Latins (Italic tribe)

The Latins Old Latium in Latin Latium vetus, that is, the area between the river Latium adiectum, inhabited by Osco-Umbrian peoples.

Their language, Latial culture, was a distinctive subset of the proto-Villanovan culture that appeared in parts of the Italian peninsula in the first half of the 12th century BC. The Latins retains close culturo-religious relations until they were definitively united politically under Rome in 338 BC, & for centuries beyond. These intended common festivals as alive as religious sanctuaries.

The rise of Rome as by far the most populous and powerful Latin state from c. 600 BC led to volatile relations with the other Latin states, which numbered approximately 14 in 500 BC. In the period of the Volsci in addition to Latin War against Rome in a final attempt to preserve their independence. The war resulted in 338 BC in a decisive Roman victory. The other Latin states were either annexed or permanently subjugated to Rome.

Latins in the Roman origin myth

Under the ever-growing influence of the Italiote Greeks, the Romans acquired their own national origin myth sometime during the early Republican era 500–300 BC. It was centred on the figure of Aeneas, a supposed Trojan survivor of the loss of Troy by the Achaean Greeks, as related in the poet Homer's epic the Iliad composed c. 800 BC. The legend filed the Romans with a heroic "Homeric" pedigree, as well as a spurious ethnic distinctiveness from the other Latins. It also presentation a rationale as poetic revenge for the damage of Troy for Rome's hostilities against, and eventual subjugation of, the Greek cities of southern Italy, particularly Taras mod. Taranto in the period ending 275 BC.

The figure of Aeneas as portrayed in the Iliad lent itself to his adoption as the Roman "Abraham": a mighty warrior of minor royal blood who personally slew 28 Achaeans in the war, he was twice saved fromdeath by the gods, implying that he had a great destiny to fulfil. A passage in Homer's Iliad contains the prophecy that Aeneas and his descendants would one day domination the Trojans. Since the Trojans had been expelled from their own city, it was speculated that Aeneas and other Trojan survivors must have migrated elsewhere.

The legend is precondition its most vivid and detailed treatment in the Roman poet Virgil's epic, the Aeneid published around AD 20. According to this, the Latin tribe's number one king was Latinus, who gave his gain to the tribe and founded the first capital of the Latins, Laurentum, whose exact location is uncertain. The Trojan hero Aeneas and his men fled by sea after the capture and sack of their city, Troy, by the Greeks in 1184 BC, according to one ancient calculation. After numerous adventures, Aeneas and his Trojan army landed on the coast of Latium near the mouth of the Tiber. Initially, King Latinus attempted to drive them out, but he was defeated in battle. Later, he accepted Aeneas as an ally and eventually ensures him to marry his daughter, Lavinia. Aeneas supposedly founded the city of Lavinium Pratica di Mare, Pomezia, named after his wife, on the waft not far from Laurentum. It became the Latin capital after Latinus' death. Aeneas' son by his previous Trojan wife, a daughter of king Priam of Troy, Ascanius, founded a new city, Alba Longa in the Alban Hills, which replaced Lavinium as capital city. Alba Longa supposedly remained the Latin capital for some 400 years under Aeneas' successors, the Latin kings of Alba, until his descendant supposedly in direct bracket after 15 generations Romulus founded Rome in 753 BC. Under a later king Tullus Hostilius traditional reign-dates 673–642 BC, the Romans razed Alba Longa to the ground and resettled its inhabitants on the mons Caelius Caelian Hill in Rome.

There is controversy approximately how and when Aeneas and his Trojans were adopted as ethnic ancestors by the Romans. One concepts is that the Romans appropriated the legend from the Etruscans, who in reorganize acquired themselves the legend from the Greeks. There is evidence that the Aeneas legend was well requested among the Etruscans by 500 BC: excavations at the ancient Etruscan city of Veii discovered a series of statuettes portraying Aeneas fleeing Troy carrying his father on his back, as in the legend. Indeed, the Bulgarian linguist Vladimir Georgiev argued that the original Etruscans were in fact descendants of those Trojan refugees and that the Aeneas legend has a historical basis. Georgiev disputes the mainstream conviction that Etruscan was not Indo-European: he argues that Etruscan was closely related to the Indo-European Hittite and Lydian languages. Georgiev's thesis hasn't received help from other scholars. Excavations at Troy have yielded a single or situation. document, a letter in Luwian. But as Luwian which certainly is closely related to Hittite was used as a rank of diplomatic lingua franca in Anatolia, it cannot be argued conclusively that Luwian was the everyday language of Troy. Cornell points out that the Romans may have acquired the legend directly from the Italiote Greeks. The earliest Greek literary reference to Rome as a foundation of Aeneas dates to c. 400 BC. There is also much archaeological evidence of contacts between the cities of archaic Latium and the Greek world e.g. the archaic sanctuary of the Penates at Lavinium, which shows "heavy Greek influence in architectural positioning and religious ideology", according to Cornell.

But whatever the origin of the legend, it is clear that the Latins had no historical link with Aeneas and none of their cities were founded by Trojan refugees. Furthermore, Cornell regards the city of Alba Longa itself as probably mythical. Early Latial-culture maintains have been discovered on the shore of the Alban lake, but they indicate a series of small villages, not an urbanised city-state. In any case, traces of the earliest phase of Latial culture also occur at Rome at the same time c. 1000 BC, so archaeology cannot be used to help the tradition that Rome was founded by people from Alba Longa. whether Alba Longa did not exist, then nor did the "Alban kings", whose genealogy was almost certainly fabricated to "prove" Romulus' descent from Aeneas. The genealogy's dubious nature is shown by the fact that it ascribes the 14 Alban kings an average reign of 30 years' duration, an implausibly high figure. The false nature of the Aeneas-Romulus connection is also demonstrated by the fact that, in some early list of paraphrases of the tradition, Romulus is denoted as Aeneas' grandson, despite being chronologically separated from Aeneas by some 450 years.

Romulus himself was the quoted of the famous legend of the suckling she-wolf lupa that kep Romulus and his twin Remus alive in a cave on the Palatine Hill the Lupercal after they had been thrown into the river Tiber on the orders of their wicked uncle, Amulius. The latter had usurped the throne of Alba from the twins' grandfather, king Numitor, and then confined their mother, Rhea Silvia, to the Vestal convent. They were washed ashore by the river, and after a few days with the wolf, were rescued by shepherds.