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Title: The Childhood of Rome

Author: Louise Lamprey

Release date: May 31, 2011 [eBook #36296]

Language: English

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDHOOD OF ROME ***

Illustration: Marcia wove her basket, putting a band of red around the curve

Marcia wove her basket, putting a band of red around the curve.
Frontispiece.

THE CHILDHOOD
OF ROME

By
L. LAMPREY

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
EDNA F. HART-HUBON

Illustration: Printer’s sign

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1925

Copyright, 1922,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

to
Maitland C. Lamprey

[pg vii]

INTRODUCTION

It is scarcely necessary to say that these stories are not meant to be taken as history, even legendary history. The tales of the founding of Rome and of the early life of the Italian races are many and contradictory. It is quite possible that future discoveries may disprove half the theories now held on these subjects. There must have been, however, heroic semi-savage figures like the Romulus of the legends, and the aim of the author has been to re-create in some degree the atmosphere and the surroundings in which they may have lived.

The various customs and events introduced here were not, probably, part of the history of one generation. It is possible, however, that as a tree grows from a seed, the laws of the future city were foreshadowed and suggested in the relations between the Romans as individuals and between the town on the Palatine and its neighbors.

It will be observed that the forms of Latin and Italian names used in these stories do not [pg viii]follow the usual classic Latin style and end in “us.” It is said by some authors that the original immigrants from whose customs and traditions Roman civilization developed came from Greece, and in that case such Greek forms as “Vitalos” might have been preserved long after such clipped forms as “Marcus” and “Marcs” became current. Inasmuch as Italian peasant names hardly ever end in anything but a vowel it seems illogical to take it for granted that in a colony of farmers, such as the men who founded Rome, the names would all have taken the classical Latin form at first. They would have been much more likely to vary according to the ancestry, dialect and intelligence of the family. Later they would tend to a conventional form as certain families of distinction set a standard for others to follow and took pride in keeping their own speech correct.

In short, the period described here is a transition stage, and like any age of the founding of a new civilization, contains incongruous elements. It has been stated that even in the great days of the Roman Empire the number of people who actually spoke correct classical Latin was extremely small in proportion to the whole population of any city.

[pg ix]

THE LIVING LANGUAGE

Sing a song of little words, homely parts of speech,

Phrases children use at play, songs that mothers teach,—

Who would think when Rome was new, they used that language then—

Table, chair and family, map and chart and pen?

Sing a song of stately ways, camp and square and street,

Consuls, tribunes, governors, the legion’s myriad feet,

If those wise men so long ago had not known what to say,

All they gave us readymade we should not have to-day.

Clear and straight and brief their talk in country or in town.

Lucid, vivid, accurate the thoughts that they set down.

Still the world is using words that bear the Roman stamp—

Coined in forum, villa, temple, market place or camp.

Still our thoughts take day by day those shapes of long ago—

If you read the dictionary you will find it’s so.

[pg x]

[pg xi]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER |  | PAGE
I. | The Mountain of Fire | 3
II. | Ten Families | 17
III. | The Sacred Year | 28
IV. | The Banditti | 40
V. | The Wolf Cub | 55
VI. | Boundary Lines | 68
VII. | Masterless Men | 81
VIII. | The Beehive Temple | 94
IX. | The Square Hill | 108
X. | The Kinsmen | 117
XI. | The Taking of Alba Longa | 130
XII. | The Ring Wall | 140
XIII. | The Soothsayers | 152
XIV. | Bread and Salt | 161
XV. | The Trumpery Man | 174
XVI. | The Great Dyke | 184
XVII. | The War Dance | 196
XVIII. | The Peace of the Women | 208
XIX. | The Priest of the Bridge | 224
XX. | The Three Tribes | 233
XXI. | Under the Yoke | 243
XXII. | The Goat’s Marsh | 251
| A Roman Road | 261

[pg xii]

[pg xiii]

ILLUSTRATIONS

Marcia wove her basket, putting a band of red around the curve | Frontispiece
| PAGE
Other flocks of sheep and other men with oxen were hurrying to shelter | 12
The patriarch looked at the fire on the altar | 21
All the young voices took up the song | 33
The people gathered in the public square | 45
Whoever they were, it was proper at this time to offer food to strangers | 59
“I have seen something like this before,” he said | 72
The lad went straight down the mountainside with his wolf at his heels | 79
The little maidens walked soberly together | 96
The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs | 103
“Victory! Vic-to-ry! Romulus forever!” | 132
Then they blessed him and crowned him with the victor’s crown of laurel | 139
A plan of Rome in classical times, showing the seven hills | 144
The copper plow was drawn by a white bull and a white cow | 147
They sat together that night and watched the moon sail grandly over the flood | 161
Mamurius lifted her in his strong arms and carried her through the door | 170
Toto spread out his gay cloth upon the ground | 178
There was a gleam of bright metal in the hole they were digging | 203
Emilia was allowed to sit with them and spin and sew | 216
His mother molded for him men and animals | 235
Far away, in a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd | 259

[pg 1]

THE CHILDHOOD OF ROME

[pg 2]

[pg 3]

I

THE MOUNTAIN OF FIRE

Marcia, the little daughter of Marcus Vitalos the farmer, sat on a sheltered corner of a stone wall, making a willow basket. Basket weaving was one of the first things that all children of her people learned, and she was very clever at it. Her strong, brown fingers wove the osiers in and out swiftly and deftly, as a bird builds its nest. The boys and girls cut willow shoots, and reeds, and grasses that were good for this work, at the proper time, and bound them together in bundles tidily, for use later on. The straw, too, could be used for making baskets and mats after the grain was threshed out of it.

A great many baskets were needed, for they were used to hold the grain, and the beans, and the onions, and the dried fruit, and the various other things that a thrifty family kept stored away for provisions. They were also used to gather things in and to carry them in, and some[pg 4]times they took the place of dishes in serving fruit or nuts. Almost every size and shape and kind could be made use of somewhere. The one Marcia was making was round and squat and quite large, and it was to have an opening at the top large enough to put one’s hand into easily, and a cover to fit.

The house in which she lived was one of the oldest in the village on the slopes of the Mountain of Fire. It was so old that there was no knowing how many children had grown up in it, but they were all of the same family,—the family of the Marcus Vitalos Colonus who built it in the first place. This long-ago settler was called Colonus, the farmer, not because he was the only farmer in the neighborhood, for everybody worked on the land, but because he was an unusually good one, a leader among them in the understanding of the good brown earth and all its ways.

His sons after him took the name Colonus, for among their people it was considered very important to belong to a good family. As soon as a man’s name was mentioned his ancestry was known, if he had any worth the naming. The ancestor of all this people was said to have been Mars, the god of manhood and all manly deeds. Their names showed this, for the common ones [pg 5]were Marcus, Mamurius, Mavor, Mamertius and so on, with some other name added to describe their occupations, or the place where they lived, or some peculiar thing about them. Plautus meant the splay-footed man; Sylvius, the man of the forest; Marinus, the seaman,—and there had been a Marcus Vitalos Colonus in this family, ever since the first one. Marcia’s elder brother, two years older than she was, had this name, but he was usually called Marcs, for in their language the last syllable was apt to be slurred over.

It was very quiet in the village just now, for all the men were off getting in the harvest. The grain lands and the pastures were some distance away, wherever the land was suitable for crops or grazing. Every morning, directly after breakfast, every one who had anything to do away from the village went out, and usually did not come back until supper time. It was said that the first Marcus Vitalos was the leader who had persuaded the people to settle down in one place instead of moving about, driving their herds here and there. It was said also that he began the custom of a common meal in the middle of the day for all the men who were working on the land. This not only saved time and trouble, but made them better acquainted and gave them time to talk over and plan the work during the hottest [pg 6]part of the day. When the day’s toil was finished, each man returned to his own house and had supper with his family. The houses were built, not too near together, around an open square. The wall around the house enclosed the sheepfold and the cattle sheds besides. The people worked and played together for much of the time, but there was a certain plot of ground that came down from father to son in each family and belonged to that family alone. Nobody else had any rights there at all.

The people were very careful to do everything according to custom. Almost everything they did had been worked out long ago into a sort of system, which was considered the best possible way to do it. Certain customs were always observed because the gods of the land were said to be pleased with them. Whether the gods had anything to do with it or not, these children of Mars were certainly more prosperous than most of their neighbors, and had many things which they might not have had if it had not been for their careful ways. The soil of the sunshiny mountain slopes was rich and fruitful and easy to work; the clear mountain waters were pleasant and wholesome, and in certain places there were hot springs which had been found good to cure disease. It was not strange that they believed [pg 7]the gods took especial care of them and would go on being kind to them so long as proper respect was shown.

Marcia wove her basket, putting a band of red around the curve before she began to draw it in, and her thoughts went far and near, as thoughts do.

The family spent very little time indoors when it was possible to be in the open air. The mother sat spinning in the doorway, and the baby played at her feet. The father was harvesting, and Marcs was out with the sheep. The next younger brother, Bruno they called him, had gone fishing. Supper was in an earthen pot comfortably bubbling over the fire. It would be ready by the time they all came home. Marcia had had her dinner and helped clear away before she came out here. Although the people had some vegetables and herbs, their main crop was grain. It was a kind of cereal a little like wheat and a little like barley, with a small hard kernel, and they called it “corn,” which meant something that is crushed or ground into meal. When it was pounded in a mortar and then boiled soft, it made good porridge. Boiled until it was very thick, and poured out on a flat stone or board to cool, it could be cut into pieces and eaten from the hand. The children had all they [pg 8]wanted, with some goat’s-milk cheese and some figs. Marcia could hear them laughing and shouting as they played with the pet kid. He was old enough now to butt the smaller ones right over on their backs, and he did it whenever they gave him a chance.

Marcia was rather a silent girl, with a great deal of long black hair in heavy braids, level black brows over thoughtful eyes, and a square little chin. As she began to draw in her basket at the top, she was thinking of the stories the old people sometimes told about a long-ago time when their ancestors lived in another and far more beautiful place. There the rivers ran over sands that gleamed like sunshine, and all the land was like a garden. The houses were larger than any here and built of a white stone. There were stone statues like those she and Marcs sometimes made in clay for the children to play with, but as large as men and women and painted to look like life. The gods came and went among the children of men and taught them all that they have ever known, but much had since been forgotten. So ran the story.

Sometimes in the heart of this mountain there were rumblings underground, as if the thunder had gone to earth like a badger. The old people said then that the smith of the gods was working [pg 9]at his forge. The noises were made by his hammer, beating out weapons for the gods. The plume of smoke that drifted lazily up from the deep bowl-shaped hollow in the mountain top came from his fires. To these people the mountain was like a great still creature, maybe a god in disguise. The forest hung on the slopes above like a bearskin on the shoulders of a giant. Up higher were barren rocks and cliffs, where nothing grew.

Marcia looked up at the mighty crest so far above, and then down across the valley, where the stubble of the grain fields shone golden in the westering sun. The river, winding away beyond it, was bluer than the sky. She wondered whether, if her people should ever go away, they would tell their children how beautiful this land was. But of course they never would go. They had lived too long where they were ever to be willing to leave their home on the mountain. No other place could be like it. The floods that sometimes ruined the lowlands never rose as high as this; the wandering, warlike tribes that sometimes attacked their neighbors did not trouble them here. They belonged to the mountain, as the chestnut trees and the squirrels did.

“Me make basket,” announced her little sister, pulling at the withes, her rag doll tumbling to [pg 10]the ground as she tried to scramble up on the wall. “Up! up!”

“O Felic’la (Kitty), don’t; you’ll spoil sister’s work! I’ll begin one for you.”

The Kitten had got her name from her disposition, which was to insist on doing whatever she saw any one else doing, just long enough to make confusion wherever she went. What with showing the little fingers how to manage the spidery ribs of the little basket she began, and working out the braided border of her own basket, Marcia’s attention was fully taken up.

She did not even see that Marcs was driving in the sheep until they began crowding into the sheepfold. The walls of this, like the walls of the house itself, were of stone, laid by that long-ago Colonus, and as solid and firm as if they were built yesterday. The stones were not squared or shaped, and there was no mortar, but they were fitted together so cleverly that they seemed as solid as the mountain itself. They hardly ever needed repair. The roofs, of seasoned chestnut boughs woven in and out, seemed almost as firm as the stonework. This place had been settled when the farmers had to fight wolves every year. Even now, if the wolves had a hard winter and got very hungry, they sometimes came around and tried to get at the sheep. [pg 11]Then the men would take their spears and long knives and go on a wolf-hunt. But that had not happened now for several years.

Why were the sheep coming in so early?

Marcs looked rather disturbed, and he was in a hurry. Bruno too was coming home without any fish, an unusual thing for him; and he looked both scared and puzzled. The mother was standing in the door, shading her eyes with her hand and looking at the sky. Marcs caught sight of the girls in their corner.

“You had better pick up all that and go in,” he called to them. “Pater sent us home as quick as we could scamper. See how strange the sky is.”

They all looked. Little Felic’la, with round eyes, dropped her basket and pointed.

“Giants,” said she.

It did not take much imagination to see, in the dark clouds spreading over the heavens, huge misty figures like gigantic men, or like gods about to descend upon the earth.

“Mater,” said Bruno, “the spring and the stream have dried up.”

The father was hurrying up from the grain fields, and the boys ran to help him manage the frightened cattle and get the load under cover. Other flocks of sheep and other men with oxen [pg 12]were hastening to shelter. The sky was growing darker and darker. Blue lights were wavering in the marshy lands by the river. The fowls, croaking and squawking in frightened haste, huddled on to their roosts, all but Felic’la’s pet white chicken, which scuttled for the house. Birds were flying overhead, uttering some sort of warnings in bird language, but there was no understanding what they said.

Illustration: Other flocks of sheep and other men with oxen were hurrying to shelter

Suddenly there was a crash as if the earth had cracked in two. Everything turned black. The [pg 13]air was filled with smoke and dust and ashes raining down from the sky.

Marcia caught up her little sister and the baskets together and groped her way to the door. Her mother darted out to drag them in and barred the door against the unknown terrors outside. The boys and their father were under the cattle shed, with the stout timber brace against the door; it had been made to keep out wild beasts. In the roar of the tumult outside the loudest shout could not have been heard.

The terrific detonations above were heavier than any thunder that ever rolled down the valley, sharper than any blows of a giant hammer. The earth trembled and rocked under foot. Then came a pounding from all sides at once, like the trampling of frantic herds. An avalanche of dust and cinders came through the smoke hole and put out the fire. Part of the roof had fallen in, for they could hear stones tumbling down on the earth floor. Through the opening they saw a crimson glow spreading over the sky. Only the beams in one corner, the corner where the mother and her children were, still held firm.

At last the rain of ashes was over, the stones no longer fell, and it was light enough for them to see each other’s faces. They had no way of knowing how long they had crouched there in the [pg 14]dark, but they had been there all night. The house had no windows and only one door. Now the father and the boys were trying to get the door open against a heap of fallen roof beams and thatch and stones and ashes and broken furniture. In a minute or two they got it far enough open to let them in.

“Are you safe, Livia? And the children?” The man’s deep voice was shaking. But even as he spoke he saw that they were alive and unhurt. He took his baby boy from his wife’s arms, and put the other arm round the two girls, while the little boys clung to him as far up as they could reach. Livia sprang up at the first sight of Marcs and Bruno, for Marcs was bleeding all down one side of his face and his shoulder, where a stone had glanced along.

“I was trying to catch the white heifer,” he said rather shamefacedly, “but she got away. It’s only a scrape along the skin—let me go, Mater.” And before she had fairly done washing off the blood and bandaging the cuts, he was out from under her hands and out of doors after Bruno.

Cautiously they all went out, and stood outside the wall, gazing about them. Everything as far as they could see was gray with ashes and cinders and stones. Here and there the woods were on [pg 15]fire. Far up toward the top of the mountain, one tall tree by itself was burning like a torch. An arched hole was broken out in the cliff above, and down through it flowed a fiery river of molten rock, like boiling honey or liquid flame, cooling as it went. Ravines were broken out, great slices of rock and earth had fallen or slid, and the river, choked by fallen trees and earth and rocks, was tearing out another channel for itself. The very face of the earth was strange and unnatural.

The walls of their own house and of most of the others in the village had been wrenched and thrown down in places by the twisting of the earth. Then the roof had given way under the pelting rocks. In the corner where Livia and her children had taken shelter, one timber, a tree trunk set deep in the ground, had held firm and kept the roof from falling. The same thing had happened in the narrow cattle shed. They went on to see how their neighbors had fared.

There was less loss of life than one might have expected, considering that the oldest man there had never seen anything like this. The people were trained to obey orders and look out for themselves. The father was the head of the family, and in any sudden emergency the people did not run about aimlessly but looked to who[pg 16]ever was there to give orders. The children had each the care of some younger child or some possession of the family. Even Felic’la, trotting along beside Marcia, held tightly in her arms her white chicken. The chicken was trying to get away, but Felic’la felt that this was no time for the family to be separated.

[pg 17]

II

TEN FAMILIES

Whatever the strange and terrible outbreak of the Mountain of Fire could have meant, the people had no thought of abandoning the land. Within a few days they were repairing or rebuilding their huts and returning to the habits of their daily life. Centuries might pass, more than one such calamity might befall the village, but there would still be men living on the same spot where their forefathers lived, on the slopes of the Mountain of Fire.

All the same, a great change had taken place, and they felt it more as time went on. They began to see that the land that had once brought forth food for them all would not now feed them with any such abundance. They would be lucky if they could secure enough food to keep them alive. Some of the fields were burned over by the lava stream; some were ruined by the dammed-up river. Cattle and sheep had been killed or had run away. Much of the grain and [pg 18]wool and other provision for the future had been destroyed. It was a very hard winter.

Yet rather than leave their homes and be strangers and outcasts without a country, they endured cold and scarcity and every kind of discomfort, even suffering. Outside the land they knew were unknown terrors,—races who did not speak their language or worship their gods; soil whose ways they did not understand, and very likely far worse troubles than had come upon them here. Most of the people simply made up their minds that what must be, they must endure, because anything else would only be a change for the worse.

There were a few, however, who did not take this view. The first to suggest that some might go away was Marcus Colonus. He spoke of it to a little group of his friends while they were in the forest cutting wood. Sylvius, whose wife and children were killed when the stones fell, and Urso the shaggy hunter, who never feared anything, man or beast, and Muraena the metal-worker, a restless fellow who knew that he could get a living wherever men used plows and weapons, all agreed that if Colonus went they would go. If ten heads of households joined the party, it would make a clan. But first the head of the village must be consulted.

[pg 19]

Old Vitalos was the grandfather of Marcus Colonus and related in one way or another to nearly every person in the village. When his grandson came to him and told what he had in mind, the old chief stroked his long white beard and did not answer at once. He seemed to be thinking, and he thought for a long time.

Before written histories, or pictured records, or even songs telling the history of a people, were in use, the memories of the old folk formed the only source of information that there was. As old men will, they told what they knew over and over again, and those who heard, even if they did not know they were remembering it, often remembered a story and told it over again, when their time came. The experiences and the wisdom that old Vitalos had gathered in the eighty years of his useful life were stored in his mind in layers, like silt in the bed of a river. Now he was digging down into his memory for something that had happened a long time ago.

When he had done thinking, he spoke.

“My son,” he said, “you tell me that you desire to go forth and make your home in another land.”

“I desire it not, my father,” said Colonus, “unless it is the will of the gods. I have thought that it may be best.”

[pg 20]

He did not know it, but while the old man’s mind was busy with the past, his keen old eyes were busy with the strong, well-built figure, the stubborn chin and the fearless eye of this man of his own blood. Colonus walked with the long, sure step of the man who knows where he is going. The fingers of his hand were square-tipped and rugged, the kind that can work. He was Saturn’s own man, made to work the land and produce food for his people. He would not give up easily, nor would he be dismayed by difficulties.

“And where will you go?” was the chief’s next question.

“That I do not know,” said Colonus. “Yet something I do know. The mountain folk are not friends to us, and we should have to fight them. Their land is all one fortress, not easy to take. To the sea we will not go, for we know nothing of the ways of the sea-tamers. Perhaps our gods would not help us in those things, which are strange to our lives. There remains the plain beyond the marsh, where the river runs out of the valley. I have been there only once, but I remember it. Around it are mountains, and the plain itself is broken by low hills, as we have seen from our heights. In such a land we might live according to customs of our fore[pg 21]fathers. The little hills can be defended, and if enemies come we can see them from far off. Is this a good plan that we make, my father?”

The patriarch looked at the fire on the altar, which burned in his house as in every other house of the village; then he looked keenly at his grandson.

Illustration: The patriarch looked at the fire on the altar

“There are two ways of living in a strange place, Marcus Colonus,” he said. “One is, to live after the manner of those who are born there, obey their gods, learn their law, eat their food, work as they do, join in their feasts and their games. The other is to fight them, and drive [pg 22]them away, or make them your servants. Which is your choice?”

Colonus hesitated. “My father,” he said, “to take the first path, I must change my nature and become another man, which I would not do even if I could. Here or in another country, or in the moon if men could go there, I should be Colonus, the farmer,—not a sailor, or a trader, or any other man. To take the second way I must be leader of many fighting men, and this is not possible, since if we go we must take our wives and children. It is in my mind, my father, that there may be a middle way. If we hold to our own customs and are faithful to our own gods and to one another, surely the gods should keep faith with us. If we hurt not the people of the land where we go, but stand ready to defend ourselves against any who try to attack us, they may allow us to live as we please. If not, then must we fight for the right to live.”

The old chief smiled. “My son,” he said, “you are wise with the wisdom of youth. Yet sometimes that is better than the unbelief of age. It is better to die fighting strangers than to die by starvation, or to fall upon one another, and I have had fear that one or the other might happen here, for truly the land is changed. It may be that this plan of yours shall end in new branching [pg 23]out of our people, the Ramnes, and in new power to our gods,—and if so, surely the gods will lead you.

“Now I have a story to tell you, and you will give careful heed to it, and not speak of it lightly, but store it away in the secret places of your mind. Sit down here, close to me, for I do not wish to be heard by any listener.

“Many years ago, before you were born, or ever the road was made over the marsh or the bridge across the river, our people were at war with a strange people from the north. My son, whom you resemble, went to fight against them and did not come back. Whether he died in battle and was left on some unknown field we did not know. We never knew, until in after years, one who was taken prisoner with him came back, his hair white as snow, and told what he had seen.

“In that country of which you have spoken, where a plain stretches away toward the sea, and is guarded with mountains and divided by a yellow river, there are people who speak a language like ours and are sons of Mars, as we are. Some live in the hills and some in the plain, and some on the Long White Mountain. Beyond the river the people are strange in every way and their gods are also strange and terrible.

“Now among the people of the Long White [pg 24]Mountain was a chief with two sons, and when he died the elder should have been ruler in his place. But the younger one, an evil man, stole into his brother’s place and killed his sons, and forbade his daughter to marry. Here my son was taken as a captive, and he became a servant to that chief.

“The daughter of the elder brother was a fair woman, and my son was a strong and comely man, and in secret they married. Then did my son escape, thinking to come back with an army and bring away his wife with their twin boys. But the wicked chief discovered what had been done, and killed the mother and the children, and sent a war party after my son to kill him also. He could have escaped even then, for he crossed a river in flood by swimming. But when they called to him that his wife and her two sons were dead, he returned across the river and fought his pursuers until they killed him. Then he went to find his beloved in that unknown country which is neither land nor water and is full of ghosts.

“Now it is in my mind that if that evil chief is dead, the people of his country may welcome you among them. Or if he is not dead, and the elder brother still lives, he may be your friend, since we are of one race and speak one language. [pg 25]In any case it is well for you to know what has happened there in other days, for before we plant a field we desire to know whether wheat, or lentils, or thistles, or salt was last sown there. I was told also that the evil man who killed the mother and the babes declared that the father of the children was the god Mars himself, not wishing that any kinswoman of his should be known to be a wife to a captive and a stranger. Now, my son, go, and peace go with you.”

Colonus rose and bowed to the old man, and went home.

Now the way was clear to prepare for the emigration, and from time to time others came to talk about it and join the company. Besides the four men who had made the plan in the first place, there were finally seven others,—Tullius, who knew all the ancient laws and customs well, Piscinus the fisherman, Pollio the leather worker, Cossus, an old and wary fighter, the two Nasos, quiet and able farmers (all of whose children had the big nose that marked the family), and Calvo, whose great-grandfather had bequeathed to his descendants a tendency to grow bald young. Calvo already had a little thin spot on the crown of his head, though he was not much over thirty. Among them they had all the most necessary trades and could supply most things they needed. [pg 26]But every one of them was also a good farmer; in fact, in such migrations the settlers were most generally known as coloni or farmers. They had to understand the care of the land in order to get through the first years without starving to death, for there were no cities where they went.

Muraena could make unusually fine weapons, and he took care that each of the party should be provided with the best that he could make. The grain was chosen with care, for when they found the place for their settlement they would want it for seed. The finest animals were chosen to stock the farms. The women who were not going made gifts of their best weaving to the housewives who were. The lads who were old enough to fight gave especial attention to their bows and their slings, and spent a good deal of time practicing.

All the men who had agreed to go had sons and daughters except Sylvius, and most of the children were old enough to do something to help. They were very much excited, and secretly most of them were rather scared.

There was no priest in the company; that is to say, there was no man who had nothing else to do, for that was not the custom among the Ramnes. They chose a man they all trusted for this office. Tullius was chosen priest by the [pg 27]coloni. It was due to his advice that the water jars and the leather bottles for water-carrying were well selected, strong and numerous. It was a hobby of his, the drinking of pure water, and he believed it had more to do with health than any other one thing. He also believed that the gods do not protect the careless and the lazy. For instance, if a man were to pray to Mars to keep his house from being destroyed by fire, and then burn brush on a windy day in summer, when the wind was blowing that way, and a spark happened to light on the thatch, Mars would not be likely to put it out. He would let it burn. If the gods went to the trouble of saving people from the consequences of not using common sense, they would show themselves to be fools, and not in the least god-like. Tullius prayed at all proper times, but when he was working he worked with his head as well as with his hands. He said that that was what heads were for.

[pg 28]

III

THE SACRED YEAR

In the month of spring when day and night are equal, and the young lambs frisk on new grass, a company of young men and girls went slowly out from a little town on the eastern side of a great mountain range. The long narrow country stretching out into the sea, which is now called Italy, is divided by this range lengthwise into two parts, and in the earliest days of the country the people on one side had hardly anything to do with those on the other. On the coast toward the sunrise were many harbors, and seafaring men from other countries came there sometimes to trade. On the other side, the young people who were now setting their faces westward did not at all know what they would find.

