Myths, Monarchs and Republicans

In the days of Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, a young writer from Padua, Titus Livius, brought to a close the first part of his epic history of the city in which he had come to live. His story had begun in that remote age, seven hundred years before his own birth, in which the origins of Rome were overcast by the mists of romantic legend. Its scene was the high ground overlooking the Tiber some fifteen miles from the salt flats through which the river flowed to the sea. Down the slopes of the hills ran streams which formed swamps and small lakes in the valleys below. And beyond the valleys was the wide expanse of the Roman Campagna, a silent, undulating plain of woodland and pasture that stretched as far as the eye could reach to the surrounding mountains, to the Alban hills in the south, to the Apennines in the east, and, in the north, to the commanding heights of the empire of the Etruscans. Above a bend in the Tiber, where an island lay in midstream like an anchored ship, was the only place for miles at which the river could be crossed with ease. Here rose a hill which was to become known as the Palatine; and it was here, in the eigth century before Christ, that Titus Livius set his story.

He wrote of Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor, King of Alba Longa in the Alban Hills and a descendant of Aeneas, the hero of Troy. While a virgin attendant in a sacred shrine, Rhea Silvia had been raped by a man she claimed was Mars, god of war. Her twin babies had been left to die in a bucket by the waters of the flooded Tiber but had been saved by a shewolf which had offered them her teats to suck and had nursed them gently until they were found by a herdsman who took them back to his hut. On reaching manhood, in 753 b.c. the twins decided to establish a new settlement for their tribe on the hills above the river where their lives had been saved; and they asked the gods of the countryside to declare by augury which of them should be its governor. Romulus then climbed to the top of the Palatine, while Remus took up his position on the summit of the nearby hill, the Aventine, to watch for signs in the flight of birds by which the gods made their wishes known. Soon six vultures flew across the Aventine, and Remus understood from this that his claims had been preferred. But then a flight of twelve vultures spread their wings above the Palatine, and Romulus took this as a sign that the gods’ favours had fallen upon him. The brothers fell to quarrelling; their supporters began to fight each other; Remus jumped over the half-finished walls which his brother had built on the Palatine, and Romulus killed him in a fit of rage.

Thereafter Romulus’s settlement grew and prospered. Yet, whereas there were strong and able men enough, there were too few women, the refugees from other tribes to whom asylum had been given at Rome, in the hope of increasing the population being mostly male. Romulus, therefore sent envoys to the surrounding population proposing intermarriage. But their offers were insultingly declined. To Romulus the use of force now seemed inevitable, and he set the scene of it with care and cunning. Concealing his resentment, he announced that the forthcoming celebrations of the Consualia, the festival Livy supposed was in honour of the water-deity Neptunus, would be at Rome that year with particular splendour and that all surrounding tribes would be welcome to attend them. Among the peoples who accepted the invitation and came to inspect the walls and dwellings of the rapidly growing settlement were the Sabines a well-favoured mountain tribe from the north. When the celebratioins were at their height, the men of Rome fell upon the youngest of the Sabine women and dragged them to their homes, while their parents fled through the gates in panic-stricken terror. The fears of the Sabine girls were allayed by Romulus who assured them that as wives of Romans they would thereafter be treated well, sharing in the privileges of the new community and enjoying its coming greatness; they must overcome their present bitterness and give their hearts to those who had taken possession of their bodies.

In due time the Sabine women did learn to live contentedly with their Roman husbands, but the people from whom they had been seized could not forget the humiliation of their rape and planned to avenge it. Their opportunity arose when the daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, commander of the Roman garrison, who had gone outside her father’s fortficatioins to fetch fresh water for a sacrifice, encountered in the valley a party of Sabine soldiers. She fell into flirtatious conversation with them and was persuaded to admit them into the citadel, asking to be given, as a reward for her treachery, ‘what they had on their shield arms’, meaning the gold bracelets the Sabines then wore from wrist to elbow. The bargain was struck and, on her part, ,fulfilled, but, once the Sabines had gained access to the citadel, they rewarded her not with the bracelets on their shield arms but with the shields themselves, crushing her to death beneath their weight as a fitting punishment for a traitor. In the ensuing battle with the Romans, the Sabines gained the first advantage; but then the Romulus rallied his warriors and seemed on the point of destroying his opponents when the Sabine women, their hair hanging loose and their garments rent, pushed their way in a body between the combatatans, beggin them, as husbands on the one side and as fathers and brothers on the other, not to shed kindred blood. ‘The effect of the appeal was immediate and profound’, so Livy recorded. ‘Silence fell. Not a man moved. A moment later Romulus and the Sabine commander stepped forward to make peace. Indeed, they want further; the two people were united under a single government, with Rome as the seat of power.’

