SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

That is to say, when the well-connected senator Fabius Pictor, who was born around 270 BCE, sat down to compose the first extended written account of Rome’s past, he might well have remembered talking in his youth to people who had been eyewitnesses to events at the end of the fourth century BCE or who had talked to men of Barbatus’ generation who were.

Pictor’s History does not survive beyond a few quotations in later writers, but it was famed in the ancient world. His name and a brief synopsis of his work have even been found painted on the walls of one of the few ancient libraries ever unearthed, in Taormina in Sicily, a combination of advertisement and library catalogue.

Among the most remarkable and revealing of all, however, are the eighty or so short clauses from the first written collection of Roman rules and regulations (or ‘laws’, to use the rather grand term that most ancient writers adopted), put together in the mid fifth century BCE and laboriously reassembled thanks to centuries of modern scholarly detective work. The collection is known as the Twelve Tables, from the twelve bronze tablets on which it was originally inscribed and displayed.

But there are enough pieces in place to be confident that the decisive change in Rome came in the fourth century BCE, in the generation of Barbatus and Appius Claudius Caecus and that of their immediate predecessors, and that what happened then, hard as it is to pin down in detail, established a pattern of Roman politics, at home and abroad, which lasted for centuries.

The Republican regime started with a whimper rather than a bang. There are all kinds of stirring tales told by Roman historians of the new political order, of warfare on a grand scale over the first few decades of the fifth century BCE and of larger than life heroes and villains, who have become the stuff of modern legend too.

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.

Whatever the political organisation of the city when the Tarquins were removed, archaeology makes it clear that for most of the fifth century BCE, Rome was not thriving at all.

As for all the heroic warfare that bulks so large in Roman accounts, it may have played a significant part in the Roman imagination, but it was all very local, fought out within a few miles’ radius of the city. The likelihood is that this was traditional raiding between neighbouring communities or guerrilla attacks, later written up, anachronistically, as something more like formal military clashes.

The Twelve Tables are the best antidote to those later heroising narratives. The original bronze tablets no longer survive. But some of their content has been preserved because later Romans looked on this motley collection of regulations as the beginning of their distinguished tradition of law.

What had been inscribed on bronze was soon put into pamphlet form and was still being learned by heart, so Cicero tells us, by schoolboys of the first century BCE. Long after the rules had any practical force, they continued to be reissued and re-edited, and several ancient scholarly commentaries were compiled on the meaning of the individual clauses, their legal importance and language – to the irritation of some lawyers in the second century CE, who felt that their book-bound colleagues were rather too interested in the linguistic puzzles of old Roman precepts.

It is a much simpler society, and its horizons much more restricted, than Livy’s account ever implies. That is clear from the language and forms of expression as much as from the content.

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. In ancient Athens, for example, the work of Draco in the seventh century BCE, though now a byword for harshness (‘draconian’), was notable as the first attempt there to put what had been oral rules into writing; a thousand years before that in Babylon, Hammurabi’s code did something similar.

The themes of the regulations point to a world of multiple inequalities. There were slaves of various types, from defaulters on their loans who had fallen into some form of debt bondage to those fully enslaved, presumably (though this is only a guess) captured in raiding or war. And their disadvantage was spelled out: the penalty for assault on a slave is set at half as much as for assault on a free man, whereas a slave could be punished with his life for an offence for which free citizens got off with not much more than a beating.

There were hierarchies within the free citizen population too. 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).

For the most part, the Twelve Tables confront domestic problems, with a heavy focus on family life, troublesome neighbours, private property and death. 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.

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. The strikingly tentative formulation of the regulations, in places awkward or even confusing, should call into question some of the references in Livy and other ancient writers to complicated laws and treaties at this period.

And the absence, at least from the selection of clauses preserved, of any reference to a specific public official, apart from a Vestal Virgin (who as a priestess was to be free of her father’s control), certainly does not suggest a dominant state apparatus.

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.

