Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal cities.

The history of every nation, and Italian history especially, is a Synoikismos on a great scale. Rome, in the earliest form in which we have any knowledge of it, was already triune, and similar incorporations only ceased when the spirit of Roman vigour had wholly died away. Apart from that primitive process of amalgamation of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, of which hardly anything beyond the bare fact is known, the earliest act of incorporation of this sort was that by which the Hill-burgesses became merged in the Palatine Eome. The organization of the two communities, when they were about to be amalgamated, may be conceived to have been substantially similar, and in solving the problem of union they would have to choose between the alternatives of retaining duplicate institutions or of abolishing one set of these and extending the other to the whole united community. They adopted the former course in the case of all sanctuaries and priesthoods. Thenceforth the Roman community had its two guilds of Salii and two of Luperci, and as it had two forms of Mars, it had also two priests for that divinity; the Palatine priest, who afterwards usually took the designation of priest of Mars, and the Oolline, who was termed priest of Quirinus. It is likely, although it can no longer be proved, that all the old Latin priesthoods of Eome, the Augurs, Pontiffs, Vestals, and Eetials, originated in the same way from the combined colleges of priests of the Palatine and Quirinal communities.