ABSTRACT
THE Augustan division of Italy into regiolles, the boun-daries of which so far have proved often convenient for the purposes of this book, will henceforward no longer serve us so well. For whatever reasons the old cultural and ethnic divisions north of Rome were somewhat closely followed by Augustus, those reasons evidently did not operate south of the city. Perhaps the actual divisions had become far more broken and obscured by the greater volume of traffic and intercourse, by wars, and by foreign influences; perhaps, too, the ancient boundaries themselves had kept to natural frontiers less closely. However that may be, the first regio of Augustus comprised not only Latium-in the wider use of the term as including the territory of the Volsci, Hernici, and Aurunci-but also Campania, and thus extended along the west coast from the mouth of the Tiber to the mouth of the Silarus. Rome had its own organization into fourteen regiolles. Here we shall be concerned only with Latium in its oldest sense, the land of the Latini,l that is of the people who lived around the flanks of the Alban mount; with outlying tribes such as the Rutuli, Labici, Pranestini, and of course the Romani themselves; and with the Hernici. It is true even at the date when our written records first begin, that what we call the Latin language, that is the language of Latium, had been diffused among other neighbouring tribes outside the frontiers of Latium proper; as the Marsi, the .l.Equi, the Sabini; and the Falisci, whose speech had always been closely akin to Latin. But
though the inscriptions and glosses and proper names of these and some other tribes do represent a patois that belongs to the Latinian group of dialects rather than to Osco-Umbrian, that fact is not in itself enough to warrant us in including them culturally with the oldest Latini. For there are clear traces, even in their " rustic" Latin, of dialectal peculiarities 1 which suggest, as we should naturally have assumed, that Latin had been superimposed upon dialects which certainly shared some of the features of the Osco-Umbrian group. This is true actually of the dialect of Prreneste itself, with its medial f in the word nefrones (at Lanuvium it was nebrundines), and some of the local names of the Latini proper show this same non-Latin feature (e.g. Tifata, Aft/tB, IEfula). The dialect of the Volsci, in which we have one inscription of some length, we are bound to reckon in the OscoUmbrian group, and in fact it belongs more closely to Umbrian than to Oscan. The Aurunci, or as they called themselves, the Ausones (cf. the modern river-name Ausente), probably spoke a dialect similar to that of the Volsci, though there is no satisfactory evidence for its classification. But the Hernici, who were the allies of the Latins from very early times, whereas the V olsci were regularly allied with the lEqui, those bitter enemies of Rome, seem never to have spoken a dialect really different from that of their allies, and we shall deal with them together with the Latini ; their very name shows a pure Latin initial h-as contrasted with the dialect f-. 2
The first inhabitants to occupy this limited Latium, or the site of Rome, in considerable numbers are not older than the beginnings of the iron age. Objects belonging to earlier periods
are found sporadically.l These are numerous enough, but they seldom come from actual tombs. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that Latium was settled, though sparsely, in the neolithic and immediately following periods, by the same race as central and northern Italy; and recently there has come to light, not far outside Rome, at Saccopastore on the left bank of the Anio and between it and the via Nomentana, a skull which is confidently assigned to the Neanderthal (palreolithic) type. 2 But it is idle to attempt to associate any significant part of the population of ancient Rome or Latium with palreolithic man. On the other hand, there was a very large element of the neolithic race that survived into bronze age and early iron age times. These survivors, together with the invading Villanovans, and later the Etruscans, both of whom were doubtless numerically inferior and were in due course absorbed by the people among whom they had come to live, are clearly revealed by the iron age cemeteries of Rome and of the Alban hills, and these three are the only stocks which went to make up the popllllls Romanlls and the Latini of historical times.
