130 CARTER— EVOLUTION OF THE CITY OF ROME. [April 22, 



graphical sketch (for under this treatment the city itself becomes 

 endowed with life and the product is veritably a biography) covers 

 a distinct field in that long series of periods which follow one 

 another in the story of the Eternal City. 



Yet this period of the origins has been strangely neglected by 

 modern scholars, at least in so far as attempts at the co5rdination 

 of material are concerned. The student of ethnography has formed 

 his own opinions regarding the early settlement of this part of 

 Italy, the student of language has drawn his own deductions; the 

 student of religion has discovered certain perfectly definite things 

 regarding the civilization of these primitive peoples ; and the stu- 

 dent of topography has made his own discoveries, but has also held 

 his own counsel. Yet the language of communication between 

 these special students has been in the main the old traditional one 

 of Rome's founding. 



The greatest difficulty which confronts the student of the origins 

 of Rome is not the absence of statements regarding it, but rather 

 the superabundant presence of such statements. If what was after- 

 wards the great city of Rome had been entirely unknown in its 

 birth, we would have placed it in the category of many other famous 

 individuals, and thought nothing of it. But the presence of such 

 a plenitude of sources has at least two bad results; first it leads 

 to endless and hopeless attempts to reconcile conflicting statements^ ; 

 and second even after our reason has convinced us that these 

 statements are without authority and represent merely the late prod- 

 ucts of artificial legend making, we have great difficulty in casting 

 them to one side, and we unconsciously and instinctively recur to 

 them, so much are they a portion of our intellectual heritage. 

 We may prove that Romulus was not known in Rome until after 

 the Gallic catastrophe,- and that we have no reason to suppose 

 the Palatine settlement to be any older that the Capitoline or the 



^ Compare the attempts periodically made to reconstruct the early history 

 of Rome on the basis of the legendary accounts. 



"See Carter: "The Death of Romulus," American Journal of Archceol- 

 ogy, 1909, pp. 19-29; and (more fully) my forthcoming article, s. v. 

 " Romulus," in Roscher's " Lexikon der griechischen und romischen 

 Mythologie." 



