SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

The central claim of the story of Aeneas is one that echoes, or rather exaggerates, the underlying theme of Romulus’ asylum. Where Romulus welcomed all comers to his new city, the story of Aeneas goes further, to claim that the ‘Romans’ really were originally ‘foreigners’. It is a paradox of national identity, which stands in glaring contrast to the foundation myths of many ancient Greek cities, such as Athens, which saw their original population as springing miraculously from the very soil of their native land.

foreignness. In fact, in one episode of the Aeneid, the hero visits the site of the future city of Rome and finds it already settled by primitive predecessors of the Romans. And who are they? They are a group of settlers under a certain King Evander, an exile from the land of Arcadia in the Greek Peloponnese. The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.

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 idea that any serious ancient scholars could turn a blind eye to the obviously correct etymology that was staring them in the face in favour of a silly idea that derived Aborigines from ‘to wander’ via a tendentious alternative spelling is not a reflection of their obtuseness. It shows just how ingrained the idea was that ‘Rome’ ha...

One way of doing this is by turning away from the foundation stories and seeking out clues lurking in the Latin language or in later Roman institutions that might point back to earliest Rome. The key here is what is often simply, and wrongly, termed the ‘conservatism’ of Roman culture. 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.

What happened at this celebration is not at all clear, but one learned Roman noted that ‘Septimontium’ was the name of Rome before it became ‘Rome’, and another gave a list of the ‘hills’ (montes) involved in the festival: Palatium, Velia, Fagutal, Subura, Cermalus, Oppius, Caelius and Cispius (Map 2). The fact that there are eight names suggests that something has got confused somewhere along the line. But more to the point, the oddity of this list (Palatium and Cermalus are both parts of the hill generally known as the Palatine), combined with the idea that ‘Septimontium’ was the predecessor of ‘Rome’, has raised the possibility that these names might reflect the sites of separate villages that preceded the fully fledged town.

But we can fill in some of the gaps if we look just outside Rome. One of the best preserved, and most carefully excavated, of these early structures was found at Fidenae, a few miles north of the city, in the 1980s. It is a rectangular building, some 6 by 5 metres, made of wood (oak and elm) and rammed earth – so-called pisé de terre construction, still in use up to the present day – with a rough and ready portico around it, formed by the overhanging roof. Inside was a central hearth, some large pottery storage jars (plus a smaller one, which seems to have been a container for potting clay) and traces of some fairly predictable foodstuffs (cereals and beans) and domestic animals (sheep, goats, cows and pigs). The most surprising discovery amid the debris was the remains of a cat, which died (perhaps it was tethered) in a savage fire that eventually destroyed the building. Its claim to fame now is as the earliest known domestic cat in Italy.

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.

The hut at Fidenae, for example, was dated around the middle of the eighth century BCE according to traditional archaeological criteria, but that is pushed back towards the end of the ninth century BCE if we follow the radiocarbon. Currently, dates are in flux, even more than usual; if anything, Rome appears to be getting older.

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’.

Archaeology is not, however, just about dates and origins. 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.

Etruscans to the north,

through the Latins and Sabines on Rome’s doorstep to the south,

Oscans, who formed the original populati...

and Samnites beyo...

hence the standard image of the Samnites as tough, barbaric, non-urbanised and dangerously primitive.

If anything, what has been discovered in Rome is less impressive and less suggestive of wealth than discoveries elsewhere. Nothing has emerged from the city to compare with, for example, the finds from some extraordinary tombs in nearby Praeneste – though that might just be bad luck or, as some archaeologists have suspected, a case of some of the best finds from the nineteenth-century excavations in Rome having been stolen and directed straight to the antiquities market.

Later Roman writers were well aware of the black stone and had various ideas about what it signified. ‘The black stone,’ one wrote, ‘marks an unlucky spot.’ And they knew that there was something underneath it, going back centuries: not a religious shrine, as archaeologists are now fairly confident it was, but a monument connected with Romulus or his family.

The current, fragile consensus is that it was inscribed in the second half of the sixth century BCE.

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’. Livy, among others, tells of a standard sequence of six monarchs following Romulus, each with a distinctive package of achievements attached to his name.

