SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

Second, there were similarities, and some important differences, between Rome and its neighbours. 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.

It is much harder to reconstruct the history of any of the other inhabitants of the peninsula: from the Etruscans to the north, through the Latins and Sabines on Rome’s doorstep to the south, to the Oscans, who formed the original population of Pompeii, and Samnites beyond them.

What archaeological finds do show, however, is that Rome in its early days was very ordinary indeed. The development, from scattered settlements into an urban community, that we can just about detect in Rome seems to have happened at roughly the same period throughout the neighbouring region to its south.

The final question for this chapter, however, is whether the archaeological material must remain quite as separate from the mythic traditions of Romulus and Remus as I have presented them.

This is a seductive temptation that has influenced a lot of modern work on early Rome by both historians and archaeologists.

There is just one location in the whole of the city Rome where it is possible to link the early material remains directly with the literary tradition.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archaeologist Giacomo Boni – a celebrity at the time to rival Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, and with none of the dubious reputation for fraud – excavated below the black stone, where he found the remains of some much earlier structures.

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.’

They also knew, whether because they had seen it before it was covered or from hearsay, that there was an inscription down there.

Dionysius records two versions of what it was: the epitaph of Hostilius, ‘documenting his bravery’, or an inscription ‘recording his deeds’ put up after one of Romulus’ victories.

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.

The text is in many respects extremely frustrating. It is incomplete, the top third of the pillar not surviving. It is close to incomprehensible. The Latin is difficult enough anyway, but the missing section makes it almost impossible to grasp the meaning fully.

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.

RECEI in Boni’s inscription successfully challenged that radical scepticism.

Even now, this inscription puts the idea of the Roman kings centre stage and raises the question of what kingship might mean in the context of a small, archaic community of a few thousand inhabitants living in wattle-and-daub huts on a group of hilltops near the river Tiber.

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.

This regal period is caught in that intriguing territory that straddles the boundary dividing myth from history.

These successor kings certainly appear more real than the founder. If nothing else, they have apparently real names, such as ‘Numa Pompilius’, unlike the fictional ‘Romulus’, or ‘Mr Rome’. Yet throughout their stories we meet all kinds of flagrantly mythical elements.

It 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.

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. Dating from around the mid fourth century BCE, they are by several hundred years the earliest direct evidence for him that we have anywhere.

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.

The most economical solution to this problem is either to assume that the regal period was really much shorter than the Romans calculated or to propose that there were more kings than have come down in the record (there are, as we shall discover, a couple of potential candidates for these ‘lost monarchs’).

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.

In fact, Livy’s account of the wheeling and dealing after the murder of Tarquinius Priscus – in which his scheming wife Tanaquil carefully concealed the death until she had firmly secured the throne for her favourite, Servius Tullius – is similar to the wheeling and dealing by Livia after the death of the emperor Augustus in 14 CE (p. 381).

Roman relations with neighbouring peoples are described on a similarly grand scale, complete with treaties, ambassadors and formal declarations of war.

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 con...

But it is much more likely than the exaggerated totals that ancient authors give. Livy, for example, quotes the very first Roman historian, Quintus Fabius Pictor, who wrote around 200 BCE and claimed that towards the end of the regal period the number of adult male citizens was 80,000, making a total population of well over 200,000. This is a ludicrous figure for a new community in archaic Italy (it is not far short of the total population of the territories of Athens or Sparta at ...

It is, needless to say, impossible to know anything much about the institutions of this small, proto-urban settlement.

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.

In most early communities, it took a long time before the various forms of private violence, from rough justice and vendetta to guerrilla warfare, came fully under public control. Conflict of all sorts was regularly in the hands of individuals with their own following, the ancient equivalents of what we might call private warlords; and there was a blurry distinction between what was conducted on behalf of the ‘state’ and what on behalf of some powerful leader. Almost certainly that was the case in early Rome.

So where does that leave the kings and the word rex on the inscription from the Forum? Rex can certainly mean ‘king’ in the modern sense – a sense we broadly share with the Romans of the first century BCE.

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.

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. It is not hard to spot many of the same themes and concerns that we found in the story of Romulus. 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.

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. Of the seven kings, it was alleged that three were murdered; a divine lightning bolt struck another as punishment for a religio...

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.

Numa Pompilius and Servius Tullius were given the credit for the most significant of these. 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 s...

And, to reverse the axiom, any failure they encountered could be put down to some fault in their dealings with the gods: perhaps they had ignored bad omens, wrongly conducted a key ritual or run roughshod over religious rules. Their ...

Religion, in other words, underwrote Roman power.

There are a few glimpses of this in the story of Romulus. As well as dedicating the Temple of Jupiter Stator, he consulted the gods in deciding where exactly to found the new city: it was partly a disagreement about how to interpret the divine signs, observed in the flight of some birds, that led to the fatal quarrel between Romulus and Remus.

This did not make Numa a holy figure along the lines of Moses, the Buddha, Jesus or 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.