SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Rome was from its very beginning a city made up of slaves and runaways (‘Whoever your earliest ancestor was, he was either a shepherd or something I’d rather not mention’).

In short, Romans could always see themselves following in Romulus’ footsteps, for better or worse. When Cicero gestured to Romulus in his speech against Catiline, it was more than a self-aggrandising appeal to Rome’s founding father (though it was certainly that in part). It was also an appeal to a story that prompted all kinds of discussion and debate among his contemporaries about who the Romans really were, what Rome stood for and where its divisions lay.

There is often a fuzzy boundary between myth and history (think of King Arthur or Pocahontas), and, as we shall see, Rome is one of those cultures where that boundary is particularly blurred. But despite all the historical acumen that Romans brought to bear on this story, there is every reason for us to see it, in our terms, as more or less pure myth.

Besides, the writers and scholars of the first century BCE who have bequeathed to us their version of Rome’s origins had not much more direct evidence of the earliest phases of Rome’s history than modern writers have, and in some ways perhaps less. There were no surviving documents or archives.

True, they had access to a few earlier historical accounts that no longer survive. But the earliest of these were composed in about 200 BCE, and there was still a great chasm between that date and the city’s origins, which could be bridged only with the help of a very mixed bag of stories, songs, popular dramatic performances and the shifting and sometimes self-contradictory amalgam that makes up oral tradition – constantly adjusted in the telling and retelling to changing circumstances and audiences.

Of course, to put it another way, it is precisely because the story of Romulus is mythic rather than historical, in the narrow sense, that it encapsulates so sharply some of the central cultural questions of ancient Rome and is so important for understanding Roman history, in its wider definition.

It was not, in other words, to go back to Horace, that civil war was the curse and destiny of Rome from its birth; Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder.

The story of Romulus and Remus is by turns intriguing, puzzling and hugely revealing of big Roman concerns, at least among the elite. And, to judge from the designs on coins or the themes of popular art, knowledge of the stories was widespread – even if hungry peasants did not spend much time worrying about the niceties of the Rape of the Sabines. But the extra complication, to be added to this already complex picture of the legend of Rome’s origins, is that the story of Romulus and Remus was not the city’s only foundation story.

The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.

Greek and Roman intellectuals were fascinated by word derivations, which they were convinced gave the key not just to the origin of the word but also to its essential meaning. They were sometimes correct in their analysis, and sometimes extravagantly wrong. Their mistakes are often revealing, as in this case. Dionysius, at an early point in his history, reflects on yet another group of even more primitive inhabitants of the site that became Rome: the Aborigines. The derivation of this word should have been blindingly obvious: these were the people who had been there ‘from the beginning’ (ab origine). Dionysius, to be fair, does raise that explanation as a possibility, but – like others – he gives equal, or more, weight to the hugely improbable notion that the word derived not from origo but from the Latin errare (‘to wander’) and had originally been spelled Aberrigines. These people were, in other words, he writes, ‘vagabonds of no fixed abode’.

The many stories of Romulus and the other founders tell us a good deal about how the Romans saw their city, their values and their failings. They show too how Roman scholars debated the past and studied their history. But they tell us nothing, or at most very little indeed, about what they claim to: that is, what earliest Rome was like, the processes by which it became an urban community and when.

However hard we try, it is impossible to construct a coherent narrative that could replace the legends of Romulus or Aeneas.

Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric. Yet Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of ‘fossils’ – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost. As one modern writer has nicely put it, the Romans were rather like people who acquire all kinds of brand-new kitchen equipment but can’t ever bear to throw away their old gadgets, which continue to clutter up the place even though they are never used. Scholars, both modern and ancient, have often suspected that some of these fossils, or old gadgets, may be important evidence for the conditions of earliest Rome.

archaeological remains certainly demonstrate that there is a long and rich prehistory behind the ancient Rome we see, but quite how long is another matter.

For example, there is an ongoing debate about whether the small pieces of wattle and daub found in excavations in the Forum in the mid twentieth century indicate that there was an early hut settlement there too – or whether they were inadvertently introduced as part of the rubble used a few centuries later to provide a new raised surface for the area. It has to be said that, though fine for a cemetery, this would have been a rather damp and marshy place for a village.

cannot be stressed enough that there is no certain independent date for any of the archaeological material from earliest Rome or the area round about, and that arguments still rage about the age of almost every major find. It has taken decades of work over the past century or so – using such diagnostics as wheel-made pottery (assumed to be later than handmade), the occasional presence in graves of Greek ceramics (whose dating is better, but still not perfectly, understood) and careful comparison from site to site – to produce a rough chronological scheme covering the period from around 1000 to 600 BCE.

On that basis, the earliest burials in the Forum would be around 1000 BCE, the huts on the Palatine around 750–700 BCE (excitingly close to 753 BCE, as many have observed). But even these dates are far from certain. Recent scientific methods – including ‘radiocarbon dating’, which calculates the age of any organic material by measuring the residual amount of its radioactive carbon isotope – have suggested that they are all too ‘young’, by as much as a hundred years.

What is certain is that by the sixth century BCE Rome was an urban community, with a centre and some public buildings. Before that, for the earliest phases, we have enough scattered finds from what is known as the Middle Bronze Age (between about 1700 and 1300 BCE) to suggest that some people were then living on the site, rather than just ‘passing through’. Over the period in between, we can be fairly confident that larger villages grew up, probably (to judge from what ends up in the graves) with an increasingly wealthy group of elite families; and that at some point these coalesced into the single community whose urban character was clear by the sixth century BCE.

The material dug up in the city, the area around it and even further afield has important things to tell us about the character of Rome’s early settlement. First, it had extensive contacts with the outside world. I have already mentioned in passing the ivory bracelet of the little girl in the cemetery and the Greek pottery (made in Corinth or Athens) that turned up in Roman excavations. There are also signs of links with the north, in the form of a few jewels and decorations in imported amber; there is no clue of how these reached central Italy, but they certainly point to contact, direct or indirect, with the Baltic. Early Rome, from almost as far back as we can see it, was well connected, as Cicero hinted when he stressed its strategic location.

The Italian peninsula between about 1000 and 600 BCE was extremely mixed. There were many different independent peoples, with many different cultural traditions, origins and languages. The best documented are the Greek settlements in the south, towns such as Cumae, Tarentum and Naples (Neapolis), founded from the eighth century BCE on by immigrants from some of the major cities in Greece – conventionally known as ‘colonies’ but not ‘colonial’ in the modern sense of the word. To all intents and purposes, much of the southern part of the peninsula, and Sicily, was part of the Greek world, with a literate and artistic tradition linked to match. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest specimens of Greek writing to survive, maybe the very earliest, have actually been discovered there.

There, before the end of the first century BCE, in the pavement of the Forum was set a series of slabs in distinctively black stone forming a rectangle of roughly 4 by 3.5 metres, marked out with a low stone border.

The most obvious explanation, to judge from the finds, which seem to include religious dedications, is that this was an early shrine, possibly of the god Vulcan. It was covered over when the Forum was repaved sometime in the first century BCE – but to preserve the memory of the sacred site underneath, the distinctive black stone was laid above.

THE INSCRIPTION DISCOVERED in 1899 under the black stone in the Forum includes the word ‘king’, or in Latin rex: RECEI, as it appears in the early form of the language used there. That single word accounts for the inscription’s fame and has changed the way the history of early Rome has been understood ever since.

Despite all those unknowns, archaeologists instantly realised that the recognisable RECEI – in the dative case, meaning ‘to or for the king’ – supports what Roman writers themselves had claimed: that for two and a half centuries, up to the end of the sixth century BCE, the city of Rome had been under the control of ‘kings’.

The word ‘king’ almost certainly implies something much more formal, and grander, than we should be envisaging. But there were many different ways in which later Romans saw, or imagined, their early rulers. On the one hand, after the dramatic fall of Tarquinius Superbus, kings were an object of hatred for the rest of Roman history. To be accused of wanting to be rex was a political death sentence for any Roman; and no Roman emperor would ever countenance being called a king, even though some cynical observers wondered what the difference was. On the other hand, Roman writers traced many of their most significant political and religious institutions back to the regal period: if, in the legendary narrative, the city was conceived under Romulus, its gestation came under the kings, from Numa to the second Tarquin. Abominated as they were, kings were credited with creating Rome.

is clear, however, that towards the end of the regal period – let’s say the sixth century BCE, though precision dating remains as hard as ever – we begin to reach slightly firmer ground. As Boni’s dramatic discoveries hint, it then becomes plausible, for the first time, to make some links between the stories the Romans told about their past, the archaeological traces in the ground and a historical narrative, in our sense of the term. What is more, we even get a glimpse of some of this history from the point of view of Rome’s neighbours and enemies.

The nineteenth-century sceptics had good reason to doubt the surviving Roman accounts of the regal period. There are all kinds of things about the kings that do not quite add up, most obviously their chronology. Even if we imagine unusually healthy lifespans, it is impossible to make seven kings, Romulus included, spread over the 250 years – from the mid eighth century to the late sixth century BCE – that Roman writers assigned to them. That would mean each of them reigned, on average, for more than three decades. No modern monarchy has ever equalled that consistent level of longevity.

The biggest problem is that Rome’s ancient historians tended systematically to modernise the regal period and to aggrandise its achievements, as if seeing them through some patriotic magnifying glass. According to their accounts, the early Romans already relied on such institutions as the senate and assemblies of the people, which were part of the political institutional furniture of the city half a millennium later; and in arranging the kingly succession (which was not hereditary) they followed complex legal procedures that involved the appointment of an interrex (a ‘between king’), a popular vote for the new monarch and senatorial ratification.

However else we may choose to describe the urban community of the early Romans, it remains somewhere on the spectrum between tiny and small. Population size in what is effectively prehistory is notoriously difficult to estimate, but the best guess is that the ‘original’ population of Rome – at whatever moment it was when the aggregate of little settlements started thinking of itself as ‘Rome’ – amounted to at most a few thousand.

But unless Rome was different from every other archaic township in the ancient Mediterranean (or early townships anywhere), it would have been much less formally structured than the stories suggest. Complex procedures involving an interrex, popular voting and senatorial ratification are entirely implausible in this context; at best, they are a radical rewriting of early history in a much later idiom.

Rex can certainly mean ‘king’ in the modern sense – a sense we broadly share with the Romans of the first century BCE. They, like us, would have had in mind not just an image of autocratic power and its symbols but also a theoretical concept of monarchy as a form of government, to be contrasted with, for example, democracy or oligarchy. It is extremely unlikely that anything of this sort was in the minds of the men who centuries earlier carved the stone in the Forum. For them, rex would have signalled individual power and prominence, but in a much less structured, ‘constitutional’ way. When we are discussing the realities, rather than the myths, of this early period of Rome’s history, it might be better to think in terms of chiefs or big men instead of kings, and to think of the ‘chiefly’ rather than the ‘regal’ period.

For Roman writers, the kings who followed Romulus were part of the extended foundation process of the city of Rome. Like him, these rulers were assumed to be historical characters (even if more sceptical writers doubted some of the taller stories told about them); but again, it is clear that much of the tradition that has come down to us, far from reality, is a fascinating mythical projection of later Roman priorities and anxieties into the distant past.

Rome under the kings also continued to be torn apart by bitter civil war and family conflicts. Moments of succession proved particularly dangerous, and bloody.

This theme certainly picks up the idea that civil conflict was embedded in Roman politics, but it also points to another fault line in Roman political culture: that is, how power was transmitted from person to person or generation to generation. It is worth noting that more than half a millennium later, the first dynasty of new autocrats, the emperors from Augustus to Nero, had a similar, or even worse, record of brutal death, largely murder, or alleged murder, from within the family.

Servius Tullius is supposed to have devised the method of counting and rank-ordering the Roman people known as the census. This lay at the heart of ancient Rome’s political process for centuries, enshrining in it a fundamental hierarchical principle: that the rich had by right more power than the poor. But before him, Numa is said to have established, more or less single-handedly, the structure of official Roman religion, and religious institutions that left their mark, and their names, well beyond the limits of this book. In fact, the official title of the Catholic popes even now – pontifex, or ‘pontiff’ – derives or was borrowed from the title of one of the priesthoods supposedly founded by Numa.