After Romulus came Numa Pompilius, a peaceable character who invented most of the religious institutions of Rome; then Tullus Hostilius, a renowned warmonger; after him, Ancus Marcius, the founder of Rome’s seaport at Ostia, ‘Rivermouth’; then Tarquinius Priscus, or ‘Tarquin the Elder’, who developed the Roman Forum and the Circus Games; then Servius Tullius, a political reformer and the inventor of the Roman census; and finally, Tarquinius Superbus, ‘Tarquin the Proud’ or, perhaps better, ‘the Arrogant’. It was the tyrannical behaviour of this second Tarquin, and of his family, that led to revolution, to the end of monarchy and to the establishing of ‘liberty’ and the ‘free Republic of Rome’. He was a paranoid autocrat who ruthlessly eliminated his rivals, and a cruel exploiter of the Roman people, forcing them to labour on his fanatical building projects. But the awful breaking point came, as such breaking points did more than once in Roman history, with a rape – this time the rape of the virtuous Lucretia by one of king’s sons.

It was only a short step from this, and a step that many notable historians then took, to claim that the Roman ‘regal period’, as it is now often called, never existed; that those famous kings were figments of the Roman imagination; that the true history of early Rome was entirely lost to us.

Exploits of Servius Tullius almost certainly feature in a series of paintings discovered in a tomb in the Etruscan city of Vulci, 70 miles to the north of Rome.

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.

Roman relations with neighbouring peoples are described on a similarly grand scale, complete with treaties, ambassadors and formal declarations of war. Their fighting too is presented as if it involved large-scale clashes between mighty Roman legions and equally mighty enemies: we read of the cavalry charging the opposing flanks, of the infantry being forced to yield, of the opposition driven to confusion … and various other clichés (or truths) of ancient battle. Indeed, this kind of language seeps into modern accounts of the period, many of which also confidently refer to such things as the ‘foreign policy’ of Rome in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. At this point a reality check is required. 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. By the time the last king was thrown out, towards the end of the sixth century BCE, according to standard modern calculations, we are probably dealing with something in the region of 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants. This is only a best guess based on the size of the place, the amount of territory that Rome probably controlled at that point and what populati...

idiom. Military activity is another good case in point. Here geography alone should give us pause. We need simply look at the location of these heroic battles: they were all fought within a radius of about 12 miles of the city of Rome. Despite the style in which they are recounted, as if they were mini-versions of Rome against Hannibal, they were probably something closer, in our terms, to cattle raids.

16. This late sixth- or early fifth-century inscription discovered in 1977 about 40 miles south of Rome is one of the best pieces of evidence for private militia in the early city. It is a dedication to the god Mars (here, in the Latin of the time, the last word, ‘MAMARTEI’) by the ‘SUODALES’ of Publius Valerius (here, ‘POPLIOSIO VALESIOSIO’, on the first line) perhaps the same man as one of the semi-legendary consuls in the first year of the Republic (p. 129), Publius Valerius Publicola. His SUODALES (sodales in classical Latin) may be, politely, his ‘companions’; more realistically, they may be his ‘gang’.

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.

These successor kings, for example, were said to come from all kinds of different backgrounds: Numa, like Titus Tatius, was a Sabine; Tarquinius Priscus came from Etruria and was the son of a refugee from the Greek city of Corinth; Servius Tullius was, according to those who rejected the story of the miraculous phallus, the son of a slave or at least of a prisoner of war (such was the dispute over his parentage that of all the triumphing generals listed on the roster in the Forum, Servius is the only one whose father’s name is omitted). Although we read of occasional Romans, usually the ‘bad’ ones in these stories, complaining that foreigners or the low-born are taking away their birthright, the overall message is unmistakeable: even at the very pinnacle of the Roman political order, ‘Romans’ could come from elsewhere; and those born low, even ex-slaves, could rise to the top.

In a particularly gruesome twist, the daughter is supposed to have deliberately driven over the dead body with her carriage and brought her father’s blood into her house on its wheels.

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.

