SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

François Tomb

Circus Maximus

This rape is almost certainly as mythic as the rape of the Sabines: assaults on women symbolically marking the beginning and the end of the regal period.

Pisistratid dynasty.

There was, however, a terrible sequel. For during that visit, we are told, Sextus Tarquinius conceived a fatal passion for Lucretia, and one evening shortly afterwards he rode back to her house. After being politely entertained again, he came to her room and demanded sex with her, at knifepoint. When the simple threat of death did not move her, Tarquinius exploited instead her fear of dishonour: he threatened to kill both her and a slave (visible in Titian’s painting [see plate 4])

that it would look as if she had been caught in the most disgraceful form of adultery. Faced with this, Lucretia acceded, but when Tarquinius had returned to Ardea, she sent for her husband and father, told them what had happened – and killed herself. 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. In one bawdy epigram, Marcus Valerius Martialis (‘Martial’ for short), who wrote a whole series of clever, sparky and rude verses at the end of the first century CE, jokes that his wife can be a Lucretia by day if she wants, so long as she is a whore by night. In another quip, he wonders whether Lucretias ...

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. In the early fifth century CE, St Augustine, who was well versed in the pagan classics, wondered if Lucretia had been raped at all: for had she not, in the end, consented? It is no...

The Tarquins did not give up without a fight. According to Livy’s implausibly action-packed account, Tarquinius Superbus made an abortive attempt to stage a counter-revolution in the city and, when that failed, joined forces with King Lars Porsenna of the Etruscan town of Clusium, who mounted a siege of Rome with the aim of restoring the monarchy – only to be defeated by the heroism of its newly liberated inhabitants.

Lars Porsenna

The three surviving columns, from a later rebuilding of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, still make their mark in the Roman Forum. The rest of the temple is largely destroyed but the sloping base of its steps, often used as a place for speakers to address the people, is still visible (bottom left). The little door is a reminder that the basements of temples were used for all sorts of different purposes. Excavations have shown that there was once a barber’s shop/dentist in the basement of this

Needless to say, plenty of satire was also directed at those later Romans who happened to be landed with the surname (cognomen) ‘King’.

res publica, meaning literally ‘public thing’ or ‘public affairs’)

63 BCE was for them ‘the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida’; and wine made ‘when Opimius was consul’ (121 BCE) was a particularly famous vintage.

By Cicero’s day, Romans had worked out a more or less complete list of consuls going back to the beginning of the Republic, and it was soon put on public display in the Forum along with the list of triumphing generals. It was largely this roster that enabled them to pinpoint the precise date of the end of the monarchy, as by definition it had to correlate with the date of the first consul.

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 first word of the second book of Livy’s History, which begins the story of Rome after the monarchy, is ‘free’; and the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ are together repeated eight times in the first few lines alone. 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?

All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold ‘democracy’. But there were repeated and intense conflicts over what that meant. We have already seen that, when Cicero was sent into exile, his house was demolished and a shrine of Libertas erected on its site. Not everyone would have approved. Cicero himself tells how during the performance of a play on the theme of Brutus, the first consul of the Republic, the crowd burst into applause at a line spoken by one of the characters: ‘Tullius, who underpinned the citizens’ liberty’.

The play was actually referring to Servius Tullius and suggesting that liberty might have had a prehistory at Rome before the Republic, under a ‘good king’, but Marcus Tullius Cicero, to give him his full name, was convinced – maybe rightly – that the applause was for him.

He was consul and censor and aedile among you. He took Taurasia and Cisauna from Samnium. He subdued the whole of Lucania and took hostages.’

Although the popular image of the Roman man is hardly of someone much bothered with his appearance, in this open, competitive, ‘face to face’ society, the public figure was expected to look the part. As he walked through the Forum or stood up to address the people, his inner qualities were clearly revealed in how he looked. In Barbatus’ case, unless he had simply inherited the name from his father, he sported a splendid beard, which may have been increasingly unusual at the time.

One story has it that barbers first started to work in Rome in 300 BCE, and that for several centuries after that most Romans went clean-shaven.

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

Appius Claudius Caecus, who in the same year also launched the first major Roman road, the Via Appia (the Appian Way, named after him), leading straight south from Rome to Capua.

the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. It was not for nothing that both Lord Palmerston and John F. Kennedy proudly broadcast the Latin phrase Civis Romanus sum (‘I am a Roman citizen’)

Marcus Furius Camillus

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, for example, who more than two millennia later gave his name to the American city of Cincinnati, is supposed to have returned from semi-exile in the 450s BCE to become dictator and lead Roman armies to victory against their enemies before nobly retiring straight back to his farm without seeking further political glory.