The word ‘plebeian’ remains an especially loaded term in our class conflicts; even in 2012, the allegation that a British Conservative politician had insulted a policeman by calling him a ‘pleb’ – short for ‘plebeian’ – led to his resignation from the government.

As the story of this conflict unfolds, it was only a few years after the Republic had been established, at the beginning of the fifth century BCE, that the plebeians began objecting to their exclusion from power and their exploitation by the patricians. Why fight in Rome’s wars, they repeatedly asked, when all the profits of their service lined patrician pockets?

In 494 BCE, plagued by problems of debt, the plebeians staged the first of several mass walkouts from the city, a combination of a mutiny and a strike, to try to force reform on the patricians. It worked. For it launched a long series of concessions which gradually eroded all the significant differences between patricians and plebeians and effectively rewrote the political power structure of the city. Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 let a plebeian be consul,’ it was decided to open one of the consulships to plebeian...

By far the most dramatic events in the conflict surrounded the drafting of the Twelve Tables, in the mid fifth century BCE. The clauses that are preserved may be brief, allusive and even slightly dry, but, as the Romans told the story, they were compiled in an atmosphere involving a tragic, highly coloured mixture of deception, allegations of tyranny, attempted rape and murder.

There was worse to come. This second board of decemviri – the Ten Tarquins, as they were sometimes known – started to ape the behaviour of tyrants, right down to sexual violence.

Virginia’s story has always been even more unsettling than that of Lucretia. It not only combines domestic murder with the brutality of class conflict but inevitably raises the question of the price to be paid for chastity.

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.

Many aspects of the story as it has come down to us must be wrong, heavily modernised by later writers or, especially towards the beginning of the period of the conflict, still much more myth than history.

Much of the argument, and even more of the rhetoric, of the early plebeian reformers is almost certainly an imaginative reconstruction by writers of the first century BCE, drawing on the sophisticated debates of their own day rather than being a product of the world of the Twelve Tables – and it may well be better evidence for the popular political ideology of that later period than for the Conflict of the Orders.

What is more, despite Roman certainty that the exclusion of plebeians from power in the state went back to the fall of the monarchy, there are hints that it developed only in the course of the fifth century BCE. The standard list of consuls, for example, however fictionalised it may be, includes in the early fifth century BCE plenty of recognisably plebeian names (including that of the first consul, Lucius Junius Brutus himself), which completely disappear in the second half of the century.

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 priv...

For them, this was the revolutionary moment when it was decided not only that the consulship should be open to plebeians but that one of the two consuls must always be a plebeian.

If so, the law was flouted as soon as it was made, as on several occasions in the following years two patrician names are recorded as consuls. Livy noticed the problem and unconvincingly suggests that the plebeians were satisfied with getting the right to stand and not so bothered about being elected.

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.

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

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.

The expansion of Roman power through Italy was dramatic. It is easy to be dazzled, or appalled, by Rome’s later overseas empire, which eventually amounted to more than 2 million square miles, while taking for granted the idea that Italy was Roman.

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.

Both Cicero and the historian Polybius (a shrewd Greek observer of Rome, who features prominently in the next chapter) claim to have seen documents, or ‘treaties’, from that period suggesting that Rome was then the leading player in this small, local Latin world.

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.

Yet the consequences of Roman victory were significant, even if not in the way suggested by Roman writers, who emphasised the enslavement of the population, with all their goods and chattels taken as spoils, and the total destruction of the town.

The important change is of a different kind. Rome annexed Veii and its land, instantly increasing the size of Roman territory by about 60 per cent.

Livy claims that it was in the run-up to the siege of Veii that Roman soldiers were first paid, from Roman taxes. Whether literally true or not (and whatever they were paid in, it was not yet coin), this may well be an indication of a move towards a more centralised organisation of Roman armies and the decline of private warfare.

Defeat soon followed victory. The story went that in 390 BCE a band of Gauls – possibly a tribe on the move looking for land or, more likely, a well-trained posse of mercenaries looking for work further south – routed a Roman army on the river Allia, not far from the city. The Romans apparently did little more than run away, and the Gauls marched on to take Rome.