They were all of about the same age, and they looked grave and a little anxious; some of the girls had been crying. The day had come when they were to leave the place where they had been born and brought up and go into an unknown [pg 29]world, and it was not likely that they would ever come back.

They belonged to the Sabine people, who used to live on the banks of the rivers not far from the coast, and kept cattle and sheep and goats, and raised grain and different kinds of vegetables, and had vineyards. The land was so rich that they had more food and other things than they needed, and used to trade more or less with the strangers from other countries. So many strangers came there and settled in course of time that the first inhabitants were crowded back toward the mountains, away from the sea. Then war parties of Umbrians from the north came pushing their way into the country, and the peaceable farming folk were obliged to retreat still farther up the rivers into the mountain, and clear new land and settle it. This happened all a long time ago. It was not easy to live there, and they were poorer than they used to be, for so much of the land was rock and forest that they had to spend a great deal of their time getting it into a fit condition for either grain or cattle or anything else. But they learned to do most things for themselves, as mountain people do; they were not afraid of hard work or danger, and although they lived plainly they were comfortable.

[pg 30]

But even here they were not let alone. About twenty years earlier, before any of these boys and girls were born, the Umbrian war parties came up into the higher valleys, and the Sabines had to fight for their very lives. They won the war and drove back the invaders in the end, but it began to seem that some day they would be wiped out altogether and forgotten.

After this war there were some hard years. Many of the men had been killed, and the fields had been neglected when the fighting was going on. Where the enemy came they trampled down and ruined the vineyards, and burned houses and barns, and drove off the flocks and herds for their own use. That one year of war almost ruined the work that had been done in half a lifetime. If they were to be obliged to spend half their time defending what land they had, every year would be worse than the last.

Finally Flamen the priest, the man most respected in the central and largest of the towns, spoke of an old custom called the “sacred spring.” It was a method of making sacrifice to the gods when things came to a very evil pass indeed. In a way it was a sacrifice, and in a way it was a chance of saving something from the general ruin. Flamen believed that if they kept a “sacred spring” their guardian god, [pg 31]Mars, would help them. All this happened a long time before the calamity that drove the emigrants to set out from the Mountain of Fire. There are all sorts of reasons why people change their place of living and begin new settlements in a strange country, but in those days it was a much more serious matter than it is now, and it took almost a life-and-death reason to make them do it.

When villages agreed to keep a sacred year, as these finally did, they gave to the gods everything that was born in that year. The cattle, sheep, goats and poultry were killed in sacrifice, when they were grown. But the children born that spring were not killed. They were taught that when they were old enough they were to go out and build homes for themselves in another land, trusting in the great and wise god Mars to show them where to go. If this was done, even though the Umbrians attacked the country again and again, and killed off the people or made them slaves, there would still be Sabine men and women living in the old ways, somewhere in the world. And now the time had come for them to set out to find their new home.

Flamen the priest gave a daughter in the year of the sacred spring; Maurs the smith gave a son. Almost every family in all the country [pg 32]round had a son or daughter or at least a near relative who was going. Some of the young people were married before the day came for them to go; in fact, there were a great many brides and grooms in the party. The parents had given their children plenty of seed grain and roots and plants, cuttings of shrubs and trees and vines, animals and fowls to stock their farms, provision for the journey, and whatever clothing and other goods they could carry without the risk of being delayed or tempting plunderers to kill them for their riches. Everything that could be done was done to make their great undertaking successful.

At daybreak on the day that had been decided upon, the farewell ceremonies began. Hymns were sung and a feast was held, prayers and sacrifices were made; there were all sorts of farewell wishes and loving hopes and instructions. Nothing, however, could make it anything but a very solemn occasion. The young people must go beyond the mountains, for on this side they could have no hope of finding any place to live. No one knew what awaited them. But whatever happened, no one would have dreamed of breaking the promise made to the gods. A pledge is a pledge, and not the shrewdest cheat can deceive the gods, for they know men’s hearts.

[pg 33]

Illustration: All the young voices took up the song

Flam’na, the wife of young Mauros the maker of swords, looked back just once as they lost sight of the village. Then she led in the singing of the last of the farewell songs. She had a beautiful voice, clear and strong and sweet; her husband’s deeper tones joined hers, and then all the young voices took up the song as streams run into a river. The fathers and mothers heard the wild music of their singing floating down from the mountain forest as they climbed the narrow trail. They were following a path which the young men knew from their hunting expeditions, which led around the shoulder of the mountain to a pass [pg 34]through which they could cross and go down the other side. Now that they were fairly on their way, the care of the young animals they were driving, all of them full of life and not at all used to keeping together in strange woods, took up most of the attention of the whole party.

On the western slopes, as far as the hunters had ever gone, there were no people living in villages—only scattered woodcutters and hunters, and here and there a poor ignorant family in a little clearing. If they went far enough down to reach the upper valleys of streams or rivers, they might find just the sort of place they wanted for their new home. Others must have done this in the past, or there would never have been the custom of the sacred spring, for the emigrant parties would have been all killed off or starved to death. The young men said that what others had done they could do, and they went valiantly on, chanting a marching song.

In these spring days, as time passed, the mornings were earlier and the twilights later. They lived well while their provisions lasted, and there was game in the forest and fish in the little streams. They always carried coals from their camp fires to light the next fires, and in the cool evenings the leaping flames were pleasant. [pg 35]They also kept wild beasts from coming too near.

There were three groups of the young people, from three different villages. At night they gathered in three camps; each “company” which ate bread together was made up of relatives and friends. After they had crossed the mountain pass and before they had gone very far on the other side, they halted for a day to talk matters over and decide what to do next. It was very important now to take the right course.

The youths gathered under a huge oak to hold a council while their wives and sisters and cousins busied themselves with affairs of their own. The men would have to do the fighting, and the girls were quite willing to leave the general plans to them. They were a sober and serious group of young fellows as they sat there in the dappling sunshine. It was enough to make any man serious. Mars had brought them so far without any serious mishap, and he might go on protecting them all the rest of the way; but the question was, how to discover what was best to do. All the ways down the mountain looked very much alike, and yet one might lead into a country inhabited by fierce and cruel enemies, and another into a barren rocky waste, and another to a fertile valley.

Mauros was their leader, so far as they had [pg 36]one, but he called on each man in turn to say what he thought. There seemed to be a good deal of doubt about the wisdom of so large a party traveling together. The chances were against their finding a valley large enough for all to live in. They were not likely to find so much cleared land or good pasture in any one place. If they were to separate, and each party took a different direction, one or another certainly ought to be able to find the right sort of place. Perhaps all of them would. Even one of the camps was strong enough to defend itself against any ordinary enemy. They were all young and strong, active and full of courage, and as time went on they would be traveling lighter and lighter, for the provisions would be eaten up and the spare animals killed for food. They decided to do this, to offer a sacrifice to Mars and pray to him to direct them. The next morning all were ready to go on and waited only for a sign.

Each of the gods had certain favorite animals, birds and plants. Mars had plenty of servants he could send to do his will, and surely he would show them what to do.

Flam’na stood with her cousins, watching Mauros as he stood in the center of the silent group under the great oak tree. The fires were [pg 37]flickering slowly down to red coals, and a little wind blew from the west. Suddenly their lead-ox, the wisest of the team, lifted his head and sniffed the breeze, pawed the earth, bellowed, and plunged down a grassy glade, followed more slowly by the other oxen and the whole party in that camp. The ox was one of the beasts of Mars. Nothing could be clearer than this. Mauros turned and waved a laughing farewell to the other camps, and raced on to make sure that the ox did not get out of sight. Before they had gone very far they came to a tiny brook, which went chuckling on as if it knew something interesting. They followed it downward and began to find more and more grass as the valley widened and the trees grew less thick. Finally they found a place where the water was good and the soil rich, and there was room for all their beasts to graze. They called the town they built there Bovianum, after the ox of Mars. They were sometimes called by their neighbors the Bovii, the cattlemen, for herds of cattle were not very common in that part of the country.

In the camp to the right of this, not long after the departure of the ox, one of the girls saw something red moving high up on the trunk of a tree, and pointed it out to her brother. His eyes followed hers, and soon all the company [pg 38]gathered in the edge of the woodlands, watching that scarlet dot among the thick leaves. Then, with a sudden rush of little wings, a green woodpecker flew down from the tree top and perched on a bough just over their heads. He looked down knowingly into the upturned, eager faces, and with a cheery call flew away down a ravine, and alighted again. Breathless, wide-eyed and silent, they ventured nearer. He beat his tiny tattoo on the bark as if he were sounding a drum, and flew on. Now scarlet was the color of Mars, the drum was his favorite instrument of music, and Picus the woodpecker was his own bird. Following their little feathered guide, they went farther and farther north until they found a home among the spurs of the Apennines. They called themselves the Picentes, the Woodpecker People, and their children all knew the story of the sacred spring and the bird of Mars.

The third company had no time to watch the others, for some wolves had winded their sheep, and the young men had to run to fight them off. Some of them chased the skulking gray thieves for some distance and came back with the news that the wolves had led them southward to a rocky height, where they could look over the tops of the trees below and see an uncommonly fine place for the colony. This was as plain a sign [pg 39]as one could ask for, and the whole party, in great satisfaction and relief, went on to the home that the wolves had found for them. The wolf was another of the beasts of Mars. This settlement took the name of the Herpini, the Wolf People.

All three of the Sabine colonies prospered and grew strong, and although they had little to do with each other they lived in peace with relatives and neighbors. There came to be many villages on the slopes of the Apennines in which the Sabine language was spoken. This was the last time that they were forced to keep a Sacred Year, for the Umbrian war parties left them alone, and perhaps did not even know where they were; and the mountain land was pleasant and fertile, out of the way of floods. There was no reason in the world why the brave young couples who founded their homes here, and worked and played and kept holiday, and loved the green earth as all their forefathers had loved it, should not be prosperous and happy, and they were, for many a long year.

[pg 40]

IV

THE BANDITTI

When the Sabines came to the western side of the mountain range, they did not try to plow much land at first. They had to find out what the land was like.

People who lived by pasturing their cattle and sheep wherever it was convenient hardly ever settled in the same place for good, because the pasture differs from year to year even in the same neighborhood. A hillside which is rich and green in a wet year may be barren and dry when there are long months with no rain. A valley that is rich in long juicy grass in spring may be under water later in the summer. Herdsmen need to range over a wide country, and especially they need this if they keep sheep. The sheep nibble the grass down to the roots, and when they have finished with a field there is nothing on it for any other animal that year. But the true farmer, who uses his land for a great many different purposes, can shift his crops and his pasturage [pg 41]around so that he can have a home, and this was what the Sabines wished to do.

For a farm of this kind, a place between mountain and plain is best, with a variety of soil and good water supply. In such a mountain valley as the Herpini chose, with wooded heights above it, the roots of the trees bind the earth together and keep the wet of the winter rains from drying up, so that there is not often either flood or drought, and almost always good grass is found somewhere in the neighborhood. The people began by raising beans and peas to dry for winter, and herbs for flavoring, and in the summer they had kale and other fresh vegetables. Now and then, for a holiday, they killed a sheep or a young goat or a calf and had a feast. The heart and inner organs were burned on the altar for an offering to the gods; the flesh was served out to the people, cooked with certain herbs used according to old rules. For vineyards and grain fields, which needed a certain kind of soil, they chose, after awhile, exactly the ground which suited them, and plowed their common land, and sowed their corn and planted their vines.

Most of the farm land was worked by all the people in common. This was a very old custom. There were good reasons for it. In farming, the work has to be done when the weather is suitable. [pg 42]The planting or haying or harvesting cannot be put off. By working in company the men saved time and labor, and if one happened to be ill the land was taken care of all the same, and nothing was lost. Also, in this way all of the land suitable for a certain crop was used for that crop. Nobody was wasting time and strength trying to make rocky or barren soil feed his family, while his strength and skill were needed on good ground. The third and perhaps the best reason was, that in this way the houses were not scattered, but close together, so that no enemy could attack any one in the village without fighting all. The village was clean and wholesome, because no animals were kept there except as pets. The flocks and herds were taken care of by men and boys trained to that work. Each man had for his own the land around his own house, and every year he was allowed a part of the common land for his especial use, but he did not own it as he owned his house and lot,—the heredium, as it was called.

Everything connected with the cultivation of the land was in the hands of twelve men chosen for it, called the Arval Brethren, or the Brethren of the Field. It was their work to see that all was done according to the well-proved rules and customs, that the gods received due respect, and [pg 43]that the festivals in their honor were held in proper form.

In a society where people have to depend upon each other in this way, there is no room for a person who will not fit in, and who expects to be taken care of without doing his share of the work. Here and there, in one village and another, a boy grew up who shirked his work, took more good things than his share and made trouble generally. Sometimes he got over it as he grew older, but sometimes he did not; and if he could not live peaceably at home, he had to be driven out to get his living where he could. There was no place in a village ruled by the gods for any one who did not respect and obey the laws.

These outlaws did not starve, for they could get a kind of living by fishing and hunting, and they stole from the ignorant country people and from travelers. They were known after awhile as banditti, the banished men, the men who had been driven out of civilized society. Some of them left their own country altogether and went down to the seashore, or into the strange land across the yellow river. The people in the villages did not know much about them. They were very busy with their own concerns.

There were two great festivals in the year, to [pg 44]do honor to the gods of the land. One was in the shortest days of the year, early in winter. This was the feast of Saturn. He was the god who filled the storehouses, who sent water to drench the earth and feed the crops, who looked after the silent world of the roots and underground growing things generally. When his feast was held, the harvest was all in, the wine was made, and it was time to choose the animals to be killed for food and not kept through the winter. For four or five days there was a general jollification. No work was done except what was necessary. There was feasting and singing and story telling, and some of the wilder youths usually dressed up in fantastic costumes like earth spirits, and wound up the holiday with dancing and songs and shouting and all sorts of antics. Sometimes a clever singer made new songs to the old tunes, with jokes and puns about well-known people of the place. These songs were always done in a certain style, and this style of verse came to be known later as Saturnian poetry, and the sly personal fun in them was called satirical. It was part of the joke that the singer should keep a perfectly grave face.

Illustration: The people gathered in the public square

The people gathered in the public square.

The other festival came in the spring, when the grass was green and the leaves were fresh and bright, and flowers were wreathing shrubs [pg 47]and hillsides like dropped garlands. It was in honor of the beautiful open-handed goddess called Dea Dia, or sometimes Maia. One spring morning the children of the village could hear the blowing of the horn in the public square, and then they all understood that the priest was about to give out the announcement of the festival of Maia. They crowded up to hear, even more excited and joyous than the older people.

There were no books or written records; not even a written language was known to the villagers. The priest of the village, who kept account of the days when ceremonies were due, and the changes of the moon, gave out the news, each month, of the things which were to happen. The months were not all the same length, and no two villages had just the same calendar. The year was counted from the founding of the city, whenever that was, and naturally it was not the same in different places. The people gathered in the public square, waiting to hear what Emilius the priest had to tell them.

He was a tall and noble-looking man, generally beloved because he always tried to deal justly and kindly with his neighbors, and was so wise that he usually succeeded. The person who paid him the deepest and most reverent attention was little Emilia, his daughter, who believed [pg 48]him to be the wisest and best of men. She stood with her mother in a little group directly in front of him, looking up at him with her deep, serious blue eyes, in happy pride.

Emilia was six and a half years old. This would be her first May festival, to remember, for she had been ill the year before when it came, and one’s memory is not very good before one is five years old. Her bright gold-brown hair curled a little and looked like waves of sunshine all over her graceful small head. It was tied with a white fillet to keep it out of her eyes, and in the fillet, like a great purple jewel, was thrust an anemone from a wreath her mother had been making. Her mother dressed her in the finest and softest of undyed wool, bleached white as snow. She wore a little tunic with a braided girdle, and over her shoulders a square of the same soft cloth as a mantle; it looked like the wings of a white bird as it shone in the morning sun. On her feet were sandals of kidskin, and around her neck was a necklace of red beads that had come from far away. A trader brought them from the place by the seashore where such things were made. From this necklace hung a round ball of hammered copper, made to open in two halves, and inside it was a little charm to keep off bad spirits. The charm was made [pg 49]of the same red stone and looked like the head of a little goat.

Emilia had never in her life known what it was to be afraid of any one, or to see any one’s eyes rest upon her unkindly. The world was very interesting to her. It was filled with wonderful and beautiful things, especially just now. Each day she saw some new flower or bird or plant or animal she had never seen before. Spring in those mountains was very lovely. It hardly seemed as if it could be the real world.

The people were all rather fine-looking and strong and active. They worked and played in the open air and led healthy lives, and being well and full of spirits, there was really no reason why they should be ugly.

Emilius told them when the feast of Maia would take place. The moon, which was called the measurer, was all they had to go by in reckoning the year. The feast was to be the day after it changed. Emilius repeated the names of the Brethren of the Field, and mentioned things that should be done to prepare for the feast, and that was all.

Far up on the heights of the mountain above, in among the rocks where nothing grew except wind-stunted trees and patches of moss and fern, there was another settlement of which the vil[pg 50]lage people knew nothing. Two of its men happened to be farther down the mountain than usual, hunting, when this announcement was made. They got up on a rock overgrown with bushes, where they could look down into the village, and lay watching what went on. They were not beautiful or happy. They looked as they lay on the rock, spying over the edge with their hard, greedy eyes under shaggy unkempt locks, rather like wild beasts.

One was a runaway from this very place, and he knew it was nearly time for the May festival. His name was Gubbo, and he had been cast out of the village because he was cruel. He liked to torment animals and children; he liked to compel others to give him what he wanted. When finally he had been caught slashing at the favorite ox of a man he had had a quarrel with, he had been beaten and kicked out and told never to come back. He had wandered about for some years, and then joined the banditti on the mountain.

These banditti came from many towns; some were even of another race, of the strange people beyond the river. There were not very many of them, but there were enough to surprise and beat down a much larger number if circumstances favored. Their usual plan was not to fight in [pg 51]the open, but creep up near a place where stores or treasure happened to be kept, when the most skillful thieves would get in and carry off the plunder to the hiding-place of the others, who stood ready to fight or to act as porters, whichever might be necessary. If they were chased, the best runners drew off the pursuers after them and joined the rest of the band later.

They did not spend all or even very much of their time in their mountain den. They had picked this country as their headquarters because it was largely wilderness above the farming belt. The rocks held many caves and good strongholds. Often they went off and were gone for perhaps a month at a time, prowling about distant settlements, or haunting the roads the traders traveled. Many a luckless merchant had been knocked on the head from behind, or dragged out of his boat and drowned, by these thieves, with no one to tell the tale.

They had found the Sabines here when they came, and it had not seemed worth while—yet—to quarrel with them. The scattered country folk, who went in deadly fear of the robbers and did whatever they were told, said that the farmers could fight, and kept watch over what they had, and had very little but their animals and food stores. There was no use in provoking a war [pg 52]with them. The better plan would be to terrify them so thoroughly that they would give the bandits anything they asked, to keep the peace.

There was no use in upsetting these quiet folk so that they could not work. They could be told that unless they brought to a certain place, at certain times, grain, cattle and other provision, and left them for the outlaws, something terrible would happen to them. They certainly could not hunt the mountains over for the band, and they could not know how many or how few there were. This plan worked well in other places, and it would do very well here.

The leader, the oldest of the robbers, had once been a slave, and he knew all the things that are done to slaves who resist their masters. The others were afraid of him, and there were very few other things in the world of which they were afraid. He listened to the report of Gubbo and his companion, and sent them back to watch the village during the time of the festival, see who the chief men were, how well off the people seemed to be, how many fighting men they had, and where they kept their grain and other stores.

For five days one or the other of the bandits was always watching from the edge of the rock. If they had been the kind of men to understand beauty, they must have owned that the festival [pg 53]of Maia was a beautiful sight. But it only made them angry and bitter to think that they could not have all the comforts these people had. Often they did not have enough to eat, and then there would be a raid on some village, and all the men would eat far more than was comfortable, and drink more than was at all wise, and the feast usually ended in a fight. This festival in the village was not at all like that.

The young girls had a great part in the dancing and singing and processions of Maia. A tall pillar, decorated with garlands and strips of colored cloth, had been set up, and a circle of white-robed little maidens, with wreaths of flowers on their heads, danced around it. Little Emilia sat sedately in the center, wand in hand, and directed the dancing. There were stately processions, and marching and countermarching of white figures bearing garlands; the oxen appeared with their horns wreathed in flowers; blossoms were strewn all over the public square as the day passed. The blessing of Maia was asked upon the springing grain, now standing like a multitude of fairy sword blades above the brown soil; upon the bean and pea vines climbing as fast as ever they could up the poles set for them; upon the vineyards, every vine of which was tended like a child; and upon the orchards, [pg 54]all one drift of warm white petals blowing on the wind. The chestnut trees were a-bloom and looked like huge tents with great candelabra set here and there over them; and the steady hum of the bees was like the drone of a chanter.

When the day was over, and all the people were asleep, the spies went back to the den in the rocks and told what they had seen.

The chief decided that these people were to be let alone all through the summer and early fall, until all their stores of wine and grain and fat beasts were in, and they went afield to get nuts in the forest. That would be the time to strike. The child of the head priest could be carried off, perhaps, or the son of the chief man of the village. Then one of the country people would be sent to tell the villagers that unless they agreed to furnish provisions at certain times and places, the child would be killed. That would bring them to heel.

So the summer passed, and the unconscious, happy people prayed for a good harvest.

[pg 55]

V

THE WOLF CUB

The new moon was rising above a wet waste of marsh and tussock and tasseled reeds. A man and two boys climbed hastily up a hill. Before them they drove a bleating, cold, rain-wet, bewildered flock. As any shepherd will admit, sheep are among the silliest creatures in the world, and if there is any way for them to get themselves into trouble they will do it. Even so small a flock as this had proved it abundantly.

A dry time, when all the grass in the usual pastures was burned brown or eaten down to the roots, had been followed by a rainy fall and winter. The shepherd and his two foster sons—his wife had long been dead—left their hillside pastures by the river and went with their flock wherever they could find any grass. They meandered about for some time on the great plain that was usually too wet for sheep; that grass was rank and sometimes unwholesome, but it [pg 56]was better than nothing. When the wet weather began, they were on the other side, and they edged up among the foothills of the mountains that stood around it, wherever they could without getting into trouble with people who had cattle there. They would have had more difficulty than they did if it had not been for the wolf cub which the taller of the two boys had tamed. He was named Pincho, and he seemed to be everywhere at once. No sheep ever delayed for an instant in obeying him.

For hours they herded the tired flock up and down, among hills and gullies, until they came on a little hollow among bushes, out of the way of the water, where they could stop and get a little sleep. The man and the boys were all three wet, cold and hungry, even hungrier than the sheep were, for they could not eat grass; hungrier than Pincho, who now and then caught some sort of wild creature and ate it on the spot. They ate what little they had left, and then one kept watch while the others slept, by turns, in the driest place that could be found.

When it was light enough to see, they looked about to find out where they were. Farther down the slope and to one side of them was a village, and the people there kept sheep and also cattle. Nobody seemed to be doing much [pg 57]work, for half the men were standing about talking, and the shrill note of a flute player came up the hill as if it were a signal.

The boys did not know what this meant, for they had never been near a village on a holiday,—and not often at any time. But the shepherd knew; he knew that it must be a feast day, and he told the boys that if they wished to go to the village and see what was going on, he would look after the sheep. They must not try to go in unless they were asked, and they ought not to take Pincho; some one might see him and kill him for a wolf, not knowing that he was tame.

But Pincho had something to say about that. He had no intention of being left behind, and the shepherd had to cut a thong off his sheepskin cloak to tie up the determined beast. Then when the boys were about two-thirds of the way to the village, something came sniffing at their heels, and there was Pincho, with the thong trailing after him; he had gnawed it in two.

His young master only laughed. “Here, Pincho!” he said good-humoredly, and as the young wolf came and licked his hand he made a loop of the trailing end and thrust his strong brown fingers into it. And so they came up to the edge of the village where the people were making ready the feast,—two boys and a wolf.

[pg 58]

The lads were both rather tall for their years, and moved with the wild grace of creatures that constantly use every muscle and never get stiff or lazy. They wore only the shepherd’s tunic of sheepskin with the wool outward, and a braided leather girdle to hold a knife and a leather pouch. In his left hand each held a crook, with a sharp flint point at the other end so that it could be used as a spear if a weapon were needed. The taller led the wolf, which fawned and licked his bare feet; the other, who was not quite so dark of hair and eye, was playing on a reed pipe, taking up the call of the pipers and weaving it into a simple melody. For a moment the people did not know who they could be. All the shepherd boys in that neighborhood were known. Surely only gods come out of the forest would be accompanied by a wolf.

They did not enter the village. They halted on the outside where they could look into the square and see what was going on, and they stared in silent wonder, like animals.

The fact was that they were so hungry that if they had dared, they would have rushed on the tables and seized the bread and meat and honey cakes, and run away into the forest to devour them as if they were wolves themselves. As it was, the intelligent nose of Pincho caught the [pg 61]maddening odor of meat, and it was all his master could do to hold him.

Illustration: Whoever they were, it was proper at this time to offer food to strangers

Whoever they were, it was proper at this time to offer food to strangers.

Whoever they were, it was proper at this time to offer food to strangers, and if they were gods or wood spirits this was the way to find it out. The wife of Emilius the priest, a tall and gracious woman, took up a flat basket-work tray and filled it with portions of the various good things on the nearest table. By the way they took the food and ate it, she saw that they were probably only hungry boys. Pincho got the bones, but only when it was certain they were not mutton bones. He had never been allowed to find out what the flesh of a sheep was like. This was a portion of a yearling calf.

The matron’s little daughter, a straight, slender, bright-haired child, came with her, and when Pincho sniffed curiously at her little sandalled feet she did not draw back, but stooped and patted his head. The boy with the reed pipe, when he had finished his share of the food, sidled away toward the musicians, but the other one stayed where he was, his arm round the shaggy neck of the young wolf, and they asked him questions. He explained, when they were able to make out what he said—for he spoke in a thick voice as the peasants did—that he and his brother lived with a shepherd on the other [pg 62]side of the great plain. The shepherd had told them to ask whether they might let their sheep graze here awhile, until the water had gone down so that they could get back. Emilius the priest and some of the other men were there by this time, and they said that this would be allowed.

“Why do you stay away from your own village on a holiday?” asked the child straightforwardly.

“We have no village,” the boy answered. “We live by ourselves.”

The little maiden knit her straight, dark, delicate brows. People who had no village and lived by themselves had never come to her knowledge before. She thought it must be very dull not to have any holidays, or playmates.

