a Latin. But in the passage in which he makes his recantation, there is more diffidence exhibited than can usually be found in his writings, and he admits, that in attacking error, men naturally run into exaggeration. He even pronounces the judgment, "If any pretend that he is able to decide in questions of such obscurity, let none listen to him" (13). But as time advances, his confidence is restored, and in his lectures he asserts that it is "historically certain" that Tarquinius was a Latin, and he thus corrects the errors of antiquity (14). "The Romans described Servius Tullius, who was an Etruscan, as a Latin of Corniculum, and made Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, who was a Latin, an Etruscan." But a couple of years later, in another part of his lectures (15), he gives very good reasons for considering Servius to have been a Latin after all, as the Romans had always made him. The whole subject reads rather confusedly in Schmitz's edition, where the lectures, as given in different years, are amalgamated together; but this appears to be the course of Niebuhr's change of opinion,-and the reason for the change is sufficiently characteristic. The grounds for making Servius an Etruscan were a fragment of a speech of the Emperor Claudius, preserved in an inscription at Lyons, in which he says that the Etruscan records made him a man of that nation, whose original name was Mastarna; and Niebuhr maintains that "the most credulous adherents to what commonly passes for a history of the early ages of Rome, could not decline the challenge to abide by the decision of Etruscan histories" (16). But, in the meantime, a few fragments of two Etruscan historians were discovered in some palimpsest scholia on Virgil, which, in Niebuhr's opinion, "immensely reduce the estimate of the value of Etruscan books for the early times." (17) "It appears," says he, "that just as the Romans misunderstood the ancient Latin history, and substituted the

(13) Hist. I., p. 387.

(14) Lect. R., Hist. I., p. 52 (lect. v.).

(15) Ibid., p. 99 (lect. ix.).

(16) Hist. I., p. 381.

(17) Lect. R., Hist. I., p. 100 (lect. ix.).

Tyrrhenian in its place, so the Etruscans adopted the traditions of the Tyrrhenians, whom they subdued, and represented Tarchon as the founder of their empire from Tarquinii." In other words, their account directly contradicts Niebuhr's unsupported theory, that the Tyrrhenians and Etruscans were not one and the same nation, as all antiquity had made them.

In contrast to this final conclusion of Niebuhr, which recognizes no Etruscan element in Rome at all, it may be interesting to see what the view of another great authority is, with regard to the reigns of the three last kings. Müller does not, indeed, admit any of them to be real personages, but he supposes them to represent the ascendency of certain Etruscan cities. Thus the two Tarquins shadow forth the pre-eminent influence of Tarquinii, and the intermediate reign of Servius, that of the rival city of Volsinii, secured by the invasion of Mastarna; while the expulsion of the Tarquins is supposed to be effected by Porsena, who established the ascendency of Clusium. These accounts evidently differ from each other even more than they both depart from anything which the Romans themselves believed of their early history.

Niebuhr's treatment of the story of Coriolanus is a very good specimen of his method. He does not deny the existence of Coriolanus, or that he was banished in consequence of his attempt to abolish the Tribunate. He does not deny that the Senate had corn (respecting which the quarrel originated), but he disputes its having come from Sicily. He believes that he took refuge with the Volscians, but that he went to Attius Tullus of Antium, the particular Volscian leader mentioned in history, he considers apocryphal; and that he was commander of a Volscian army he looks upon as pure fabrication. He places the whole story at a much later date, but what is evidently his favorite emendation is his discovery of the true meaning of the female embassy, which induced Coriolanus to remove his army. He supposes him to have been at the head of a band of Roman exiles, of whom no mention is made in the history as it has come down to us, and to have been

supported by a Volscian army. "The Republic," he says, "invited him to return, and the entreaties of his mother and wife can have had no other meaning than that he should return alone, and not bring with him that terrible band" (18). In another place he says, "These, his companions in misfortune, Coriolanus demanded should be recalled as well as himself: this is as indubitably certain as if every historian attested it" (19). The whole story, as related to us, is certainly full of many inconsistencies and improbabilities, and it has doubtless been a good deal embellished by tradition; but if we are called upon altogether to deny the authenticity of the account we have, and to reconstruct it from pure imagination, I confess that I prefer the poetical falsifications to the critical ones.

