The Childhood of Rome Part 13

It seemed like a stupendous enterprise, and even those who had seen most of Calvo's work did not see how he was going to do it. The river was twenty feet deep, and that was too deep for any pier building in those days. It would be a timber bridge.

More or less all the city took part in building that bridge. There were large trees to be cut down and their logs hauled from distant places, and shaped to fit into one another. There was stonework to be done at each end of the span, and on each side of the island. By the time this work was planned, the people were using iron more or less, and found it very convenient for many things; but Calvo set his foot down; not a bit of iron was to be used in his bridge. It was to be all wood, resting on stone foundations. Some of those who had worked with him remembered then that he never did use iron in such work. The younger men thought he must have reason to suppose that the G.o.ds were not pleased with iron.

Romulus had known Calvo for a great many years, although they had never been exactly intimate. As they stood together, watching the work go on, Romulus said in a tone that no one but Calvo could hear.

"There is no iron in this work?"

"None," said Calvo.

"The G.o.ds do not approve it?"

"Apparently not," said Calvo. "The fires of Jove burned two bridges for me before I found it out.

"Also I have found that iron and water are bad friends, and in a bridge, which hangs above water, the bolts would rust. Finally, a thing which is all timber, put together without the use of anything else, does not grow shaky with time, but settles together and is firmer. There are some things a man does not learn until he has watched the ways of building for fifty years, and I have done that."

If Calvo had been like some men of his day, he would have thought, when his bridges were burned, that the G.o.ds were angry with him for omitting some ceremony. But he was a man who noticed all that he saw and put two and two together; and he noticed in the course of time that lightning was much more likely to strike where iron was. He observed the path of it once when it did strike, and saw that it ripped the wood all to splinters and set it on fire trying to get at the iron, which it melted.

It is of course true that iron expands and shrinks with heat and cold, and when iron bolts are used in wood, the iron and the wood do not fit as well together after a few seasons, on this account. So Calvo planned his bridges without iron, and they were all made of dovetailed wooden timbers, as many old wooden bridges were which remain to this day. Calvo's observations about his bridges tended to make others think as he did. No iron was ever used in any of the temples or sacred buildings of Rome, even long after it was in common use for weapons, tools and other things.

The way in which the bridge over the Tiber was built was much like the way in which Caesar built bridges, hundreds of years later. It was so constructed that if necessary it could be removed at short notice. It was never struck by lightning or burned, and it remained until-long after Calvo was dead-another pontiff built a new and greater bridge, using all his knowledge and all else that had been learned in five generations.

XX

THE THREE TRIBES

The hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,-the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government of Rome. Any open place for public discussion was called a forum-there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time-but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. a.s.semblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.

Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level s.p.a.ce that was used for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.

Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Sh.o.r.e. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father's ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.

Aquila had a little plot of his own, where he planted blue flowers, which bees like, and raised snails of the big, fat kind found in vineyards. He was like his mother's people, a born gardener. The countryman, Peppo, made little wooden toys for him, and among them was a little two-wheeled cart with a string harness, which Aquila attached to a team of mice, but he had to play with that out of doors, because his mother would not have the mice in the house. He had also a set of knuckle-bones which the children played with as children now play with jackstones. His mother molded for him men and animals and even whole armies of clay, so that he could play at war with spears of reeds, and demolish mud forts with stones from his little sling.

[Ill.u.s.tration: His mother molded for him men and animals]

He heard many stories,-some from his father, some from his mother and some from Peppo. He liked best the story of his father's pet wolf, and always on the feast of Lupercal and the other feast days of Mars he and his mother went to put garlands on the little stone that was raised to the memory of Pincho, in one corner of the garden.

The city was now ruled by three different groups of elders, from the three different races of settlers. They were generally known as the three tribes, and the public seat of the three rulers was called the tribunal.

The oldest tribe, of course, was the Ramnian, the people who had come from the Mountain of Fire to Rome. The t.i.ties were the Hill Romans or the Sabines, and the Luceres, the People of the Grove, were the tribe that had collected where the soldiers settled and the outsiders who were neither Ramnians nor Sabines lived. There were three great fraternities-the Salii or men of Mars on the Palatine, the Salii on the Quirinal, a Sabine branch of the same wors.h.i.+p, and the new priesthood of the whole people, whose priest was called the Flamen Dialis, the Lighter of the Fire of Jove.

Besides these fraternities there were two important groups of men who were not exactly rulers, but were chosen because of their especial knowledge.

These were the six Augurs, who were skilled in watching and explaining omens, and the Bridge Builders, the Priesthood of the Bridge, who were skillful in measuring and constructing and building. There were five of these, the head priest being called the Pontifex Maximus or High Pontiff.

Instead of being a large and rather straggling town growing so fast that it was hard to know how to govern it, Rome was really taking on the look of an orderly and prosperous city.

Sometimes, when the children of the first colonists looked back at the simple village life they could just remember, and then looked about them at the many-colored life that had gathered on the Seven Hills, it seemed to them almost like another world. Yet in their homes they still kept the old customs and the old wors.h.i.+p, and the servants they had gathered about them were very proud of being part of a Roman household.

There was one danger, however, which n.o.body realized in the least. In the great change from farm life to city life, the mere crowding together of people is a danger. The fever which had broken out in the early days of the settlement broke out again. This time it swept away lives by the hundred. The poor people were frightened almost out of their wits, and ran out of their houses and spread the disease before any one understood that it could be caught. Emilia had a maid who came back from a visit to her brother on the Quirinal and died before morning. In less than a week Emilia herself and her little son were dead also, and Romulus was left alone.

