Among the Romans, the conviction prevailed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, had been born of a maiden ravished by a god; that he had been wonderfully preserved alive, rescued from the floods, and suckled by a she-wolf. The ancient date of this poetry cannot be doubted. But did the legend at all times call Romulus the son of Rea Silvia, or of Ilia? Perizonius has first remarked against Ryckius, that Rea Ilia never occurred in combination; that Rea Silvia was the daughter of Numitor, Ilia of Æneas. He is perfectly right. Both Nævius and Ennius, call Romulus the son of Ilia the daughter of Æneas, as Servius in his notes on Virgil, and Porphyrion in those on Horace (Carm. 1, 2.), bear witness. Yet it must not thence be inferred, that this was also a national Roman belief; those poets who were familiar with the Greeks, might have annexed their legends to the Greek poems. But the old Romans could not possibly have made the mother of the founder of their city a daughter of Æneas, whose time was dated 333 or 360 years earlier. Dionysius says that his narrative, which was that of Fabius, is found in the sacred songs; it is also consistent with itself. Fabius cannot, as Plutarch asserts, have borrowed it from a wretched unknown Greek writer, Diocles. The statue of the she-wolf was erected in 457, long before Diocles wrote; at least a hundred years before Fabius. Certainly, therefore, this tradition is the older Roman one, and it places Rome in connection with Alba. There has lately been a monument discovered at Bovillæ, an altar which the _gentiles Julii_ erected _lege Albana_; a religious reference therefore of a Roman family to Alba. The relation between the two towns goes as far back as to the founder. The well known legend, with the old poetical details of which Livy and Dionysius already leave out much, because they were afraid of accumulating marvels, is the following.