“Do the sheep and the wolves live together in your country?” she asked, watching Pincho’s wedge-shaped, savage head as he gnawed his bone.

“No; but Pincho is not really a wolf. He is my friend.”

“How can you be friends with a wolf?” persisted the small questioner. “Wolves are thieves and murderers. They kill sheep. If they killed only the old sheep, I would not care. The old ram with horns knocks people down. But they kill the little lambs.”

[pg 63]

“Pincho has never killed a sheep.”

“Emilia, my child,” said her mother, “it is time for the dance of the children.” And she led her little daughter away.

The boys of the village were very curious about Pincho. He had been caught when he was a tiny cub and his mother had been killed. There were two cubs, but the other one died. This one slept at his master’s feet every night. The lad beckoned to his brother, who began to play a curious, jerky tune, and then the boy and the wolf danced together, to the wonder and entertainment of the villagers. Then in his turn the boy began to ask questions. What was a holiday and why did they keep it?

The boys explained that there were many holidays at different times. There was one in the later days of winter called the Lupercal, in honor of the god who protected the sheep. That was the shepherds’ festival, and when it took place, the young men ran about with thongs in their hands, striking everybody who came in the way. The day they were now keeping was Founder’s Day, in honor of the founder of their town.

This was puzzling. How could one man found a town? A town grew up where many people came to live in one place.

[pg 64]

“Nay, my son,” said a white-haired old man, the oldest man in the village, who had sat down near the group. He spoke in the language the shepherd spoke, so that it was easy to understand him. “That is nothing more than a flock of crows or a herd of cattle that eat together where there is food. The man who founds a city determines first to make a home for the spirits of his people, as a man who builds a house makes a home for his family. His gods dwell in this place, and he himself will dwell there when he is dead, and his spirit is joined to theirs. Without the good will of the spirits there is no good fortune. How can men know what is wise to do, or what is right, if they do not ask help of the gods, as a child asks its father’s will? Have you never heard this? Has your father not told you?”

“We have neither father nor mother,” said the boy, but not shamefacedly,—even a little proudly. “We were found when we were little children by Faustulus the shepherd who is to us as a father, and we serve him.”

This did seem rather strange. Some of the village people drew back and whispered among themselves. Could the lads be gods or spirits indeed? They were strong and handsome—but who knew what things lived in the forest?

[pg 65]

“Nay,” said Emilius, “they have eaten our salt.”

“The shepherd sometimes prays,” the lad was saying thoughtfully. “He prays when he has lost his way. I asked him once when I was very small what he was saying, and he said that he prayed to his god. He said the god was like a man, but had goat’s legs and little horns under curling hair, and played on a reed pipe. My brother said that he had seen him in the forest, but I never did. When the shepherd sees anything unlucky, he makes the sign of his god—thus.”

He held up his fist with all the fingers except the little finger doubled in; this, with the thumb, stuck straight up. “He calls it ‘making the horns.’ ”

“The people across the river have many gods,” he went on cheerfully. “Once I ran away and found a boat, and went over there, to see what it was like. The priests watch the flight of birds for signs; and the people give a great deal of time to fortune telling. An old witch told mine for love, and she said that I should rule over a great people. Then I laughed and came away, for I knew that she must think me a fool to be pleased with lies. She said that their laws were taught the priests by a little man no bigger [pg 66]than a child, who came up out of a field which a farmer was plowing.”

The priest Emilius smiled. “My son,” he said kindly, “these things are foolish and lead to nothing. If you will stay with us and help to tend our flocks, you shall learn of our gods, and live as we do, sharing our work and our play. But unless you obey our law we cannot let you stay. The gods are not pleased when strangers come into their sacred places.

“The founder of our city is as a kind father who watches us and sees what we do, whether it is good or whether it is evil. Our children are his children, and our fortunes are his care, as they were when he was alive and ruled his people wisely as a father. This is why we honor him. Will you stay with us and be our herd boy?”

The lad stood up, his staff in one hand, the other in the loop of the wolf’s collar. “We owe the shepherd our lives,” he said, with his proud young head erect. “We will go back to him and serve him until we are men. When I am a man, I think I will found a city of my own.”

His brother laughed. In a flash the lad turned on him and knocked him down. Emilius caught him by the shoulder.

“My boy,” he said sternly, “there must be no quarreling on a holiday. Go back to your [pg 67]own place, for you are right to cherish your foster father. In good or bad fortune, in all places and at all times, it is right to return kindness for kindness, to show reverence to the old who have cared for the young.”

The villagers, puzzled, curious and a little afraid, watched the two wild figures and their strange companion move away into the long shadows of the woodlands. They did not come back when any one could see them, but about a week later there was found at the door of the priest a basket woven roughly but not unskillfully of the bark of a tree, lined with fresh leaves and filled with wild honey and chestnuts.

[pg 68]

VI

BOUNDARY LINES

The boy with the pet wolf did not come again to the village where he had first seen a holiday feast and heard what religion was, but he saw a great deal of it for all that. His brother never cared to go back and seemed to take no interest in what he had seen.

Pero, one of the shepherds, while out looking for stray lambs on the hills, met the youngster and his wolf coming down with two of the woolly black-faced truants. They had been hunting, the boy said, and had come across these lambs far up on the heights where lambs had no business to be, and brought them back. When the shepherd asked the lad his name, he said the Cub was as good a name as any. The shepherd was an old man and had seen many queer things in his life and heard of queerer ones. He had found that most frightful stories, when one came to know the truth of them, were some quite nat[pg 69]ural incident made large in the eyes of a frightened man. This boy might, of course, be a wood demon, and his wolf might be another, servants of some evil power, but the shepherd had never seen any such beings and he did not know how they were supposed to look. When he offered the Cub a piece of his bannock, made with salt and water and meal and cooked on a hot stone, it was accepted and eaten, and Pincho the wolf ate some of it also. Pincho would eat almost anything. But that ought to prove that they were no devils, for if they were they would not have eaten the salt.

Pero was a little lame from a fall he had had several years ago, although he got about more nimbly than some younger men. He found the help of this wild youth and his wilder companion very convenient at times. After awhile he began to see that the Cub was very curious about the customs of the Sabine village. He did not ask many questions, but he would listen as long as Pero would talk. Many a long still hour the two spent, on the grass while the sheep grazed, or coming slowly down the slope toward the village at nightfall, but always, when they came near the village gate, Pero would look around presently and find that he was alone.

The first time that Pero noticed this curiosity [pg 70]was one day when they were high above the village so that they could look down on a level stretch of land where the men were marking out a new field. Boundary lines were very important with any people as soon as they stopped wandering from place to place and settled down to work the same land, year after year. Of course, it takes more than one season to make any plot of ground produce all it can, and no man cares to do a year’s work of which he gets none of the benefit; there must be a clear understanding on the subject of the boundary.

In the beginning there were no writings, or deeds, or public records to mark the line of a farm, and the only way to protect property rights was by ceremonies which would make people remember the boundary lines, and the landmarks which it was a horrible crime to move.

Pero began by explaining that every house of the village had to be separated from every other house by at least two and one half feet. As each house was a sort of family temple, the home of the spirits of the ancestors of that family; naturally nobody but these spirits had any right there. Two families could not occupy the same house any more than two persons could occupy the same place. On the same plan, each field was enclosed by a narrow strip of ground never [pg 71]touched by the plow or walked on or otherwise used. This was the property of the god of boundaries, Terminus.

The boundary line of each field was marked by a furrow, drawn at the time the field was marked out for the village or the individual owner. At certain times, this furrow would be plowed again, the owners chanting hymns and offering sacrifices. On this line the men were now placing the landmarks they called the termini. The terminus was a wooden pillar, or the trunk of a small tree, set up firmly in the soil. In its planting certain ceremonies were observed.

First a hole was dug, and the post was set up close by, wreathed with a garland of grasses and flowers. Then a sacrifice of some sort was offered—in this case a lamb—and the blood ran down into the hole. In the hole were placed also grain, cakes, fruits, a little honeycomb and some wine, and burned, live coals from the hearth fire of the home or the sacred fire of the village being ready for this. When it was all consumed the post was planted on the still warm ashes. If any man in plowing the field ran his furrow beyond the proper limit, his plowshare would be likely to strike one of these posts. If he went so far as to overturn it or move it, the penalty was death. There was really no excuse [pg 72]for him, for the line was plainly marked for all to see.

The Cub looked down at the solemnly marching group, the white oxen, and the setting of the posts with bright and interested eyes.

Illustration: “I have seen something like this before,” he said

“I have seen something like this before,” he said. “Everywhere it is death to move a landmark. In some places not posts but stones are used. The dark people across the river say that he who moves his neighbor’s landmark is hated by the gods and his house shall disappear. His land shall not produce fruits, his sons and grandsons shall die without a roof above their heads, and in the end there shall be none left of his [pg 73]blood. Hail, rust and the dog-star shall destroy his harvests, and his limbs shall become sore and waste away.”

Pero stared in astonishment. “Where did you hear all that?” he asked.

“When I was younger I ran away and crossed the river,” said the Cub calmly. “They are strange people over there, not like your people. They go down to the sea in boats. I went in a boat also, but I did not like it. There was a fat trader on the boat, and when we were outside the long white waves along the shore, and the wind came up and rocked our boat, his face turned the color of sick grass. Perhaps my face did also; I do not know. We were both very sick. After that I came back to tend sheep again, for I do not like that place.

“They have a god called Turms there who is the god of traders, and of thieves, and of fortune tellers. They pray to him for good luck, for they believe very much in luck. He is sometimes seen in the shape of a beggar man with a dog and a staff that has snakes twisted about it, and a cap with a feather in it.”

The Cub stood up laughing and slipped away down under the rocks with his wolf; it almost seemed as if he had flown. As Pero stared after him, he remembered that the lad had an eagle [pg 74]feather in his pointed cap, and his staff had a twisted vine around it. But the next time they met the boy was so clearly only a boy in a sheepskin tunic that Pero called himself an old fool too ready to take fancies.

The Cub had spent time enough on the other side of the river to know something about the people, and he had interesting things to tell. They enjoyed bargaining and spent much time buying and selling. They could make fine gold work, bright-colored cloth, and brown vases with black pictures painted on them. Their walls were often painted with pictures. When a trader from that country, named Toto, came to the village, Pero remembered some of the things he had been told. The people bought some of his trinkets, but by what they said of them when the brightness was worn off and the color faded, he was not a very honest merchant. Pero remembered then that this people had the same god for trading and for stealing.

The Cub said that he had been to other villages along this mountain slope, and they seemed to be as separate as if they were islands on a sea of waste wilderness. They did not have their feasts on the same day, they did not measure time alike; in some ways they were almost as far apart in their ideas as if they had been [pg 75]different kinds of animals. And yet they all spoke nearly the same language and worshiped in much the same way. If they knew each other better and met oftener they would be all one people, strong enough to drive away their enemies. If he and Pero could meet in this friendly way, surely others could. But this was a new idea to the shepherd, and he was not used to thinking. When the Cub saw that he did not understand he began talking of something else. The invisible boundary lines were too strong to be crossed.

Often, late at night, after Pero had gone home, the Cub would lie on a high rock that overlooked the village, looking down at the twinkling circle of lights that meant altar fires in homes. Then he would look up at the twinkling points of light in the sky, and wonder if the gods lived there, and if the lights were the altar fires of their homes. If he had known that Pero once half believed him to be a god in disguise, he would have been very much surprised. He was only a boy, without father, mother or home, and he wished he knew what lay before him in the life he had to live.

He could keep sheep, he could hunt, he could fight, he could run and swim better than most boys of his age, and there was no beast, fowl, [pg 76]bird, reptile, fruit or tree in the wilderness that he did not know. But there seemed to be no place for him to live among men unless he was a sort of servant. This was not to his liking. He had never seen any man whose orders he would be willing to obey. He had seen some who were wiser, far wiser than he was, who could tell him a great deal that he wished to know. But he had never seen any to whom he would be a servant. A servant had to do what he was told and make himself over into the kind of person some one else thought he ought to be. The old woman who was a witch had told him that he was born to rule, but he did not see how he could, unless it was ruling to command animals. To rule men he must live where they were, and so far as he could see they had no place for him.

His brother never seemed to have such thoughts. Give him enough to eat and drink, a fire to warm him in winter and a stream to bathe in when the summer suns were hot, and his reed pipe to play, and that was enough. He would spend hours playing some tune over and over with first one change and variation and then another. Even the wolf, now grown large and powerful, with his gaunt muzzle and fierce eyes, was more of a companion than that. He was always ready for a wrestle or a race or a swim [pg 77]with his master. The two of them were feared wherever they went, and treated with unqualified respect.

One day the Cub lay on his favorite rock, hidden by a low-sweeping evergreen bough, when he heard shrieks and outcries. Peering over the edge, he saw that in the edge of the woods below, where some women and children were picking up nuts the men had shaken down for them, something was happening. Half a dozen fierce men had rushed upon them and caught up one of the children and run away, so quickly that by the time the fathers and brothers got there no one could say which way they had gone. They joined some others hidden in the woods, and came straight past the rock where the Cub was watching. They were going to keep the child until they got what they wanted. He could hear them talking. The biggest man had the child on his shoulder. Her little face, as he got a glimpse of it, was very white, but she did not cry out.

The boy rose and followed them with his wolf at his heels. He knew a spring some distance above, where he thought they would be likely to stop for a drink. They did. They were far enough away by this time not to fear pursuit, and they had passed a rocky place where they could hold the narrow trail against many times [pg 78]their number. But long before the men could get up there they would have gone on.

The Cub crept up, inch by inch, until he was within a few feet of the savage, careless group by the spring, and behind them, on a bank about six feet high. Only the child was facing him. He showed himself for an instant, and laid a finger on his lips, and beckoned. She struggled free from the man who was holding her, striking at him with her little hands, and he laughed and let her go. Even if she tried to run away, they would catch her. But she only staggered unsteadily toward the bank, as if to gather some bright berries there.

The instant she was clear of the group two figures hurled themselves through the air,—a man and a wolf, or so it seemed in the moment or so before the thing was over. There was a snarling, growling, breathless struggle, and then the two strange figures were gone, and so was the child, and the bandits were nursing half a dozen wolf bites and various cuts on their shoulders and arms. Some they had given each other in the confusion, and some were from the long, keen knife the Cub had ready when he leaped among them.

The lad went straight down the mountainside with his wolf at his heels and the child on his [pg 79]shoulder, and came out on the path that led upward just as the men from the village were coming up. He set down the child, and with a cry of delight she rushed into the arms of her father. A spear hurtled through the air from the hasty hand of one of the men, who had caught a glimpse of a brown shoulder and a sheepskin tunic. The Cub disappeared. He was rather disgusted. If that was the way that the villagers repaid a kindness—

Illustration: The lad went straight down the mountainside with his wolf at his heels

From his rock he watched them returning with the child, all talking at once. It seemed to him a great deal of talk about what could not [pg 80]be helped by talking. He called Pincho, and only silence answered. He slid off the rock and retraced his steps. When he reached the place where he had set down little Emilia, he found the body of his pet, quite dead, with a spear wound straight through the heart. Then he remembered that in the flash of time when the spear was hurled, Pincho had sprung at the man. He had taken the death wound meant for his master.

Pero never saw the boy with the wolf again. When he heard Emilia’s story of her rescue, he was inclined to think that they were gods after all,—Mars himself, for all any one could say. But the Cub, feeling much older, was far away, and it was long before he returned to that countryside.

[pg 81]

VII

MASTERLESS MEN

The story the robbers had to tell, when they returned to their captain, was not a very likely one. It was so unlikely that they took time to talk the matter over thoroughly before attempting to face him. Perhaps it would be better to tell a lie, if they could concoct one that would do. The trouble was that they could not think of any explanation for their failure, that was likely to satisfy him any better than the plain facts.

Of course it seemed impossible that a man and a wolf should be traveling peaceably in company,—to say nothing of taking a child out of the hands of several strong and reckless men. But even so, where had they gone? One of the men had been quick enough to thrust with his spear at the wolf as he got it against the sky,—and it went through nothing. He forgot that the motion of an animal is usually quicker than the human eye, on such occasions. Moreover, though two of them went back down the path until they [pg 82]could hear the voices of the villagers, there was no sign of man, wolf or child. The conclusion they felt to be the only one possible was that the villagers’ gods had come and taken the child away from them, in the form of the wolf and the man. In that case they must be very powerful, so powerful that it would not be safe to attempt anything against that village in the future.

Gubbo, who came from that village, assured them that its gods were powerful indeed. He had not, when he and the other man were watching it, seen anything like this man and wolf apparition, and it was certainly remarkable enough to attract attention. Neither had the country people ever mentioned such a thing. Privately, Gubbo did not believe much in gods, but he was afraid of them for all that, because he was not sure. Gubbo’s father had impressed upon him very hard that if he did wrong, bad luck would surely overtake him. The patience of the gods was great, but they knew everything, and in the end no man could escape them. Gubbo, wincing at the pain where the wolf’s teeth had caught him, was uncomfortably wondering whether his bad luck had begun. There had never been any other failure to kidnap somebody, when men were sent to do it. Perhaps the bad luck in this case came from the fact that one of the party was attacking [pg 83]his own relatives and friends. There would be more bad luck when the chief of the bandits heard of this thing. Gubbo decided to dodge any further trouble if he could, and he lagged behind and quietly slipped away, to find some other way of making a living. He intended to go on traveling for a long time, to be out of the way of his former comrades.

It was just as well for him that he did this, for the men who returned to the den in the rocks and reported to the chief had a very bad time of it. The leader was executed, and so was the man who had had charge of the child. Of the other three, one died of the bite of the wolf and the others were very ill. After that, not a man of them could have been induced to join in an attack against that village. The chief wisely did not press the matter. After all, that was the nearest village of all those in their range, and it might not be altogether prudent to arouse the anger of the fighting men. It might lead to discovery.

The Cub, as he made his way back to the hut of Faustulus, was doing a great deal of thinking. When he was younger he had sometimes dreamed of being captain of a band of outlaws, because that seemed the only chance to be captain of anything, for a fatherless boy. But he had no taste [pg 84]for kidnaping children or being a nuisance to peaceable and kindly people. Merely to think of those scoundrels made him hot all over. He would have liked to follow their trail up to their very den, for he had an idea that he knew where it was. One day, when he and Pincho had been hunting together, he had seen a place where men evidently lived, and lived without any sort of peaceful farming or other business. If that were the den of the banditti, they could easily make themselves the pest of the countryside, and what they had done would be nothing to what they could do. Although he did not himself know it, this boy was the kind of person whose mind leaps ahead and sees possibilities for others as well as himself,—evil as well as good.

One day he asked his brother how he would like to gather the masterless men of all that neighborhood into a band of soldiery, to live by hunting and by fighting for any chief who would give them their living. They were growing too old to live much longer as they had lived. Perhaps if they could gather followers enough, they could go somewhere after awhile and make a place for themselves. First they might go to the Long White Mountain, where there was a rather large town, and see what the prospect was for such an undertaking. They had already [pg 85]taken part in one campaign, with some of the boys of the neighborhood, under the names of the Wolf and the Piper. All of the troop had some nickname or other. There was the Ram, whose head would crack an ordinary board in two; the Snake, who could wriggle out of any bonds ever tied—they had tried him time and again; Big Foot, Flop-Ear, Long Arm, and some others. They found the captain they had followed before glad to use them again and give them ordinary soldier rations. On the second night of their life in camp, a broad-shouldered and slightly bow-legged individual came and asked to see the head of the band. Gubbo did not recognize the young leader, but the latter knew him the moment he saw him. Gubbo explained that he had been a member of a company of banditti, had become disgusted with their ways, and left them. He would like to make an honest living.

“What can you do?” asked the youth consideringly.

Gubbo said that he could teach tricks in knife work to almost any man; also he could wrestle.

“Try me,” said the Wolf, slipping out of his heavy tunic. He enjoyed the rough-and-tumble that followed more than he had anything since he used to play with his wolf. This man really [pg 86]was a fair match for him. Gubbo was taken into the band.

“He is a brute,” said the Ram bluntly.

“He is,” said the leader. “But he can teach you fellows something.”

They learned a great deal from the villainous-looking newcomer, though if he had not been a little afraid of the young head of the troop, they might have paid a heavy price for their learning. The latter found out by judicious questioning that the den was where he had supposed it was. After a time he began to see that Gubbo was doing his men no good. The man was cruel, treacherous and base. Two or three times he had played tricks which others were blamed for. One day Gubbo heard that a merchant was coming along the road to the mountain villages, and at the same time he was sent on scout duty that way. He watched in the bushes until the man came along slowly, muffled in a long mantle, with a donkey loaded with panniers. He seemed to be old; his beard was white. Gubbo sprang on him; the man turned in that instant and met him with a knife thrust. Then the Wolf straightened up, dropped his white goat’s-hair beard and wig, and went back to camp. The bad luck that Gubbo feared had got him at last, and nobody mourned him at all.

[pg 87]

Wolf and the Piper and their troop spent some seasons in fighting and adventure, and then they disappeared. It was said that they had separated.

This was true, but they had separated for a purpose. If the company went together to the lair of the banditti they might as well go blowing trumpets and beating drums; it would be known long before they came near. Their orders were to go by twos and threes, and when the moon was full to meet near a certain great rock that overlooked the valley where the river became a lake and then went on. One by one, as the young leader sat watching on this rock, dark forms came slipping through the shadows and joined him. Last of all came his brother, who had guided some of the party by a very roundabout way.

When all were there, and sentinels posted, he unfolded his plan. Above the place where they now sat, among the tumbled rocks of a narrow valley, was the headquarters of a most pestiferous company of robbers. For years they had terrified and despoiled the people of the villages, and if any resisted they were tormented almost beyond endurance in many different ways. The people were expected to turn over to them at certain times and places practically everything they produced, except just enough for a bare living. [pg 88]Whatever the banditti did not use themselves, they sold for things that could not be got in the villages. The villagers never knew what they were to be allowed to have at the end of the year, and often they suffered for food and warm clothing; but they stayed there because they knew nowhere else to go. It was a miserable state of things.

His plan was this. They were to steal upon this den of banditti and take it by surprise. Gubbo had said that it was not fortified to any extent, because the chief relied on the locality not being known. They were to kill the chief and such men as could not be trusted to behave themselves if they had a chance. Perhaps some would join the troop and abide by its rules. They would take the stronghold for their own, and keep it as a place to return to when they were not busy elsewhere. Then, instead of making enemies of the villagers or keeping them so terrified that they dared not refuse any request, let them make a friendly agreement. If the people who lived in these valleys gave them a certain tribute three or four times a year—a certain part of the crop, whatever it was—they would take care that there was no more plundering and kidnaping, and the farmers could attend to their own affairs in safety and comfort. If any enemy [pg 89]came against the people, too great for the Wolf and his soldiers to encounter successfully, the fighting men of the villages would be expected to help them, but they would undertake to keep the region clear of banditti. In return, if any one asked whether there was a band of outlaws hiding thereabouts, the villagers were to say that they did not know where there were any, and that would be the truth.

The plan was approved, as the young chief knew it would be. He had talked it over beforehand with each man separately. If the people were ungrateful enough, after the den of thieves was broken up, not to agree to the plan proposed, they could take their chance with other thieves, but he thought that after what they had been through in the last few years they would be willing to agree to almost anything.

As men are apt to do when they are much feared, the banditti in the rock-walled ravine were growing rather careless. The scouts of the Wolf’s troop were able to follow their movements closely. On the following night, when their destruction was to take place, the robbers were all in camp, having just returned from one of their expeditions to bring up supplies. The fat calf and the fowls and other provisions were sizzling and stewing over great fires. There was plenty [pg 90]of new wine. From a trader’s pack some of the younger men had got little ivory cubes with figures engraved on the sides, and were playing a game of chance. Their huts were furnished rather luxuriously, with fur robes, wool garments and gay hangings, but these, like their clothing, were stained and injured more or less by the fighting that usually took place over the plunder. The chief did not care what his men did in camp so long as they obeyed his orders. He did not wish them to do much thinking; he preferred to do all of that for them. He would have been surprised indeed if he had known that some of them did think and had almost made up their minds that they had had enough of him and of his methods and would go somewhere else.

As he grew older, the robber captain was fonder of eating and drinking, and now he sat on a handsome ivory stool near the fire—for the night was chilly—waiting for the meat to be done to a turn. The cook was a stout, short, bright-eyed man, a slave from across the river, and there was very little that he did not know about preparing rich dishes.

It was a windy night. The wind howled among the trees and down the ravine as if it were chasing something. It was like the howling of wolves, though there had been no wolves on that [pg 91]part of the mountain for a long time. Far to the right of the camp there was heard a noise like the cry of a child. Far to the left there was a bleating like a lamb. These were the signals arranged by the attacking force that was coming silently through the woods, and the sentinels went out a little way to see what a lamb and a child could be doing up here. They were knocked down, bound and carried off to a safe distance. By the time supper was ready in the ravine, the men in the woods were lying on the bank above, all around, looking down into the stronghold. The huts were ranged in two rows down the hollow, with a line of fires between and the fronts open. The entrance below was blocked by a log gate. But the men now ready to attack the place could climb like goats; they had all been brought up among the hills.

All of a sudden arrows came shooting down on the careless banditti, and almost every one found its mark. Down to the roofs of the huts and to the ground came leaping figures, well armed and fighting with the strength and skill of trained men. Whenever they could they disarmed and bound their men, but the leader of the banditti was an exception to this rule. He was killed without a chance to surrender.

When every man in the camp of the banditti [pg 92]had been cut down or captured—and about half of them surrendered,—the victors sat down and ate the feast prepared for the robbers.

Next day, when things had been cleared up and put in order, each prisoner’s case was taken up separately. A few, whose deeds were the terror of the countryside, were executed. The rest were glad enough to join the troop under the Wolf, on probation. If they did well, they should be full members in time.

The people of the villages were thankful to buy protection on the reasonable terms offered. They did not know exactly who these men were who had rid them of the banditti; some supposed they were a troop of soldiers from some chief. They almost never saw any of the band. The tax demanded was brought to a certain place and left there, and that was all. Emilius the priest often wondered why these men did not ask anything of his village, but they never did. Their village was the only one that had hardly ever suffered from the banditti. It was very odd. He never connected either of these facts with the long-ago visit of the shepherd youths and the tame wolf. So matters went on for a year or two. A guard was always left at the stronghold, but the men were often absent. Merchants and traders learned that they could get these men to [pg 93]protect them, at a price, when they were traveling through a strange country. They had really established a sort of patrol. The scattered hunters and fishermen had walked in desperate terror of the banditti, but they almost worshiped the troopers, and they would have died rather than reveal anything they had been told to keep secret. When Amulius, the hoary and evil chief of the people of the Long White Mountain, heard of these two youths who were such excellent fighters and whose men had so good a reputation, he tried to find out where they were, but he never could. For all the people of the country seemed to know, they might come out of the air and vanish into the clouds. It was very mysterious. When the young leader heard that Amulius had been trying to find him he smiled, and did not make any comment whatever.

