community. Respecting the origin of the Luceres nothing can be affirmed, except that there is no difficulty in the way of our pronouncing them, like the Ramnians, a Latin community. The second, on the other hand, of these communities is with one consent derived from Sabina. This view can at least be traced to a tradition preserved in the Titian brotherhood, which represented that brotherhood as having been instituted, on occasion of the Tities being admitted into the collective community, for the preservation of their distinctive Sabine ritual. It would appear, therefore, that at a period very remote, when the Latin and Sabellian stocks were beyond question far less sharply contrasted in language, manners, and customs than were the Roman and the Samnite of a later age, a Sabellian community entered into a Latin canton-union; and, as in the older and more credible traditions without exception the Tities take precedence of the Ramnians, it is probable that the intruding Tities compelled the older Ramnians to accept their synoikismos. A mixture of different nationalities certainly therefore took place; but it hardly exercised an influence greater than, for example, the settlement which occurred some centuries afterwards at Rome of the Sabine Attus Clauzus, or Appius Claudius and his clansmen and clients. The earlier admission of the Tities among the Ramnians does not entitle us to class the community among mongrel peoples any more than does that subsequent reception of the Claudii among the Romans. With the exception, perhaps, of isolated national institutions transplanted in connection with ritual, the existence of Sabellian elements can nowhere be pointed out in Rome; and the Latin language in particular furnishes absolutely no support to such an hypothesis.[1] It would in fact be more than surprising if the Latin nation should have had its nationality in any sensible degree affected by the insertion of a single community from a national stock most closely re-
- ↑ After the older opinion that Latin is to be viewed as a mixed language, made up of Greek and non-Greek elements, has been now abandoned on all sides, cautious inquirers even (e. g. Schwegler, R. G. i. 184, 193) still seek to discover in Latin a mixture of two nearly related Italian dialects. But we ask in vain for the linguistic or historical facts which render such an hypothesis necessary. When a language presents the appearance of being an intermediate link between two others, every philologist knows that the phenomenon may quite as probably depend, and more frequently does depend, on organic development than on external intermixture.
