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In the developed political life of Italy there is a survival of a form of association known as the pagus[1]—an ethnic or, at least, a tribal unit, which is itself composed of a number of hamlets (vici, οἶκοι). This district with its group of villages perhaps represents the most primitive organisation of the Italian peoples engaged in agriculture and pastoral pursuits.[2] The pagus seems to resemble the tribe (tribus) of the fully formed city-state,[3] while the vicus may often have represented, or professed to represent, a simple clan (gens). In the centre of the district lay a stronghold (arx, castellum), in which the people took shelter in time of danger.

There are, indeed, traditions of isolated units still smaller than the pagus. The clan is sometimes pictured as wandering alone with its crowd of dependants.[4] But migration itself would have tended to destroy the self-existence of the family; the horde is wider than the clan, and the germ of the later civitas must have appeared first, perhaps, in the pagus, later in the populus which united many pagi. The union may have been slight at first, and may often have been based merely on the possession of some common shrine. Much of the civil and criminal law was administered within the family in the form of a domestic jurisdiction which survived in historical Rome; but a common market would involve disputes, and these would have to be settled by an appeal to an arbitrator (arbiter) even before the idea of a magistracy was evolved. Lastly come military necessities whether of defence or aggression. It is these that create a power which more than any other makes the state. The mild kingship of the high-priest of the common cult gives way to the organised rule of an imperium, and the king, praetor or dictator, is the result, the coherence of infant organisation being dependent on the strength of the executive power.

In the earliest city of Rome, to which we are carried back by tradition or archaeological research, this development has already been attained. The square city (Roma quadrata) was the enclosure of the Palatine, the “grazing-land” of the early Roman shepherd;[5] the bounds of the oldest pomerium were known in later times to have been the limits of this site,[6] and traces of the tufa ring-wall may yet be seen. From this centre the city spread in irregular concentric circles.[7] Traces of ritual have preserved a memory of a city of the seven hills (Septimontium)—not those of the Servian Rome, but five smaller elevations, three (Palatium, Cermalus, Velia) on the older city of the Palatine, and two (Oppius, Cispius) on the newly-included Esquiline; while two valleys on the latter (Fagutal and Subura) also bear the name montes,[8] and are, with the sites that really deserve the name, inhabited by the montani, who are distinguished from the pagani, the inhabitants of the lower-lying land beneath. It is not impossible that these seven “hills” were once the sites of independent or loosely connected villages (vici, or perhaps even pagi) which were gradually amalgamated under a central power, and, as the walls of the state could never have been coterminous with its territory, each successive enclosure must show the incorporation, voluntary or enforced, of a far greater number of smaller political units than those which the fortifications directly absorbed. Modern inquirers, following up a further hint supplied by the survival of a ritual, have held that there was another advance before the epoch of the Servian Rome was reached, and that what is known as “the Rome of the four regions” survives in the sites associated with the chapels of the Argei,[9] and is preserved in the administrative subdivisions of the city to the close of the Republic.[10] To form these regions the Caelian, the Quirinal, and the Viminal hills were added, while the Capitol with its two peaks now became, not indeed a part of the town, but, as the “head” of the state, its chief stronghold and the site of its greatest temples. The final step in the city’s growth was the enclosure associated with the name of Servius Tullius, a fortification extending beyond the limits of the true pomerium, which added to the city the whole of the Esquiline to the north-east, the Aventine to the south-west, stretched to the west to the bank of the Tiber where the Pons Sublicius crosses the river, and formed the enceinte of Republican Rome.

It is possible that an amalgamation of slightly different ethnic elements may be associated with this extension of the city. That a difference of race lay at the basis of the division of the primitive people into their three original tribes was believed in the ancient, and has often been held in the modern world. The Tities (or Titienses) were supposed to be Sabine,[11] the Ramnes (or Ramnenses) Roman; the Luceres were held by some to be also Latin, by others to be Etruscan. There is, however, a rival tradition of the artificial creation of these tribes by the first Roman king,[12] and, when we remember the arbitrary application in the Greek world of tribe-names that had once been significant,[13] we may hold it possible that the great συνοικισμός typified by the name of Romulus was not accompanied by any large alien intermixture with the primitive Latin population. The existence of Sabine gods like Sancus, or Sabine ritual as typified in Numa Pompilius, is no more evidence of Sabine intermixture than the early reception of Hellenic deities is of Greek;[14] and though it is possible that a Sabine tribe once settled on the Quirinal, and it is almost certain that at the close of the monarchical period an Etruscan dynasty ruled in Rome, yet the language, religion, and political structure of the early state were of a genuinely Latin type. There was, indeed, contact with peoples more developed in material civilisation or more gifted in their spiritual life, and to this contact the debt of Rome was great. Rome adopts the Chalcidian alphabet; she receives early Greek divinities such as Hercules, Castor, and Pollux; she models her statue of Diana on the Aventine on that of Artemis at Massilia; she imitates the Greek tactical organisation in her early phalanx. But it is very doubtful whether the obligation extended to the reception of the political ideas of Hellas. Parallels between Roman and Hellenic organisation may be observed in certain institutions such as the equites and the census; but these are military rather than purely political, and in all the fundamental conceptions of public law—the rights of the citizens individually and collectively, the power of the magistrate and the divine character even of secular rule—Rome differed widely from the developed Greek communities with which she was brought into contact, and seems in her political evolution to have worked out her own salvation. The more developed civilisation of Etruria doubtless filled up certain gaps in her political and religious organisation both by contact and by rule. The strength of the religious guilds (collegia) of Rome may be due in part to an imitation of the Etruscan hierarchy; the refinements of the science of augury may also be Tuscan; and tradition, as we shall see, derives from the same source the insignia of the Roman king.