[pg 94]

VIII

THE BEEHIVE TEMPLE

The preparations at the village on the Mountain of Fire were completed during the winter, and the little company of men, women and children made ready to go out into the unknown world as soon as a favorable day arrived. It was a more serious undertaking than any they had known or even heard of before. Even when their ancestors came to this place, so long ago that no one could remember when it was, it was after a lifetime of wandering; they were not used to anything else. This company was made up of people who had never in their lives been more than a day’s journey from the place where they were born, and what was more, hardly any of their forefathers had, for generations.

It was made still more difficult and doubtful by the fact that they were taking their women and children with them. There was no other way. There was not too much to eat in the vil[pg 95]lage, as it was, and there would be less, if the men went away for a year and left their families to be supported. Although the men would have preferred to go first and explore the land, the women were privately better pleased as it was. They felt that if their husbands were to be killed they wanted to die too. As for the children who were old enough to understand the situation, their feelings were mixed. It was exciting and delightful to be going to see new lands, and made them feel important and responsible, but when the time of leaving actually approached and they began to think of never seeing their old home again, they felt very sober indeed.

They left the mountain on the day that was later called the Ides of March, at the beginning of spring, and slowly they followed the shining river out into the valley. Two-wheeled carts drawn by the oxen were loaded with the stores and clothing they were able to take with them. The fighting men had their weapons all in order. The boys were helping drive the cattle and sheep, and the married women had the younger children with them. Every one who was able to walk, walked. The eldest girl in each of the families—none was over ten years old—had charge of one most important thing—the fire. The little maidens walked soberly together, feeling a [pg 96]great dignity laid upon them. Each carried a round, strong basket lined with clay and covered with a beehive-shaped lid of a peculiar shape. In this were live coals carefully covered with ashes, for the kindling of the next fire. No matter what happened, they must not let those coals go out.

Illustration: The little maidens walked soberly together

“What-ever happened?” repeated a little yellow-haired girl, called Flavia because she was so fair. She was the daughter of Muraena the smith, and the youngest of the ten.

Ursula, the biggest girl, laughed. “If we were crossing a river and one of us got drowned, [pg 97]I suppose her fire would be lost,” she said teasingly. “But they wouldn’t excuse us for anything short of that.”

“But if it did go out—if all of the fires were put out?” persisted Flavia, walking a little closer to Marcia, whose word she felt that she could trust. She had visions of a dreadful anger of the gods,—another night of darkness and terror like the one they all remembered. “Should we never have a fire again, and have to eat things raw, and freeze to death, and let the wolves eat us up?”

“Certainly not,” answered Marcia reassuringly. “Father told me all about that when I was younger than you are. Don’t you remember how they kindled the fire in the new year?”

Flavia shook her yellow head. “I never noticed.” She had been so taken up with the chanting and the ceremonies that she had not seen how the fire actually blazed up on the altar.

“They do it with the terebra and the tabula. The tabula is a flat wooden block with a groove cut in it, and the terebra is a rubbing-stick that just fits the groove. They have some very fine chaff ready, and they move the stick very fast in the groove until it is quite hot. Don’t you know how warm your hands are after you rub them together? When there is a little spark it [pg 98]catches in the chaff, and then it is sheltered to keep it from going out, and fed with more chaff and dry splinters until the fire is kindled. They can always kindle a fire in that way.”

“What if the terebra and the tabula were lost?” asked Flavia.

“They would make others.”

“If I rubbed my hands together long enough, would they be on fire?” asked the child. She did not yet see how fire could be made just by rubbing bits of wood together. In fact, it was so much easier to keep the fire when it was once made that this was hardly ever done. It was only done regularly once a year, at the beginning of the month sacred to Mars. Then all the altar fires were put out and the priest kindled the sacred fire in this way afresh.

The girls all laughed, and Marcia answered,

“No, dear, it is only certain kinds of wood that will do that. I suppose the gods taught our people long ago which they were. The hearth god lives in the fire, you know. I always think it is like a living thing that will die without care. Father says that the fire keeps away the wicked fever spirits.”

“What’s fever?” asked Yaya, on the other side. “Did you ever have it?”

“No, never; but Father did once, when he was [pg 99]working on the road across the marsh, before I was born. It makes all your bones ache as if they were broken, and you cannot keep still because the spirits shake you all over. You grow hot and grow cold, and have bad dreams, and talk nonsense. Father woke up one day when he had the fever, and said that there were great rats coming to carry off my brother Marcs, who was a baby then, and he tried to get up and kill the rats, when there were none there. And when he was well he never remembered seeing the rats at all.”

Although the children did not know it, a blazing fire and wool clothing help to keep away the malarial fever of a wet wilderness. The people believed that their gods taught them to keep up a fire, to wear clean wool garments and to drink pure water, and it is certain that they were wise in doing all these things religiously, as they did. When they found a good spring on their journey they filled their water bottles and left a little gift there for the god of the waters. They kept near pure running water when they could, and away from standing water, even if they had to go a long way round to do it. In the sudden damps and chills of the lowlands through which they traveled the tunics and mantles of pure wool kept them from taking cold, and there [pg 100]was very little sickness on the journey. They kept to their own habits of eating, and the children were not allowed to experiment with strange and possibly unripe fruits.

It was a long time, however, before they came in sight of any place that could be thought of as a home. Most of the country they saw was not inhabited except by a stray hut dweller here and there, getting a miserable living as he could,—simply because the land was not fit to live in. They crossed a rolling plain, where the marshes were full of unpleasant looking water, and the air at night was full of singing, stinging insects that drove the cattle frantic. It was not quite so bad near the fires. The insects seemed to dislike the smoke, or perhaps their wings could not carry them through the strong currents of air that the flames made around them. As soon as possible they moved up toward the higher land, and here at last they came in sight of the river of the yellow waters, the great river that ran down to the sea. Beyond that they could not go without meeting strange people and the worship of strange and cruel gods.

Every night the beehive covers were taken off the baskets, and the fires were kindled, and in a round hut that was like a big basket lid, a bed of coals was made ready for the next day’s [pg 101]journey. It was the duty of the ten little girls, the guardians of the fire, to take care of this, and they spent a great deal of time around the miniature temple of the fire god. One or another was always there.

One night when they were carefully covering the coals with fine ashes, Marcia and Tullia and Flavia looked up and saw two strange men standing near and looking down at them. They were startled but not at all frightened. The strangers would not be there if they were not friends; the men would not allow it. The two youths did not say anything; they watched for a few minutes, smiling as if they liked what they saw; then they turned away. They looked very much alike, and walked alike, and their voices were alike; but one was a little taller and darker than the other and always seemed to take the lead. They were not like the rude, ignorant, pagan people who sometimes came to stare and beg and perhaps to pilfer when they found some one’s back turned. They looked like the people of Mars. But what could they be doing away out here?

The next day there was great news to tell. In the first place, the fathers of the colony had decided to stay here a few days, and let the cattle feed, and the women wash their clothing and rest for a little before going on. The water was [pg 102]good, and they had learned that it was a safe part of the country, though it was too rocky and barren to be a good place to live. But that was the smallest part of the news. The two youths were their own kinsmen, born of their own people, sons of a son of the old chief who had died in a far land many years ago.

This was wonder enough, to be sure, but there was more to come. The wicked uncle of the two brothers had killed their mother and father, and told one of his servants to take the twin boys down to the river and drown them. They were babies then. The servant did not like to do this. He may have been afraid he would get into trouble if he did it and any of their people found it out later. He may have hated to do the cruel work, for they were strong and handsome little fellows. At any rate he put them in a basket and gave the basket to a slave, telling him to throw it into the river.

The river was in flood just then, and its banks were overflowed for miles on each side. There was water everywhere, and the ground was soft so that it was hardly possible to get down to the real river, where the water was deep and the current strong. If the children had been thrown into that, they would have drowned at once. But the slave did not take time to go all the way [pg 103]around the plain to the bank itself. He put the basket down in the first deep pool he found and left it to be carried down to the river, for the flood was beginning to ebb. Instead of that the basket lodged on a knoll and stayed there, not very far from the banks.

Illustration: The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs

In flood time, as Ursula had often heard her father the hunter say, animals are sometimes so frightened that the fierce and the timid take refuge together on some island or rocky ridge, without harming each other at all. This flood had come up suddenly and drowned some of them in their dens. A wolf that had lost her cubs [pg 104]in that way was picking her steps across the drenched plain, when she heard a noise—two noises—from a willow basket under a wild fig tree. She went quietly over there and looked in. The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs, but they were hungry; any one would know that from the way they squalled. Wolf talk and man talk are quite different, but baby talk and cub talk are understood by all mothers. The wolf tipped the basket over with her paw, and the little things tumbled out in the cold and wet and cried louder than ever. Perhaps they thought she was a big dog. At any rate they crawled toward her, and plunged their strong little chubby hands into her fur, and crowed. When she lay down they snuggled close to her warm furry side, and she licked them all over.

A shepherd named Faustulus came that way when the flood had gone down, looking after a lost sheep. He found wolf tracks, and grasping his spear firmly, traced them to this knoll. He found the gray wolf curled up there with the two babies, asleep and warm and rosy, in the circle of her big, strong body.

The shepherd did not know just what to do. He thought that if he tried to take the children away from her she would fight, and they might [pg 105]be hurt, and he probably would be hurt himself. He decided to go and get help. Later in the day he came back with some of his friends, and set a rude box-trap for the wolf, baited with fresh meat from a drowned calf. When they had trapped her they took her home and the children also, in their basket. They kept the wolf for some time, and she seemed quite tame; but at last she ran away and never came back. They fed the babies on warm milk, and the shepherd and his wife both fell in love with them from the very first. They heard a rumor after awhile, whispered about secretly as such things are, that the chief Amulius had had his two little nephews drowned. The shepherd guessed then who the foundlings might be, but he kept quiet about it. The city was not too far away, and some one might be sent even yet to kill the twins. In the language of the country the word for river was Rumon, and the word for an oar was Rhem. He named the boys Romulus and Remus, and those were all the names they had. They grew up to be fine active fellows, afraid of nothing and good at all manly sports. As they grew up, they gathered other young men outside the villages into a sort of clan, to protect the countryside against robbers, and to fight and hunt and earn a living in one way and another. They had a [pg 106]rocky stronghold on the mountain, where they lived, and whenever strangers came that way, some one was sent to see who and what they were. That was how the two brothers came to the camp of the colonists.

When this remarkable story was told, there was intense interest in the strange kinsmen. The girls were a little afraid of them. Their eyes were so bright and keen, their teeth so white, and their faces so bronzed and stern that they looked rather savage, especially in their wolf-skin mantles and tunics. But the boys all wished that they could join the patrol in the mountains.

For two days the colonists remained where they were, talking with the two brothers about the country. At last it was settled that the very hills where the two foundlings had grown up would be the best place for the colony to live!

Near the yellow river, there was a group of seven irregular hills which had never been inhabited, because the place was far from any town, and the neighboring chiefs had no especial use for it. There was good water on these hills and pasture enough for all the herds, if the woods were cleared off. The hills were so shaped that they could be defended, and from those heights they could see for miles and miles across the plain. The wild face of Romulus changed and [pg 107]kindled as he talked, and Marcus Colonus saw that here in this youth, his kinsman, in spite of his adventurous and untrained life and his ignorance of the old and time-honored ways, he had found a true son of the Vitali, who loved his land and his people.

The colonists crossed the plain to the seven hills, with the brothers guiding them, and on the largest, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river, they made their camp and set up the beehive temple for the last time. Here, they hoped, the sacred fire would burn year after year, and their people find a home.

[pg 108]

IX

THE SQUARE HILL

The colony had chosen for their home one of the largest of the seven hills, squarish in form and more or less covered with woodland. They began at once to fence it around, to keep their beasts from wandering out and thieves and wild beasts from getting in, for all this country was very lonely. They had done this sort of thing so often since they left their old home that they did it quickly and rather easily. It was the habit of their people to save time and strength wherever they could, without being any less thorough. To do a thing right, in the beginning, saved a great deal of loss and trouble in the end.

While some cut down trees that grew on the land where they intended to make their permanent settlement, others trimmed off the branches as fast as the trees were down, and cut the logs to about the same length, and pointed the ends. The boys gathered up the branches and cut firewood from them. The brush that was not needed [pg 109]for the fires was made into loose fagots and piled up on the logs, as they were laid along the line where the wall was to be. This made a kind of brush fence, not of much use against a determined enemy but better than none at all. Even this would keep an animal from bouncing into the camp without being heard, and in fact most wild beasts are rather suspicious of anything that looks like a trap.

When they had logs enough to begin fencing, all placed ready for use, they dug holes along the line they had marked out with a furrow, and planted the logs side by side as closely as they could, like large stakes. In any newly settled place, where trees are plenty, this is the most easily built fortification settlers can have, and the strongest. A stone or earth wall takes much longer to build. It is still called a palisade, a wall of stakes,—just as it was by men who built so, thousands of years ago and called a sharpened stake a “palum.” A fence built of boards set up in this way is called a paling fence, and the boards are called palings. The word fence itself is only a short word for “defence,”—a defence made of pointed stakes planted in the ground.

The earth that was dug up was always thrown inside and formed the basis of a low earthwork [pg 110]that made the palisade firmer. It was made as high as possible from the outer side by being built on the edge of the hilltop so that the ground sloped away sharply from it. The pointed tops of the logs were a foot or two too high for a man to grasp at them and climb up, but from the inside the defenders could mount the earthwork and look through high loopholes.

There was a gateway at the top of a slope that was not so deep as the others, placed there so that if the colonists were outside and had to run for shelter, they could get in quickly. Almost anywhere else, a person who tried to get in and was not wanted would have to climb the hill under fire from the slingers and bowmen above. He must then get over the perfectly straight log wall, which afforded no foothold, because all the nubs of the branches had been neatly pared off, and force his way over the sawlike top in the face of men with long spears. No matter what sort of neighbors the colonists might have, they would think twice before they tried that.

The gate was made as strong as possible, of smaller tree trunks lashed together, and strengthened on the inside by crosspieces. When it was closed, two logs, one at the top and one at the bottom, were laid in place across it. Some one was always there to guard it, day and night, and [pg 111]could see through a little window who was coming up the hill.

Although strongholds like this had not been necessary for many years in their old home, there was one, built of stone in the ancient days, and never allowed to go to ruin. It seemed very adventurous to the boys to be erecting defences like that for their own families. But Romulus and Remus had told them that this would be the only way of being quite safe. They had a great deal that petty thieves might want to steal; and the chief Amulius might take it into his head to send a force to attack them, if he knew that so large a party of strangers had come in. When they had been there some years, and more people had joined the colony, the seven hills could be fortified so that nobody could take them. Colonus himself could see that, and it gave him a feeling of confidence and respect for his young cousin to know that he had seen it too.

By the time the palisade was finished, not only most of the land within it was clear, but the material for the huts was ready and some huts had been built. The timber was piled as it was cut, by the boys of the various families, on the lots marked out for the houses. The younger children cut reeds and grass for thatching and for the fodder of the cattle. They did this work [pg 112]in little companies and had a very pleasant time. Sometimes they caught fish, or shot waterfowl with their bows and arrows, or set snares for game.

Later the men would gather stone for a stone wall in place of the palisade, to run along the same line, and then the seasoned timbers of their log wall would still be good for building purposes. There was a steeper and narrower hill near the river which would make an excellent fortress. But the thoughts of the colony now were given to laying out farms.

They cleared and laid out wheat fields and orchards and vineyards as soon as they found land suitable. As any farmer knows, the sooner land is cultivated the more can be got out of it; it is not work that can all be done in a year, or two years, or three. This is especially true of land never used before for anything but pasture, and much of this had never been used even for that. Sheep do not like wet ground, and both sheep and cattle, unless they were tended constantly, might stray into the swampy low grounds. Drainage would help that land; when some of it was drained it would make rich lush meadows and golden grain fields. The land-loving Vitali could see visions of richer crops than any they had ever harvested, growing on that [pg 113]unpromising plain, if only they could have their way with it.

The children who were here, there and everywhere, watching all that was done and helping where they could, felt as if they were looking on at the making of a new world. It was really almost like a miracle—some of the ignorant marsh folk thought it was one—when that uncultivated hilltop, overgrown with bushes and wind-stunted trees and with the rocky bones of it cropping out here and there, became a trim encampment of orderly thatched huts. The beasts grew sleek and fat on the good fodder and grazing, and no one had appeared so far who had any evil designs. In fact, few persons came near them at all. It was as if they had the new world all to themselves.

In the house-building the children helped considerably after the men got the timber frames up. Instead of building stone walls, they were going to do what they had sometimes done before when a wall was run up temporarily,—use mud. They set stakes in rows along the walls, not close together like the palisade, but far enough apart for twigs and branches to be woven in and out between them like a very rough basketry. When this was done the men built a kind of pen on the ground, for a mixing bowl, and brought lime [pg 114]and sand and clay and water, and mixed it with tough grass into a sort of rough plaster. This was daubed all over the walls with wooden spades until the whole was quite covered, and when it hardened it would be weather-proof and warm. Small houses built in this “wattle and daub” fashion have been known to last hundreds of years.

The thatched roof was four-sided, running up to a hole in the middle to let out the smoke. When it rained, the rain dripped in around the edges of the hole and ran into a tank under it. The altar with the sacred fire was at one side of this tank, and when the room was dark the flame was reflected in the wavering, shining depths of the water. The space opposite the door, beyond the altar, was where the father and mother slept, and later it might be walled off into a private room. Other rooms could be partitioned off along the sides. In later times there was a small entry or vestibule between the door and the inner rooms. But although the other rooms might vary in number and size and use, the atrium, the middle space, in which were the altar and the impluvium or water pool, remained the same. It was the heart of the home. Here the family worship was held, and this was the common room of the family.

[pg 115]

The plan of the encampment itself was like the house on a larger scale. The huts were built around the inside of the palisade, with a separating space or belt of land that was never plowed or built on—the pomerium, the space “before the wall.” In the middle was an open square which was to the town what the atrium was to the house,—the common ground, where public worship was held, announcements made, and public affairs social or religious carried on. Here was the beehive hut with the sacred fire, and all other temples or public buildings there might be would open on this square. The line of encircling houses made a sort of inner defense line, and even if any stranger could have climbed the wall for purposes of robbery or spying, it would have been hard for him to pass the houses without being found out.

This was the ancient way in which all the towns of this race were built. As the towns increased in size, other gates were opened, and streets laid out, but always after the same general plan. And as a family never stayed indoors when it was possible to work or play in the open air, so the colonists did not stay inside their wall when they could go out on the common land and make it fruitful. Their descendants are seldom contented to live inside walls and streets, where they [pg 116]can have no land of their own. They find homes outside, where they can have land to dig up and plant and tend and watch, season after season,—and in the thousands of years since they began to plant and to reap, they have gone almost everywhere in the world.

[pg 117]

X

THE KINSMEN

While the colonists were clearing the land on the Square Hill, building huts and laying out farms, they saw nothing of Romulus and Remus. The old shepherd Faustulus came up now and then to look at the work as it went on, and plainly thought these newcomers wonderful and superior beings. But the wolf’s foster children were fighters, not husbandmen, and this work was not in their line at all.

The fathers of the colony were not altogether sorry that this was so. They felt that if the hunters, woodsmen, shepherds, soldiers of fortune, and outlawed men Romulus commanded should happen to quarrel with peaceable people like the settlers, it might create a very unpleasant state of things. The brothers themselves were friendly enough, but it was not certain whether they could keep their men from plunder or fighting if they tried. Such bands, so far as Colonus [pg 118]and his friends had known of them, were like a pack of wolves,—the chiefs only held their leadership by being stronger, fiercer and more determined than the others. Their group of rude huts in the forest was not at all like a civilized town, from what they said of it, and they never seemed to give any attention to the gods or to worship. Perhaps they did not know much about such things. Even those who came from civilized places had wandered about so much that they seemed to think one place as good as another. They had no idea of the feeling that made their home, to the colonists, dearer than any other place ever could be. It was so not because it was pleasanter, or because they had more comforts than others, but because it was home, the place where people knew and trusted one another and trusted in the unseen dwellers by the fire to protect and guide them, and to make them wise and just in their dealings with one another.

To the colonists there was a very great difference between the ways of different people. The words they used showed it. Civil life began when men lived in a city, but this was not a large settlement of miscellaneous persons, but a permanent home of men who all worshiped the same gods, and obeyed the same laws and took responsibility. A man who did his part in the [pg 119]life of such a place was a “citizen,” and the life itself was “civilized,” the life of men who served one another and the whole community—men, women and children—looking out for its future as they would for the prosperity of their own family. In fact, such a body of people usually began with a group of relatives, as this one had. Without this dependence on one another to do the right thing, there could not be civilization.

A “company” was a group who were so far friends as to eat bread together. This in itself was a proof of a sort of friendship, for in eating a man had to lay down his weapons and be more or less off guard; when men ate together they were all off guard for the time. “Community” meant a group of families or persons bound together by kindred or friendship or common interest, and stronger for being bound together, as a bundle of sticks is stronger than separate sticks can be. “Religion” meant something stronger still, the binding together of people who felt the same sort of ties to the unseen world, who worshiped in the same way, and loved the same sweet, old, familiar prayers and chants, and believed in the same unseen rulers of life and death.

The various words for strangers outside these ties which bound them to their own people were [pg 120]just as expressive. Among farmers who lived on cleared land, within walls, the people who did not were “out of doors,” the forest people, the “foreigners.” Among a people who all spoke the same language, the thick-tongued country people, whose ideas were few, like their needs and their occupations, were the “barbarians,”—the babblers. And in a place like the settlement they were making now, a little island of orderly, intelligent life in a waste of almost uninhabited wilderness, the scattered hut dwellers were the “pagans,” the people of the waste. But almost every word that meant a civilized family or town had in it the idea of obligation. People must see that they could not be lawless and have any civil life at all. Civil life meant living together and living more or less by rules that were meant for the comfort and welfare of all.

Now the wild followers of Romulus could surely not be united by any such law as this. They fought as if Mars himself had taught them, the country folk said; but the worship of this god of manhood meant a great many things besides fighting. No settlement could be strong where the men were free to fight one another, knew nothing of self-control, made no homes. Just how much Romulus understood of this, Colonus was not sure. As it proved, he understood a [pg 121]great deal more than any one thought he did.

Suddenly, as they always came and went, the twins appeared one day at the gate of the palisade and were made very welcome. It happened to be a feast day, the feast of Lupercal, which came in midwinter, and the fact was that Romulus had found this out and had come that day on purpose. He was always interested in sacrifices, omens, and old customs. Remus had brought his pipes, and while he played for the dancers some wild music that none of them had ever heard, Romulus came over to the older men. He was rather quiet for a long time, watching all that went on, and his eyes turned often to the fire on the altar.

“My uncle,” he said at last to Marcus Colonus, when they were seated a little apart from the others, “I came here to tell you the desire of my heart, and now that I am here, I feel afraid. There is much in the world that I have never seen and do not know. With you, I feel like a little boy who has everything yet to learn.”

This was a surprise to Colonus, and it was a pleasant one. This young man, who had fought his way to power and leadership at an age when most boys are still depending on their fathers for advice in everything, had somehow learned to be gentle and reverent, and not too sure of himself. This was a thing that Colonus could not have [pg 122]expected. He did not see exactly where Romulus had learned it, but it gave him a feeling of great kindness toward his young kinsman.

“There is no need for you to be afraid,” he said cordially. “We are all your friends here. We owe you much for your aid and counsel. You are of our blood. This is your home whenever you come among us.”

The young leader stole a quick look from his keen, dark eyes at the older man. He had opened the conversation with that speech, not because he did not mean it, for he did; he felt very rude and ignorant among these kinsfolk of his, with their kindly, pleasant ways, and practical wisdom, and unconscious dignity. He was perfectly honest in saying that. But he said it just then because he wished to find out how Colonus felt toward him, and how far he could count on his approval and support in a plan he had. It would be better not to ask for help at all than to ask for it and be refused. The young chief of outlaws was proud. He was also wise, with the sagacity of a wild thing that has had to fight for life against all the world from birth. He never had really trusted anybody. The weak who were afraid to oppose him might do it if they dared. The strong must not be allowed to see his weakness or they would take the advantage. The old [pg 123]shepherd was kind, but he did not always see danger. Strength and kindness did not go together in Romulus’ experience. Even when he and his men were protecting the mountain villages, doing for them what they could not do for themselves, the people never let them forget that they were outlawed men. Because they did not live inside the walls and do just as the farmers did, they could not be called civilized. But these men here were his kinsmen, and they seemed different. Some instinct told him that with Colonus it would be better not to pretend to be wise and strong, but to ask advice.

“That is very good of you,” he said gratefully. “But I am not, after all, really one of you. I was not brought up as your sons have been. I cannot be sure that they would trust me as my own men do. If I were sure—”

And then he stopped.

“Do you mean,” asked Colonus, “that you wish the help of our young men in some expedition?”

Romulus decided to risk it. “If it is wise in your eyes,” he said.

“We are strangers in this land,” said Colonus deliberately, “and we must be careful what we do. You had better tell me exactly what the plan is, for I cannot judge in the dark. If I [pg 124]think it is not good I will say so, and we will let the matter drop and say no more. If it seems wise I will speak of it to Tullius the priest and the other men, and do all I can to help you.”

He suspected that Romulus had some plan for making war against his wicked uncle and winning back the place that he and his brother had been robbed of. He wished to know more of the young man’s ways of thinking and acting before he made any promises. It might be a very good thing if Amulius were overthrown, for he was feared and hated even by his own people. The colonists were not strong enough to do it themselves, and it was not their quarrel, but it was a very grave question whether they would not have to fight the soldiers of Amulius sooner or later. He had never troubled the few scattered shepherds and hunters by the riverside, but a settlement like theirs, if it grew and was prosperous, might attract his attention.

It was natural enough for Romulus to desire to overthrow the man who had cast him out of his rightful place, but whether he could do it was another matter. The young men would not make any trouble about joining him in his war if they were allowed to, for he was already a sort of hero among them. But if they drifted into the vagabond godless life of the outlaws in the forest, [pg 125]it would be very unfortunate indeed. The only possible way in which the settlement by the river could hold its own was by standing together and keeping the old proved discipline. The lads had never done any real fighting, and it would be a great experience for them. Everything would depend on the leader under whom they fought, and Colonus did not really know much about him.

