body of immigrant cultivators could scarce
have spontaneously resorted in search of a suitable settlement to
that unhealthy and unfruitful spot in a region otherwise so highly
favoured, and that it must have been necessity, or rather some
special motive, which led to the establishment of a city there.
Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact:
the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under
the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus,
is nothing but a naive attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain
the singular circumstance of the place having arisen on a site so
unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome
with the general metropolis of Latium. Such tales, which profess
to be historical but are merely improvised explanations of no very
ingenious character, it is the first duty of history to dismiss; but
it may perhaps be allowed to go a step further, and after weighing
the special relations of the locality to propose a positive conjecture
not regarding the way in which the place originated, but regarding
the circumstances which occasioned its rapid and surprising prosperity
and led to its occupying its peculiar position in Latium.

Earliest Limits of the Roman Territory

Let us notice first of all the earliest boundaries of the Roman
territory. Towards the east the towns of Antemnae, Fidenae, Caenina,
and Gabii lie in the immediate neighbourhood, some of them not five
miles distant from the Servian ring-wall; and the boundary of the
canton must have been in the close vicinity of the city gates.
On the south we find at a distance of fourteen miles the powerful
communities of Tusculum and Alba; and the Roman territory appears
not to have extended in this direction beyond the -Fossa Cluilia-,
five miles from Rome. In like manner, towards the south-west, the
boundary betwixt Rome and Lavinium was at the sixth milestone.
While in a landward direction the Roman canton was thus everywhere
confined within the narrowest possible limits, from the earliest
times, on the other hand, it extended without hindrance on both
banks of the Tiber towards the sea. Between Rome and the coast there
occurs no locality that is mentioned as an ancient canton-centre,
and no trace of any ancient canton-boundary. The legend indeed,
which has its definite explanation of the origin of everything,
professes to tell us that the Roman possessions on the right ban