Nothing seemed able to harm him. He went among the poorest, and by his fearless courage kept them from going mad with fear. When the fever pa.s.sed his hair had begun to turn from black to gray.

He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.

Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.

Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the G.o.ds were angry.

Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the G.o.ds were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.

Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.

After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths.

He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition; he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man's wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers' den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the G.o.ds alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the G.o.ds to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the G.o.ds would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the G.o.ds to take care of him if he used no judgment.

None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and wors.h.i.+p, but they took good care to do also everything that they had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.

XXI

UNDER THE YOKE

Many years had pa.s.sed since the colonists first came to the Seven Hills, and Rome was now the city from which a large extent of country on both sides of the river was ruled. Romulus had inherited the land of his ancestors on the Long White Mountain, and village after village, town after town, had found it wise to come under his rule. The way in which he managed these new possessions was rather curious and very like himself. He let them rule themselves and settle their own affairs so far as their own local customs and people were concerned, and so far as these did not contradict the common law of Rome.

When the children of Mars first came to this part of the world, people called them very often the "cattle-men," because cattle were not at all common there. Many of the customs both of the Romans and the Sabines came about because they kept cattle and used them. This made it possible for them to cultivate much more land than they could have farmed without the oxen, and it also rather tied them down to one place, for after cultivating land to the point where it would grow a good crop of grain, n.o.body of course would wish to abandon it. They had a G.o.d called Pales who protected the herds and was said to have taught the people in the beginning how to yoke and use cattle, and the long-horned skulls were hung up around the walls of the early temples and served to hang garlands from on a feast day. When the "outfit vault" was filled at the founding of the city, a yoke was one of the things put in.

In a certain way, all the scattered villages and peoples which gradually joined the new colony, although keeping their own land and homes, were rather like oxen. They were not equal to the colonists in wisdom or skill or ability to direct affairs. They could work, and they could fight for their wives and children;-but cattle can work and fight. Without some one to govern and teach them, they would belong to any one who happened to be strong enough to make himself their master.

The use of the yoke was the one great thing in which the Roman farmer differed from these pagans and peasants, and he could teach them that. It was the thing which would make the most difference in their lives, in comfort and plenty and skill. A man must be more intelligent to work with animals and control them than to dig up a plot of ground with his own hands. It struck Romulus, therefore, that the yoke would be a good symbol to use when Rome took possession of such a village. A great deal of the ceremony used in the daily life of the ancient people was a sort of sign language. When something important changed hands, the buyer and the seller shook hands on it in public. When a man was not a slave nor exactly a servant, but a member of the household who did something for which he was paid, he was paid in salt, because he could be invited to eat salt with his master, and this pay was called _salarium_,-salary. When Rome took formal possession of a place, the men pa.s.sed under a yoke, as a sign that now they belonged to the men who used oxen, and worked as they did and for them.

Whenever it was possible, some Roman families were sent to such places to live among the people and show them Roman ways. There were always some who were willing to do this, because they could have more land and better houses in that way than in the older town, which was getting rather crowded. In this way, the widely scattered towns and villages and farms ruled by Rome became more or less Roman in a much shorter time than they would if they had been left to themselves.

Life in such a growing country, made up of a great many different sorts and conditions of people, is not by any means simple. The Romans themselves were aware of this before the first settlers were old men. As the sons of these colonists became men, they were proud to call themselves "the sons of the fathers." The word "father" was used in the old way, which meant that every father of a family in a village was the head of that family. The head of the house was a ruler simply because he was the oldest representative of his race. In the same way the houses built by the first families within the palisade, on the Square Hill, were called palaces, and the hill itself the hill of the palaces, the Palatine. The families of those first colonists were known, after a while, as the "patricians." After the Sabines came, there were two groups of settlers of the same race, one on the Square Hill and the other on the hill called the Quirinal, the Hill of the Spears. The Palatine settlers sometimes called themselves the Mountain Romans, and the others the Hill Romans. The people who had settled in the place Romulus called the Asylum lived among groves of trees, and they were called the People of the Grove, the Luceres. But all these citizens of Rome itself considered themselves superior to the outsiders, who had sometimes been conquered and sometimes been glad to join Rome for protection. The Romans were beginning to be very proud of the town they had made.

The Tuscans beyond the river, however, did not all feel this pride in belonging to Rome. The town of the Veientines, especially, objected to the idea of Tuscans being "under the yoke" of these strangers. When the Romans took the town of Fidenae, the Veientines were very indignant, though they did not come to the help of their neighbors, and presently they claimed that Fidenae was a town of their own and set out to make war against the Romans. Romulus promptly took the field and won the war. Although he was now growing old, and his hair was white as silver, he fought with all his old fire and sagacity, and the Tuscans were glad to make terms. They offered to make peace for a hundred years, but that was not quite enough for Romulus. They had begun the war, and he meant to make them pay for it.

When the matter was finally settled, they agreed to give to Rome their salt works on the river and a large tract of land. While the talk was going on, fifty of their chief men were kept prisoners in the camp of Romulus.

There was a great sensation in Rome when the news of the peace was made known. The army paraded through the streets, with the prisoners and the spoils of various kinds, and there was great rejoicing. It was the first celebration of a victory by a "triumph"-called by that name because many of those who took part in the parade were leaping and dancing to the sound of music. Then Romulus proceeded to divide the land he had taken from the Tuscans among the soldiers who had taken part in the war. He sent the Tuscan hostages home to their people.