Very often conversation goes on without the use of words. This is so in animals, who seem to understand each other without any talk at all. There is more or less of it even among modern, civilized men. The two kinsmen were not so far from the wild life of their ancestors that they did not see through each other to some extent. Romulus knew well enough that the colonists ruled their lives by ancient customs, and by what they could learn of the will of the gods. A man like Marcus Colonus would naturally have some questions to ask of a young fellow who paid no more attention to old rules and ceremonies than a wild hawk. The youth intended to answer as many of these questions as he could, before they were asked.

“A long time ago,” Romulus began, his dark eyes fixed thoughtfully on the leaping flames, “when my brother and I were boys, Faustulus the shepherd took us farther from our pastures [pg 126]than we had ever been before. We came to a place after much wandering, where all the people were making holiday. When we asked, being still youths and curious, what holiday it was, they said it was the day of the founding of the city.

“They knew the name and the history of the founder of the city, who came from a far country with his people, and was led by a wolf to the place where the city was to be. Although he had long been dead, he was remembered and loved. The priest said that his spirit was often with them and blessed them when they did right. He was to them a kind father, who never forgets his children.

“Then, not understanding how one man could found a city, I asked the priest, and he told me that the city was not a mere crowd of people, but the home of the gods and of the ancestors of the people, as a house is the home of a man. The unseen dwellers by the fireside require not great houses, but when the fire is kept burning they love it as do the living. Then I watched and saw the processions, and the dancing, and heard the chanting of songs and the sacred music, and all that was done in honor of the founder. I saw that the city was the home of a man, living or dead, forever and ever. Then I said, ‘When I am a man, I will found a city in the place where [pg 127]the wolf saved our lives when we were children.’ My brother laughed, and I, being angry, knocked him down. I wanted to kill him in that moment. But the priest told me that there must never be quarreling on a feast day, because it brought ill luck. I was afraid that the founder of the city saw me and was angry. I went away. But from that time I have always wished to found a city in this place, and for that reason I was glad when your people came and I could lead them here.”

Colonus found this story a touching one. It showed a reverence and affection for the things he had not known, which he was glad to see in this strong young man.

“And that is your secret desire?” he said, smiling.

“That is my dream,” said Romulus. And he looked at the older man with eyes that had a question in them.

“If you are to found a city here,” said Colonus slowly, “Mars must lead you as he leads us. If our young men fight in your battles, your men must come and live with us and worship our gods and obey our laws. That is what a city means. How will these things be, Romulus, son of the Ramnes, son of the wolf?”

“My men will go where I go,” said Romulus [pg 128]briefly. “This also is in my mind, my uncle, and you shall tell me whether it is a wise plan or the hasty vision of youth. There are many in the army of Amulius, my uncle, who hate him as much as they fear him. He suspects that we are the children he tried to murder, and will try to hunt us down and make the people we have protected betray us. Perhaps they will fight for themselves if they will not fight for us; I do not know. But there is not one among my men,” the youth lifted his dark head in high confidence, “who follows me from any other reason than because he wishes. They do not all love me,” he added, with a grin that showed his sharp white teeth, “but I am their leader and they will die fighting before they will yield to Amulius.

“If then I lead my men boldly against Amulius, not waiting for him to be ready, not staying until he sends his slaves to hunt me down, not letting him hear of our coming till we are there, I think that we may succeed, and then will the land be freed. He himself is old and has not led men to war for many years. I think that many in his army will refuse to fight against us, and others will yield without much fighting, and when we have come and taken his city, the people who obey him now will be glad. But my grandfather is still alive, and he, and not my brother [pg 129]nor myself, has the right to rule upon the Long White Mountain.

“When my grandfather is again ruler where he has the right, then would I come here and found my own city in my own place where the she-wolf saved our lives. Was she not the servant of Mars?”

Colonus nodded thoughtfully. “It would seem so.”

“Then shall my people be your people, and your gods my gods,” said Romulus, his clear voice cutting the rest like the call of a trumpet. The young people on the other side of the square looked curiously at the two, the young man and the older one, so deep in talk, and Remus, laughing, began to play again. It was a sweet and piercing measure that set all their feet flying.

Colonus stood up and took his young kinsman by the hand. “You are of our blood,” he said, “and your fight is our fight. We have talked of this among us, and have thought that perhaps you would do this. I think that our council will be of one mind with me in this matter. The gods guide you, my son.”

[pg 130]

XI

THE TAKING OF ALBA LONGA

Never in his life had Romulus felt in his own soul the strength of kinship as he felt it after the colonists agreed to join their forces with his. He had made his men into a fighting force when courage was almost the only virtue they had, but there was no natural comradeship between them as a whole. Here were men of his own people, welded together by all the ties of a boyhood and manhood spent together in one place, and they were ready to stand by him to the death. It seemed to give him a strength more than human. Remus was his brother, but he too was different and did not understand. He was no dreamer; he would have been content to go on all his life a shepherd boy or a soldier. But these men understood; they looked down the road of the years to come and planned for their children and grandchildren. That was why they were willing to let their sons go to fight against the tyrant Amulius under a stranger and a cap[pg 131]tain of outlaws,—because they saw that in the end the war must be fought, and all the men who could fight were needed.

There were anxious days in the settlement by the yellow river, after the young men marched away. Even if Romulus won the victory, perhaps there would be some who would not come back. And if he failed, the first the colonists would know of it would be an army coming to kill or enslave them all.

Not quite a month after the departure of the little fighting force the watchmen on the wall saw far away on the plain a single running figure. At first they could not be sure who it was. The word flew about the colony and soon the people were gathered wherever they could get a view of the running man. It was toward evening; the long shadows stretched over the level ground, and the red sunset made the still waters look like pools of blood. Everything was very quiet. They could hear the croak and pipe of the frogs, far below at the foot of the hill.

On and on came the racing figure, and now he had caught sight of the people on the hill, for he lifted his arm and waved to them again and again. It was good tidings; that was the meaning of his gesture in their signal language. Many hastened to meet him, but the path down [pg 132]the hill was a winding one and those who stayed where they were heard the news almost as soon. The runner was Caius Cossus, who always outstripped every other lad of his age in the races, and when he came to the foot of the hill he shouted:

Illustration: “Victory! Vic-to-ry! Romulus forever!”

“Ai-ya! Victory! Vic-to-ry! Romulus forever!”

His mother began to cry for joy and pride. The other women did not dare to yet. They did not allow themselves to be really glad until the small boys came scampering in ahead of their elders, to be the first to tell. Amulius was dead [pg 133]and Numa ruled in his place, and not one of their own men had been killed. Cossus reached the gate carried on men’s shoulders, for he was almost worn out. He had had nothing to eat for several hours, and had been running all the last part of the way, to get home before it was too dark to see.

Caius Cossus lived to be very old, and his long life brought him much honor and happiness, but never again, so long as he lived, did he have so glad a triumph as when he came in at the gate of the little, rude town by the river, and told the story of the fight at Alba Longa to the fathers and mothers who had the best right to be proud of it. It was the first battle the young men of the colony had ever been in, and a great deal would have depended on it in any case. They were strangers, with their reputation for courage and coolness all to make.

When the young messenger had had a chance to get his breath and some food and drink—and the best in the place was none too good for him—he told the story of the campaign from the beginning.

Romulus had separated his force into three companies and sent them toward Alba Longa by three roads and in small groups, not to attract attention, until they were within a few hours’ [pg 134]march of the town of the chief. Here they halted, and some of the outlaw band came up with them, carrying new shields and weapons that had been hidden in a cave until the time came to use them. The place of meeting was a wild rocky place where not even goats could have found pasture, and here Romulus made a brief speech giving them their orders. Fortune, he said, always favored those who were loyal to the gods. Amulius was loyal to nothing; he was a liar, a thief and a coward, and the invisible powers of heaven were arrayed against him. He was not afraid that any of his followers would offend the gods. Whatever else they had done, they had not bullied the weak or robbed the poor, or turned their backs on the strong, or violated the holy places of any city. They were to go forward in the faith that the stars of heaven would fight for them and against the armies of Amulius.

Some of the country people were there to serve as guides. There was a way around the city to the back, where the wall was not so high, and Remus and his party would go first and come around that way. The colonists were to swing to the left, where a road branched off, and come up toward the gate where the barracks were. Romulus himself with his own men would attack the main gate just after dawn and push his way [pg 135]in while the troops were partly distracted to the left and to the rear. When he gave the signal, a triple drum roll, the colonists were to give back as if they were retreating, and follow his men in at the main gate and bar it after them. He would send a part of his men toward the west gate to take the troops in the rear, and if they could drive the enemy out and hold that gate, the city would be in Romulus’ hands.

It all went as it was planned. The headlong rush of the young chief and his men, who were as active and sinewy as cats, took them through the main gate and over the walls almost at the same moment. They had brought slim tree trunks with the nubs of the branches left on, for ladders, and rawhide ropes on which they could swarm up over the walls in half a dozen places at a time. The soldiers were completely taken by surprise, and many surrendered at once. The invaders were in the public square and pushing into the palace of the chief almost before the bewildered and terrified people found out what had happened. Romulus himself was the first to enter the private rooms of Amulius, and there he found the old chief dying from a spear wound in the breast. The captain of his guard had killed him and then offered his sword to Romulus in the hope of being the first to gain favor.

[pg 136]

“A man who is false to one master will be false to two,” said Romulus, with a flash like lightning in his dark eyes. He ordered the captain bound and turned over to his grandfather, when he should arrive, for judgment. This was not the sort of timber he wanted for an army. If the captain had surrendered, it would have been very well, but to kill his master in his room, unarmed, for a reward, was black treachery, and it was not the young chieftain’s plan to encourage either traitors or cowards.

From the steps of the palace he sent the triple drum roll sounding through the gray light of a rainy morning, and heard it answered by the battle shout of the young men of the colony, as they came charging into the gate, and by the shrill piercing music of the pipes from the company Remus led. The three companies met in the square, keeping order and rank as if it were a game, and as they saw their leader standing in the doorway in the red flame of the torches, they shouted the triple shout of victory. Standing there in his armor, above the savage confusion, the white faces of the people uplifted to him from the crowded streets, he looked every inch a chieftain. He beckoned his brother to his side, and lifted his sword, and all was still.

“Ye who know what Amulius did in the days [pg 137]of his brother Numa,” he began, “know now that he is dead.

“Ye who know that he killed his own sons for fear they should grow up and rebel against him, fear him no more, for he is dead.

“Ye who have been bowed down with the burden of his cruelty and his greed, rise up and stand straight like men, for he is dead.

“Ye, the gods of his fathers and mine, who know what he was in his lifetime, I call on ye to judge whether his slayer did well to kill him, for he is dead.

“Ye, the people of the Long White Mountain, who have heard the name of Romulus and the name of Remus, know now that we are the children whom he would have slain after he had killed our father and our mother, and that we were saved by a wolf of Mars to live and rule our own people now that Amulius is dead.

“Ye, the people of Alba Longa, of the ancient home of our race, take Numa for your chief now, and be loyal to him and serve him, for he who took the right from him is dead!”

There was an instant’s pause, and then shouts of “Numa! Numa!” broke from the people. If Romulus had claimed the place for himself they would have shouted his name just as readily, but this was not Romulus’ plan at all. The [pg 138]headship of this people belonged to his grandfather Numa, and there was no question about it. Until the old man was dead, he was the rightful chief, and for his grandsons to push into his place would simply be the same high-handed robbery Amulius had committed. The brothers were his heirs, and they could wait and rule over their own city until they had the right to rule here.

This did away with the last bit of resistance. The remainder of the army was only too glad to surrender, and messengers were sent off to tell Numa the good news and bring him home in triumph to his own place. When they had welcomed him, they would come to the hill beside the river and found their own city.

It was a day long to be remembered when the Romans returned, the young men marching lightly with laughter and singing, their young leaders in the van. The people went out to meet them with music and rejoicing, and there was a great feast in the colony. But to Colonus the most precious moment of that day—not even excepting the first sight of his own son Marcus—was that in which the young and victorious Romulus came to him where he stood with Tullius the priest, and knelt before them, saying,

“Tell me that I have done well, my fathers, [pg 139]for without your approval the rest is nothing. Have I proved myself worthy to found our city, O ye who know the law?”

Illustration: Then they blessed him and crowned him with the victor’s crown of laurel

Then they blessed him and crowned him with the victor’s crown of laurel. The outlaw had found his own people.

[pg 140]

XII

THE RING WALL

In the weeks that followed the slaying of Amulius, Romulus sat many hours each day with the older men, consulting and planning. He was very quick to understand all that he heard and saw, and very anxious not to leave out the least ceremony proper to the founding of the city. Each one of these ceremonies had a meaning. The founder of the city was to the community what the father of a family was to his household; he was a sort of high priest. It was a strange experience for the wild young chief of a band of men of no family,—outlaws and almost banditti. From a forest lair with no temple and no altar he had come to a town where the altar was the heart of everything. From expeditions planned and directed by himself, in which his will was the only law, he was now to be the head of a life in which everything was guided, more or less, by customs so old that no one could say where they came from. He was no man’s [pg 141]servant or subject, but he was the chosen man of the gods, to do their will in the city.

The fathers of the city saw more and more clearly the difference between the two brothers. Remus did not, apparently, take any interest in the traditions and the ceremonies so strange to him and so familiar to the colonists. Romulus had been leader in all their expeditions, not because he tried to make himself first and crowd his brother down into second place, but because his men would follow him anywhere, and they did not seem to have the same faith in Remus. Moreover, Remus did not seem to care to be a leader. He never sat, silent, planning and working out a way to do what seemed impossible, as Romulus did. Romulus was not a great talker unless at some especial time when he had something it was necessary to say. He was in the habit of thinking a matter over very thoroughly before he said anything at all about it. People wondered at his lightning-like decisions in an emergency, but the men who knew him best knew that he had often come to them privately beforehand, and talked the whole thing over, without their knowing what he was after until the time came.

Remus did most of the talking, in fact. He was fond of raising objections and expressing [pg 142]doubts, and Romulus once said with a smile that this made him very useful, because if Remus could not pick a hole in his plans no one could. It was better to know all the weak points beforehand, instead of finding them out by making a failure. This dream of founding a city, in any case, was none of Remus’; it was the dream of Romulus, and his doing.

Therefore the Romans were surprised when Remus objected to the choice of the Square Hill for the sacred city. In his opinion the one next to it, which had been named the Aventine, the hill of defense, because that was where the soldiers had encamped, would be the place. There was no sign that the Square Hill was favored by the gods. If Romulus considered signs and omens so important, how could he be so sure that he had the right to choose the place himself?

Romulus’ black brows drew together. He had not thought of it in that way. He had intended to choose, so far as he could be certain of it, the very place where he and his brother were found by the shepherd, for the sacred enclosure which would be the heart of the city. He had talked with Tullius, who thought this entirely right; the almost miraculous rescue of the two children was a sign, if any were needed. But Remus recalled the custom that the priesthood beyond the [pg 143]river had, and that was also found among the Sabines, of watching the flight of birds for a sign. He challenged Romulus to make sure in this way. Let each of the brothers take his position at sunrise on the site selected by himself and remain there through the day. Whichever saw an omen in the flight of birds should have the right to choose the place for the city. To this Romulus agreed. It might have been partly for the sake of peace, for he knew of old that when Remus became possessed of an idea he could be very eloquent about it. In addition to this, if the omens did favor the Square Hill, there could be no question then,—and he believed they would.

It was a still day, late in spring, and most of the birds had already flown northward on their usual migration. For a long time none appeared. Then Remus gave a shout. He saw winging their way slowly but steadily a flock of vultures,—six in all. If that were the only flight observed during the day, it would seem that the Aventine was the right hill, after all. The sun began to sink and cloud over. Then from the mountains where Romulus had gathered his troop, and on which his eyes were resting, arose a dark moving spot that spread into a cloud of outspread wings,—vultures again, and many of them. There were twelve altogether. The [pg 144]huge birds came sailing on wide-stretched, dusky pinions directly over the village of huts, noiselessly as the clouds. When they had passed, the sun came out again and shot rays of dazzling splendor across the hill, so that the people’s eyes, following the strange flock, could not bear the light. The gods had spoken, and the Square Hill was the chosen place.

Illustration: A plan of Rome in classical times, showing the seven hills

A PLAN OF ROME IN CLASSICAL TIMES, SHOWING THE SEVEN HILLS.

[pg 145]

On what would now be called the twenty-first of April, the day when the sun passes from the sign of the Ram into the sign of the Bull, in the beginning of the month sacred to Dia Maia, the goddess of growth, the city was founded.

The first rite was one of purification. Fire, which cleanses all things, was called upon to make pure every one who was to take part in the ceremonies of the day. The father of the city stood with Romulus near a long heap of brushwood. With a coal from the altar fire Romulus lighted the pile and leaped across the flame, followed by the others in turn.

Then around the spot where Faustulus had always said he found the children, Romulus dug a small circular trench. The space inside this was called the mundus, the home of the spirits. Here the ancestors of all these people who had left their old homes might find a new home, a place where they would still be remembered and honored, a sort of sacred guest chamber in the life of the new city. These invisible dwellers by the altar would see their children’s children and all their descendants keeping the good old customs and the ancient wisdom from dying out, just as they showed their ancestry in their eyes and hair and gait and way of speaking.

The things that were put in this trench, in a [pg 146]hollow called the “outfit vault,” were all symbols of the life of the people. First Romulus himself threw into it a little square of sod that he had brought from the courtyard of the house where he was born, on Alba Longa. Each of the fathers of the colony in turn threw in a piece of sod they had brought from their old homes on the Mountain of Fire. This, like so many things in old ceremonies, was a bit of homely poetry. When a man was obliged to leave the place where he was born he took with him a little of the sod. Even to-day we find people taking from their old homes a root of sweetbriar, or a pot of shamrock or heather, a cutting of southernwood or of lilac. The look and the smell of it waken in them a love that is older than they are, that goes back to some unknown forefather who brought it from a still older place, perhaps, centuries ago. To the people of long ago this feeling was part of religion.

Together with the earth there were placed in the circle some of the grain, the fruit, the wine, and all the other things that made a part of the life of the people. Finally an altar was built in the center of it, and a fire was lighted there from coals brought by the young girls. This was the hearth fire of the spirits and was never to be allowed to go out except once a year. Then [pg 147]it was kindled afresh by the use of the terebra and tabula, and all the other hearth fires would be lighted from it.

Illustration: The copper plow was drawn by a white bull and a white cow

Now came the last and most important ceremony, the tracing of the line of the wall around the city itself,—the urbs, the home of the people. This of course had all been decided upon beforehand, and the places for the gates had been fixed. Romulus wore the robes of a priest, and his head was veiled by a kind of mantle, in order that during the ceremony he might not see anything that would bring bad fortune. The copper plow was drawn by a white bull and a white cow, the finest of all the herd. As he turned the furrow [pg 148]he chanted the prayers which he had learned from Tullius, and the others, following in silence, picked up such clods of earth as dropped outside the furrow and threw them within, so that these, having been blessed by this ceremony, should not be trodden by the feet of any stranger. One of the strictest rules of ancient religions was that whatever was sacred, or made so by having been blessed, should be treated with as much reverence as if it were alive. It should never, of course, be trodden upon or defiled.

When he came to the places where the gates were to be, Romulus lifted the plow and carried it over. These openings in the furrow were called the portae,—the carrying places. Of course, where there was a gate, the soil must be trodden by many feet, and there the furrow was interrupted. It is not known where all of these gates were, but the one called Porta Mugionis, the Gate of the Cattle, out of which the herds were driven to pasture, was where the Arch of Titus stands in the Rome of to-day. The Porta Romana was the river gate and there were others leading to the common land to the other hills. This first enclosure was afterwards sometimes called Roma Quadrata,—the square city by the river.

When the wall was built, a little inside this [pg 149]furrow, the wall also would be sacred. Nobody would be allowed to touch it, even to repair it, without the leave of the priest in whose charge it was. On both sides of it, within and without, a space would be left where no plow was used and no building allowed. There was a good practical reason for these rules about the wall, though they were so time-honored that no one gave any thought to that. The danger of a city being taken was considerably lessened, when it was an unheard-of thing for any one to be near the wall for any reason. No spy could get over it without attracting attention. The foundations also would be much less likely to be undermined if the land next them were not used at all.

No human being among the lookers-on who reverently followed the procession around this city that was to be, could have told what thoughts and feelings filled the soul of Romulus. Perhaps he felt the solemnity of it even more than he would if he had been accustomed to all these beliefs from childhood. Things that he had dreamed of, things that he had seen from a distance as an outlaw and a vagabond, were part of the scene in which he was now the central figure. He had the sensitive understanding of others’ feelings and thoughts which a man gains when he has had to depend on his instincts in [pg 150]matters of life and death. The intense reverence and solemn joy of all these grave fathers of families, these gentle and kindly women, these children with their wide, wondering eyes, and the youths and maidens in all their springtime gladness were like wine of the spirit to him. He felt as they felt, and all the more because it was so new and strange a thing in his life. The very words of the chant, the smell of the earth as the plowshare turned it, had a sort of magic for him. It was exciting enough for those who looked on, but their feeling was gathered in his, like light in a burning glass.

When the circle was all but completed something happened which no one could have foreseen. Remus had followed all that was done with a rather mocking light in his eye. He did not believe in the least what these people believed. Suddenly he stepped past the others, and with a jeering laugh leaped across the furrow. If he had stabbed his brother to the heart, it could not have made more of a sensation. It was a deliberate, wilful insult to everything that religion meant to these people. All Romulus’ hot temper and his new reverence for the ways of his forefathers blazed up in an instant, and he struck his brother to the earth with a blow. Even one single blow from his hard fist was not an expe[pg 151]rience to be coveted, but Remus would not have been more than stunned if his head had not struck on the copper plowshare. He lay quite still. He was dead. Whether the gods themselves had willed that he should die, or whether it was chance, the blow killed him.

There were places where such an act as that of Remus would have been punished with death, but Romulus did not know that. He had struck out as instinctively as a man might knock down a ruffian who insulted his wife. Such an insult might not be a physical injury, but the intention would be enough to warrant punishment. The older men of the colony were inclined to think that the gods had done the thing. Romulus himself did not. He never got over it, though he never spoke of it. That day took the boyish carelessness out of his eyes and set a hard line about his mouth. It was the proudest and most sacred day of his life, and now it was the saddest.

[pg 152]

XIII

THE SOOTHSAYERS

After the founding of the city and the tragic ending of the day, Romulus went away, no one knew exactly where. He was gone for some time, He told Marcus Colonus that he was going to Alba Longa, where some of his men still were as a garrison for Numa. But he did not stay there many days.

Although he was the founder and in one way the ruler of his city, this did not mean that he was obliged to stay there to settle all its problems. Most of them were solved by the common law and common sense of the colonists. Their ruler had no authority over them contrary to custom, and custom would apply in one way or another to almost everything they did. Hence the young man was free to go wherever he saw fit.

The fancy took him to cross the river and see the old woman who had told him when he was a boy that he was to be the ruler of a great people. He found her still alive, though so old that her [pg 153]brown face looked like an old withered nutshell. She glanced up at him keenly.

“Welcome, king,” she said.

Just how much she had heard of his life from traveling traders and vagabonds, no one can say, but she seemed to know a great deal about it. She told him that when he returned to his own country, if he followed certain landmarks and dug in the ground at a certain point near the river bank some distance from Rome, he would find an altar and a shield of gold. The shield, she said, had fallen from heaven, and was intended for him, because he was the especial favorite of Mars, the god of war. He did not take this very seriously, but he found himself much interested in the ways of this strange people. Their priests knew how to measure distances, and mark out squares, and consult the stars. Their metal workers, dyers and potters knew how to make curious and precious things. The fortune tellers had a great reputation all over the country. Their name, soothsayers, meant “those who tell the truth.”

The old woman told him that it was a great mistake for those who were born under a certain star to try to get away from their fate. If a man were born to be a ruler and a commander of men, it was useless for him to try to make himself a [pg 154]farmer or a trader. It would be far better for him to keep to what he could do well, and buy of others what he needed. This struck Romulus as directly opposed to the ways of the villagers as he had seen them. They made for themselves everything they possibly could, and all of them were farmers. He began to wonder where their future would lead them. A man like Colonus, or Tullius, or Muraena, or Calvo knew enough to direct other men. There was not one of the ten who came out from the Mountain of Fire who was not far superior to most of the people in the country round about. They were quite as fit to be rulers of a tribe as he was; in fact, they were more so, in many ways. But if they had stayed where they were born, they would have gone on to the end of their days, working with their hands, and owning only their share of the common crop and the flocks and herds of the village. Here in the land beyond the river it was different. The powerful nobles and the priesthood ruled, and other men served.

In talking with the soothsayers, he heard a great deal about the influence of the stars. The priests also put great faith in this. They divided the sky into twelve parts, or houses, as they called them, and each of these was ruled by some star named after a god. In the course of the year [pg 155]the sun passed through each house, or sign, in turn. If a man were born in the house of the Ram, which was ruled by Mars the red planet, he would be like Mars,—a warrior, bold and fearless, and not afraid to venture into new fields and to do things that other men had not done before. If he were born in that sign when the planet was in it with the sun, he would be more a son of Mars in every way. If Venus, the planet which ruled love, were also in the sign, he would be ruled by reason even in his love affairs, and his marriage and his wars would be more or less connected. All these things, according to the soothsayers, were true of Romulus.

Romulus was acute enough to see that these people knew him for a chief, and that some of what they told him was flattery; but he was not sure how much of it was. He had not wandered about his world for twenty-odd years without seeing the difference in people. He knew that the great art of ruling men successfully lies in understanding their different characters and not expecting of any person what that person cannot do. The rules of the villages were very well for a small place, where all of the people were related. But how would they fit such a miscellaneous collection of people as seemed likely to gather in the town by the river? His mind was gradually [pg 156]getting at the problem of governing such a town in such a way that instead of being a little island of civilization in a sea of wilderness, it would be a center of civilization in a country inhabited by all sorts of people who would look up to it and be ruled and influenced by it. Such an idea, to Colonus, to Emilius in the Sabine village, or even to the old chief Numa on Alba Longa would have seemed wildly impossible. It seemed to Romulus that if a band of outlaws had been welded into an effective fighting troop as he had welded them, a country might be made up of a great many different sorts of persons living peaceably together. He grinned as he thought of such a man as his old captain, Ruffo, obeying all the customs of the colony and giving his whole mind to the tilling of the soil and the raising of cattle. It would be like trying to harness a wolf, or stocking a poultry yard with eagles. The thing could not be done. And yet, when it came to keeping order, Ruffo was wise and just and kind.

