The story of Rome from its founding to the end of the regal period, as it is told in the ancient classics, is no longer accepted as history. It is, for the most part, classified with those mythical creations with which an uncultured people endeavor to account for the origin and the evolution and revolutions of their race. Yet, passing over the marvellous and the manifestly impossible, why may we not at least claim the right to believe the compilers of these ancient legends, when they tell us of certain names that were great in the beginning of their nation? Modern criticism may be right in asserting that it is not likely that the city on the Tiber was called Roma because a man named Romulus selected an uninhabited site and built upon it. Yet why may we not be allowed to believe that in those early times there was one hero so strong and masterful that he came to be known as preëminently the "Man of Rome"? The character may have been a real one, even though the city gave him his name, instead of the reverse, as later generations surmised. And inasmuch as there is an Alexandria, not to speak of innumerable modern "villes" with well-known surnames for prefixes, it need not be thought a thing entirely incredible that the ancient city was really called after the man who established its importance.
It is the habit of modern historians to look with suspicion upon stories such as those which form our sole material for any personal illustration in this present chapter, because they are of a kind so generally found in the legends of all nations. But may not the multiplication of these long-lived narratives, instead of disproving the intrinsic truth of any given one, simply serve to illustrate the fact that, human nature being a permanent factor, the doings of men under similar circumstances, in any age or locality, will be marked by a uniformity of character? For our present purpose, however, if in such twilight as is given by long-preserved monuments and ancient relics, we choose to fancy that we perceive, moving about in their daily life, the feminine forms of traditional lore, the combination will only serve to form a more human, and really not less accurate, picture.
The limits of our subject do not require that we should go back so far as the epoch of Æneas, the hero of Troy; nor need we take into consideration the part which he and Lavinia, his wife, may have played upon the Latin shores. Their traditional coming to Italy simply serves to indicate the fact that nearly all the tribes which inhabited the country at the commencement of Roman history were of the same branch of the great Aryan race as the Greeks. The Romans were the brothers of the Greeks. The former were of that same lithe, supple-bodied, straight-featured type which the wonderful art of the latter has enthroned, for all the ages, as the noblest realization of ideal physical beauty.