Trading was favored because farming did not altogether supply the needs of the people. Now and then the river rose and flooded their land. The only part of the country they could absolutely depend on as yet was the group of seven hills, where they kept their herds and flocks. One year, when their grain was ruined, they had to send across the river and buy some of the Etruscans, in exchange for wool and leather and weapons. Within the first ten years every one of the colonists had discovered that men who make their home in a new land must change their ways more or less if they are to live. While they are changing the land, the land changes them. The children of these people would not be exactly the same when they grew up as they would have been if they had stayed in their old home. Their children’s children would be still more different. It is possible that a ruler who had not grown up as Romulus had, making his own laws and habits and managing men more or less by instinct, might have been bewildered and frightened. Whatever came up, he always had some expedient ready, and whatever strange specimen of human nature cropped out in the soldiers, or the traders, or the pagans, he had always seen something like it before.
At the end of ten years the town on the Square Hill had spread out into a collection of villages and huts in which almost every kind of human being to be found in that region might have been seen, somewhere. On the Palatine Hill lived the original ten families and some of their kindred who had joined them. On the Aventine were barracks for the soldiers, and also on the steep narrow hill near the river. Clusters of huts here and there on the plain showed where hunters and fishermen lived, who came up the hill sometimes with what they had to sell, or came to buy weapons of the smiths. In the hollow called the Asylum lived the runaway serfs from Alba Longa, fishermen from the river bank, pagans and foresters from a dozen places. When there was a feast, all of these various kinds of families learned something of the worship of Mars, or Maia Dia, or Saturn, or Pales, or Lupercus. They all knew something about the laws of the colony, because the rulers took care that any offense against public order was punished. It was not a good place for thieves or brawlers or idlers. There was the beginning of a common law.