nity[1] is perhaps best evinced by the fact that the Romans, in matters of constitutional law especially, regularly used the forms "tribuere" (to "divide into three") and "tribus" (a "third") in the sense of "partition" and "part," and the latter expression ("tribus") early lost, like our "quarter," its original signification of number. After the union, each of these three formerly separate communities but now subdivisions of a single community still possessed its third of the common domain, and had its proportional representation in the burgess-force and in the council of the elders. In ritual also, the number divisible by three of the members of almost all the oldest colleges—of the Vestal Virgins, the Salii, the Arval Brethren, the Luperci, the Augurs—probably had reference to that threefold partition. These three elements into which the primitive body of burgesses in Rome was divided have had theories of the most extravagant absurdity engrafted upon them. The irrational opinion that the Roman nation was a mongrel people finds its support in that division, and its advocates have striven by various means to represent the three great Italian races as elements entering into the composition of the primitive Rome, and to transform a people which has exhibited in language, polity, and religion, a pure and national development such as few have equalled, into a confused aggregate of Etruscan and Sabine, Hellenic and, forsooth! even Pelasgian fragments.
Setting aside self-contradictory and unfounded hypotheses, we may sum up in a few words all that can be said respecting the nationality of the component elements of the primitive Roman commonwealth. That the Ramnians were a Latin stock cannot be doubted, for they gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth, and therefore must have substantially determined the nationality of the united
- ↑ We might even, looking to the Attic τριττύς and the Umbrian trifo, raise the question whether a triple division of the community was not a fundamental principle of the Græco-Italians; in that case the triple division of the Roman community would not be referable to the amalgamation of several once independent tribes. In order to the establishment, however, of a hypothesis so much at variance with tradition, such a threefold division would require to present itself more generally throughout the Græco-Italian field than seems to be the case, and to appear uniformly everywhere as the ground-scheme. The Umbrians may possibly have adopted the word tribus only when they came under the influence of Roman rule; it cannot with certainty be traced in Oscan.