Muhammad. The traditional religion of Rome was significantly different from religion as we usually understand it now. So much modern religious vocabulary – including the word ‘religion’, as well as ‘pontiff’ – is borrowed from Latin that it tends to obscure some of the major differences between ancient Roman religion and our own. In Rome there was no doctrine as such, no holy book and hardly even what we would call a belief system. Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions. Nor was ancient Roman religion particularly concerned with personal salvation or morality. Instead it mainly focused on the performance of rituals that were intended to keep the relationship between Rome and the gods in good order, and so ensure Roman success and prosperity. The sacrifice of animals was a central element in most of these rituals, which otherwise were extraordinarily varied.

Some were so outlandish that they undermine better than anything else the modern stereotype of the Romans as stuffy and sedate: at the festival of Lupercalia in February, for example, naked young men ran round the city whipping any women they met (this is the festival that the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar re-creates). In general, it was a religion of doing, not believing.

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.

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.

Its system is basically one of twelve lunar months, with an extra month (the distant precursor of our extra day in a leap year) inserted from time to time to keep this calendar in proper alignment with the solar year. The biggest challenge facing primitive calendars everywhere is the fact that the two most obvious, natural systems of timekeeping are incompatible: that is to say, twelve lunar months, from new moon to new moon, add up to just over 354 days; and this cannot be made to match in any convenient way the 365¼ days of the solar year, which is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete circuit of the sun, from spring equinox to spring equinox, for instance. The wholesale insertion of an extra month every few years is just the kind of rough-and-ready

method typical of early attempts to solve the problem.

In detail, this is not only terribly complicated but also anachronistic. Whereas some of the innovations attributed to Numa might not have been out of place, as we have seen, in early Rome, this is a flagrant projection into the past of much later Roman practices and institutions, complete with Servius Tullius as founding father. 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.

Servius Tullius was one of the last three kings of Rome, sandwiched between Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus.

First was their particularly bloody story: Priscus was murdered by the sons of his predecessor; Servius Tullius was eased on to the throne in a palace coup masterminded by Tanaquil and was eventually murdered by Superbus. Second was their Etruscan connection. For the two Tarquins, this was a case of direct ancestry. Priscus is supposed to have migrated to Rome from the Etruscan town of Tarquinii, along with his Etruscan wife, Tanaquil, to seek his fortune – because he feared, so the story went, that his foreign blood, from his Greek father, would hold back his career in his home town.

Fragments of lifesize terracotta statues from the sixth-century BCE temple often associated with Servius Tullius, depicting Minerva with her protégé Hercules (recognisable from the lion skin around his shoulders). The Etruscans were known for their expertise in terracotta statuary; here the influence of Greek art is also clear – suggesting Rome’s contacts with the wider world.

Modern visitors to the archaeological sites of Etruria have often been entranced by the romance of the place. The eerie cemeteries of the Etruscan towns, with their lavishly painted tombs, have captured the imaginations of generations of writers, artists and tourists, from D. H. Lawrence to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

‘Etruscan places’,

church of St John Lateran in Rome. On a smaller but no less

One particular skill of the Etruscans was reading signs sent by the gods in the entrails of sacrificial animals. This bronze liver (second to third century BCE) was a guide to interpreting the organs of the victim. The liver is carefully mapped, with the gods concerned with each part clearly identified, to help make sense of the particular characteristics or blemishes that might be found there.

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. It has almost nothing to do with the story of Servius Tullius, the Roman constitutional reformer and inventor of the census. Instead it seems to offer an Etruscan view – and it comes from the lips of the emperor Claudius, in his speech to the senate in 48 CE when he urged its members to allow leading men from Gaul to become senators. One of the arguments he used in support of his case was that even the early kings were a remarkably ‘foreign lot’. When he reached Servius Tullius, things got even more interesting. Claudius knew a good deal about Etruscan history. Among his many learned researches he had written a twenty-volume study of the Etruscans, in Greek, as well as compiling an Etruscan dictionary. On this occasion he could not resist explaining to the assembled senators, who might have begun to feel they were on the receiving end of a bit of a lecture, that outside Rome there was a different version of the story of Servius Tullius. This was not the story of a man who came to the throne thanks to the favour, or scheming, of his predecessor, Tarquinius Priscus, and Priscus’ wife, Tanaquil. For Claudius, Servius Tullius was an armed adventurer:

Caelius Vivenna