An Inquiry Into the Credibility of the Early Roman History (V. 2)
by George Cornewall Lewis (9780217774420)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: wards, under the protection of Aristodemus the despot. They only differ by one year as to the time of this event, placing it either in 496 or 495 B.C., about fourteen years afier the expulsion of the kings. If however we suppose him, according to the ordinary account, to have been the son of Tarquinius Priscus and Tanaquil, he would have been at least 110 years old at the time of his death: an age improbable in itself and quite inconsistent with the received accounts of his life.74) The death of Tarquin at Cumae is considered by Niebuhr as a certain historical fact; and we shall find the presence of members of the Tarquinian party in that city alluded to in the subsequent history. Even however with respect to this event, the accounts were not uniform; for some histories represented him as ending his days with his wife at Tusculum.(i7i) - 14 The foregoing analysis shows that the received history of the first fourteen years of the commonwealth has, like that of the regal period, a legendary character; and that the details and cireumstances of the events are variously narrated, and appear to have been derived from an uncertain and fluctuating tradition. Still it might be possible that the main facts should rest on authentic contemporary registration: the nuclens of the history might be sound, though it might be invested with a fictitious covering. In order to determine how far there is any trace of the existence of a uniform series of events which, though meagre and scanty, might have served as a sure support to the oral traditions, we will place in juxtaposition the principal occurrences, as they are arranged under the successive consulships by Dionysius and Livy, from the first to the fourteenth year of the Republic: ? (i74) See above, oh. xi. 25, 38. In vi. 11, Dionysi...

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