One thing he could see very clearly, and that was that for a long time yet the colonists would have to give especial attention to disciplined warfare. He wished that there were more of them. If they ever had a quarrel with the dark Etruscans beyond the river, it would be a fight for [pg 157]life, for the Etruscans outnumbered them ten to one. It would be well to trade with them so far as they could, but there again the customs of the colonists were against him. There was not much that they wished to buy.

When he left the land beyond the river, he paid a farewell visit to the old witch, and she told him again that he was born to rule. He hoped that he was.

When he came back to the Square Hill, he found the fathers of the colony confronting a new problem, which they had no tradition to help them settle. The problem was what to do with the new settlers who were coming in for protection and in the hope of getting a living, but who were not of their own people. Often they had not intelligence enough to understand what the colonists meant by their customs. This was something that Romulus had expected. He had his answer ready. He said that there was a god of whom he had heard, called Asylos, who protected homeless persons and serfs who had escaped from cruel masters, and that they might set apart a space outside the walls and dedicate it to this god. There his own soldiers could live, and there would be a place for any one who came who would work for a living. And this was done. The people who came in from various [pg 158]places seeking protection, and were useful in various ways even if they could only hew wood and draw water, were called after awhile the plebs, the men who helped to fill the town. There was so much to do, and so little time to do it, that every pair of hands was of value. It would not do to let every one who came become a citizen, an inhabitant of the city, because that might destroy all comfort and order within the walls. But the town grew much faster when it became known that any man not a criminal could get a living there.

Another circumstance that made it grow was that the country people and the villagers from farther up the river began to bring down what they had to sell. Sometimes the Etruscans bought of them, and sometimes the Romans did. It was the last riverside settlement before the boats went down to the sea, and it began to be a trading as well as a farming place not many years after the colonists settled there.

Trading was favored because farming did not altogether supply the needs of the people. Now and then the river rose and flooded their land. The only part of the country they could absolutely depend on as yet was the group of seven hills, where they kept their herds and flocks. One year, when their grain was ruined, they had [pg 159]to send across the river and buy some of the Etruscans, in exchange for wool and leather and weapons. Within the first ten years every one of the colonists had discovered that men who make their home in a new land must change their ways more or less if they are to live. While they are changing the land, the land changes them. The children of these people would not be exactly the same when they grew up as they would have been if they had stayed in their old home. Their children’s children would be still more different. It is possible that a ruler who had not grown up as Romulus had, making his own laws and habits and managing men more or less by instinct, might have been bewildered and frightened. Whatever came up, he always had some expedient ready, and whatever strange specimen of human nature cropped out in the soldiers, or the traders, or the pagans, he had always seen something like it before.

At the end of ten years the town on the Square Hill had spread out into a collection of villages and huts in which almost every kind of human being to be found in that region might have been seen, somewhere. On the Palatine Hill lived the original ten families and some of their kindred who had joined them. On the Aventine were barracks for the soldiers, and also on the steep [pg 160]narrow hill near the river. Clusters of huts here and there on the plain showed where hunters and fishermen lived, who came up the hill sometimes with what they had to sell, or came to buy weapons of the smiths. In the hollow called the Asylum lived the runaway serfs from Alba Longa, fishermen from the river bank, pagans and foresters from a dozen places. When there was a feast, all of these various kinds of families learned something of the worship of Mars, or Maia Dia, or Saturn, or Pales, or Lupercus. They all knew something about the laws of the colony, because the rulers took care that any offense against public order was punished. It was not a good place for thieves or brawlers or idlers. There was the beginning of a common law.

[pg 161]

XIV

BREAD AND SALT

Illustration: They sat together that night and watched the moon sail grandly over the flood

The children who had come to the Square Hill learned to know one another very well in those first years of the colony. There were about a dozen of the older ones who were nearly the same age, and they shared more responsibility than children do in a more settled community. When the river rose suddenly, and [pg 162]all the animals had to be hustled at a minute’s notice to the highest part of the hills out of the way of the waters, Marcs the son of Colonus, and Mamurius the son of the metal worker Muraena were old enough to be treated almost as if they were men. They sat together that night and watched the moon sail grandly over the flood, and talked of all the things that boys do talk of when they begin to look forward into the future.

It was a wild and lonely scene. The rising of the flood had covered the plain for miles, although in many places the waters were not deep. The seven hills stood up like seven islands in an ocean, and although neither of the boys had ever seen an ocean, they knew that it must be something like this. The hill where they had driven their scrambling goats was high and steep and rocky and had been partly fortified. It was a natural stronghold, standing up above the group as the head of a crouching animal rises above the body. All the hills were crowned with circles of twinkling fires, and on the highest point of each was a beacon fire which was used for signals. Each had signaled to the others that all was right, and now there was nothing to do but wait for the morning.

The smaller boys who had helped were very [pg 163]much excited at first, and danced around the fires gleefully, and ate their supper with a great appetite; but they went to sleep quite soon afterward. The two older lads were the only ones awake when the moon rose, and it seemed as if they were the only people awake in the whole world. In the safe and orderly and protected life of their childhood they had never seen anything like this, or been given so much responsibility. For some hours no one had known how much farther the waters would rise, and all the boats had been kept ready, and the men had made rafts, to save what they could if the river should sweep over the last refuge. But evidently it was not going to do anything like that. It had stopped rising already. Faustulus the old shepherd, who had lived among these hills ever since he was a boy, said that once in a few years they had a flood like this, but that it never in all his recollection had gone more than a few inches higher.

These two boys had always been good friends, for they were just unlike enough for each to do some things the other admired. Marcs was like his father, square-set and strong and rather silent. Mamurius was a little taller and slenderer, and very clever with his hands. He could invent new ways to do things when it was necessary and when the old ways were impossible. He had [pg 164]never built a boat before he and Marcs made theirs the summer before, but he had shaped a steering oar that was better than the one he copied. On this night they found themselves somehow closer together than they had ever been before, and they promised each other always to be friends, to work and fight for each other as for themselves as long as they lived.

The girls also had their responsibilities, which made them rather more capable and sure of themselves than they might have been if they were not the children of colonists. After the flood went down it left things wet and unwholesome for some weeks, and a fever broke out, of which some of the people died. Mamurius’ mother, and Marcia’s two little brothers, and two girls in the family of Cossus died of it, and at one time hardly a family had more than one or two well persons. Marcia was watching over her mother, who was very ill, when Mamurius came to the door with a basket of herbs and gave her a handful. He said that he had asked Faustulus whether he did not know of some medicine for the fever. Faustulus told him that there were certain herbs in his hut which his wife used to prepare in a drink, and this drink helped the fever. Mamurius had brewed the drink and given it to his father, and taken some himself, [pg 165]and it had done them both good. The old shepherd stood in considerable awe of the colonists, who knew so many things that he did not, and he would never have thought of suggesting anything to them himself.

One night Muraena the metal worker came to the house of Colonus, and sat down with the head of the house under a fig tree by the door and talked with him. The two had been friends for many years, and now, he said, the time had come to make the friendship even closer by an alliance between the two houses. He had long observed the goodness and dutiful kindness of Colonus’s daughter Marcia, and it was his wish that now she was come to an age to be married, she might be his own daughter. He had reason to believe that his son would be glad to marry her. What did Colonus think about it?

Colonus had no objection whatever. That night he went in and called Marcia to him, and told her kindly that Mamurius the metal worker’s son had been proposed for her husband, and that it would be most pleasing to both families if the marriage could be arranged. It was a surprise to Marcia, but not at all an unpleasant one, and she went to sleep that night a very happy girl.

This was the first wedding in the colony, and as the preparations went forward, everybody, old [pg 166]and young, took a great deal of interest in it. Marcia never knew she had so many friends. Everybody seemed to wish her well and approve of the marriage. The wooden chest Marcs had made for her, and Bruno had carved and painted, began to fill with webs of linen and wool, the gifts of her mother and the other matrons, and some that had been spun and woven by Marcia herself. She could see from the door the house that was to be her home, as its fresh, new walls arose day by day. And at last the day arrived for the confarreatio; as it was called, the wedding ceremony, the eating of bread. Like the other ceremonies in the religion of the people, this was very old, so old that the beginning of it was not known. The reason of some of the things that were done had been forgotten. Marcia could just remember going to one wedding when she was a little girl before they left the Mountain of Fire. All the colonists who went out were already married and had children, and until now none of the children were old enough to begin a new home.

There was always a certain meaning in the eating of salt together; it is so in all the ancient races. Salt was not like food that any two men might eat together, like animals, where they found it. It was part of the household stores; [pg 167]it was eaten by families living in houses. In some places it was not easy to come by, and it was the one thing necessary to a really good meal, whatever else there was to eat. When a man was invited to share a meal with salt in it, it meant that he was invited to the table and was more or less an equal. People who were simply fed from the stores of the farmer prepared their own food in their own way, often without salt. It was said that the wood spirits, the gods of the wilderness, of whom nobody knew much except that they were mischievous and tricky, could always be known by the fact that salt to them was like poison; they could not eat it at all.

When a bride left her own home to go to that of her husband, it was a very solemn proceeding, because she said farewell to her own family, the spirits of her ancestors, and the gods of her father’s hearth, and became one of her husband’s family, a daughter of his father. All that was done was based more or less on this idea. A girl who ran away from home without her father’s knowledge could not expect to be blessed by her ancestors, the unseen dwellers by the fireside. A woman who came into another home without the permission of the spirits who dwelt there could not hope to be happy; bad luck would certainly follow. The wedding ceremonies were [pg 168]meant to make it perfectly clear that all was done in the right and proper and fortunate way.

The day was chosen by Tullius the priest, and was a bright and beautiful day, not long after the feast of Maia. The ceremonies began at dawn. Before sunrise Tullius was scanning the sky to make sure that the day would be fair and that no evil omen was in sight. Felic’la, who hovered around her sister with adoring eyes, thought she had never seen Marcia look so beautiful. She was in white, with a flame-colored veil over her head, and her hair had been, according to the old custom, parted with a spear point into six locks, arranged with ribbons tied in a certain way to keep it in place. Her tall and graceful figure was even more stately than usual in the white robe she wore, and her great dark eyes were like stars.

When the guests were all at the house, Marcus Colonus offered a sacrifice at the family altar and pronounced certain ancient words, explaining that he now gave his daughter to the young Mamurius and set her free from every obligation that kept her at home. When the sacrifice was over, the guests wished the young couple happiness, and the marriage feast began. There was no one in the whole village who did not have reason to remember the rejoicings on the day [pg 169]when the daughter of Colonus was married, for it was the richest feast that had ever been given in the colony. The house was decorated with wreaths and the best of the wine was served, and all the dainties the Roman women knew how to make were to be found upon the table. Marcia sat among her maidens like a young goddess among priestesses; they were all eager to show her how dear she was to them and how glad they were that she was happy. There was not a child in the village who did not think of her as a kind elder sister. Now she herself was to be served and made happy, and for that day she was the most important person in the eyes of all those who had been her playmates.

At last the rejoicings at the home of Colonus were over, and it was time for the wedding procession. Attended by the young girls near her own age, the bride was taken from her mother’s arms by the bridegroom, and the whole party moved in procession toward the new home. In advance went torch bearers, and the children scattered flowers for her feet to tread upon as she passed. Every one was singing or shouting “Talassio! Talassio!” The flute players were making music, and the bridegroom scattered handfuls of nuts for which the boys scrambled. When they reached the door of the new house [pg 170]Marcia poured a little oil upon the doorposts, and wound them with wool which her own hands had spun. Then Mamurius lifted her in his strong arms and carried her through the door.

Illustration: Mamurius lifted her in his strong arms and carried her through the door

Exactly why this was part of the marriage ceremony is not known. Some think it was because a bride must not be allowed to stumble on the threshold, for that would be unlucky. But it was more likely to mean that she was brought by her husband into the house to join in the worship of the spirits of the home, and so did not come in without an invitation. As she stood in the atrium, the middle room where the altar and [pg 171]the family table were, she received the fire and water of the family worship and reverently lighted the first fire ever kindled on that hearth. She and Mamurius repeated together the prayers that thousands of young couples had repeated since first their people had homes. Then they ate together a flat cake made with the corn blessed by the priest, and Marcia poured a little of the marriage wine upon the fire as a sacrifice of “libation” to the gods of her new home. This was the confarreatio. They felt as if the silent, burning fire that lighted the dusky little room were trying to tell them that their simple meal was shared by the gods themselves, and that the blessing of all Mamurius’ forefathers was on the bride that he had brought home to be the joy of his house.

On the next day there was another feast, to celebrate the beginning of the new home, and the wedding was over.

“I am glad,” said Marcia’s mother to her husband when they went home that night, leaving their daughter and young Mamurius standing together at their own door, “that everything went so well, without a single unlucky or unhappy thing to spoil the good fortune. Marcia well deserves to be happy,—but I shall miss her every day I live.”

[pg 172]

She sighed, and Felic’la looked rather sober. She knew very well that they would all miss Marcia, but she determined in her careless little heart to be a better girl and do so much for her mother and brothers that when her turn came, they would all be sorry to see her go.

“I am glad,” said Colonus, “for more than one reason. I have been rather anxious for fear that in this new place our young people would not remember the old ways as they might if they had grown up in our old home. It was important to have the first wedding one that they would all remember with pleasure, and wish to follow as an example. I am very glad Marcia has so good a husband. Mamurius is a youth who will go far and be a leader among the young men. I suppose that now they will all be thinking of marriage.”

There were, in fact, several other marriages in the colony within a year or two, but nobody who was at that first wedding ever forgot it. Marcia was often called upon to tell how the garlands were made, and just how much honey they put in the cakes for the feast, and how the other little matters were arranged that all seemed to be managed exactly right. In fact, that wedding set a fashion and a standard, and as Marcia’s father was shrewd enough to see, it is a good thing [pg 173]in a new community to have the standards rather high. There was nothing in what Marcia and Mamurius did that other people could not follow if they chose, but the simple comfort and grace of their way of living did mean that they cared enough for their home to take it seriously. Girls who might not have thought much about cleanliness, thrift, cheerfulness and beauty began to see, when they visited Marcia, how pleasant it was to have a home like hers. She did not tell them so; she was herself, and that was enough.

[pg 174]

XV

THE TRUMPERY MAN

One autumn day a little while after the harvest, a squat, brown man with large black eyes under great arched eyebrows set in a large head, and with unusually muscular shoulders and arms, was paddling slowly in a small boat across the yellow river. As he crossed he looked up attentively at the range of hills near the riverside, now partly covered with wooden huts. It was his experience that villages were good places to trade. They were especially so when, as now, pipes were sounding and the people were keeping holiday in honor of some god. He had gone to many places with his wares, but he had not as yet visited the town by the river. He was not even quite sure of its name. Some called it Rumon and some Roma. The people of his race were not very quick of ear, and often pronounced letters alike or confused them when they sounded alike,—as o and u, or b and p, or t and d. He himself was called Utuze, Otuz, or [pg 175]Odisuze, or Toto, according to the place where he happened to be. He came from Caere, the Etruscan seaport near the mouth of the river.

He had landed on this bank when he went up the river and approached the men from the settlement when they were working on their lands outside the walls, but they did not pay much attention to him. He could not tell whether they did not want his wares, or were suspicious, or simply did not understand what he was talking about. Now he was going to find out,—for he was of a persistent nature. Perhaps there would be some one at the festival who could speak both his language and theirs and tell them what he wanted to say. Then it would be easy.

On a glittering chain around his neck he carried a metal whistle, or trumpet, that could be heard a long distance and would pierce through most other noises as a needle pierces wool. On his back he carried in a sack a great variety of small things likely to please women and girls and children. He had learned a very long time ago that however shrewd a man may be, he will buy very silly things and pay any price you like for them when he is persuaded that they will please a girl. He also knew that men will buy things for their wives that no sensible woman ever buys for herself, and that if children cry for a toy long [pg 176]enough, they often get it. But the most important thing was, he knew, that a man who can attract attention to himself, no matter how he does it, generally sells more goods than one who depends only on the usefulness of what he has to sell. Therefore, when he set out on these trading journeys, he put on the most gorgeous and gay-colored clothes he could find, decorated with bright-colored figures, embroidered, and fringed or fastened with little glittering beads and ornaments such as he carried in his pack. Shining things were easier to sell than other things, as they were easier to look at. The peddler had given careful attention to selecting his stores, and Mastarna, the fat merchant from whom he got them, helped him. He wished to know more of these people in the town by the river.

The squealing of the peddler’s trumpet reached the ears of the soldiers, who were having a good time in their own way. They had their own games and frolics and feats of strength, and some of the young men from the town were there to look on and perhaps to join. Urso the hunter’s son, and Marcus and Bruno the sons of Colonus, and little Pollio the son of the sandal maker, were all there, and when they heard the trumpet they sprang to their feet. But Ruffo the captain of the guard laughed, and the others [pg 177]shouted, and Ruffo said, “By Jove, there’s Toto!”

“Diovi” was the general name for “the gods,” and when it is pronounced quickly it sounds like “Jove.” The father of the gods was “Diovis-Pater”—which in course of time became “Jupiter.”

The peddler had been in their camp in the days before the town by the river was thought of, and when he saw them, he came up the path grinning broadly, and they grinned back. They explained to the boys of the colony that he came from across the river and dealt in all sorts of things that were not made at all on this side, and some that were brought from the seashore. Toto spread out his gay cloth on the ground and began to lay out his wares.

Through long practice he knew just how to place them so that they would show most effectively, and many a customer wondered why the trinket did not look as well when he got it home as it had before he bought it. The colors in the painted cloth were combined in old, old patterns worked out according to laws as certain as the laws of music, and everywhere was the gilding that set off the colors and seemed to make them brighter and richer.

Illustration: Toto spread out his gay cloth upon the ground

There were scarfs such as women wore on their [pg 178]heads, and fillets for the hair, and girdles and veils. There were necklaces and bracelets and rings and brooches and pins. There were boxes of sweetmeats, and metal cups and spoons, and curious little images of men and animals, and strings of beads, and charm strings, and hollow metal cases for charms, that could be hung around the neck, and pottery toys, and trinkets of all kinds. It seemed impossible that so much merchandise of so many different kinds could have been packed in that bag, or that a man could have carried it, after it was packed. If the things [pg 179]had been as heavy as they looked, it would have been too great a load even for Toto’s broad shoulders.

The Roman boys had never seen anything like this before, but they did not show any great curiosity. One of the things that the people of Mars taught their children, without ever saying it in so many words, was not to be in a hurry to talk too much in strange company. They were brought up to feel that they were the equals of any one they were likely to meet and need not be in haste to make new friends. This feeling gave them a certain dignity not easily upset. In fact, dignity is merely the result of respecting yourself as a person quite worthy of respect, and not feeling obliged to insist on it from other people. The colonists had it.

Pollio picked up one of the sandals and smiled.

“My father would not think this leather fit to use,” he said in a low tone to Bruno.

Marcus was looking at a pin of a rather pretty design and wondering how Flavia, his betrothed, would like it, when it bent in his fingers. That pin had not been made for the handling of young men with hands so muscular as his. Marcus paid for the pin and tossed it into the river. He had no intention of making a gift like that to any one.

[pg 180]

When they handled the charm necklaces they saw from the lightness that what looked like gold was not gold. It was so with all the peddler’s stock. The soldiers, seeing that the boys from the colony did not think the stuff worth buying, did not buy much themselves, nor did they drink much of his wine.

Ruffo said after Toto had gone that he did not always carry such a collection of trash as he had to-day. Sometimes he sold excellent fish-hooks and small tools. Marcus said that if he bought anything, he wanted a thing that was worth buying, and they began to throw quoits at a mark.

Marcus had seen traders before and dealt with them, but for some reason this peddler’s pack set him thinking. In their way of living a farmer made most of his own tools, and wishing them to last as long as possible, he made them well. It was the same with the baskets, the linen, the wool and the leather work, and the other things made at home. It was the same with the work done in the smithy of Muraena. He wished to have a reputation among his neighbors for making fine weapons. The men always put the greater part of their time on their farms, and since they had been in this new country, their planning and contriving how to make the soil produce more and [pg 181]more had been far more exciting than ever before. Each year a little more of the marsh or the waste land would be drained and cleared; each year the flocks and herds would be larger and more huts would be built. They were founding a new people.

In view of these great thoughts of the future, the glittering trinkets of the man with the trumpet looked small and worthless. Marcus began to see what was meant by the elders when they spoke of “gravity” as a virtue and “levity” as a rather foolish vice. Life depended very much on the way one took things; to take important things lightly, or give valuable time and thought to worthless objects left a man with the chaff on his hands instead of the good grain.

Something his father had told him a long time ago, when he was a little boy, came into Marcus’s mind. It was when he wanted something very much, and being little, cried because he could not have it and made himself quite miserable. His father came in just then and watched him for a minute or two. Then he said,

“My son, do you wish to be a strong man, when you grow big?”

“Y-yes,” sniffed the little fellow dolefully.

“You wish to be strong of soul and heart as you are in your body, so that no one can make [pg 182]you do anything you are not willing to do?”

“Yes, Father,” said the boy, with his puzzled dark eyes searching his father’s face.

“Then, my son, remember this: the strong man is the man who can go without what he wants. If you cannot do without a thing you want, without being unhappy, you are like a boy who cannot walk without a crutch. If you can give up, without making a ridiculous ado about it, whatever it is not wise for you to have—if you can be happy in yourself and by yourself and stand on your own feet—then you are strong. In the end you will be strong enough to get what you really want. The gods hate a coward.”

Now in the long shadows of the fading day, as he heard the far sound of the peddler’s trumpet down the river, Marcus found a new meaning in his father’s words. He saw that those who wasted what they had earned by hard work on that rubbish would end by having nothing at all, because they were caught by the color and the shine of things made to tempt them. What was there in all that collection that was half as beautiful as a golden wheat field? What ornament that could be worn out or broken was equal to the land itself, with its treasure of fleecy flocks and sleek cattle, and roof trees under which happy [pg 183]children slept? The treasure of the world was theirs already, in this plain that was theirs to make fruitful and beautiful, and people with prosperous villages. That was the real estate; the other was a shadow and a sham.

[pg 184]

XVI

THE GREAT DYKE

Although Toto did not find his first visit to the Seven Hills very profitable, he had much that was interesting to tell Mastarna when he returned. The two had a long talk in their strange rugged language with its few vowel sounds. Mastarna was most interested in the gods of these strangers. If he could find out what they did to bring good luck and ward off misfortune, he could have charms and lucky stones made to sell to them. If he knew what their gods were like, he could have images of these carved in wood or molded in clay or cast in metal. But Toto could tell him very little about these questions. The soldiers at the camp had no altars and no regular worship at all, and they moved from place to place and did not keep any place sacred. But these people on the Square Hill seemed very religious. They behaved as if they had settled down there to stay forever.

[pg 185]

“What are they like?” asked the old man.

“They are like no other townspeople in this valley,” said Toto decidedly. “They are not like the herdsmen who wander from place to place and sleep in tents, or the hunters who live alone in huts, or the fishermen by the river or the sailors by the seashore. They are tall and straight and strong and very active, because they work all the time. They work mostly on their land. When they are not plowing, or digging, or cutting grain, or cutting wood, or making things, they are working to make themselves stronger. They run and leap and throw heavy weights; they hurl the spear and shoot arrows at a mark. They stand in rows and go through motions all together, and march to and fro, and play at ball. They do everything that is possible to make themselves good soldiers; even the boys begin when they are small to play at these games.

“And that is not all. The women work also, but not as slaves. The matrons go here and there as they choose, and see eye to eye with their husbands, and manage the household as the men manage the farm. The men sit in council, but each man speaks of his work in private to his wife, and she advises with him. They do not have slaves to wait on them; even their great men work with the others in the field. No one is [pg 186]ashamed to work with his hands. They build their own houses and their own walls; they breed their own cattle. If there should be a sheep gone from the flock, or a heifer strayed from the herd, they would know it and search until the thief was found.”

“Hum,” said the old man thoughtfully. He was thinking that this must be a strong and valiant people, and that if they increased in the valley of the yellow river they might become very powerful. “And what are their priests?”

“They have no priesthood dwelling in the temples,” said Toto. “Their elders are their priests and pretend to no magical powers. They are chosen for their wisdom. Their gods are invisible.”

“Hum,” said Mastarna again.

The people to whom he and Toto belonged were called at one time and another Tuscans or Etruscans by others, but they called themselves the Ras, or Rasennae. They had some towns in the mountains beyond the plain where these strangers were. They held most of the country on their side of the rivers, as far north as the river Arno, and they had always lived there, so far as they knew themselves or any one else could say. They were different in almost every way from these strangers of the hills. He wondered [pg 187]if his people had anything whatever that the strangers wanted.

“You say that they build walls,” he said to Toto. “Do they build good ones?”

Toto grinned. He was nothing of a builder himself, but even he could see the difference between the rude stone laying and fencing of the strangers, and the scientific, massive masonry and arched drains of his own country. “They will find out how good they are,” he said, “after twenty years of flood and drought.”

In fact, the worst enemy the colonists had met thus far was water. They were used to mountain slopes with good drainage. They knew how to keep a field from being gutted by mountain freshets, and how to repair roadways and build drains that would carry off the water. They were strong and clever at fitting stones into the right place for walls, and they could dam up a stream for a fishpool or a bathing place. But this sort of country was all new to them. It was not exactly a marsh and not so swampy as it became in later centuries, but at any time it might become a marsh full of ponds and stagnant streams, and remain so for weeks at a time. This was bad for the grain and worse for sheep, and unhealthy for human beings. During the next rainy season after Toto’s visit, the farmers [pg 188]had a very unhappy time. They discovered that too much water is almost if not quite as much a nuisance as too little. In a dry time it is sometimes possible to carry water from a distance, but in a wet time there is nowhere to put the water that is not wanted, and many of their ditches were choked up with débris, and their grain was washed away.

Mastarna was full of patience. He let them toil and soak and chill and sweat until he thought they would welcome a suggestion from almost any quarter. Then he and a man he knew, a stone worker called Canial, took a boat and went across the river to a point where three or four of the colonists were prying an unhappy ox out of the mire. The strength, determination and skill with which they conducted the work were worthy of all admiration. But it would have been far better if the land could have been drained and protected by a solid dyke.

