This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson (_History of the Roman Republic_, 1783, ch. i, _note_; perhaps following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the nature of the remains of the great _cloacæ_, which he held could not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's _Remains of Ancient Rome_, 1892, i, 104-107; and Robiou et Delaunay, _Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, § 1. Cp. Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 9-11; Burton, _Etruscan Bologna_, 1876, pp. 170-74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great _cloacæ_ to the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the other hand, confidently decides that the _cloaca maxima_ belongs to the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined, so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the habitation of countless generations" (_Survey of Greek Civ._ 1897, p. 28). § 2 There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans were even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic Rome--vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity in conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders seems to have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a real federation,[33] securing local peace as between the hill-holders. It has been said that Rome grew up without any known aid from men of political genius such as Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for something in all stages of upward human evolution. The guiders of early Rome are lost in a cloud of myth and fable; but some man or men of civic faculty there must have been to shape tendency, though doubtless a main factor in the early union was the simple _collocation_ of the hills first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is a mythical king, the elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for _some_ planning by able men, and has several main points in common with that given to Athens by Solon.