he ancient poem passed on at once to the time when Romulus had
completed his earthly career, and Jupiter fulfilled his promise to Mars,
that Romulus was the only man whom he would introduce among the gods.
According to this ancient legend, the king was reviewing his army near
the marsh of Caprae, when, as at the moment of his conception, there
occurred an eclipse of the sun and at the same time a hurricane, during
which Mars descended in a fiery chariot and took his son up to heaven.
Out of this beautiful poem the most wretched stories have been
manufactured: Romulus, it is said, while in the midst of his senators
was knocked down, cut into pieces, and thus carried away by them under
their togas. This stupid story was generally adopted, and that a cause
for so horrible a deed might not be wanting, it was related that in his
latter years Romulus had become a tyrant, and that the senators took
revenge by murdering him.

After the death of Romulus, the Romans and the people of Tatius
quarrelled for a long time with each other, the Sabines wishing that one
of their nation should be raised to the throne, while the Romans claimed
that the new king should be chosen from among them. At length they
agreed, it is said, that the one nation should choose a king from the
other.

We have now reached the point at which it is necessary to speak of the
relation between the two nations, such as it actually existed.

All the nations of antiquity lived in fixed forms, and their civil
relations were always marked by various divisions and subdivisions. When
cities raise themselves to the rank of nations, we always find a
division at first into tribes; Herodotus mentions such tribes in the
colonization of Cyrene, and the same was afterward the case at the
foundation of Thurii; but when a place existed anywhere as a distinct
township, its nature was characterized by the fact of its citizens being
at a certain time divided into _gentes_ [Greek: gene], each of which had
a common chapel and a common hero. These _gentes_ were united in
definite numerical proportions into _curiae_ [Greek: phratrai]. The
_gentes_ are not families, but free corporations, sometimes close and
sometimes open; in certain cases the whole body of the state might
assign to them new associates; the great council at Venice was a close
body, and no one could be admitted whose ancestors had not been in it,
and such also was the case in many oligarchical states of antiquity.