The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (autobiographies to read txt) 📕

id="id01627" >1. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

2. The account given by Dionysius (vi. 95; comp. Niebuhr, ii. 40) and by Plutarch (Camill. 42), deriving his statement from another passage in Dionysius regarding the Latin festival, must be understood to apply rather to the Roman games, as, apart from other grounds, is strikingly evident from comparing the latter passage with Liv. vi. 42 (Ritschl, Parerg. i. p. 313). Dionysius has—and, according to his wont when in error, persistently—misunderstood the expression -ludi maximi-.

There was, moreover, a tradition which referred the origin of the national festival not, as in the common version, to the conquest of the Latins by the first Tarquinius, but to the victory over the Latins at the lake Regillus (Cicero, de Div. i. 26, 55; Dionys. vii. 71). That the important statements preserved in the latter passage from Fabius really relate to the ordinary thanksgiving-festival, and not to any special votive solemnity, is evident from the express allusion to the annual recurrence of the celebration, and from the exact agreement of the sum of the expenses with the statement in the Pseudo-Asconius (p. 142 Or.).

3. II. III. Curule Aedileship

4. I. II. Art

5. I. XV. Metre

6. I. XV. Masks

7. II. VIII. Police f.

8. I. XV. Melody

9. A fragment has been preserved:

-Hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra
Camille metes-

We do not know by what right this was afterwards regarded as the oldest Roman poem (Macrob. Sat. v. 20; Festus, Ep. v. Flaminius, p. 93, M.; Serv. on Virg. Georg, i. 101; Plin. xvii. 2. 14).

10. II. VIII. Appius Claudius

11. II. VIII. Rome and the Romans of This Epoch

12. The first places in the list alone excite suspicion, and may have been subsequently added, with a view to round off the number of years between the flight of the king and the burning of the city to 120.

13. I. VI. Time and the Occasion of the Reform, II. VII. System of Government

14. II. VIII Rome and the Romans of This Epoch. According to the annals Scipio commands in Etruria and his colleague in Samnium, and Lucania is during this year in league with Rome; according to the epitaph Scipio conquers two towns in Samnium and all Lucania.

15. I. XI. Jurisdiction, second note.

16. They appear to have reckoned three generations to a hundred years and to have rounded off the figures 233 1/3 to 240, just as the epoch between the king's flight and the burning of the city was rounded off to 120 years (II. IX. Registers of Magistrates, note). The reason why these precise numbers suggested themselves, is apparent from the similar adjustment (above explained, I. XIV. The Duodecimal System) of the measures of surface.

17. I. XII. Spirits

18. I. X. Relations of the Western Italians to the Greeks

19. The "Trojan colonies" in Sicily, mentioned by Thucydides, the pseudo-Scylax, and others, as well as the designation of Capua as a Trojan foundation in Hecataeus, must also be traced to Stesichorus and his identification of the natives of Italy and Sicily with the Trojans.

20. According to his account Rome, a woman who had fled from Ilion to Rome, or rather her daughter of the same name, married Latinos, king of the Aborigines, and bore to him three sons, Romos, Romylos, and Telegonos. The last, who undoubtedly emerges here as founder of Tusculum and Praeneste, belongs, as is well known, to the legend of Odysseus.

21. II. IV. Fruitlessness of the Celtic Victory

22. II. VII. Relations between the East and West

23. II. VII. The Roman Fleet

24. II. II. Political Value of the Tribunates, II. II. The Valerio-Horatian Laws

25. I. XIV. Corruption of Language and Writing

26. In the two epitaphs, of Lucius Scipio consul in 456, and of the consul of the same name in 495, -m and -d are ordinarily wanting in the termination of cases, yet -Luciom- and -Gnaivod- respectively occur once; there occur alongside of one another in the nominative -Cornelio- and -filios-; -cosol-, -cesor-, alongside of -consol-, -censor-; -aidiles-, -dedet-, -ploirume- (= -plurimi-) -hec- (nom. sing.) alongside of -aidilis-, -cepit-, -quei-, -hic-. Rhotacism is already carried out completely; we find -duonoro-(= -bonorum-), -ploirume-, not as in the chant of the Salii -foedesum-, -plusima-. Our surviving inscriptions do not in general precede the age of rhotacism; of the older -s only isolated traces occur, such as afterwards -honos-, -labos- alongside of -honor-, -labor-; and the similar feminine -praenomina-, -Maio- (= -maios- -maior-) and -Mino- in recently found epitaphs at Praeneste.

27. -Litterator- and -grammaticus- are related nearly as elementary teacher and teacher of languages with us; the latter designation belonged by earlier usage only to the teacher of Greek, not to a teacher of the mother-tongue. -Litteratus- is more recent, and denotes not a schoolmaster but a man of culture.

