VI. Sylla, who soon afterwards held an interview with Mithridates at Dardanus, consoled the Ilicans, on the conclusion of the war, by restoring many of their shattered buildings; and, when he settled the province of Asia, in recompense of their fighting on his side, or of their sufferings for their good will toward him, he left them free, and enrolled them friends of the Roman people'. It was he who first introduced at Rome from Ilium the spectacle of boys exercising in troops on horseback called the Trojan game or course.

VII. The Tenedians were at this time rich, as appears from the Orations of Cicero, who pleaded for them in a cause concerning their immunities, which, says Bayle', was determined with too much rigour against them. It is related by an historian of the Augustan age, that they had made a decree forbidding the mention of Achilles within the sacred portion of Tennes their founder, whose worship there had been transmitted down to a time not then remote *. It probably ceased on the removal of his beautiful image, which, Cicero informs us, the people accompanied to the sea-side with loud groans, as it was carrying away to be transported to Rome by Verres.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE JULIAN FAMILY..

I. Of Ilium under Julius Cæsar.—II. Augustus Cæsar.—III. Tiberius Cæsar.-IV. Tiberius Claudius Cæsar.-V. Nero Cæsar. -VI. End of the Julian family.-VII. Decline of Ilium.— VIII. The Claim of the Romans to Trojan descent continued.

THE peculiar fortune of the Iliéans reserved for them, an

insignificant people, the power of vaunting, not only that their city was the mother of Rome, but, as their supreme glory, that they had furnished the parent-stock of the imperial despots, who governed both it and the subject world.

The Romans claiming Æneas for their founder, some considerable families had the vanity, as we have before stated, to trace their descent from the reputed companions of his voyage. It may well be imagined, that they had in general very little, if any, ground for their pretensions. Some conformity or resemblance of name seems to have sufficed; and the pedigree, being once promulged, was not controverted; each person desiring only the unmolested enjoyment of his own fancied ancestry. But Ascanius, son of Æneas, seems to have been called also Iülus, for the

express purpose of furnishing one family, on its rising into distinction, with a brilliant progenitor; for the name Ascanius only is found in the Greek authors anterior to the Roman historians.

. Iülus, son of Æneas, is supposed to have been adopted into the pedigree of the Julians with the surname of Cæsar, (a family one while of mean condition at Aricia, a little town near Rome) about the time when the Romans began to emerge from barbarism; and this lineage, being recorded by their early writers, was afterwards generally allowed. But, though the origin of Julius Cæsar from the goddess Venus and Anchises the father of Eneas was admitted, the idea that he was of a race predestined to wield the sceptre of the Universe was probably suggested by the exalted station to which his ambition attained, and was propagated and more fully established under the influence of the success and policy of his crafty nephew and adopted son, Augustus.

If the Roman people be accused of foolish credulity in the article of their heaven-descended emperors, it is to be remembered, that the tale was connected with that of the arrival of Eneas in Italy, which had the sanction of the unanimous assent of their own historians; while, that the prophesy concerning his posterity had been rightly applied, was attested as it were by the most extraordinary events, by the transcendent fortune of the Julian line, and by the widely-spred dominion which came into its possession.

I. It is remarkable that the Iliéans, not influenced by the consideration of the ancestry of Julius Cæsar, sided, in the civil

war,

war, with his competitor Pompey. Either they did not then regard the Julian race as that prophesied of in Homer, or they misinterpreted and were misled by omens, in which they were great dealers'.

After the battle of Pharsalia, the conqueror, pursuing his rival into Asia, went to Ilium; full, we are told, of admiration of the antient renown of the place, and desirous to behold the spot from which he derived his origin. His reception there must have pleased him, as he overlooked the recent default of the people; and from magnanimity, partiality, or policy, not only forgave their offence, but proved much kinder to them even than Sylla; adding to their territory, and letting them retain their liberty, and their immunity from public offices. It was strongly reported, after his death, that he was about, if he had lived, to remove to Ilium or Alexandréa; carrying away with him the riches of the empire, leaving Italy exhausted of men by

levies, and Rome to be governed by his adherents'. This was perhaps a tale devised to promote or accelerate the conspiracy which destroyed him; or, to render his memory odious to the people; if he was not rather indeed impressed with the idea that he was really descended from Æneas; and did not mean more completely to verify the prophesy in Homer, by actually reigning in the Troia.

II. Augustus, ridiculously vain of his Trojan ancestors, caused them all to be represented on the temple of Mars the Avenger, which he erected at Rome. To please him and the Romans, Dionysius of Halicarnessus sullied the dignity and purity of history by labouring to prove the arrival of Eneas in Italy. The same track of adulation was pursued by the poets. Horace has frequent allusions to his Dardan origin. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, hoped to obtain his favour by settling Æneas, after much wandering, in Italy; and deducing the Julian family from his son Iülus. Virgil, besides introducing this pedigree in the Georgics, has made it the ground-work of the Eneis. It is amusing to note the difficulties he struggles with in suiting to his design a story presenting so many obstacles and improbabilities, to be encountered and overcome. He exposes the absurdity of the tale, and amply confutes, while he beautifully embellishes it. The reflecting reader wonders that he is able at all to convert the

• Suetonius, Cæsar, c. 79. Gyllius, p. 26, c. 3.

2 See Ovid, Fast. 1. v. 565,

Trojans