344 



DISCOVERY 



Patricians were the deities of the Sabincs ; and this 

 can mean nothing less than that the Patricians were 

 Sabincs. Further, one of the two old Roman calendars 

 — which were essentially religious documents — that 

 known to the Romans as the Calendar of Numa, began 

 with the month of the Sabine god Mars — mensis 

 Martius, or March. This calendar the Patricians for 

 many centuries (till 302 B.C.) succeeded in keeping 

 strictly secret, and in their own control. And we 

 shall see that one of the festivals recorded in it 

 actually had its name in a Sabine, non-Latin form. 



At Rome there were three forms of maniage. The 

 first, called confarreatio, " meating together " (to use 

 " meat " in its etymological sense), was accompanied 

 by a solemn religious ceremony, and was entirely 

 different from the other two, which were known as 

 coemptio and tisus. Coemplio involved a civil cere- 

 mony which was a survival of wife-purchase ; marriage 

 by usus was brought about by nothing more than 

 cohabitation for the period of one year. It is clear 

 that confarreatio was the Patrician form of marriage, 

 because no one could be one of the flamines maiores 

 unless his parents were Patricians who had been 

 married by it ; but this rule did not apply to candidates 

 for the " minor " priesthoods. The barrier, too, against 

 intermarriage between Patricians and Plebeians, which 

 was not broken down until so late as 445 B.C., 

 suggests a distinction in form of marriage as well as in 

 the way it was regarded. For confarreatio was held 

 to be a binding contract from which there was no 

 divorce (save with great difficulty) ; whereas to be 

 released from marriages entered into by means of 

 coemptio or nsus was as easy as to contract them. In 

 this we find reflected exactly the moral and social 

 conceptions of the two strata of population. The 

 Sabines remained, down to Imperial times, patterns of 

 virtuous living held up for imitation to the degenerates 

 of those days. There is, on the other hand, good 

 evidence ' that the peoples of the earlier stratum had 

 at one time, and that a time not wholly forgotten, 

 traced descent through the mother only. This custom, 

 as students of anthropology know, descends from an 

 epoch when marriage, fatherhood, and family hfe as we 

 understand it had not been developed. We should 

 therefore expect their views of married life to differ 

 from those held by the Sabines, whose racial con- 

 nections are with northern peoples of severer moral 

 standards. 

 It is universally admitted that the miUtary consti- 



' Note especially what Vergil says about the Latin senator 

 Dranccs in JEneid, xi. 340-41 : 



" Genus huic materna superbum 

 Nobilitas dabat. inccrtunu de patre ferebat." 



(" His mother's noble birth gave him high rank ; none knew 

 surely the race he inherited from his sire.") 



tution attributed to Servius Tullius, the sixth of the 

 " seven " kings, must in its main outlines be taken as 

 historical. Under this all citizens were divided into 

 five classes according to their wealth, and their armour 

 and place in battle varied in the same way. Now 

 the first of these five seems before Tullius to have 

 constituted the entire (Patrician) army alone, and the 

 arms which it bore are analogous to those used in 

 Central Europe by the warriors of the Early Iron Age. 

 The most conspicuous example is the round shield, 

 which was also carried by the Equites, or Cavalry, 

 always finked with the First Class. But the armour 

 of the other classes was incomplete, and the shield 

 they carried was the oblong one ; and this was the type 

 of shield used generally by the Mediterranean peoples 

 of the preceding age. In this again, therefore, we have 

 evidence that the ruling class at Rome was an invading 

 body which came from the north, bringing with it its 

 own type of armour. 



Now turn again to the cN-idence from language. 

 We have already seen that Latin, the language spoken 

 by the Romans, was a j-language. For Sabine, the 

 evidence we have makes it probable that it was a 

 /)-language. Thus the name of the king Numa Pompi- 

 lius, whose birthplace given by tradition is the Sabine 

 town of Cures, would in Latin be represented by 

 Quintilius (standing for Quin(c)tilius). But Numa, 

 it is needless to say, was a Patrician.' The common 

 names, Pompeius, Petronius, and some others must 

 have been borrowed, Uke bos, "ox," from some of the 

 /)-languages, the nearest of which to Rome was Sabine. 

 If there was a considerable Sabine element in the 

 population of Rome, it is easy to see how this and other 

 borrowings came about. Particularly interesting is 

 the name of a district in Rome which in early times we 

 know was called Sugusa, and which therefore, in Latin 

 of the classical period, we should expect to appear as 

 Sugttra, whereas we have instead the familiar Subura. 



In Latin, what are known as the Indo-European 

 palatal and dental aspirates {gh and dh) became /«- 

 initially, but in Sabine they became /-. Yet in Latin 

 we have words beginning with /- which we know, from 

 comparison with other languages, began with gh- or dh- 

 in Indo-European. These can only have been borrowed 

 from Sabine. They include ft I urn, " thread " — spinning 

 was the mark of the Patrician and Sabine ladies ' ; and 



2 The initial of Quirintis, the Sabine god attended by priests 

 of Patrician extraction, who gave his name to the Quirinal Hill 

 where the Sabine settlement had been made, seems an exception. 

 But there is reason for thinking that it is derived from Cures, 

 and should be Ctnimis, but was altered to Quirinus in order 

 to coincide with the name of the citizens of Rome, the Quiriles. 



3 The pure I-atin hilum survives in iii-/n7, " nothing," literally 

 " not a thread." The explanation of ferrum as Sabine is due 

 to Professor Conway, who allows me to publish it here for the 

 first time. 



