Latins Erotic

The Latins were an Iron Age Italic people who, from roughly 1000 BC, farmed and fortified the volcanic country south of the Tiber in central Italy, and who were absorbed so completely into the Roman state they helped create that by the late Republic Latin meant a legal status rather than a bloodline. Their descendants are the Romans, and through Rome the Romance-speaking world. Their homeland was Old Latium: the coastal plain, the Alban Hills, and the ridge towns running down to Mount Circeo, a country of crater lakes and tufa outcrops. Rome was one Latin community among thirty or so, and for its first centuries not obviously the most important. What made a Latin a Latin was language and cult. Latin belonged with neighboring Faliscan to its own small branch of Italic, distinct from the Osco-Umbrian speech of the Sabines, Volsci and Hernici in the hills around it, and unrelated entirely to Etruscan across the river. The towns kept shared rites at shared sanctuaries: Jupiter Latiaris on the summit of the Alban Mount, where each year the Latin communities sacrificed a white bull and divided the meat among themselves at the Feriae Latinae; Diana in her grove above Lake Nemi at Aricia; Juno Sospita at Lanuvium in her goatskin cloak. Alba Longa was remembered as the mother city, and the founding story ran back through Lavinium to Aeneas and a king named Latinus. The earliest Latin dead were cremated and their ashes placed in clay urns shaped like the round thatched huts the living occupied, complete with a small removable door: models of home for the grave, found from the Alban Hills to the Palatine.

Rome's rise turned kinship into rivalry. The Latin League fought Rome at Lake Regillus around 496 BC, then signed a treaty of near equals, then in 340 BC went to war again and lost. In 338 BC Rome dissolved the League and settled with each town separately: full citizenship for some, a reduced alliance for others, and a bundle of trade, marriage and migration rights, the Latin right, that Rome went on to grant far beyond Latium. That right outlived the people. It was extended to colonies planted across Italy, then to communities in Spain and Gaul, so that by the imperial period Latin named a legal condition held by people who had never seen the Alban Hills. The tribe dissolved and the word kept traveling. It survives in Lazio, in the Latin alphabet, in the Latin rite, and in a hemisphere of the Americas named, two thousand years on, for the language of a few hill towns south of the Tiber.