SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Lucretia’s story remained an extraordinarily powerful image in Roman moral culture ever after. For many Romans, it represented a defining moment of female virtue. Lucretia voluntarily paid with her life for losing, as Livy put it, her pudicitia – her ‘chastity’, or better the ‘fidelity’, on the woman’s part at least, that defined the relationship between Roman wife and husband. Yet other ancient writers found the story more difficult. There were poets and satirists who predictably questioned whether pudicitia was really what a man wanted in a wife.

To some Romans, it looked as if she was more concerned with her reputation than with real pudicitia – which surely resided in the guilt or innocence of her mind, not her body, and would not have been remotely affected by false allegations of sex with a slave.

At the same time, this was seen as a fundamentally political moment, for in the story it leads directly to the expulsion of the kings and the start of the free Republic.

The end of the monarchy was also the birth of liberty and of the free Roman Republic. For the rest of Roman history, ‘king’, or rex, was a term of loathing in Roman politics, despite the fact that so many of Rome’s defining institutions were supposed to have their origins in the regal period. There were any number of cases in the centuries that followed when the accusation that he was aiming at kingship brought a swift end to a man’s political career.

In foreign conflicts too, kings were the most desirable of enemies. Over the next few hundred years, there was always a particular frisson when a triumphal procession through the streets of the city paraded some enemy king in all his regal finery for the Roman populace to jeer and pelt.

Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared. As we shall see, through the centuries that followed these tenets were increasingly reiterated, and became increasingly difficult to uphold.

The Republic, in other words, was not just a political system. It was a complex set of interrelationships between politics, time, geography and the Roman cityscape. Dates were directly correlated with the elected consuls; years were marked by the nails hammered into the temple whose dedication was traced back to the first year of the new regime; even the island in the Tiber was a product, quite literally, of the expulsion of the kings. Underpinning the whole thing was one single, overriding principle: namely, freedom, or libertas.

Fifth-century BCE Athens bequeathed the idea of democracy to the modern world, after the Athenian ‘tyrants’ were deposed and democratic institutions established at the end of the sixth century BCE – a chronological match with the expulsion of the Roman kings that was not lost on ancient observers, who were keen to present the history of the two places as if they ran in parallel. Republican Rome bequeathed the equally important idea of liberty.

The idea that the Republic was founded on libertas rings loudly throughout Roman literature, and it has echoed through radical movements in later centuries, in Europe and America. It is no coincidence that the slogan of the French Revolution – Liberté, égalité, fraternité – puts ‘liberty’ in pride of place; nor that George Washington spoke of restoring ‘the sacred fire of liberty’ to the West; nor that the drafters of the United States Constitution defended it under the pseudonym of ‘Publius’, taken from the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, another of the earliest consuls of the Republic. But how was Roman liberty to be defined?

That was a controversial question in Roman political culture for the next 800 years, through the Republic and into the one-man rule of the Roman Empire, when political debate often turned on how far libertas could ever be compatible with autocracy. Whose liberty was at stake? How was it most effectively defended? How could conflicting versions of the freedom of the Roman citizen be resolved? All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold ‘democracy’.

Conflicts of this kind form one important theme in the chapters that follow. But before we explore the history of Rome in the first centuries of the Republic – the warfare at home, the victories for ‘liberty’ and the military victories over Rome’s neighbours in Italy – we must look a little harder at the story of the birth of the Republic and the invention of the consulship. Predictably perhaps, it was not quite as smooth a process as the standard story, which I have given so far, makes it appear.

HOW DID THE Republic really begin? Ancient Roman historians were experts at turning historical chaos into a tidy narrative and always keen to imagine that their familiar institutions went back much further than they really did.

There is still a big question mark over when exactly the defining office of the Republic was invented, or when and why some other office was renamed ‘consul’, or even when the fundamental Republican principle that power should always be shared was first defined. ‘Chief praetor’ smacks of hierarchy, not equality. But whatever the key date or dates, the list of consuls on which the chronology of the Republic was based – going back in an unbroken series to Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus in 509 BCE – was in its earliest parts the product of a good deal of adjustment, imaginative inference, clever guesswork and most likely outright invention.

The earliest known use of the word ‘consul’, in fact, dates from two hundred years later. It turns up in the first surviving example of those thousands upon thousands of loquacious Roman epitaphs carefully carved on tombs all over the empire, both extravagant and humble, which tell us so much about the lives of the deceased: the offices they held, the jobs they did, their aims, aspirations and anxieties.

Barbatus’ Rome was very different from the Rome of the earliest Republic, two hundred years before, and it had ceased to be ordinary. Vast by the standards of the time, the city was home on a reasonable guess to something between 60,000 and 90,000 people. That put it roughly in the same bracket as a handful of the biggest urban centres in the Mediterranean world; Athens at this point had a population of considerably less than half that number, and never in its history had more than 40,000 in the city itself. What is more, Rome controlled directly a large swathe of land stretching from coast to coast, with a total population of well over half a million, and indirectly, by a series of agreements and alliances, much more – foreshadowing its later empire.

