The Latins

Archaeological evidence suggests that the territory of Rome was not permanently inhabited until about 1000 BC. The first people who settled around the Tiber valley and in the area that was later to become Rome were the Latins and the Sabines, two of the Indo-European peoples referred to collectively as Italians, who drifted down from the North across the Alps into the Italian peninsula at the close of the second millennium BC.^[104] The people of Latium, as this area became known, lived in small fortified villages and were engaged mainly in pasturage and the cultivation of the land.

religious inheritance and having largely common interests. This is manifested by the formation of religious associations, or leagues, between the various Latin communities, which provided the framework for their later political unification. The Latins' culture and conditions of life underwent very little change until the end of the seventh century BC when they came into contact first with the Etruscans, who occupied the neighbouring territory of Tuscany, and later with the Greeks and the Carthaginians. But it was mainly to the Etruscan influence that the people of Latium owed much of their political and cultural development.