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6 j TOLERANT (continued) There is no reason to think that Romans in a republic were any less open to foreign ways than they had been under their kings. The welcome offered to Tarquin the Elder was also offered to a Sabine immigrant and his dependents on a grand scale in the late 500s: to Attius Clausus remade as citizen Appius Claudius, and still more, as a patrician, and in a decade, a consul. Etruscan neighbors for their part continued to advise the senate, that is, the Roman state itself: it turned to them to provide haruspices , the seers with the only proper credentials still at the turn of the fourth century, if we may trust Livy.1 In the early fasti consuls occur with an ethnic second name, a cognomen Etruscan or other (“Tuscus”, “Clusinus ”, “Sabinus”, “Camerinus”, “Auruncus”), showing the debt or attraction of Rome to other peoples of central Italy.2 Most notably, and to a Greek observer a thing of wonder, the Romans freed their slaves liberally and upon freeing them made them citizens straightway, automatically, and this, from the time of the kings. The freed received citizenship and membership in a gens, accepted into their master’s clan and its cults, in a dependent, duty-laden status.The practice is best explained as a concession to captives taken in wars with Latin cities, who were of an essentially identical language and way of life and therefore easily absorbed; but in time all captives of any sort were treated in the same way. These new Romans , in numbers that rose with every passing generation of wider warfare, best demonstrate the tolerance that characterized the master society. There don’t seem to have been any second thoughts about the matter, ever.3 76 Another indication of an open society—although a practice shared across all of central Italy—was mentioned in chapter 1 (at n. 26): people bought terra-cotta or occasionally bronze replicas of a body part to represent whatever was their point of suffering and dedicated them at the shrine of almost any deity (since all deities were healers) along with a prayer for recovery. The rite has left its mark almost everywhere in ‹nds from the opening of the ‹fth century to the end of the fourth, and touches every stratum of wealth. Over the span of a generation or so, beliefs and articles introduced from outside thus permeated the culture almost from top to bottom.4 We certainly see in this illustration much movement and openness ; we can imagine how, and how well, the market worked. So much being said, however, it must be conceded that archaeological and literary evidence most often shows us only the elite. Of course, the more money people command, the better the quality they demand for it; the longer trained the artist must be who satis‹es them; the more elaborate and carefully worked the idea or product on sale, and therefore the more likely to be mentioned in our written sources or preserved for excavation. All this goes without saying, today; but Tocqueville’s reader perhaps needed the reminder that “the aristocratic class naturally derive from their superior and hereditary position a taste for what is extremely well-made and lasting”.5 Thus it was with the Romans. In their response to other cultures , we are able to see a lot of show-off or nonessential things like tomb paintings or eulogies, porticoed temples or parades, while we know almost nothing about how food was cooked or girls got married among the generality of the population. In modern studies of “Roman civilization” this huge fact is generally forgotten, giving rise to the question, whether there was in fact any civilization that was truly Roman, not imported. The answer is, yes, indeed there was; but it lay in those levels of life most often hidden from us and consequently quite forgotten. So far as regards religion , I tried to draw the distinction in the ‹rst chapter.6 As might be expected, sharing with Latins was easiest. They were closest in every respect. Almost next door was little Gabii from which Romans took a special folding of the toga in the act of worship.7 Even in con›ict, Latin communities were given special treatment by the earliest fetial rites, evidently because the Romans felt themselves to be under the eye of exactly the same gods as the enemy and must therefore behave themselves like good pious folk.8 No...

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