The genuine and veracious tradition of the foundation and earliest fortunes of Rome seems to have soon perished--if indeed it ever existed. This could hardly have been otherwise. It had neither been safeguarded against destruction or travesty by written records, nor cast into fixed traditional form, in song at least, by becoming the subject of popular poetry; and it was therefore in the nature of things that during the course of generations it should pass into silence and oblivion. It is possible--it is even probable--that as far back as the decemvirate the Romans had no trustworthy information concerning the origin of their city. But they did not rest content in their ignorance. They felt the need of affirming something definite about that period and those events none the less strongly for their lack of historical knowledge, and on the foundation of dim memories and isolated legends that had survived, of proper names, monuments, institutions, and customs, they therefore elaborated a superstructure of history to supply the gaps of tradition. There is not the slightest suggestion of conscious deceit or deliberate falsification of history in this; on the contrary they held in good faith that in these tales they had made successful guesses at the actual facts and thus reconstructed the original story--a naïve proceeding characteristic of myth-invention in general. It is obvious that a history made up in this artificial fashion would not start as the connected whole presented to us in Roman historical works; this whole, in which the legend of the settlement of Æneas is brought into circumstantial relation with the founding and history of Alba Longa, and the dynasty of the Alban kings with the founding of Rome, so that the history of Rome and that of the antecedent period from the landing of Æneas to the fall of the younger Tarquin are held together by an unbroken thread of continuous historical narrative--this systematised whole must naturally have come into existence by a process of linking and welding together, the result, in part no doubt, of literary effort and reflection. [Illustration: A ROMAN OFFICER (After Vecellio)] If we resolve this history into its component parts and examine each of these parts separately as to its origin and genetic motive, we perceive that the Roman legends and traditions take origin from very diverse sources and demand very diverse explanations.