There were other familiar aspects. These included an army organised in legions, the beginnings of an official system of coinage and signs of an infrastructure to match the city’s size and influence.

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.

In short, Rome for the first time began to look ‘Roman’ as we understand it, and as they understood it.

Admittedly, even in 300 BCE the earliest Roman literature was still decades away, and the later accounts looking back to this period contain plenty of myth, embellishment and fantasy. Camillus is probably not much less fictional than the first Romulus, and we have already seen how the words of Catiline were used to ventriloquise the speeches of an early Republican revolutionary, none of whose words could possibly have survived. Yet the end of this period stands on the brink of history and history writing as we know it, far beyond a simple four-line epitaph.

Increasingly too, fragments of contemporary evidence survive, to set against the later Roman historical account or point to an alternative narrative.

Although modern translations do their best to make it all sound fairly lucid, the original Latin wording is often far from that. In particular, the absence of nouns and differentiated pronouns can make it almost impossible to know who is doing what to whom.

Yet the mere attempt to create a formal record of this sort was an important stage in what is now often called state formation. One of the key turning points in many early societies is the rudimentary, usually very partial, codification of law.

They are a long way from being a comprehensive legal code and may well never have been intended as such. Unless the range of surviving quotations is very misleading, they included almost nothing on public, constitutional law. What they do imply is a commitment to agreed, shared and publicly acknowledged procedures for resolving disputes and some thought on dealing with practical and theoretical obstacles to

One clause draws a distinction between patricians and plebeians, another between assidui (men of property) and proletarii (those without property – whose contribution to the city was the production of offspring, proles). Another refers to ‘patrons’ and ‘clients’ and to a relationship of dependency and mutual obligation between richer and poorer citizens that remained important throughout Roman history. The basic principle was that the client depended on his patron for protection and assistance, financial and otherwise, in return for a variety of services rendered, including votes in elections. Later Roman writing is full of rather high-flown rhetoric from the patron class on the virtues of the relationship, and miserable complaints from the side of the client about the humiliations they have to go through, all for a second-rate meal. In the Twelve Tables, the rule simply states: ‘If a patron has done harm to his client, he is to be cursed’ – whatever that meant.

To judge from the Twelve Tables, Rome in the mid fifth century BCE was an agricultural town, complex enough to recognise basic divisions between slave and free and between different ranks of citizen and sophisticated enough to have devised some formal civic procedures to deal consistently with disputes, to regulate social and family relations and to impose some basic rules on such human activities as the disposal of the dead. But there is no evidence that it was more than that.

First, what happened in politics at home? The Twelve Tables were one of the outcomes of what is often now called the Conflict of the Orders (the Latin word ordo meaning, among other things, ‘social rank’), which according to Roman writers dominated domestic politics in those crucial couple of hundred years after the end of the monarchy. This was the struggle by the plebeian citizens for full political rights and for parity with the elite, patrician citizens, who were generally loath to give up their hereditary monopoly of power. In Rome it was seen ever after as a heroic vindication of the political liberty of the ordinary citizen, and it has left its mark on the politics, and political vocabulary, of the modern world too.

The first reform in 494 BCE was the appointment of official representatives, known as tribunes of the people (tribuni plebis), to defend the interests of the plebeians. Then a special assembly was established for plebeians only. This was organised, like the Centuriate Assembly, on a system of block voting, but the technical details were crucially different. It was not based on a hierarchy of wealth. Instead, the voting groups were defined geographically, with voters enrolled in tribes (tribus), or regional subdivisions of Roman territory, nothing to do with any ethnic grouping that the modern sense of ‘tribe’ might imply.

This story of the Conflict of the Orders adds up to one of the most radical and coherent manifestos of popular power and liberty to survive from the ancient world – far more radical than anything to survive from classical democratic Athens, most of whose writers, when they had anything explicitly to say on the subject, were opposed to democracy and popular power. Taken together, the demands put into the mouths of the plebeians offered a systematic programme of political reform, based on different aspects of the freedom of the citizen, from freedom to participate in the government of the state and freedom to share in its rewards to freedom from exploitation and freedom of information. It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians. Nor is it surprising that early trades unions could look to the plebeian walkouts as a model for a successful strike.

That said, there is no doubt that long periods of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were fractured by social and political struggles between a privileged, hereditary minority and the rest. More than half a millennium later, the formal distinction between patrician and plebeian families still survived, as one of those ‘fossils’ I discussed earlier (p. 79), with a whiff of snobbery attached to it and not much more. It would be hard to explain why the distinction existed at all if the difference between the two groups had not once been a significant marker of political, social and economic power. There are also strong reasons to think that the year 367 BCE was a major turning point, even if not in quite the way Roman historians imagined it.

Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of ‘old men’ (senes), and that by the fifth century BCE it was already a fully fledged institution operating much as it did in 63 BCE. One highly technical entry in an ancient Roman dictionary implies a very different version, suggesting that it was only around the middle of the fourth century BCE that the senate was established as a permanent body with lifelong members rather than being just an ad hoc group of friends and advisors to whatever officials were in charge, with no continuity from one year, or even one day, to the next. If this is correct (and, of course, not all arcane pieces of technical information necessarily are), then it backs up the idea that the Roman political system took its characteristic form in the mid fourth century BCE. Whatever the precursors, whatever elements such as assemblies or the census, may long have been in place, Rome did not look distinctively ‘Roman’ for more than a century after 509 BCE.

Rome’s relations with the outside world were entirely unremarkable, so far as we can tell, until around 400 BCE. Its trading relations with the wider Mediterranean had been no more than typical for an Italian town. Its direct interactions were mainly local, above all with the Latin communities to the south, which shared a common language, a sense of common ancestry and several common festivals and sacred sites with Rome. The most that can be said is that by the end of the sixth century BCE the Romans probably had some kind of control over some of the other Latins.

Yet between the sack of Rome in 390 BCE and the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BCE, the manpower involved in these conflicts increased dramatically. Campaigns were fought further and further from Rome. Whereas Veii was 10 miles up the road, Sentinum was some two hundred miles away, across the Apennines. And the arrangements made between Rome and the defeated had far-reaching consequences for the future. The military impact of Rome by the end of the fourth century BCE was so great that Livy felt it worthwhile to compare Roman prowess with that of the world-conquering Alexander the Great, who between 334 and 323 BCE had led his Macedonian army on a spree of conquest from Greece to India. Livy wondered who would have won, the Romans or the Macedonians, if they had come head to head, a military conundrum that armchair generals still ponder.

By Livy’s day, Roman generals had long been keen to emulate Alexander. They had imitated his distinctive hairstyle, they had called themselves ‘the Great’ and both Julius Caesar and the first emperor, Augustus, had made a pilgrimage to Alexander’s tomb in Egypt, Augustus – so it was said – accidentally breaking off the corpse’s nose as he paid homage. So it is perhaps not surprising that Livy pondered a classic counterfactual question: who would have won if Alexander had turned his army westward and faced the Romans instead of the Persians? Alexander, he concedes, was a great general, though not without his faults, drunkenness among others. But the Romans had the advantage of not depending on a single charismatic leader. They had depth in their command, supported by extraordinary military discipline.

In his roundabout way, Livy – who sometimes seems rather plodding in his analysis – offers a perceptive answer to the questions of what made the Roman armies at this period so good at winning and how it came about that Rome extended control so rapidly over so much of Italy. This is one of the few cases in which he looks beneath the surface of the narrative, to underlying social and structural factors, from the organisation of Roman command to Rome’s resources of manpower. It is worth pushing Livy’s point a little further, to think harder about what was, in retrospect, the beginning of the Roman Empire. Two things are clear and undermine a couple of misleading modern myths about Roman power and ‘character’. First, the Romans were not by nature more belligerent than their neighbours and contemporaries, any more than they were naturally better at building roads and bridges. It is true that Roman culture placed an extraordinarily – for us, uncomfortably – high value on success in fighting. Prowess, bravery and deadly violence in battle were repeatedly celebrated, from the successful general parading through the streets and the cheering crowds in his triumphal procession to the rank-and-file soldiers showing off their battle scars in the middle of political debates in the hope of adding weight to their arguments.

English its word ‘rostrum’. Yet it would be naïve to imagine that the other peoples in Italy were different. These were very disparate groups, much more varied – in language, culture and political organisation – than the shorthand ‘Italians’ implies. But to judge from the comparatively little we know about most of them, from the military equipment found in their graves or the occasional passing references in literature to their spoils, warfare and atrocities, they were just as committed to militarism as the Romans and probably just as greedy for profit. This was a world where violence was endemic, skirmishes with neighbours were annual events, plunder was a significant revenue stream for everyone and most disputes were resolved by force. The ambivalence of the Latin word hostis nicely captures the blurring of the boundary between ‘the outsider’ and ‘the enemy’. So too does the standard Latin phrase for ‘at home and abroad’ – domi militiaeque – in which ‘abroad’ (militiae) is indistinguishable from ‘on military campaign’. Most of the peoples in the peninsula no doubt shared that blurring. To be off one’s home turf was always (potentially) to be at war. Second, the Romans did not plan to conquer and control Italy. No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a start, simple as it sounds, they had no maps.

There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies.