SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

The Italian phrase coined in the 1930s to describe this period, ‘La Grande Roma dei Tarquini’ (‘The Great Rome of the Tarquins’), may not be so misleading – though it depends a lot, of course, on exactly what is meant by ‘Grande’. Rome was still, in absolute and relative terms, far from ‘great’. But it was a larger and more urban community than it had been a hundred years earlier, having profited, no doubt, from its prime position for trading and its proximity to wealthy Etruria. So far as we can judge the town’s extent in the middle of the sixth century BCE (part of that judgement inevitably comes down to guesswork), it was now substantially bigger than the Latin settlements to the south and at least as large as the largest Etruscan towns to the north, with a population of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000, although it had nowhere near the grandeur of some contemporary Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy, and was significantly smaller. That is to say, Rome must have been a major player in the region, but it was not yet in any way extraordinary.