DISCOVERY 



341 



essentially one of wealth ; that the Patricians were 

 the old Latin burgesses and the Plebeians a collection 

 of clients and dependents who had (for some reason 

 not forthcoming) ceased to act with their patrons, 

 together with some foreign settlers who had gathered 

 around them. But the long and bitter struggle of the 

 Plebeians for equality, and the mutual jealousy between 

 the classes, especially in such matters as religion and 

 intermarriage, bear marks which suggest at least that 

 the distinction must have been of a more fundamental 

 character. 



Amongst the Romans themselves there was a deeply 

 rooted belief that the old Roman state had come about 

 by the union of two separate communities — one an 

 older settlement of Latins on the Palatine Mount, the 

 other of invaders belonging to a race called Sabines, 

 who in historical times occupied a tract of country to 

 the east and north-east of Rome ; this second settle- 

 ment was associated by the later Romans with the 

 Quirinal Hill. This tradition Mommsen denounced 

 as an idle fiction, although more patient and philo- 

 sophic historians like Schwcgler had judged it on its 

 merits to be substantially correct. What the modern 

 reader has a right to ask is whether recent discovery 

 has disclosed any new evidence which wdU enable us 

 to accept the old tradition with confidence or to reject 

 it with more solid reasons than Mommsen put forward. 



Let us ask first whether anything can be said of the 

 relation of these two classes or strata in the citizens of 

 Rome to the peoples of ancient Italy generally. Most 

 of us think of Latin as a language spoken throughout 

 the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula ; but 

 for what date was this true ? It was not until the 

 beginning of the last century B.C. that the great mass 

 of the inhabitants of Italy spoke Latin, and even then 

 the local dialects were by no means extinct. They 

 survived in rural districts for unofficial purposes until 

 the first century a.d., and in small isolated spots 

 possibly still later ; and they have left their mark on 

 some of the modem Italian dialects which in the main 

 are derived from Latin.' But early Italy was peopled 

 by a variety of races speaking a variety of dialects, 

 amongst which the Latins and their language occupied 

 a very small area. Of Latin we have, of course, 

 abundant records ; we have also sufficient remains of 

 the other dialects in the form of inscriptions, glosses, 



' For example, just as beside pure Latin ruber, " red," there 

 was the dialect form rufus, we find Latin bubulcus, "plough- 

 man," but from a dialect form with -/- modem Italian bi/olco ; 

 similarly Latin scarabtsus, " beetle," modem Italian scara- 

 faggio; Latin tabanus, "horse-fly," modern Italian tafano. 

 Note that these are words of the country. Again, -nd- in 

 Latin corresponds to -nn- in the dialects, a peculiarity well 

 known to Plautus and reflected in modem South Italian 

 dialects. Compare dial, unnici, " eleven," with Italian 

 (Tuscan) undid, Latin utidecim. 



that is, isolated words and phrases noted or explained 

 by ancient grammarians, and also a considerable 

 record of the names of places and persons from the 

 dialect-areas. The evidence from all these sources 

 has been carefully studied, and it has been showTi 

 bej'ond doubt that there were in Italy, at the time when 

 Rome was founded, at least two strata of population 

 speaking different though kindred tongues. Both 

 these tongues belonged to the great family which is 

 called Indo-European, from its including, on the one 

 hand, the oldest languages of India — Sanskrit and the 

 languages derived from it — and on the other nearly 

 all the languages of ancient and modern Europe — Greek, 

 Latin, Keltic, German, English, and the rest. The 

 first, then, of these strata was occupying the west 

 coast of Italy before the arrival of the Etruscan people. 

 Who the Etruscans were is a puzzle still under study, 

 but we know enough to be quite sure that they were 

 not Indo-Europeans, and that they came from Asia 

 Minor. The second stratum of population appears, 

 in the west and south at all events, later than the 

 Etruscans. Now it is to these two strata that we may 

 now respectively attribute (i) the Latins represented at 

 Rome by the Plebeians, and (2) the Sabines represented 

 by the Patricians. It is clear, further, that before the 

 arrival of the Etruscans, still longer before the invasion 

 of the northern race to which the Sabines belonged, 

 the main element of the population of the peninsula 

 was identical with the earlier stratum. But the 

 invading race of " Safines " which came down from 

 the north gradually worked its way southwards, 

 entrenching itself in the mountain-valleys from which 

 it made raids upon the more fertile coast-lands. The 

 hardy Samnite race which, four centuries after Rome 

 was founded, came into confhct with the Romans and 

 made such a long and brave fight against them were 

 of this same Safine stock ; so that the greatest struggle 

 which the Roman commanders, who were mostly 

 Patricians, ever conducted was really against their 

 own cousins, separated from them by geographical 

 accidents. The swarms which these Safines had sent 

 out from the mountainous centre of Italy had subdued 

 almost the whole of the south by the fourth century 

 B.C. ; and some of the more enterprising had even 

 crossed into Sicily and settled in Messina. Thus the 

 earlier folk of Campania, called the Osci, had been 

 conquered by the Samnites, and by 400 B.C. had 

 learnt to speak their language. Farther north, many 

 tribes of Central Italy, such as the Marsi and Sabini, 

 were also branches of the invading race. 



But the reader may reasonably ask how these 

 conclusions, stated here so briefly, have been reached. 

 By what criterion can a given tribe be assigned to the 

 one or the other race ? \\Tiere enough linguistic 

 evidence has been preserved upon inscriptions — the 



