Who Were the Romans Author:William Ridgeway 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: WHO WERE THE ROMANS? By WILLIAM RIDGEWAY FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY Read April 24, 1907 It has commonly been held by writers on Roman history, since Momms... more »en wrote, that the Romans were an homogeneous people, there being no ethnical distinction between Patricians and Plebeians. This view has certainly the advantage of simplicity, but the charm of simplicity has often proved as fatal in problems of history as in those of Natural Science. For the deeper we penetrate into the inwardness of things, the more complex do all the phenomena of Nature appear, and in no department can this be affirmed with greater certainty than in all that appertains to Man. The ancients themselves give a very clear and coherent account of the various elements in the population of Upper Italy in the early part of the first millennium before our era.1 Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives us very valuable information on the early ethnology, and though his authority has so often been treated with contempt by modern writers because he wrote in the latter half of the first century before Christ, it must not be forgotten that he cites explicitly from writers who lived centuries earlier, and whose works are otherwise lost to us probably for ever. First of all there were the ' Aborigines', as they are termed by Dionysius (following Cato and still earlier writers), and secondly there were the great tribes of Siculans and Umbrians. The Umbrians and Siculans seem to have been closely related, the Siculans being the earlier wave which had advanced down from the Alpine regions, whilst their kindred Umbrian tribes were constantly pushing them on further south. The Aborigines were being continually hard pressed by both the Siculans and Umbrians, and those of them who had maintained their freedom for the most pa...« less