The History of Rome, Book I: The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the MonarchyMommsen, Theodor
History
The History of Rome, Book I: The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
Mommsen, Theodor
Rome -- History
The advance of the Umbro-Sabellian stock along the central
mountain-ridge of Italy, in a direction from north to south, can
still be clearly traced; indeed its last phases belong to purely
historical times. Less is known regarding the route which the Latin
migration followed. Probably it proceeded in a similar direction
along the west coast, long, in all likelihood, before the first
Sabellian stocks began to move. The stream only overflows the heights
when the lower grounds are already occupied; and only through the
supposition that there were Latin stocks already settled on the coast
are we able to explain why the Sabellians should have contented
themselves with the rougher mountain districts, from which they
afterwards issued and intruded, wherever it was possible, between
the Latin tribes.
Extension of the Latins in Italy
It is well known that a Latin stock inhabited the country from
the left bank of the Tiber to the Volscian mountains; but these
mountains themselves, which appear to have been neglected on occasion
of the first immigration when the plains of Latium and Campania
still lay open to the settlers, were, as the Volscian inscriptions
show, occupied by a stock more nearly related to the Sabellians
than to the Latins. On the other hand, Latins probably dwelt in
Campania before the Greek and Samnite immigrations; for the Italian
names Novla or Nola (newtown), Campani Capua, Volturnus (from
-volvere-, like -Iuturna- from -iuvare-), Opsci (labourers), are
demonstrably older than the Samnite invasion, and show that, at the
time when Cumae was founded by the Greeks, an Italian and probably
Latin stock, the Ausones, were in possession of Campania. The
primitive inhabitants of the districts which the Lucani and Bruttii
subsequently occupied, the Itali proper (inhabitants of the land of
oxen), are associated by the best observers not with the Iapygian,
but with the Italian stock; and there is nothing to hinder our regarding
them as belonging to its Latin branch, although the Hellenizing of
these districts which took place even before the commencement of
the political development of Italy, and their subsequent inundation
by Samnite hordes, have in this instance totally obliterated the
traces of the older nationality. Very ancient legends bring the
similarly extinct stock of the Siculi into relation with Rome. For
instance, the earliest historian of Italy Antiochus of Syracuse
tells us that a man named Sikelos came a fugitive from Rome to
Morges king of Italia (i. e. the Bruttian peninsula). Such stories
appear to be founded on the identity of race recognized by the
narrators as subsisting between the Siculi (of whom there were
some still in Italy in the time of Thucydides) and the Latins. The
striking affinity of certain dialectic peculiarities of Sicilian
Greek with the Latin is probably to be explained rather by the old
commercial connections subsisting between Rome and the Sicilian
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