Looking back over their city’s rise to dominance in the Mediterranean and beyond, later Romans attributed their extraordinary success not merely to military prowess. They had triumphed, they reasoned, because they had the gods on their side: their pious devotion to religion guaranteed their success.

The traditional religion of Rome was significantly different from religion as we usually understand it now.

In general, it was a religion of doing, not believing.

Numa’s foundation had two different but related aspects. On the one hand, he established a series of priesthoods to perform or oversee major rituals, including, among an otherwise overwhelmingly male line-up, the Vestal Virgins, with their duty to keep the flame alight on the city’s sacred hearth in the Forum. On the other hand, he devised a calendar of twelve months, which provided the framework for the annual roster of festivals, holy days and holidays. A crucial aspect of any organised community is its ability to structure time, and in Rome it was Numa who was given the credit for inventing that structure. What is more, notwithstanding all kinds of later innovations and refinements, the modern Western calendar remains a direct descendant of this early Roman version, as the names we give to our months show: every single one of them is Roman.

No less revealing is the cycle of religious festivals that are recorded in the calendar. The nucleus of these may well have originated as far back as the regal period. Certainly the focus of many of them, so far as we can reconstruct it, is on the support of the gods for the seasonal concerns of animal husbandry and agriculture: sowing, harvesting, grape picking, storing and so forth – exactly the concerns that one would expect to weigh heavily in a small, archaic Mediterranean community.

A different set of priorities is reflected in the political institutions attributed to Servius Tullius – sometimes now given the inappropriately grand title of ‘the Servian Constitution’, partly because they were so fundamental to the later working of Roman politics.

To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens. This was because, despite their name – which looks as if it should mean that they comprised 100 (centum) men each – the centuries were in fact very different in size. The richest citizens were far fewer in number than the poor, but they were divided among eighty centuries, as against the twenty or thirty for the more populous lower classes, or the single century for the mass of the very poorest. Power was vested in the wealthy, both communally

and individually.

The complex system of property valuation entailed in the census is inconceivable in the early city; and the elaborate structures of the centuriate organisation in both army and assembly are totally out of scale with the citizen body of the regal period and with the likely character of its warfare (this isn’t how you conduct a raid on the next-door village). Whatever changes in fighting or voting might have been instituted under some ‘Servius Tullius’, they could not have been anything like what Roman tradition claimed.

Yet by pushing all this back into the formative period of their city, Roman writers were underlining the importance of some key institutions and key connections in Roman political culture, as they saw it. In the census, they were highlighting the power of the state over the individual citizen, as well as that characteristic commitment of Roman officialdom to documenting, counting and classifying. They were also pointing to a traditional connection between the political and military roles of the citizen, to the fact that for many centuries Roman citizens were also, by definition, Roman soldiers, and to one of the treasured assumptions of many of the Roman elite: namely, that wealth brought both political responsibility and political privilege.

The plural (Etruscans) is important. For these people did not form a single state but were a group of independent towns and cities which shared a language and distinctive artistic culture; the extent of their power varied over time, but at its widest, Etruscan settlements and recognisable Etruscan influence could be found as far south in Italy as Pompeii and beyond.

As I have already suggested, this was a world of big men and warlords: powerful individuals who were relatively mobile between the various towns of the region, sometimes in a friendly form of mobility, sometimes presumably not. Alongside them there must have been equally mobile members of their militia bands, traders, travelling craftsmen and migrants of any and every sort. Exactly who the Roman ‘Fabius’ was, whose name is inscribed on his tomb in the Etruscan town of Caere, it is impossible to know; nor can we be certain about the ‘Titus Latinus’ at Veii or the hybrid ‘Rutilus Hippokrates’ at Tarquinii, with his Latin first name and Greek second.

But they give a clear indication that these places were relatively open communities. It is, however, the story of Servius Tullius that provides the most vivid evidence of the warlords, the private militias and the different forms of migration, hostile and otherwise, that must have characterised this early society in Rome and its neighbours.

By the sixth century BCE, Rome was certainly a small urban community. It is often tricky to decide when a mere agglomeration of huts and houses becomes a town with a sense of itself as a community, with a shared identity and aspirations. But the idea of a structured Roman calendar, and with it a shared religious culture and rhythm of life, most likely goes back into the regal period.

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.