Latium

Roman In ancient times, a region in west-central Italy, south and east of the Tiber River on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The people of this region were known as Latins. Archaeological evidence shows that Latin communities first developed around 1200 b.c. in the Alban Hills, 12 miles southeast of the hills of modern Rome. As communities grew and shifted from herding flocks of animals to farming, they eventually spread as far north as the Tiber River, by 850 b.c. Latium's largest city was Lavinium, but by the 700s b.c., Rome became the principal city of Latium. In ancient Roman and Greek writing, authors sometimes refer to the people who would become Latins as "Aborigines," which modern scholars understand to mean "mountain people." Scholars also agree that the Latin people came originally from east central Europe. Because Rome is located in this ancient region, all of the myths of the founding of this great city tell either of the founding of Latium or of the conquest of the Latin people by newcomers. Early myths say that it was in Latium that Saturn hid after his son Jupiter attacked him in the Roman version of the Greek story about the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympian Gods. Here Saturn established a society and reigned over a Golden Age of the people. Here, too, Romulus and Remus found land suitable for establishing their own kingdom and on the great seven hills on the east banks of the Tiber, 18 miles north of Lavinium, they founded Rome. Romulus, after killing Remus and declaring himself king, made war on the people of Latium to find wives and to grow his kingdom. Greek colonists who had settled on the Italian peninsula as early as 1000 b.c. also developed stories 86 Lara of the founding of Rome and the role the Latins played in the development of the early city. Their stories were centered on Greek myth. The first of the Greeks to build a community on what would become Rome was the hero Evander, who fled Greece and settled with his mother on the Palatine Hill. Sixty years later, the Trojan War hero Aeneas arrived in Italy. With the help of Latinus, king of Latium, Aeneas defeated the nearby Rutuli people and established the neighboring city of Lavinium, which he named after his wife, Lavinia, daughter of Latinus. Thus Evander and Aeneas united the Latin people as one great community over which Rome ruled.