of the Tiber. In the earliest division of the burgesses of Rome a
trace has been preserved of the fact that that body arose out of
the amalgamation of three cantons once probably independent, the
Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, into a single commonwealth--in other
words, out of such a --synoikismos-- as that from which Athens
arose in Attica.(2) The great antiquity of this threefold division
of the community(3) is perhaps best evinced by the fact that the
Romans, in matters especially of constitutional law, regularly
used the forms -tribuere- ("to divide into three") and -tribus-
("a third") in the general sense of "to divide" and "a part," and
the latter expression (-tribus-), like our "quarter," early lost
its original signification of number. After the union each of these
three communities--once separate, but now forming subdivisions of
a single community--still possessed its third of the common domain,
and had its proportional representation in the burgess-force and
in the council of the elders. In ritual also, the number divisible
by three of the members of almost all the oldest colleges--of the
Vestal Virgins, the Salii, the Arval Brethren, the Luperci, the
Augurs-- probably had reference to that three-fold partition. These
three elements into which the primitive body of burgesses in Rome
was divided have had theories of the most extravagant absurdity
engrafted upon them. The irrational opinion that the Roman nation
was a mongrel people finds its support in that division, and its
advocates have striven by various means to represent the three
great Italian races as elements entering into the composition of
the primitive Rome, and to transform a people which has exhibited
in language, polity, and religion, a pure and national development
such as few have equalled, into a confused aggregate of Etruscan
and Sabine, Hellenic and, forsooth! even Pelasgian fragments.