Читать книгу Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men - Mary Agnes Hamilton - Страница 5

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The oldest Roman stories give a description of the coming of the people who afterwards inhabited the city, from across the seas. They tell of the founding of the first township round the Seven Hills, and of the kings, especially of the last seven, who ruled over the people until, for their misdeeds, they were driven out and the very name of King became hateful in Roman ears. Then there are many tales of the wars between the people of Rome and the neighbours dwelling round them on the plains of Latium and among the hills of Etruria and Samnium; and the fierce battles fought against the Gauls who, from time to time, swept down on Italy from the mountains of the north.

These stories do not tell us much that can be considered as actual history. But they do help us to understand what the Romans wished to be like, by showing us the sort of pictures they held up before themselves.

In later times the Romans learned to admire intensely all that came from Greece. The Greeks had been a great ruling people when the Roman State hardly existed: and from them much in Roman life and thought was borrowed. They liked to think that the first settlers on the Tiber bank came from an older finer world than that of the other tribes dwelling in Italy. So they told how, after the great siege of Troy by the Greek heroes, Aeneas, one of the Trojan leaders, fled from his ruined city across the seas, bearing his father and his household gods upon his shoulders, and after many adventures, and some time passed in the great city of Carthage, on the African coast, came with a few trusty companions to the shores of Latium and there founded a new home.

The descendants of Aeneas ruled over their people as kings. In later days, however, the Romans, who held that all citizens were free and equal, hated the name of King. Rome was a republic: its government was carried on by men elected by the citizens from among themselves, and by assemblies in which all citizens could take part. The first duty of every citizen was to the republic: its claim on him stood before all other claims.

The story of the fall of the last king and of Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the first Consuls, as the chief magistrates of the new republic were called, shows clearly how far the idea of duty to the republic could go in the minds of Romans.