en thought that if some beneficent fairy could grant us the
power of somewhere raising the veil of oblivion which enshrouds the
earliest ages of Aryan dominion in Europe, there is no place from which
the historian should be more glad to see it lifted than from Rome in the
centuries which saw the formation of the city, and which preceded the
expulsion of the kings. Even the legends, which were uncritically
accepted from the days of Livy to those of our grandfathers, are
provokingly silent upon the very points as to which we would fain get at
least a hint. This much is plain, however, that in the embryonic stage
of the Roman commonwealth some obscure processes of fusion or
commingling went on. The tribal population of Rome was more
heterogeneous than that of the great cities of Greece, and its earliest
municipal religion seems to have been an assemblage of various tribal
religions that had points of contact with other tribal religions
throughout large portions of the Graeco-Italic world. As M. de Coulanges
observes,[13] Rome was almost the only city of antiquity which was not
kept apart from other cities by its religion. There was hardly a people
in Greece or Italy which it was restrained from admitting to
participation in its municipal rites.

However this may have been, it is certain that Rome early succeeded in
freeing itself from that insuperable prejudice which elsewhere prevented
the ancient city from admitting aliens to a share in its franchise. And
in this victory over primeval political ideas lay the whole secret of
Rome's mighty career. The victory was not indeed completed until after
the terrible Social War of B.C. 90, but it was begun at least four
centuries earlier with the admission of the plebeians. At the
consummation of the conquest of Italy in B.C. 270 Roman burghership
already extended, in varying degrees of completeness, through the
greater part of Etruria and Campania, from the coast to the mountains;
while all the rest of Italy was admitted to privileges for which ancient
history had elsewhere furnished no precedent. Hence the invasion of
Hannibal half a century later, even with its stupendous victories of
Thrasymene and Cannae, effected nothing toward detaching the Italian
subjects from their allegiance to Rome; and herein we have a most
instructive contrast to the conduct of the communities subject to Athens
at several critical moments of the Peloponnesian War. With this
consolidation of Italy, thu