File:Ancient legends of Roman history (1905) (14590741129).jpg

Identifier: ancientlegendsof00pais (find matches)
Title: Ancient legends of Roman history
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Pais, Ettore, 1856-1939 Cosenza, Mario Emilio, 1880-1966, tr
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Publisher: New York, Dodd, Mead & Company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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ve, and whose name of Tullius seems to be de-rived from tullius, an old Latin word meaning a spring.Numa and Tullius, kings of Rome, were merely river andsolar divinities. The same is true of Ferentina, whosesprings, situated near Ardea and Aricia, were the gatheringplaces of the Prisci Latini. To comprehend fully the mean-ing of the myth, it is necessary to place ourselves, inthought, in those times in which mankind did not interposebetween itself and other living things so great a barrier asat present; in which the metamorphosis of a human beinginto a tree or a rock was considered as natural as the at-tributing to them of human sentiments. The loves ofJanus for Juturna, and of Turnus for Lavinia, fall into thecategory of those myths which narrate the story of theyoung stream Acis, enamored of the beautiful sea-nymphGalatea, or of the stream Achelous which, flowing beneaththe sea, strove to rejoin in Sicily his mistress Ortygia. The Greek race, whose authentic political history ante-
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LUCRETIA AND VIRGINIA 201 dated that of Rome by many centuries, assigned such nar-ratives to a period preceding the so-called Trojan War.The young Latin civilization similarly endeavored to attainto this great antiquity in its myths, and made Turnus andLavinia contemporaries of the Trojan ^Lneas. But the lackof historical material compelled it to people with legend-ary characters even the subsequent periods as late as thefifth century, in which at last there flashes the first sparkof national life. As the result of this process, not onlyNuma and Servius became kings of the earliest centuriesof Roman history, but also the stream Egerius and thelake Turnus were inserted into the history of the deeds ofthe fifth century. Egerius, the founder of the temple ofDiana Aricina, was transformed into a dictator of Tuscu-lum, or into a relative of Tarquinius and an inhabitant ofCollatia.53 In like manner, the stream Turnus, the rivalof ^Eneas, was changed into that Turnus Herdonius, eitherof Aric

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