Canial looked the bank over with a shrewd, experienced eye, and said that if he had the work to do, he would dig a ditch there, and there, and there; here he would build a covered drain lined with tilework; and in a certain hollow under the hill he would have an arched waterway, so that flood water would run through instead of tearing at the foundation of the terrace below the vine[pg 189]yards. But he saw no signs that these men in their building made any use of arches. He jumped ashore and splashed through the pools, which were almost waist-deep in some places, up to where the ox was standing panting, wild-eyed and nearly exhausted with fright and struggle. Canial squatted down by a rivulet. He did not know the language of the colonists and they did not know his, but no words were needed for what he wanted to explain. He made a miniature drain rudely arched over with mud-plastered stones while they stood there watching. That could be done, as well with, a six-inch brook as with a river. It did not take the Romans ten minutes to see that he knew more about such matters than they did.

“Caius,” said Colonus to young Cossus, “go over to the camp and find Ruffo, and ask him to come and talk to this fellow.”

He knew that Ruffo understood several languages and dialects, and whatever it was that this man had come for, he wished to know it.

Ruffo knew enough of the language Canial spoke to be able to make out his meaning, and he told Colonus that the stone worker wished to come and live in Rome. He would show them how to drain their land and bridge their streams. Mastarna would tell them that he was a man of [pg 190]honesty and ability. His reason for leaving his own country was a personal one; he had had a quarrel with the head priest of his village because the priest wished to interfere in his family affairs and make Canial’s daughter the wife of his nephew, against her will. There was no safety or comfort in his part of the country when the priesthood had a grudge against a man.

There were others in the Roman settlement who had fled there for reasons of much the same kind as Canial’s—men who had been robbed of their inheritance, slaves escaped from cruel masters, homeless men, and men who for one reason or another had found themselves unsafe where they lived before. But this was the first family which had wished to come from beyond the river. The others all came from places where the public worship was not entirely unlike that of the Romans themselves and the people were of the same race in the beginning. This was a departure from that rule.

If it had not been for the dyke-building problem, Colonus would probably have said no at once. But that would have to be settled before the town grew much larger than it was, or they would have to change their way of life altogether. They were a people who hated to be crowded. They would need land, and land, and more land, [pg 191]if they continued to live on the Seven Hills. They must have grain for the cattle and themselves, and pasturage for the beasts, room for orchards and gardens, room for the villages of those who tilled their fields. Canial seemed to think that it would be quite possible to prevent the plain from being flooded, with proper stonework and drains, but it would need a man thoroughly used to the work to direct it. Colonus could see that Canial was probably that man. Every suggestion he made was practical and good, and he knew things about masonry that it had taken his ancestors generations to learn. Colonus finally said that he would talk it over with the other men of the city and give him an answer on a certain day.

Ruffo did not know anything of the gods the people of Canial worshiped, except that they were unlike the Roman gods and seemed to be very much feared. They had a god Turms, who was rather like the Roman Terminus, who protected traders and kept boundaries. They had a smith of the gods, called Sethlans, and a god of wine and drunkenness called Fuffluns.

No person, of course, could be allowed to bring the worship of strange gods into the sacred city. The very reason of the founding of the city was to make a home for their own gods, and [pg 192]to let in strange ceremonies would be to defile that home.

It was finally decided that Canial and some of his countrymen who wished to come with him should have a place of their own, which was afterward known as the Street of the Tuscans. It was a place which no one had wished to occupy before, because it was so wet, but Canial and his friends had no difficulty in draining it. The only condition he made was that traders should be allowed to come and go and supply his family and friends with whatever they needed. Women, he said, did not like a strange place much as it was, and he should have no peace at home if his wife were obliged to learn new methods of housekeeping.

The only condition that Marcus Colonus and his friends made was that the strangers should do nothing against the law of the settlement, or against the Roman gods, and this they readily agreed to. Canial said that the priests in his country demanded so much in offerings that a man was no better than a slave, working for them.

All this happened while Romulus was away, but when he returned he said that the decision was a wise one. It privately rather amused him to see how in this new country the colonists were led to allow the beginning of new customs which [pg 193]they regarded with great horror when they first came.

Before another rainy season, the Etruscans and the Romans, working together, had made a very fair beginning on the dyking and draining of the worst of the marshes and the bridging of bad places. Canial understood how to mix burned lumps of clay containing lime and iron, and lime and sand, and water, in such a way that when the muddy paste hardened it was like stone itself. Tertius Calvo, who happened to be there when this was done, tried it by himself. Although what he made was not entirely a failure, it did not behave as it did under the hands of Canial. Without saying anything—indeed, he could say nothing, for he knew not a word of the strangers’ language—Tertius watched and measured and experimented with small quantities until he found out the exact proportions and methods Canial used. The bit of wall he built finally was very nearly as good as Canial’s own work. Calvo was good at laying stones, and had very little to learn in that line from any stranger. This mortar, as they found in course of time, would stand heat and cold and water and seemed to become harder with exposure. By using the best quality of material the work was improved. There was no secret about it; indeed, Canial did [pg 194]not object to teaching any man who wished to learn all he could.

The greatest debt they owed to their new settlers was the low round arch, built with stones set in mortar in such a way that the greater the weight, the firmer the arch would be. Another Etruscan trick was plastering over the side of a drain or a bank with a mixture of small stones stirred thickly into mortar like plums in a pudding. The best of this new way of working was that it could be done so quickly. A great deal of the work could be done by stupid and ignorant laborers under the direction of those who knew how to direct. Men whom they could not employ in any sort of skilled labor could help here. Such men were glad enough to come for an allowance of food and drink. A certain task was set them, and they had their living for that; if they did more, they had an extra allowance. The task was called moenia, and since it was the lowest and least skilled labor, work of that kind later came to be known as menial, the work of slaves and servants.

The change in the face of the plain in the following years was almost like magic. The colonists built dykes to keep the river from overflowing; they built drains to carry off the heavy rains; they built culverts; they built bridges rest[pg 195]ing on solid arches; and they made one great drain which carried off so much of the overflow water that it made the Square Hill and most of the land around it safe. In fact, a part of every year thereafter was given to the improvement and protection of newly cleared farmlands by stonework. People came from a great distance to see the dyke they built, for nothing like it had been done on that side of the river. The people in the lowlands villages, relieved from the fear of floods, were proud to call themselves the servants of the Romans. In those early years a beginning was made of the great engineering work that was to endure for centuries. The people of the Square Hill were doing on a very small scale what nobody had done before them in that part of the world. In their masonry and their farming they gave all their poorer neighbors reason to be glad they were located where they were. It was a peaceful conquering of village after village.

[pg 196]

XVII

THE WAR DANCE

When the country had grown peaceful, and there was no more need, for the time, of sending out warlike expeditions, it began to be seen that the soldiers who had come in with Romulus or had joined the troops later must have something to do. Romulus talked the matter over seriously with the fathers of the colony. If these men were to settle down as citizens, taking part in the life of the city—and some of them wished to do so—they ought to have homes; they needed wives. The family life of this people was the very heart of their religion and their society. The father was high priest in his family. The public worship was only a greater family worship, in which all had a part, old and young, living and dead. The gods themselves were often present unseen to receive prayers and offerings,—so the people believed.

The question of wives for these men was a serious one. Girls were growing up within the [pg 197]palisade on the Square Hill, but so were young men. There would be hardly enough brides for all the youths of their own generation, even if every girl found a husband. Aside from the fact that the parents would not like to see their daughters married to strangers of whom they knew nothing, the young folk themselves would be likely to object. Although theoretically, marriages were made by the elders without the girls having anything to say about it, human nature was much the same there as anywhere. In practice, the bride had some choice and the groom some independence. Any woman married against her will can make life so unpleasant for her husband and her husband’s relatives that common sense would lead a parent to avoid such a result. Care was taken to keep a young girl from knowing any men who would be unsuitable. A man did not ask any youth into his house to meet his daughters, on the spur of the moment. He met a great many men at the midday meal which the men ate together, whom he would not think of asking to a family supper. He knew a great many with whom he would not eat at all.

Here and there a soldier found a wife among the country people, but this did not usually turn out very well. The daughters of herdsmen and hut dwellers were not trained in the arts which [pg 198]made a woman dear to a civilized husband. Colonus and his friends wished the wives of the growing settlement to be women who would add to the wealth of their homes and not spoil it,—who would love their homes and their husbands, and bring up their children wisely, and live in peace and friendliness with the other women. The question which had come up was more important now than it might be later. A great deal depended on beginning with the right families. The men now coming in would be the fathers of the future Rome, and on the way in which their sons were brought up the prosperity and godliness of the people might rest.

Another possibility was in sight, and it was too nearly a probability to look very pleasant. The soldiers could get wives across the river among the Rasennae. But that would be a dangerous plan—dangerous perhaps to the men themselves and certainly to the colony. Women of a strange land, of a race so old and strong as the dark people seemed to be—a country where there was a secret council of priests who knew all sorts of things that the people did not—such women, married to settlers in the colony, would be a constant danger. They would learn from their husbands all that went on; they might persuade them to worship the strange gods; they [pg 199]might help to break down defences against the unknown power of the foreign priesthood. That was a plan not to be thought of for a minute.

Romulus sat listening and thinking, with his chin on his strong, brown hand, and his bright dark eyes gazing straight at the altar fire. When the others had said what they thought, he spoke. That was his way. He had perhaps begun in that way because he was not sure he knew all the proper forms of speech or all the matters that ought to be considered in ruling the affairs of this people. Now that he was well acquainted with all these, he still wanted to hear what every one else had to say, before speaking himself. This was becoming in a man still so young, and it was also wise.

“There is a plan, my fathers,” he said, “but I do not know whether you will think that it is the right one. Very long ago, I have heard, our people used to take their wives by capture. In those days a man never went openly to ask for his bride. He stole into the village by night with an armed guard, choosing his closest friends to go with him. Then suddenly seizing upon the maid he carried her off, and she became dead to her own family, and one of his people.

“Now this I do not commend, since it is not our wish to war with the people around us. To [pg 200]raid their towns as did the men of old time, and steal their maidens, would lead to never-ending war. The custom is an old one and long given up, and I do not like to return upon a road that I have traveled, or dig up old bones.

“In the villages on the heights—in the lower valleys of the mountain range that lies there—” he waved a brown arm toward the far blue hills, “the people who dwell there are worshippers of our gods, and their ways are as the ways of this colony, O my fathers. Their women spin, they weave, they grind grain, they tend bees, they keep the household fire alive and bright, they are fair and pure. These are fit wives for our soldiers—or for any man.

“In some of these villages were we known, for we were there in the old days. They are not walled villages, they are scattered among the valleys, and they have little to do with one another or with strangers. It is in my mind that if their women were married here, we and they might be one people. Then all the Seven Hills would be ours, and we and they together would be a strong nation. But well I know that they would never consent to give their daughters to strangers.

“This therefore is my thought. I have seen,” the young chief’s dark face was lighted by a [pg 201]fleeting smile, “that sometimes the will of a young maid is not wholly that of the old men and women of her people. Forgive me, O ye elders, if I speak foolishly, but I think that some of these Sabine girls might not themselves be unwilling to mate with my men. Would it be so great a crime to take wives from those villages despite the will of the priests and elders, if the maidens themselves became in time content? Suppose now that I send my men as messengers, to invite these people to a festival on the day when the Salii, the Leapers, have their games and their feast. They also have fraternities like ours; there is a fraternity of the Luperci, and the Salii, and others, among the Sabines. Let their young men contend with ours in the games, and their people join with ours for the day. They are not compelled to come. If they dislike and distrust us, they will stay in their villages. But if it is as I think, many will come.

“Then when all are gathered together, and weapons are laid for the games, let our young men, at a given signal, seize each his chosen maiden and bring her back within our walls to be his wife. In token that they are not to be slaves but honorable wives, whose work is to spin, let our young men shout as they go, ‘Talassa! Talassa!’

[pg 202]

“Have I spoken well, my father?” He looked straight at Colonus. “If ye have a better plan, let no more be said of this.”

But there was no better plan; in fact, there seemed to be no other plan at all. Romulus knew this very well. There was nothing in this idea that was offensive to the general opinion in those days. It was not so very long since marriage by capture was the usual way of getting wives. If the Sabine girls were brought into the colony the soldiers would be sure of having wives with the customs and the same gods of the other matrons. If they were brought in a company and lived in the same quarter of the town, they would form a little society of their own. It would not be a life entirely new and strange.

It was decided that the plan should be tried. If any of the messengers did a little courting in the villages, nothing was said of it.

The place chosen for the festival was a plain where there would be room for all the games and the feasting and the ceremonies. Romulus and some of the young men went out there a few days before the appointed date to level off the ground, arrange seats for the public men, and make ready. In removing a bowlder which would be in the way of racers, and smoothing the ground, Tertius Calvo found his pick striking [pg 203]on something strange. He dug down a little way and unearthed a flat stone which seemed to be the top of an altar. He called the others to look, and Romulus caught his breath with a queer gasp. He remembered something.

Illustration: There was a gleam of bright metal in the hole they were digging

“Jove!” said Mamurius, a few minutes later, “Here’s something else!” There was a gleam of bright metal in the hole they were digging. The altar, a small square one of a whitish stone, was lifted out, and then something struck with a muffled clang against Mamurius’ spade. They were all excitedly gazing by that time, and when the round metal thing was lifted out, and the [pg 204]earth cleaned off it with grass, and it was rubbed with a piece of leather, it almost blinded them. It was a golden shield.

Where it had come from, no human creature knew. Nothing else like it was ever found in that neighborhood. It may have belonged to some Etruscan nobleman in far-off days, when a battle was fought on that plain; it may have been part of the plunder of some city; but there it was, and the decoration showed that it was made by a smith who worshiped Mars. Reverently the young men carried it back to Rome, after they had set up the altar on the field where they found it. It seemed like a sign that the gods approved what they were doing. It was hung up in the temple, and was considered the especial property of the Salii, or Leapers, the young men who danced the war dance, for it was they who had found it. But Romulus told none of them of the witch’s prophecy that he would find an altar and a shield in just this place.

The day appointed for the feast was fair, and early in the morning the mountain people could be seen coming across the plain or camped near the field.

The soldiers who were to take part in the festival in this unexpected and startling way were [pg 205]very far from being the same rude outlaws who had followed their young leader to the Long White Mountain. They had been living within the bounds of a civilized settlement, and the life had had its effect on them. They had seen men handle the spade and the plough as if they were weapons, and treat the earth as if it were the most interesting thing in the world to study. They had seen how interesting it was to change the face of the land, to make a wild and dreary waste into a rich farming country, to fight flood and fire and other mighty natural enemies,—and win. They had seen, though at a distance, the gracious manners and gentle ways of the matrons, the sweetness and dignity of the young girls. They had fought and worked side by side with the young men who were proud to be the sons of such fathers. Many of the outlaws had had ancestors who were strong and brave and intelligent. They had the sense to see that if they joined this new settlement they would have a place and a power. And last but not least there was a great deal of wholesome comfort in the life of this place. To men who had slept unsheltered in cold and rain, who had worn sheepskins and wolfskins, who had gone without food, often for days, and never had a really good meal unless they had unusual luck, the life of the colonists [pg 206]was a revelation. Good beds, fresh vegetables, well-cooked meats, cakes made with honey, were luxuries they appreciated. The dress of the people was simple enough; a tunic for working, and over that for warmth or holiday dignity the large square of undyed wool called a toga; a pair of sandals for the feet, a cap or helmet for the head, a leather girdle and pouch. But it was a long way better than rawhide. In short, these young fellows had discovered that they liked a civilized life. They were a very fine looking company as they marched down the hill from their barracks and went with their long, swinging stride over the plain to the place where the strange, little old altar stood.

The games went on, and at the height of the gayety and excitement there was a sudden trumpet call, and all was in confusion. Each soldier seized a Sabine maiden and carried her off as if she were a child. The men who were not so burdened formed a rear guard. The older people were already on their way home. Some of them did not know what had happened. Before anything could be done by the startled and angry Sabine men, the soldiers were inside the walls of the city and the shout of “Talassa! Talassa!” revealed that this was a revival of the ancient custom of marriage by capture.

[pg 207]

The Sabines were angry enough to go to war, But they could do nothing that night, for a successful war would need preparations. There was a parley, and Romulus himself informed the commissioners that the weddings would take place with all due ceremony, and that in the meantime the girls were in the city, under the care of matrons of the best families, and would be given the best of care and provided with all things necessary for a bride. Let there be no mistake about this: if any attempt were made to recapture the Sabine girls the soldiers would fight. They had got their brides, and they meant to keep them. It was a sleepless night in the town by the riverside, but in the morning the Sabines were seen returning to their mountains.

[pg 208]

XVIII

THE PEACE OF THE WOMEN

It is not to be understood that all the people on the Square Hill approved of the capture of the Sabine girls. It did not seem to them, of course, as it would to the society of to-day, because they considered that a girl ought to marry, in any case, as her elders thought best that she should. But Tullius the priest, and three or four of the other older men, were very doubtful about the wisdom of angering the Sabine men by such a proceeding. Naso and his brother objected to the capture because they had never heard of such a thing. They were men whose minds never took kindly to any sort of new idea. When they made their great move and left their old home, they seemed to have exhausted all the ability to change that they had. They held to every old custom they had ever heard of, as a limpet holds to a rock. But the thing was done, and there was nothing they could [pg 209]do now except to prophesy that it could not possibly turn out well.

The women of the colony were curious to know how far the Sabine marriage customs were like their own, and whether the wedding would mean to these girls what it would to a Roman wife. Marcia asked her husband about it on the night of the festival, when the confusion had quieted somewhat. The watch-fires of the Sabines could be seen far away on the plain, and in the stronghold on the Capitoline Hill the sentinels were keeping watch against any sudden attack.

“Ruffo says,” answered Mamurius, “that they have the same customs as ours, in the main. The girls are taking it very quietly. I think they stopped being frightened when they found they were to be in the care of your mother and the other matrons in the guest house. You know Romulus has ordered that no maiden shall be married against her will. If she remains here until after the Saturnalia without making any choice, she shall be sent back in all honor to her own people. There are none among the girls who are betrothed to men of their villages.”

Marcia was glad to hear that. During the following days she and the other young matrons of the colony visited the captive girls and took care that they lacked nothing in clothing and [pg 210]little comforts. The matrons and the older men had stood firm in insisting that all possible respect should be shown these maidens, just as if they were daughters of the colony. If they were to defend the soldiers’ action as a necessary and wise measure and not a mere savage raid, this was necessary. Otherwise the Sabine men would have a right to feel that they could revenge themselves by carrying off Roman women as slaves, and nobody would be safe. It was much better to delay the weddings for a few days, see what the mountain people were going to do, and give the girls a chance to become a little accustomed to their new surroundings. Naso and some of the other men thought Romulus had gone rather far in promising that the girls should be sent home if they wished to go after a certain time, but he would not move an inch from that position. He had his reasons.

After two or three days the scouts came in to report that the Sabines had gone back to their villages to gather their forces. It would take time to do this, and meanwhile the wedding preparations went forward.

The town on the Square Hill was larger and finer than any of the mountain villages, and after the first shock and fright of their capture passed, many of the girls began to think that what had [pg 211]happened was not so bad, after all. They all knew something about Romulus and his mountain troop, and many of his soldiers had been in the villages at one time and another on some errand. Apparently these half-outlawed fighters had become great men in the new settlement. They had a quarter of their own, in which they had built houses for their brides, shaded by some of the forest trees that were left when the land was cleared, and furnished with many things not known in the mountain villages. It was also true, and Romulus had known all along that it was, that many of his men had known something of the Sabine maidens, and would have married in the villages before, if they could. Considering that the elders of the villages would never have consented to such a thing, this was the only way it could possibly be brought about. It had seemed to him better to make it a sort of state affair than to encourage among the soldiers the idea that they could individually raid the villages and carry off the wives they chose without any religious authority at all. Romulus heard a great many confidential secrets from his men, one by one, that would have surprised those who did not know them. He believed that if it could be managed so that they could settle down in the quarter which was their own, and have homes of [pg 212]their own, they would be as good citizens as any in Rome. But he did not waste time in trying, by argument, to make Tullius and Naso and the other colonists believe this.

The public square was swept and made clean, and the walls of all the houses hung with garlands. The Roman matrons, old and young, had taken from their thrifty stores of home-woven linen and wool, robes and veils and mantles for the strangers, and provided the wedding feast with as much care as if each one of them had a daughter who was going to be married. In fact, according to Roman faith and law, these girls were daughters of Rome as soon as they became wives of Roman men, and had as much right in all public worship and festivals as if they had been born on the Palatine Hill. Since they could not be given away by their own fathers, it had been decided that they should be treated as daughters of the city, and the ten original fathers of the colony should be as their fathers.

The procession came out into the square a little after daybreak, and here the wedding feast was set forth. The maidens were veiled and dressed in white, and attended by the young Roman girls as bridesmaids, and the soldiers were drawn up in military order. The feasting and singing and dancing went on in the usual way, and toward [pg 213]the end of the day the procession formed again and went down the slope toward the huts of the soldiers. At the door of each hut the man to whom it belonged claimed his bride; she lighted the hearth fire, and poured out the libation, and ate of the bride cake with her husband. It was a strange wedding day, but it seemed to have ended happily, after all.

There was only one girl who refused to have any part in the ceremonies. When the rest of the Sabine maidens left the guest house, she remained. She was still there when a little before sunset Romulus came back to the square and entered the room where she sat.

She was a tall and lovely creature, the daughter of the priest Emilius, and Ruffo the captain had carried her off, but she would have nothing to say to him. He had consoled himself with the daughter of one of his old comrades. Her great eyes blazed as she met the look of the young chief, and she held her head high, but she did not speak.

“You are the daughter of a great man,” said Romulus. “You are Emilia.”

It was surprising that he should know her name, but his knowing who she was made it all the greater insult that she should have been carried off by force.

[pg 214]

“Long ago,” he went on, “I saw you, a little maid, when I was a poor shepherd boy. Your mother was kind to me and gave me meat and wine. Your father reproved me when I in my ignorance would have offended the gods. As you were then, so you are now,—beautiful as a flower, fierce as a wolf, Herpilia, the wolf-maiden. You are the mate for me, and when I saw you at the festival, I knew it.”

“You! An outcast!” the girl cried, her eyes flashing in scorn.

“I am of good blood, and now I rule this city. You shall rule it with me when you will,” said the chief coolly.

“I would rather be a slave and grind at the mill!”

Romulus smiled. What did this girl know of a slave’s life?

“You had better not,” he said. “But you need not do either. If after the Saturnalia you wish to go back to your father’s house, you shall go. But you cannot know much about us until you have seen how we live.” And he turned and went out.

Emilia did not know exactly what to make of this behavior. She had made up her mind that if they tried to make her the wife of one of these strangers, she would stab herself with the knife [pg 215]she carried in her bosom, or throw herself into the river. But as the days went on and she saw no more of Romulus, or any other youth, she was still more puzzled. She never connected him with the lad in the wolfskin tunic who had rescued her from the banditti many years before. Many stray shepherd boys had been fed in their village at one time or another. The Sabines themselves had never known that the strange rescuer of the child and the leader of the mountain patrol were one and the same. In fact, they had come to believe that the little Emilia had been saved by Mars himself, in human guise. Romulus had never told of the matter, even to his own men or to his brother.

The young girls who tended the sacred fire now formed a kind of society by themselves, like the fraternities of the men. Emilia was allowed to sit with them and spin and sew, and she lived in the house of Marcus Colonus, all of whose children were now married. She heard a great deal about Romulus from time to time, but he never came near her. Sometimes she saw him marching at the head of his men, or sitting with the elders of the people on some public occasion. But he never looked her way, or sent her any word beyond what he had already said.

At first she hoped fiercely that her people [pg 216]would gather an army and come against the insolent invaders and destroy them, but as time went on, she began to hope that they would not. A war with this race would be long and bitter, for they were not the kind to yield. This town would never be taken but by killing all the men who could fight, and burning the houses, and enslaving the women and children,—and the women were kind to her.

Illustration: Emilia was allowed to sit with them and spin and sew

The settlement was now so large that it covered several of the hills, and the high steep hill that stood up like the head of a crouching animal, the Capitoline, had been strongly fortified. On one side it descended almost straight like a precipice, [pg 217]and from the brink one could see for miles across the plain.

The captain of the guard there was one of Romulus’s old comrades, Tarpeius by name. He had a daughter who often spent some hours with the other maidens, on the Palatine, spinning and gossiping, and singing old songs. She was very curious about Emilia’s people and said that her mother had been a Sabine girl. She expressed great admiration for everything about Emilia—her bright abundant hair, her beautiful eyes, her clear white skin, her graceful hands and feet, and her clothes. Especially she admired the band of gold Emilia wore on her left wrist. She was like an inquisitive and rather impertinent child.

The bracelet was a gift from Emilia’s father; he had ordered it from an Etruscan trader; it had been made especially for her. Whenever she looked at it, she felt as if it were a pledge that some day she should see him again and visit her old home.

One day late in the autumn there was a commotion in the town, and the sound of many marching feet. From the plain below came shouting, and the far-off sound of drums and pipes. Emilia’s heart jumped. The Sabine army was on the way!

[pg 218]

Villagers came flying from a distance, wild with fright, and begging to be protected within the walls. Some had taken time, scared as they were, to drive in their beasts and bring the grain they had just finished threshing. Their men joined the defenders, and the women and children were sheltered among the townspeople, many of whom were relatives.

The Sabines spread their army all around the Roman settlement. They took possession of a hill near by, almost as great as the Palatine.

It began to seem after a time as if the siege might last indefinitely. The Roman fortifications were strong and well manned, and they had plenty of provision. Now that the marsh was drained, only a most unusual flood would drive away the enemy, and they did not seem inclined to storm the hills, even if they could. Matters might have gone on so much longer but for the thoughts in the head of a girl.

Tarpeia, the daughter of the captain of the guard, watched eagerly the Sabine captains, and saw the gleam of the ornaments they wore. One night she slipped out by a way she knew and crept past the Roman guards into the Sabine camp. She had learned something of their talk from Emilia and easily made herself understood. She told Tatius the Sabine general, when they [pg 219]brought her to him, that she would open the gates of the stronghold to his men for a reward. She would do it if they would give her what they wore on their left arms.

Tatius looked at the willowy figure and the common, rather pretty face with its greedy eyes and eager smile, and agreed, with a laugh. Tarpeia returned to the stronghold, and that night, when the darkness was thickest, she slid past the sleepy guard and unbarred the gates, and waited.

Tatius had no respect for traitors, though he was willing to make use of them when they came and offered him the chance. He reasoned that a girl clever and wicked enough for this would betray him and his own men just as quickly as she betrayed her father and his people. He told his men to give her exactly what he had promised her—what they wore on their left arms, and all of it! As they rushed past her and she drew back a little toward a hollow in the hill, Tatius first and the others after him flung at her not only their bracelets, but the heavy oval shields they carried on their left arms, beating her down as if she had been struck by a shower of stones. The garrison, taken by surprise, had no chance. Brave old Tarpeius died fighting, without knowing what had become of his treacherous daughter. [pg 220]At dawn the stronghold was in Sabine hands. They had won the first move.

