[Sidenote: What was the rule of succession to the Latin kingship?] But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the kingdom among the old Latin tribes? We possess two lists of Latin kings both professedly complete. One is the list of the kings of Alba, the other is the list of the [Sidenote: The list of the Alban kings seems to imply that the kingship was hereditary in the male line.] kings of Rome. If we accept as authentic the list of the Alban kings, we can only conclude that the kingdom was hereditary in the male line, the son regularly succeeding his father on the throne.[872] But this list, if it is not, as Niebuhr held, a late and clumsy fabrication, has somewhat the appearance of an elastic cord which ancient historians stretched in order to link Aeneas to Romulus.[873] Yet it would be rash to set these names wholly aside as a chronological stop-gap deliberately foisted in by later annalists. In early monarchies, before the invention of writing, tradition is remarkably retentive of the names of kings. The Baganda of Central Africa, for example, remember the names of more than thirty of their kings in an unbroken chain of twenty-two generations.[874] Even the occurrence of foreign names among the Alban kings is not of itself sufficient to condemn the list as a forgery; for, as I shall shew presently, this feature is explicable by a rule of descent which appears to have prevailed in many ancient monarchies, including that of Rome. Perhaps the most we can say for the history of the Alban kings is that their names may well be genuine, and that some general features of the monarchy, together with a few events which happened to strike the popular imagination, may have survived in the memory of the people till they found their way into written history. But no dependence can be placed either on the alleged years of their reigns, or on the hereditary principle which is assumed to have connected each king with his predecessor.