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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



can see how it came to be cultivated among the 

 mercenaries and professional soldiers of Pyrrhus 

 and Hannibal. But what was the motive power 

 in the case of Rome ? Dismissing the notion of 

 occult qualities of race, we look for a rational ex- 

 planation in the circumstances of the plain which 

 was the cradle of the Roman Empire. 



It is evident that in the period designated as 

 that of the kings, when Rome commenced her 

 career of conquest, she was, for that time and 

 country, a great and wealthy city. This is proved 

 by the works of the kings, the Capitoline Temple, 

 the excavation for the Circus Maximus, the Ser- 

 vian Wall, and, above all, the Cloaca Maxima. 

 Historians have indeed undertaken to give us a 

 very disparaging picture of the ancient Rome, 

 which they confidently describe as nothing more 

 than a great village of single-roofed cottages, 

 thinly scattered over a large area. We ask in 

 vain what are the materials for this description. 

 It is most probable that the private buildings of 

 Rome under the kings were roofed with nothing 

 better than shingle, and it is very likely that they 

 were mean and dirty, as the private buildings of 

 Athens appear to have been, and as those of most 

 of the great cities of the middle ages unquestion- 

 ably were. But the Cloaca Maxima is in itself 

 conclusive evidence of a large population, of 

 wealth, and of a not inconsiderable degree of 

 civilization. Taking our stand upon this monu- 

 ment, and clearing our vision entirely of Romu- 

 lus and his asylum, we seem dimly to perceive 

 the existence of a deep prehistoric background, 

 richer than is commonly supposed in the germs 

 of civilization — a remark which may in all likeli- 

 hood be extended to the background of history 

 in general. Nothing surely can be more gro- 

 tesque than the idea of a set of wolves, like the 

 Norse pirates before their conversion to Christi- 

 anity,, constructing in their den the Cloaca Maxi- 

 ma. 



That Rome was comparatively great and 

 wealthy is certain. We can hardly doubt that 

 she was a seat of industry and commerce, and 

 that the theory which represents her industry 

 and commerce as having been developed subse- 

 quently to her conquests is the reverse of the 

 fact. Whence, but from industry and commerce, 

 could the population and the wealth have come ? 

 feasant farmers do not live in cities, and plun- 

 derers do not accumulate. Rome had around 

 her what was then a rich and peopled plain ; she 

 stood at a meeting-place of nationalities ; she 

 was on a navigable river, yet out of the reach of 

 pirates ; the sea near her was full of commerce, 



Etruscan, Greek, and Carthaginian. Her first 

 colony was Ostia, evidently commercial and con- 

 nected with salt-works, which may well have 

 supplied the staple of her trade. Her patricians 

 were financiers and money-lenders. We are 

 aware that a different turn has been given to 

 this part of the story, and that the indebtedness 

 has been represented as incurred not by loans of 

 money, but by advances of farm-stock. This, 

 however, completely contradicts the whole tenor 

 of the narrative, and especially what is said about 

 the measures for relieving the debtor by reducing 

 the rate of interest and by deducting from the 

 principal debt the interest already paid. The 

 narrative as it stands, moreover, is supported by 

 analogy. It has a parallel in the economical his- 

 tory of ancient Athens, and in the " scaling of 

 debts," to use the American equivalent for 8ei- 

 sachtheia, by the legislation of Solon. What 

 prevents our supposing that usury, when it first 

 made its appearance on the scene, before people 

 had learned to draw the distinction between 

 crimes and defaults, presented itself in a very 

 coarse and cruel form ? True, the currency was 

 clumsy, and retained philological traces of a sys- 

 tem of barter ; but without commerce there could 

 have been no currency at all. 



Even more decisive is the proof afforded by 

 the early political history of Rome. In that 

 wonderful first decade of Livy there is no doubt 

 enough of Livy himself to give him a high place 

 among the masters of fiction. It is the epic of 

 a nation of politicians, and admirably adapted 

 for the purposes of education as the grand pres- 

 entation of Roman character and the rich treasury 

 of Roman sentiment. But we can hardly doubt 

 that in the political portion there is a foundation 

 of fact ; it is too circumstantial, too consistent in 

 itself, and at the same time too much borne out 

 by analogy, to be altogether fiction. The insti- 

 tutions which we find existing in historic times 

 must have been evolved by some such struggle 

 between the orders of patricians and plebeians as 

 that which Livy presents to us. And these poli- 

 tics, with their parties and sections of parties, 

 their shades of political character, the sustained 

 interest which they imply in political objects, 

 their various devices and compromises, are not 

 the politics of a community of peasant farmers, 

 living apart each on his own farm and thinking 

 of his own crops: they are the politics of the 

 quick-witted and gregarious population of an 

 industrial and commercial city. They are poli- 

 tics of the same sort as those upon which the 

 Palazzo Vecchio looked down in Florence. That 