Now indeed the two armies must join battle, with the odds against the Romans. They met in a level place between the two hills but not so low as the plain, and the fighting was fierce enough. The Sabine and Roman women watched from the walls of the Palatine, and the Sabine girls, some of them with babies in their arms, were crying as if their hearts would break. Whichever army won, they would mourn men who loved them, for their fathers and brothers were fighting against their husbands.

The line of fighting surged to and fro. A stone from a sling struck Romulus on the head, and stunned him. The Romans gave back, fighting every inch of the way. Romulus came to himself and tried to rally them, but in vain. He flung up his arms to heaven and uttered a desperate prayer to Jupiter, Father of the Gods, to save Rome.

Emilia could not bear it any longer. She stood up among the other Sabine women, her eyes bright and her face as white as a lily, and spoke to them quickly.

“Come with me!” she called, moving swiftly toward the door of the temple of Vesta where they were gathered. “We will end this war—[pg 221]or die with our men! Come to the battle field!”

The women guessed what she meant to do, and with a soft rush like a flock of birds, they went past the guards and out of the gates, down over the hillside, between the armies, which had halted an instant for breath. With tears and soft little outcries they flung themselves into the arms of their fathers and brothers in the Sabine army, and some sought out their husbands begging them to stop the fighting, and not to make them twice captives by taking them away from their homes. A more astonished battle line was probably never seen than the Sabine front. The Romans on the other side of the field were nearly as much taken aback.

There is no denying that most of the men felt rather silly. There could be no more fighting without leading the women and babies back to the town, and they probably would not stay there. It dawned on the Sabines all at once that if the women who were now wives of the Romans were contented where they were, and loved their husbands, it would be cruel as well as senseless to force them back to their mountain villages. The war stopped as soon as the generals on both sides could frame words of some dignity to express their feelings. Emilia’s father, when he found that his daughter was unharmed, and had been [pg 222]treated during the past year like an honored guest, declared that there should be peace without delay. The conclusion of the whole matter was an agreement to form an alliance. The Sabines and the Romans were to share the Seven Hills and rule together. All the customs common to both should be continued, and each settlement should have freedom to govern itself in the customs peculiar to itself.

Romulus came toward Emilia and her father about sunset, after the wounded had been made comfortable and the treaty agreed upon. They were in the doorway of the priest’s tent. The Roman general looked very tall and handsome and full of authority. His shining helmet and shield, short sword, and light body armor of metal plates overlapping like plumage were as full of proud and warlike strength as the wings of an eagle. He bowed before the two; then he looked at the maiden.

“It is nearly a year. The time has not gone quickly.”

“He told me,” explained Emilia, “that if after the Saturnalia I wished to return, he would send me home.”

“And do you wish to go home, my daughter?” asked the priest.

Emilia looked up at Romulus.

[pg 223]

“I will go home,” she said, “with my husband.”

And the news ran through the camps that Romulus had taken a Sabine bride.

[pg 224]

XIX

THE PRIEST OF THE BRIDGE

In the customs of the people who founded the town by the river, there was no act of life which did not have some ancient rule or tradition connected with it. There was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. In all the important work of life, such as the care of the sheep and cattle, the sowing of the fields and the making of wine, certain elders among the men were chosen to take charge of the management, decide on what day the work was to commence and take care that all was done as it ought to be. In this new life in a strange place the colonists found that some kinds of work that used not to be very important became so because things were changed. This was the case with the priest who had charge of the public ways,—the gates, the roads and the walls. In their old home this was not a very important office, because the walls almost never needed anything done to them, and [pg 225]the roads were all made long ago. Tertius Calvo, who was the pontifex or roadmaker, was a quiet man and never had much to say, but in this place he had more to do than almost any other public officer in the city.

Calvo was a good mason and understood something of what we should call now civil engineering. He had judgment about the best place to lay out a road and the proper stone to choose for masonry. As the town grew, and the farming lands about it were cleared, and more and more persons became interested in the town by the river, Calvo, in his quiet way, was one of the busiest of men.

He got on very well with the miscellaneous laboring force that he could command, and partly by signs, partly in a mixture of the two languages, he learned to talk with the stonemason Canial quite comfortably. Gradually, as they were needed, roads were made in different directions over the plain, and always in much the same way. They were as straight as they could be without taking altogether more time and labor than could be given, and they were usually carried across streams and bogs instead of going around. Calvo enjoyed working out ways to do this. If the plain had been really boggy he might not have been able to do as much as he did, [pg 226]but it was not really a marsh. It was a more or less level area lying so little above the bed of the river that the rise of a foot or two in the waters changed its aspect until the Romans began draining it. The people were astonished to see how much more quickly they could reach the river over one of Calvo’s roads than they could over the old, winding, up-and-down paths. The road was built with a track in the middle higher than the edges, to let the water drain off, and this track was more solid than the edges and far more solid usually than the land on each side the road. There was no need for the highway to be very wide, for most of the travel was on foot. After a time people began to call the new roads the “laid” roads, because they were made by laying, or spreading, new material on the line of travel.

The new road was a “street” built up of strata.

There was never much trouble in getting men to work on these highways after they saw the convenience of them. They could not have built them for themselves, because they had not Calvo’s eye for the right place or his knowledge of every kind of stone and other road material. The roads led out from Rome like the spokes of a wheel, but Calvo did not build any roads from town to town. He said it was better not to.

[pg 227]

There came to be a proverb that all roads lead to Rome. Calvo’s object in roadmaking was to make it easy for outsiders to reach the city and return. He was not concerned about their visiting one another. The natural result was that Rome got all the trade of a growing country.

Another consequence of Calvo’s road-making system was that it would have been very difficult for the outlying settlements to join in any attack against Rome itself, because they could not reach their neighbors half as easily as they could reach Rome. Calvo saw—what most generals have to see if they are to have any success in fighting—that wars are won by the feet as well as the weapons of an army. The quicker they march and the less strength they have to expend on getting from one place to another, the better the soldiers will fight. It came to be almost second nature for any Roman to look out that the roads were in good condition, and a general on the march took care that he did not go too far into an unknown country without leaving a good road over which to come back.

In the course of their wandering about, before they found a place for their home, the colonists had not only learned the importance of good water but had found out where some of the springs and wells were. Here and there, as he [pg 228]discovered a good place for a camp, Calvo caused a rude shelter to be built, where any Roman could find a place to sleep and make a fire. On some of the roads he and Romulus took counsel together and planned the erection of a kind of barrack, so that if they sent a company of troops out that way there would be a place which they could occupy as a shelter, and if necessary hold against an enemy. They were not exactly houses, or forts; they were known as mansiones,—places where one might remain for a night or two. The practical use of these places proved so great that the plan was never given up, and mansiones were built at the end of each day’s march, in later ages, wherever the Roman army went. But in the beginning there was only a rough shelter like the khans of Eastern countries,—walls and roofs, to which men brought their own provisions and bedding, if they had any. People had these places of refuge long before there was any such thing as a tavern or hotel known in the world.

It began to be seen in course of time that the Priesthood of the Highways, or the bridges—for about half Calvo’s work here was bridge building—was one of the most necessary of all. Before he died he had four others to assist him, and was called the Pontifex Maximus, the high pontiff, and greatly revered for his wisdom. He [pg 229]had met and talked with and commanded so many different sorts of people, both intelligent and ignorant, and had solved so many different problems, for no two places where a highway is built are alike, that there were very few questions on which he did not have something worth saying. The standard he set was kept up. A road, when built, was built to last, and so was a bridge.

But the greatest work of Tertius Calvo, and the one which perhaps made more difference in the history of his people than any other, was an undertaking which he put through when he and most of the other fathers of the colony were quite old men. It was the bridge across the river.

At the point where the Seven Hills are situated, the river is about three hundred feet wide, but there is an island in it which makes a natural pier. Here Calvo suggested a bridge, to take the traffic from the other side of the river and bring it directly to Rome instead of letting it come across anywhere in boats. Such a bridge, moreover, would make it easier to hold the river, in case of war, against an enemy coming either up stream or down.

It seemed like a stupendous enterprise, and even those who had seen most of Calvo’s work did not see how he was going to do it. The river was twenty feet deep, and that was too deep for any [pg 230]pier building in those days. It would be a timber bridge.

More or less all the city took part in building that bridge. There were large trees to be cut down and their logs hauled from distant places, and shaped to fit into one another. There was stonework to be done at each end of the span, and on each side of the island. By the time this work was planned, the people were using iron more or less, and found it very convenient for many things; but Calvo set his foot down; not a bit of iron was to be used in his bridge. It was to be all wood, resting on stone foundations. Some of those who had worked with him remembered then that he never did use iron in such work. The younger men thought he must have reason to suppose that the gods were not pleased with iron.

Romulus had known Calvo for a great many years, although they had never been exactly intimate. As they stood together, watching the work go on, Romulus said in a tone that no one but Calvo could hear.

“There is no iron in this work?”

“None,” said Calvo.

“The gods do not approve it?”

“Apparently not,” said Calvo. “The fires of Jove burned two bridges for me before I found it out.

[pg 231]

“Also I have found that iron and water are bad friends, and in a bridge, which hangs above water, the bolts would rust. Finally, a thing which is all timber, put together without the use of anything else, does not grow shaky with time, but settles together and is firmer. There are some things a man does not learn until he has watched the ways of building for fifty years, and I have done that.”

If Calvo had been like some men of his day, he would have thought, when his bridges were burned, that the gods were angry with him for omitting some ceremony. But he was a man who noticed all that he saw and put two and two together; and he noticed in the course of time that lightning was much more likely to strike where iron was. He observed the path of it once when it did strike, and saw that it ripped the wood all to splinters and set it on fire trying to get at the iron, which it melted.

It is of course true that iron expands and shrinks with heat and cold, and when iron bolts are used in wood, the iron and the wood do not fit as well together after a few seasons, on this account. So Calvo planned his bridges without iron, and they were all made of dovetailed wooden timbers, as many old wooden bridges were which remain to this day. Calvo’s observa[pg 232]tions about his bridges tended to make others think as he did. No iron was ever used in any of the temples or sacred buildings of Rome, even long after it was in common use for weapons, tools and other things.

The way in which the bridge over the Tiber was built was much like the way in which Cæsar built bridges, hundreds of years later. It was so constructed that if necessary it could be removed at short notice. It was never struck by lightning or burned, and it remained until—long after Calvo was dead—another pontiff built a new and greater bridge, using all his knowledge and all else that had been learned in five generations.

[pg 233]

XX

THE THREE TRIBES

The hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,—the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government of Rome. Any open place for public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.

Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level space that was used [pg 234]for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.

Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.

Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards. He was like his mother’s people, a born gardener. The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached to a team of mice, but he had to play with that out of doors, because his mother would not have [pg 237]the mice in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little sling.

Illustration: His mother molded for him men and animals

His mother molded for him men and animals.

He heard many stories,—some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father’s pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.

The city was now ruled by three different groups of elders, from the three different races of settlers. They were generally known as the three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers was called the tribunal. The oldest tribe, of course, was the Ramnian, the people who had come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The Tities were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities—the Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine, the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of [pg 238]the same worship, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.

Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge. These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.

Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.

Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old worship, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.

There was one danger, however, which nobody realized in the least. In the great change from [pg 239]farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left alone.

Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever passed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.

He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.

Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.

[pg 240]

Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.

Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.

Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.

After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths. He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition; [pg 241]he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.

None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and worship, but they took good care to do also everything that they [pg 242]had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.

[pg 243]

XXI

UNDER THE YOKE

Many years had passed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.

When the children of Mars first came to this part of the world, people called them very often the “cattle-men,” because cattle were not at all common there. Many of the customs both of the Romans and the Sabines came about because they kept cattle and used them. This made it possible for them to cultivate much more land than they [pg 244]could have farmed without the oxen, and it also rather tied them down to one place, for after cultivating land to the point where it would grow a good crop of grain, nobody of course would wish to abandon it. They had a god called Pales who protected the herds and was said to have taught the people in the beginning how to yoke and use cattle, and the long-horned skulls were hung up around the walls of the early temples and served to hang garlands from on a feast day. When the “outfit vault” was filled at the founding of the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.

In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;—but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.

The use of the yoke was the one great thing in which the Roman farmer differed from these pagans and peasants, and he could teach them that. It was the thing which would make the most difference in their lives, in comfort and [pg 245]plenty and skill. A man must be more intelligent to work with animals and control them than to dig up a plot of ground with his own hands. It struck Romulus, therefore, that the yoke would be a good symbol to use when Rome took possession of such a village. A great deal of the ceremony used in the daily life of the ancient people was a sort of sign language. When something important changed hands, the buyer and the seller shook hands on it in public. When a man was not a slave nor exactly a servant, but a member of the household who did something for which he was paid, he was paid in salt, because he could be invited to eat salt with his master, and this pay was called salarium,—salary. When Rome took formal possession of a place, the men passed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged to the men who used oxen, and worked as they did and for them.

Whenever it was possible, some Roman families were sent to such places to live among the people and show them Roman ways. There were always some who were willing to do this, because they could have more land and better houses in that way than in the older town, which was getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by Rome became more or less Roman in a much [pg 246]shorter time than they would if they had been left to themselves.

Life in such a growing country, made up of a great many different sorts and conditions of people, is not by any means simple. The Romans themselves were aware of this before the first settlers were old men. As the sons of these colonists became men, they were proud to call themselves “the sons of the fathers.” The word “father” was used in the old way, which meant that every father of a family in a village was the head of that family. The head of the house was a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative of his race. In the same way the houses built by the first families within the palisade, on the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The families of those first colonists were known, after a while, as the “patricians.” After the Sabines came, there were two groups of settlers of the same race, one on the Square Hill and the other on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others the Hill Romans. The people who had settled in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived among groves of trees, and they were called the People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these [pg 247]citizens of Rome itself considered themselves superior to the outsiders, who had sometimes been conquered and sometimes been glad to join Rome for protection. The Romans were beginning to be very proud of the town they had made.

The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the idea of Tuscans being “under the yoke” of these strangers. When the Romans took the town of Fidenæ, the Veientines were very indignant, though they did not come to the help of their neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenæ was a town of their own and set out to make war against the Romans. Romulus promptly took the field and won the war. Although he was now growing old, and his hair was white as silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity, and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They offered to make peace for a hundred years, but that was not quite enough for Romulus. They had begun the war, and he meant to make them pay for it. When the matter was finally settled, they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on the river and a large tract of land. While the talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.

There was a great sensation in Rome when the [pg 248]news of the peace was made known. The army paraded through the streets, with the prisoners and the spoils of various kinds, and there was great rejoicing. It was the first celebration of a victory by a “triumph”—called by that name because many of those who took part in the parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the land he had taken from the Tuscans among the soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent the Tuscan hostages home to their people.

Without intending to do it, Romulus aroused a great deal of ill feeling by these two things that he did. The patricians formed a sort of senate—a body of elders—for the government of Rome, and it seemed to them that they should have been consulted about the hostages and the division of land. No one knew but the Tuscans might rise up again against Rome, and in that case these men ought to be here to serve as a pledge. Moreover, the land belonged not to Romulus personally but to the city, and the senate ought to have had the dividing of it. It was time to settle whether Rome was to be governed by one man, or by the elders of the people, as in the days of old. It was not fit that men should hold land who were not descended from land-holders.

[pg 249]

Not all the elders, or senators, took this view. It really never had been decided how far a general who took command in a war had a right to dictate in the outcome of it. Generally speaking, in a war, the men who fought took whatever they could lay their hands on. They plundered a city when they took it, and each man had what he could carry away. In this case the city of the Veientines had not been plundered, because the rulers surrendered and asked for peace before Romulus had a chance to take it. The land which had been given up was a kind of plunder, and the general had a right to divide it. This was the view of Caius Cossus and Marcus Colonus and his brother, and some of the others in the senate. But Naso—who never had enough land—and some of his friends, who never were satisfied unless they had their own way, had a great deal to say about the high-handed methods of the veteran general, the founder of the city. They said that he treated them all as if they were under the yoke, and that this was insulting to free-born Romans. In short, the time had come when all of the men who wished for more power than they had were ready to declare that Romulus was a tyrant. It was quite true that he was the only man strong enough to stand in their way if he chose. It was also true that he was the only [pg 250]man who was disposed to consider the rights of the plebs and the outsiders who were not citizens, and had according to ancient custom no right to share in the governing of the city at all.

[pg 251]

XXII

THE GOAT’S MARSH

Public opinion in Rome was like a whirlpool. The currents that battled in it circled round and round, but got nowhere. Calvo, the last of the older men who had been fathers of the people when Romulus founded the city, began to wonder if at last the downfall of the chief was near. He could not see how one man could make peace between the factions, or how he could dominate them by his single will. But it was never the way of the veteran pontiff to talk, when talk would do no good, and he waited to learn what Romulus would do.

What Romulus did was to visit him one night at his villa, alone and in secret. He had sent his servant beforehand to ask that Calvo would arrange this, and when some hours later a tall man in the dress of a shepherd appeared at the gate, the old porter admitted him without question, and there was no one in the way. The two sat [pg 252]and talked in the solar chamber, with no witnesses but the stars.

“They do not understand,” Romulus said thoughtfully, when they had been all over the struggle between the two parties, from beginning to end. “They do not see that the thing which must be done is the thing which is right, whether it be by my will or another’s.”

“They are ready, some of them, to declare that a thing is wrong because you saw it before they did,” said Calvo dryly.

“The people are with me—I believe,” said Romulus, “the soldiers, and the common folk—but they have no voice in the government. Yet are they men, Tertius Calvo,—many of them children of Mars as we are. Am I not bound to do what is right for them, as well as for the dwellers within the palaces?”

“I have always believed so,” nodded Calvo. “When a man makes a road or a bridge, he does not make it for the strong and powerful alone; it is even more for the weak, the ignorant and those who cannot work for themselves. If the gods meant not this to be so, they would arrange it so that the sun should shine only on a few, and the rest should dwell in twilight; they would give rain only to those whom they favor, and good water only to the chosen of the gods. But the [pg 253]world is not made in that way. Therefore we who are the chosen of the gods to do their will on earth should be of equal mind toward all—men, women and children.”

Calvo paused, as if he were thinking how he should say what he thought, and then went on.

“Whether men are high or low, Romulus, founder of the city, they have minds and they think, and the gods, who know all men’s souls, hear their unspoken thoughts as well as ours. Therefore it is not a small thing when many believe in a man, for their belief, like a river, will grow and grow until it makes itself felt by those who hold themselves as greater. I have seen this happen when a good man whom all men loved came to die. He was greater after his death than when he was alive, for the grief and the love of the poor encompassed his spirit and made it strong.”

Romulus smiled in the way he did when he was thinking more than he meant to say. “I shall be very strong when I am dead,” was his only comment. And Calvo knew that it was the truth.

Romulus was now fifty-eight years old, and Calvo was seventy-two. Both of them were thinking that it would not be many years when they would both, perhaps, be talking together in the world of shadows as they were talking now. [pg 254]Then Romulus told Calvo what he was going to do.

This talk took place a little after the beginning of the fifth month, which the Romans called Quintilis, but which we call July. In this month the sun is hot and the air is sluggish and damp, and in the year when these things happened it was more so than usual. The heralds announced in the market place, one sultry morning, that there would be a meeting of all the people at a place called the Goat’s Marsh some miles outside the city. Romulus would there tell publicly why he sent back their hostages to the Tuscans and how the lands were to be divided among the soldiers. No longer would the people have to depend on what was said by one and another, he would tell them himself. Partly out of curiosity, partly with the determination that they too would speak, the greater part of the patricians also went to hear.

The Goat’s Marsh was no longer a marsh, but it had kept its name partly because of the fig orchards, which bore the little fruits called the goat figs. There was a plain at the foot of a little hill, which made it a good place for any public meeting, and the country people for miles around crowded in to see Romulus and to hear him speak.

[pg 255]

They raised a shout as his tall figure appeared but he waved them to silence.

“I have not much to say,” he began, and in the still air the intense interest of his listeners seemed to tingle like lightning before a storm, “but much has been said which was not true. I will not waste time in repeating lies.

“Ye know that the Tuscan cities were here before we came, and that their people are many. We cannot kill them or drive them away, if we would. They are our neighbors.

“We made war against them and we beat them, and took their city Fidenæ and their city Veii. Before we made peace they had to pay us certain lands. Before peace was made and the price paid, there were sons of their blood in our power, whom we kept as a pledge that they were willing to pay the price. That was all. They were not guilty of any crime against us. They were here to show that their people meant to keep faith. When peace was made I sent them back.

“If we had kept them, if we had slain them, if harm had come to them, then the wrong would have been on our side, and we should have had another war. Why should there be war between neighbors? Is not friendship better than hatred?

“Some are angry because I divided the lands, which they gave us as a price, among the soldiers. [pg 256]Yet who has better right than the men who fight the battles? This is all of my story. Ye believe?” Then a shout arose to the very skies,—“Romulus! Romulus! Romulus!”

Suddenly the clouds grew black, and lightnings flashed through them. Just as Naso was rising to speak, a tremendous clap of thunder shook the earth, or so it seemed. Winds swept suddenly down from the mountains and howled across the plains, carrying away mantles and curtains and boughs of trees in their flight. The crowd broke up in confusion, and the patricians were heard calling in distress, “Marcus!” “Caius!” “Aulus!” for in the darkness they could not see their friends a rod away. They hastened to whatever shelter they could find, and sheets of rain poured from the clouds. It was one of the most terrific tempests any one there present had ever known. It did not last long—perhaps an hour—but when it was over Romulus was nowhere to be seen.

The people had scattered in all directions, but the patricians had managed to keep together. When the storm was over, they did not know at first that Romulus had disappeared, but presently one after another of the common people was heard asking where he was, and no one could be found who knew. The people searched every[pg 257]where without finding so much as the hem of his mantle. It began to be whispered that he had been killed and his body hidden away, and black looks were cast upon the public men in their white robes.

They themselves were perhaps more perplexed and worried than any one else, for they saw what the people thought. It began to dawn upon them that the united opinion of hundreds of men, even though of the despised plebs, or peasants, was not exactly a thing to be overlooked. That night was a black and anxious one.

On the following morning, Naso, Caius Cossus, and some other leaders came to see Calvo and ask his opinion of the mystery. He had not been at the Goat’s Marsh the day before, nor had Cossus and others of the friends of the vanished chief. All the men who had been there, of the upper class, were enemies of Romulus. It was a most unpleasant position for them.

Calvo heard the story gravely, without making any comment.

The storm had not been nearly so severe in Rome; in fact it was not much more than an ordinary summer storm. But when Naso told of it he described it as something beyond anything that could be natural.

“Do you think,” asked Calvo coolly at last, [pg 258]“that the gods had anything to do with these strange appearances?” Naso could not say.

“There have always been strange happenings about this man,” said Calvo thoughtfully. “His very birth was strange; his appearance among us was sudden and unexpected. What the gods send they can also take away.”

“Do you think then,” asked Cossus, “that he was taken by the gods to heaven?”

“I do not know,” said Calvo. “You say you found no trace of him? But even a man struck by lightning is not destroyed.”

The frightened men looked at each other.

Fabius the priest was the first to speak.

“It is at any rate not true that we have murdered him,” he said boldly, “and that is what men are saying in the streets.”

“And it may be true that he has been taken by the gods,” said Naso eagerly. They went out, still talking, and Calvo smiled to himself. He did not know just what had happened, but Romulus had told him that after this last appearance to the people he was going away, never to come back. Apparently that was what he had done. It did not surprise the old pontiff at all when he heard, an hour or two after, that Fabius had made a speech and told the people that Romulus had been taken bodily to the skies, in the [pg 259]midst of the crashing and flaring of the thunder and lightning, and that he would no more be seen on earth. There were some unbelievers, but after a time this was quite generally thought to be true.

Illustration: Far away, in a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd

It had the effect of settling all quarrels at once. When they had time to think it over, both factions agreed that Romulus was right. They could see it themselves. Within a few years his memory was better loved, more powerful, and more closely followed in all his ways and sayings than ever he had been in life.

He never returned to Rome, but far away, in [pg 260]a cavern on a mountain height, there lived for many years an old shepherd who became very dear to the simple people around him. He had a servant named Peppo who loved him well and whom he treated more as a son than as a slave. He had a little plot of ground which he cultivated, with nine bean-rows and various kinds of herbs, and a row of beehives stood near the entrance to his cave. There was nothing he could not do with animals, and the birds used to come and perch on his fingers and his shoulders and head, and sing. Even the wolves would not harm him, and one year a mother fox brought up a litter of four cubs within a few yards of his door. The young people used to come to him to get him to tell their fortunes, and if he advised against a thing they never went contrary to what he said. When he died and was buried, his servant returned to the place from which he came, and then Tertius Calvo, who was by that time a very old man, learned certainly where Romulus the founder of Rome had gone. But he kept the story to himself.

[pg 261]

A ROMAN ROAD

Once along the Roman road with measured, rhythmic stride

Marched the Roman legionaries in their valiant pride.

Men of petty towns and tribes, under Caesar’s hand,

Welded into Empire then their people and their land.

Now along that ancient road the silent motors run,

Driven by every ancient race that lives beneath the sun.

Swarming from their barren plains, wild barbarian hordes

Wasted all the fruitful soil—then the Roman swords

Leagued with Gallic pike and sling, held the red frontier,

Saved the cradle of our folk, all that we hold dear.

Now above the towers that rise where Rome’s great eagles flew,

Circle dauntless aeroplanes to guard their folk anew.

Gods who loved the sons of Mars found in field and wood

Altars built with reverent care—saw the work was good.

Simple, brave and generous, quick to speech and mirth;

Loving all the pleasant ways of the kindly earth;

[pg 262]

Thus they built the stately walls that still unfallen stand.

Guarding for their ancient faith the dear, unchanging land!

Winds and waves and leaping flames all have served our race.

Flint and bronze and steel had each their little day of grace.

But the lightning fleets to-day along our singing wires,

And the harnessed floods to-day are fuel for our fires.

Armored through the clouds we glide on swift electric wings.

Through the trenches of the hills a joyous giant sings.

Light and Flame and Power and Steel are welded into one

To serve the task set long ago,—when roads were first begun!

THE END

Transcriber’s Note

The following changes have been made to the text:

| page 118, “some” changed to “same”
| page 233, period added after “Rome”

Variations in hyphenation (e.g. “cattlemen”, “cattle-men”; “roadmaking”, “road-making”) and spelling (e.g. “Caesar”, “Cæsar”) have not been changed.

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