First of all, we cannot but recognise that certain fundamental facts in the traditional history of the monarchy are historically true and derived from historical reminiscence. The memory of the most vital moments in the development of the Roman constitution survived, though much confused, down to the age of written records. Hence we cannot refuse a certain amount of credence to traditions relating to public law. The double state formed by the union of Romans and Sabines, the three original tribes, the succession in which they originated, the three centuries of knights, the successive augmentations of the senate till it reached the number of three hundred, the rise of a plebeian class,[9] the creation of the inferior _gentes_, the introduction of the censorship, the fall of the monarchy, and the establishment of the republic--these fundamental facts of early constitutional history are in all likelihood historical in essence, even though the circumstantial details (more particularly the estimates of numbers) with which they are adorned and the relation of cause and effect in which they are placed by the historian may be due to the ingenuity, or construed according to the opinion, of posterity. Round this stock of fact, however, has twined a luxuriant growth of fiction, a garland of legend, the origin of which we will forthwith proceed to examine, and so exhibit it in the germ. A distinction is generally and rightly drawn between legend and myth. The legend is a reminiscence of remarkable events transmitted from generation to generation by oral tradition, especially by means of popular poetry, tinged with the marvellous by the imaginative faculty, more or less arbitrarily, though without conscious intention. The myth is the exact opposite. Where the legend has a kernel of historic fact, merely adorned and exaggerated by the accompaniment of fiction, the kernel and genetic motive of the myth is, on the contrary, a particular idea, and the facts of the story are merely the medium or material used by the poet to set forth and impress this idea. If we consider the primitive history of Rome from this point of view we cannot deny that it contains both legends and myths, according to the definition just given. To take some examples--the heroic deeds of a Horatius Cocles, a Mucius Scævola, or a Clœlia, may rank as legends; Brutus is a legendary figure; the battle of Lake Regillus is coloured with the hues of legend; as are Coriolanus’ career of conquest, the destruction of the Fabii; and the march of Cincinnatus to Mount Algidus. On the other hand, we have a specimen of the myth in the begetting of Servius Tullius by the tutelary god of the Regia, a myth which expresses the idea that in this king the inmost spirit of the Roman monarchy was embodied.