Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/58

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38
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS.
[Book I.

that it originated from the settlement of the Claudian clansmen on the Anio; and that the other districts of the earliest division originated in a similar manner is indicated quite as certainly by their names. These names are not, like those of the districts added at a later period, derived from the localities, but are formed without exception from the names of clans; and the clans who thus gave their names to the wards of the original Roman territory are, so far as they have not become entirely extinct (as is the case with the Camilii, Galerii, Lemonii, Pollii, Pupinii, Voltinii), the very oldest patrician families of Rome, the Æmilii, Cornelii, Fabii, Horatii, Menenii, Papirii, Romilii, Sergii, Veturii. It is worthy of remark that not one of these clans can be shown to have taken up its settlement in Rome only at a later epoch. Every Italian, and doubtless also every Hellenic, canton must, like that of Rome, have been divided into a number of societies, connected at once by locality and by clanship; such a clan-settlement is the "house" (οἰκία) of the Greeks, from which very frequently the κώμαι and δῆμοι originated among them, like the tribus in Rome. The corresponding Italian terms "house" (vicus) or "buildings" (pagus, from pangere) indicate, in like manner, the joint settlement of the members of a clan, and thence come, by an easily understood transition, to signify in common use hamlet or village. As each household had its own portion of land, so the clanhousehold or village had clan-lands belonging to it, which, as will afterwards be shown, were managed up to a comparatively late period after the analogy of household-lands, that is, on the system of joint possession. Whether it was in Latium itself that the clan-households became developed into clan-villages, or whether the Latins were already associated in clans when they immigrated into Latium, are questions which we are just as little able to answer as we are to determine how far, in addition to the original ground of common ancestry, the clan may have been based on the incorporation or co-ordination from without of individuals not related to it by blood.

Cantons. These clanships, however, were from the beginning regarded, not as independent societies, but as the integral parts of a political community (civitas, populus). This first presents itself as an aggregate of a number of clan-villages of the same stock, language, and manners, bound to mutual compliance with law and mutual legal redress and to make common cause in aggression and in defence. A fixed local