It was at some point during this crucial period between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, between the end of the Tarquins and the lifetime of Scipio ‘Long-Beard’, that many of Rome’s characteristic institutions took shape. Romans not only defined the basic principles of Republican politics and liberties but also began to develop the structures, the assumptions and (to put it no more grandly) a ‘way of doing things’ that underpinned their later imperial expansion.