The most important researches of Niebuhr are those connected with the constitutional history of the early republic. The character of the constitutional changes which may have occurred, rests upon a somewhat different foundation, as to evidence, from most historical events. The latter are generally isolated facts, and if they have been misrepresented, we have no means of recovering the true account. But a change in the institutions of a country leaves its traces through many succeeding generations; and in a nation which laid so much stress upon constitutional precedents as did the Romans, tradition would probably not depart very far from the truth, as long as the institution itself retained its existence. The accounts, however, as handed down to us, are often not very intelligible, and Niebuhr has done better service in this department of his researches, than in any other. Yet even here his habitual selfconfidence leads him to maintain with certainty theories which, however plausible they may be, and however generally they may have been adopted from him, rest, really, only upon conjecture. The most noticeable of these is the meaning he assigns to the word populus, as implying the patrician order only, a meaning in which it was never understood by any writer, ancient or modern,

(18) Lect. R., Hist. I., p. 190 (lect. xxiii.).

(19) Hist. II., P. 240.

until he discovered it. As many of our authorities, including Fabius, the earliest known even to Livy, wrote in Greek, Niebuhr suggests that the lack of a precisely equivalent term led to its being translated Sμos, and to its being thought to include the whole people; and he maintains that in the later ages of the republic, the old constitutional forms had become obsolete, and the true meaning of the terms forgotten. It certainly would be strange if the Romans of Cicero's day had entirely misapprehended the meaning of the word populus, involving as it does the political significance. of the comitia curiata, and the whole constitutional system of the early days of the republic, and that it should have been reserved for a German of the nineteenth century to discover it, and that too from their own words, which they had failed to understand themselves. The interpretation of the hieroglyphics even would seem a less wonderful achievement. Yet this is what Niebuhr confidently asserts that he has done. He admits that Livy or Cicero did not understand the word as he does, when they used it; but that in speaking of the early history, before the curio had degenerated into a mere ceremonial form, they copied the words of some old annalist who did understand what he meant, and that from these quotations he, Niebuhr, is able to deduce the correct view of these hypothetical annalists. (20) This proposition is distinctly stated, over and over again, in many passages of his history, and his lectures; but it evidently rests upon three perfectly gratuitous assumptions: 1st, that the authors who have come down to us quoted the exact words of the older authors, which they nowhere profess to do; 2nd, that they misunderstood the words they quoted, although, besides other sources of information which we do not possess, they had the context of the passages to guide them, which we have not; and 3rd, that there were any old authors to quote, who did not themselves live three or four centuries after the times of which they are speaking.

(20) Hist. I., p. 412; 427, note; 608 note--in which latter passage he says ho re-translates Dionysius into what he had read in the authentic notices. See also instances referred to in note 10.

I must apologize for the length to which these remarks have extended, but it was impossible to give any just idea of the characteristics of the modern German school of criticism, without exhibiting them in a few instances, and these could not be made intelligible to a general audience, without entering into some detail. Neither should I have felt myself justified in expressing a doubt as to the trustworthiness of the history as reconstructed by so great a man as Niebuhr, without giving a full explanation of what I look upon as the weak points of his method, with a reference to particular instances in illustration of them.

You may very fairly ask-if the received history of these early times is shewn to rest on no authentic evidence, and if the revised accounts, which have attained currency of late years, are based upon still less-what are we to believe? We appear like the poor dove after the deluge, which wandered over the world of waters without finding a solitary point where a firm footing could be obtained, and returned from its search with the intelligence that all was void.I do not think that our position is quite so hopeless; and I have a good deal of faith in the general truth of early history, and more especially of early Roman history.

Admitting to the fullest extent our deficiency in contemporary records, and entertaining great doubts as to the existence of those other written sources of history, upon which Niebuhr has founded many of his arguments, I think that the power of oral tradition to transmit a substantially correct statement of facts, is very much underrated. We are apt to look upon the subject, from a modern point of view, when all important events and all opinions of men of intelligence are committed to writing, and oral tradition is left altogether in the hands of the illiterate. When writing was little practiced, and writing materials were scarce and difficult to use, much more reliance must have been placed on the memory, and the recording in it the great deeds of men, and the events in which they took a part, must probably have become a sort of profession, as with the Xoyiot of Greece, and in other nations. hardly understand the extent and accuracy to which the exercise

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