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. ‘If he summons to law, he is to go. If he does not go, he is to call to witness, then is to seize him’ presumably means, as it is usually translated, ‘If a plaintiff summons a defendant to law, the defendant is to go. If he does not go, the plaintiff is to call someone else to witness, then is to seize the defendant.’ But it does not exactly say that. All the signs are that whoever drafted this and many other clauses was still struggling to use written language to frame precise regulations, and that the conventions of logical argument and rational expression were very much in their infancy. 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 lay down procedures for the abandonment or killing of deformed babies (a practice common throughout antiquity, euphemistically known to modern scholars as ‘exposure’),

for inheritance and for the proper conduct of funerals. Particular clauses prohibit women from tearing their cheeks in mourning, funeral pyres being built too close to someone’s house and the burial of gold – except dental gold – with the body. Criminal and accidental damage was another obvious concern. This was a world in which people worried about how to cope with their neighbour’s tree overhanging their property (solution: it had to be cut back to a specified height) or with their neighbour’s animals running amok (solution: the damage had to be made good or the animal surrendered). They worried about thieves breaking in at night, which was to be punished more harshly than daylight theft, about vandals destroying their crops or about stray weapons accidentally hitting the innocent. But, just in case this all sounds a bit too familiar, it was also a world in which people worried about magic. What should you do if some enemy bewitched your crops or cast a spell on you? Sadly, the remedy for this is lost.

beyond a couple of references to how particular rules applied to a hostis (a ‘foreigner’ or an ‘enemy’; the same Latin word, significantly, can mean both)

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’),

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.

Finally, after one last walkout, in a reform that Scipio Barbatus would have witnessed in 287 BCE, the decisions of this assembly were given the automatic binding force of law over all Roman citizens. A plebeian institution, in other words, was given t...

Between 494 and 287 BCE, amid yet more stirring rhetoric, strikes and threats of violence, all major offices and priesthoods were step by step opened up to plebeians and their second-class status was dismantled. One of the most famed plebeian victories came in 326 BCE, when the system of enslavement for debt was abolished, establishing the principle that the liberty of a Roman citizen was an inalienable right. An equally significant but more narrowly political milestone had been passed forty years earlier, in 367 BCE. After decades of dogged refusal and claims by hard-line patricians that ‘it would be a crime against the gods to l...

Appius Claudius

Lucius Virginius,

That would certainly fit with two other significant clues. First, even in the traditional Roman record, the entries for most of the years between the 420s and the 360s BCE name the mysterious ‘colonels’ as the chief officials of the state. That changes once and for all in 367 BCE, when consuls become the norm for the rest of Roman history.

Second, it may well be that the senate was given its definitive form at this time. 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),

The moment of change came near the start of the fourth century BCE, with two events that play a leading, and hugely mythologised, role in all ancient accounts of Rome’s expansion: the Roman destruction of the nearby town of Veii under the heroic Camillus in 396 BCE, and the destruction of Rome by Gauls in 390 BCE. What lay behind Rome’s clash with Veii is completely unknown, but it was written up as if it were Italy’s equivalent of the Trojan War: the ten-year siege that it took to capture the town, equalling the ten-year siege of Troy; and the victorious Romans eventually popping up inside the city from a tunnel under the Temple of Juno, as the equivalent of the Trojan Horse. The reality of the ‘conquest’ (which is probably too grand a term) must have been much more modest. This was not a clash of superpowers. Veii was a prosperous town, a little smaller than Rome, and just 10 miles away across the Tiber.

Another poor man gave proof of plebeian piety when he threw his wife and children out of his cart and gave a lift to the Vestal Virgins, who were evacuating their sacred emblems and talismans to safety in the nearby town of Caere.

Meanwhile, Camillus, briefly in exile for the alleged embezzlement of spoils, returned just in time to stop the Romans from paying a large ransom to the Gauls, to dissuade his compatriots from simply abandoning the city and moving to Veii and to take charge of refounding the city.

This is another case of Roman exaggeration. The various stories, which became commonplaces of Roman cultural memory, offered important patriotic lessons: in placing the claims of country above family, in bravery in the face of certain defeat, and in the dangers of measuring the worth of the city in terms of gold. The catastrophe became so much a part of the Roman popular imagination that some diehards were using it in 48 CE as an argument (or a desperate gambit) against the emperor Claudius’ proposals to admit Gauls into the senate. There is, however, no archaeological evidence for the kind of massive destruction that later Romans imagined, unless those traces of burning now dated to around 500 BCE are in fact, as archaeologists once thought, the remains of a Gallic rampage a hundred years later.

Battle of the Caudine Forks,

Battle of the Allia

Battle of Sentinum

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?

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.