the men at whose bidding these great structures of the city arose are almost as completely lost in oblivion as those of the leaders in the earliest battles and victories of Rome. Tradition indeed assigns the different works to different kings—the Senate-house to Tullus Hostilius, the Janiculum and the wooden bridge to Ancus Marcius, the great Cloaca, the Circus, and the Temple of Jupiter to the elder Tarquinius, the temple of Diana and the ringwall to Servius Tullius. Several of these statements may perhaps be correct; and it is apparently not the result of accident that the building of the new ring-wall is associated both as to date and author with the new organization of the army, which indeed bore special reference to the regular defence of the city walls. But upon the whole we must be content to learn from this tradition what is indeed from the nature of the case evident, that this second creation of Rome stood in intimate connection with the commencement of her hegemony over Latium, and with the remodelling of her burgess-army, and that while they originated in one and the same great conception, their execution was not the work either of a single man or of a single generation. It is impossible to doubt that Hellenic influences exercised a powerful effect on this remodelling of the character of the Roman community, but it is equally impossible to demonstrate the mode or the degree of their operation. It has


    prove that these structures were connected with the foundation not of the Palatine, but of the second (Servian) city. Posterity reckoned this regia, and the temple of Vesta as structures of Numa; but the cause which gave rise to that hypothesis is too manifest to allow of our attaching any weight to it.