subject of numerous sacred legends and ballads. Now, it was part of the Roman faith that their city had been founded at a point of time corresponding with B. C. 754, by twin brothers of miraculous birth, called Romulus and Remus, whose father was the war god Mars, and their mother a vestal virgin of the line of the Alban kings, the progeny of the great Æneas.
Romulus, according to this legend, surviving his brother Remus, became the king of the village of shepherds which he had founded on the Palatine; and it was in his reign that those events took place which terminated in the establishment of the triple community of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres. Setting out with Romulus, the Romans traced the history of their state through a series of legends relating to six kings his successors, whose characters, and the lengths of their reigns, are all duly determined. Of this traditionary succession of seven kings, extending over a period of 245 years (B. C. 754-509), history can recognize with certainty the existence of only the two or three latest. It is possible, however, to elicit out of the legends a glimmering of the actual history of the Roman state during these imaginary reigns.
Possessed, as all our information respecting the Romans in later times justifies us in supposing, of an unusual degree of that warlike instinct which was so rampant among the early tenants of our globe, the shepherd farmers of Rome were incessantly engaged in raids on their Latin, Etruscan, and Sabine neighbors. Strong-bodied, valiant, and persevering, as we also know them to have been, they were, on the whole, successful in these raids; and the consequence was, a gradual extension of their territory, particularly on the Latin side, by the conquest of those who were weaker than themselves. After each conquest, their custom was to deprive the conquered community of a part of their lands, and also of their political independence, annexing them as subjects to the Populus Romanus. The consequence was a gradual accumulation round the original Populus, with its 300 Houses, of a subject-population, free-born, and possessing property, but without political influence. This subject-population, the origin of which is dated by the legends from the reign of Ancus Martius, the fourth king from Romulus, received the name of the Plebs, a word which we translate 'common people,' but which it would be more correct, in reference to these very ancient times, to translate 'conquered people.' Besides the plebs, the Roman community received another ingredient in the persons called Clients; strangers, that is, most of them professing mechanical occupations, who, arriving in Rome, and not belonging to a gens, were obliged, in order to secure themselves against molestation, to attach themselves to some powerful citizen willing to protect them, and called by them Patronus, or Patron. About six centuries before Christ, therefore, the population of the growing township of Roma may be considered as having consisted of four classes: 1st, The populus, or patricians, a governing class, consisting of a limited number of powerful families, holding themselves aloof from the rest of the community, not intermarrying with them, and gradually diminishing in consequence; 2d, The plebs, or plebeians, a large and continually-increasing subject-population, of the same mixed Etrusco-Sabine-Latin blood as the populus, but domineered over by them by right of conquest; 3d, The clients, a considerable class, chiefly occupied in handicraft professions in the town, while the populus and the plebs confined themselves to the more honorable occupation, as it was then esteemed, of