28. It is at any rate a true Roman picture, which Plautus (Bacch. 431) produces as a specimen of the good old mode of training children:—

… -ubi revenisses domum,
Cincticulo praecinctus in sella apud magistrum adsideres;
Si, librum cum legeres, unam peccavisses syllabam,
Fieret corium tam maculosum, quam est nutricis pallium-.

29. I. XIV. The Oldest Italo-Greek Calendar

30. I. XIV. The Oldest Italo-Greek Calendar

31. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy

32. II. VIII. Building

33. II. VIII. Building

34. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

35. I. VII. Servian Wall

36. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

37. The round temple certainly was not, as has been supposed, an imitation of the oldest form of the house; on the contrary, house architecture uniformly starts from the square form. The later Roman theology associated this round form with the idea of the terrestrial sphere or of the universe surrounding like a sphere the central sun (Fest. v. -rutundam-, p. 282; Plutarch, Num. 11; Ovid, Fast. vi. 267, seq.). In reality it may be traceable simply to the fact, that the circular shape has constantly been recognized as the most convenient and the safest form of a space destined for enclosure and custody. That was the rationale of the round —thesauroi— of the Greeks as well as of the round structure of the Roman store-chamber or temple of the Penates. It was natural, also, that the fireplace—that is, the altar of Vesta—and the fire-chamber—that is, the temple of Vesta —should be constructed of a round form, just as was done with the cistern and the well-enclosure (-puteal-). The round style of building in itself was Graeco-Italian as was the square form, and the former was appropriated to the store-place, the latter to the dwelling-house; but the architectural and religious development of the simple -tholos- into the round temple with pillars and columns was Latin.

38. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy

39. II. V. Complete Submission of the Campanian and Volscian Provinces

40. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods

41. Novius Plautius (II. VIII. Capital in Rome) cast perhaps only the feet and the group on the lid; the casket itself may have proceeded from an earlier artist, but hardly from any other than a Praenestine, for the use of these caskets was substantially confined to Praeneste.

42. I. IX. Settlements of the Etruscans in Italy

43. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

44. I. VI. Time and Occasion of the Reform

End of Book II

* * * * *

THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK III

From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek
States

Preparer's Note

This work contains many literal citations of and references to foreign words, sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many languages, including Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek. This English Gutenberg edition, constrained to the characters of 7-bit ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:

1) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do not refer to texts cited as academic references, words that in the source manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single preceding, and a single following dash; thus, -xxxx-.

2) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double- dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as —xxx-xxx—

3) Simple unideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.

4) Ideographic references, referring to signs of representation rather than to content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. "id:" stands for "ideograph", and indicates that the reader should form a picture based on the following "xxxx"; which may be a single symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. For example, —"id:GAMMA gamma"— indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form followed by the form in lowercase. Some such exotic parsing as this is necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages, or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different times. Thus, "-id:GAMMA gamma" might very well refer to a Phoenician construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually stabilized as an uppercase Greek "gamma" juxtaposed to one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —"id:E" indicates a symbol that with ASCII resembles most closely a Roman uppercase "E", but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.

5) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.; that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be 753 B. C. The preparer of this document, has appended to the end of each volume a table of conversion between the two systems.

CONTENTS BOOK III: From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States CHAPTER

I. Carthage

II. The War between Rome and Carthage Concerning Sicily

III. The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries

IV. Hamilcar and Hannibal

V. The War under Hannibal to the Battle of Cannae

VI. The War under Hannibal from Cannae to Zama

VII. The West from the Peace of Hannibal to the Close of the Third Period

VIII. The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War

IX. The War with Antiochus of Asia

X. The Third Macedonian War

XI. The Government and the Governed

XII. The Management of Land and of Capital

XIII. Faith and Manners

XIV. Literature and Art

BOOK THIRD

From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek
States

Arduum res gestas scribere.

—Sallust.

CHAPTER I

Carthage

The Phoenicians

The Semitic stock occupied a place amidst, and yet aloof from, the nations of the ancient classical world. The true centre of the former lay in the east, that of the latter in the region of the Mediterranean; and, however wars and migrations may have altered the line of demarcation and thrown the races across each other, a deep sense of diversity has always severed, and still severs, the Indo- Germanic peoples from the Syrian, Israelite, and Arabic nations. This diversity was no less marked in the case of that Semitic people which spread more than any other in the direction of the west—the Phoenicians. Their native seat was the narrow border of coast bounded by Asia Minor, the highlands of Syria, and Egypt, and called Canaan, that is, the "plain." This was the only name which the nation itself made use of; even