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CHAPTER IV.
THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME.
Ramnes. About fourteen miles up from the mouth of the river Tiber hills of moderate elevation rise on both banks of the stream, higher on the right, lower on the left bank. With the latter group there has been closely associated for at least two thousand five hundred years the name of the Romans. We are unable, of course, to tell how or when that name arose: this much only is certain, that in the oldest form of it known to us the inhabitants of the canton are called, not Romans, but (by a shifting of the sound that easily occurs in the earlier period of a language, but fell very early into abeyance in Latin[1]) Ramnians (Ramnes), a fact which constitutes an expressive testimony to the immemorial antiquity of the name. Its derivation cannot be given with certainty; possibly "Ramnes" may mean "foresters" or "bushmen."
But they were not the only dwellers on the hills by the bank of the Tiber. In the earliest division of the burgesses of Rome a trace has been preserved of the fact that that body arose out of the amalgamation of three cantons once probably independent, the Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, into a single commonwealth—in other words, out of such a synoikismos as that from which Athens arose in Attica.[2] The great antiquity of this threefold division of the commu-
- ↑ A similar change of sound is exhibited in the case of the following formations, all of them of a very ancient kind: pars portio, Mars mors, farreum, ancient form for horreum, Fabii Fovii, Valerias Volesus, vacuus vocivus.
- ↑ The synoikismos did not necessarily involve an actual collective residence at one spot; but while each resided as formerly on his own land, there was thenceforth only one council and court-house for the whole. Thucyd. ii. 15; Herodot. i. 170.