As the years passed other rival tribes were engaged in battle and were defeated, and these vanguished tribes were allowed to establish their families in the neighbourhood of the victors, thus increasing the heterogeneous populaton of the settlement. Gradually, the power of Rome spread far and wide, westwards to the sea, eastwards to the Apennines, south towards the lands of the Volsci and north towards the empire of the Etruscans.

Romulus, the inspiration of Rome’s victories, disappeared from sight one day when a cloud enveloped him as he was reviewing his soldiers in a thunderstorm on the ground beyond Rome’s walls known as the Campus Martius. As the cloud lifted and the sun came out again it was seen that the royal throne was empty. There were those who said that the king had been lifted by a whirlwind back to the domain of the gods whence he had come. Others maintained that he had been murdered and his body had been concealed by some of the hundred senators he had created and who were now jealous of his power. But after a year’s interregnum during which the senators shared the government between them, another king was elected; and he in turn was followed by five others. The first of these six kings, all chosen after the necessary omens had been observed was a learned Sabine and man of peace, Numa Pompilius. He it was who inspired the romans with their fear of the gods. He appointed priests with specified relious duties and a high priest with wide authority over them, the Pontifex Maximus; he designated virgin acolytes to serve in the shrine of Vesta, goddess of the hearth and fireside, and to attend to her sacred flame; he introduced twelve Salii or Leaping Priests for the service of Mars, giving them a uniform of an embroidered tunic and bronze breastplate and proving them with sacred shields which they were to carry through the city as they chanted their hyms to the triple beat of their ritual dance. He divided the year into twelve lunar months and stipulated certain days upon which it would be unlawful to carry on public business; he built the Temple of Janus, god of gates and doors, which was to be left open when Rome was at war and closed in time of peace. And he succeeded in bringing peace to the city by securing treaties of alliance with those neighbouring peoples who were not already bound to it.

Upon Numa’s death, however, this peace was disrupted by his royal successor, Tullus Hostilius, who won great glory as a soldier in a reigh of thirty-two years. The next king, Ancus Marcius, was a grandson of Numa Pompilius whose noble recor in the matter of religious observances he was determined to emulate. Yet Ancus was a ready as Tullus had been to fight for the honour and independence of Rome, provided that wars were declared and peace negotiations conducted in accordance with those strict legal formalities and unvarying rites which were later to be supervised by the priestly representatives of the Roman people, the fetials.

During Ancus’ reign a clever, ambitious and cunning young man from Etruria came south to settle in Rome. The grandson of an exile from Corinth, the adopted the name of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus and within a few years had gained for himself so eminent a reputation in the city that he was able to secure his election to the throne on Ancus’s death. As king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus planned the Circus Maximus, bringing down horses and boxers from Etruria to entertain the Romans in splendid public games; he enclosed the city within a new, strong wall; he drained the low-lying land where the city’s Forum stood, making grants of land around this traditional meeting-place to builders of houses, shops and porticoes; and he laid the foundations for a new temple dedicated to Jupiter on the hill known as the Capitol.

Sometime in about 579 B.C. this first Etruscan king of Rome was murdered by assasins hired by Ancus’s sons who hoped to attain the succession for themselves. But by concealing her husband’s murder, the widowed queen was able to persuade the populace to accept her son-in-law, Servius Tullius, as regent, and eventually as king, entitled to wear the white and purple robe of royalty and to be preceded by lictors, members of the now traditional royal escort each of whom bore before him an axe bound with rods, symbolic of the king’s power to beat and behead recalcitrant citizens without trail.

Once established in power, Servius Tullius began the great work for which he was always to be remembered, the organization of Roman society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. From now on, a census of the population was to be taken regularly, and the people, already divided into curiae for voting purposes, were to be further divided in war and privileges in peace. The richest citizens were required to constitute the cavalry, the equites, or, as leaders of the infantry, to equipe themselves with slings and stones. The poorest citizens of all were exempt from military service, but denied the political privileges which the other classes enjoyed in proportion to their rank.

Having thus organized Roman society in a class system based upon wealth, Servius Tullius then dived Rome into separate administrative areas. He also extend the boundaries of the city, talking in two other hills, the Quirinal and the Viminal, building a rampart around them and, beyond this rampart, distributing land which had been captured in war among ordinary citizens. This distribution much displeased the Senators and, in their discontent, Servius’s rival, Tarquin, son of the murdered Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, saw his opportunity to replace him. Encouraged by his wicked and ambitious wife Tullia, Tarquin increased his influence in the Senate by promises and bribery and, when he considered the time ripe, he had Servius murdered. Tullia triumphantly drove over the corpse in her carriage, spattering her dress with blood. And so, in about 534 B.C. the tyranny of Tarquin the proud began.

Declaring that an idle pepole was a burden on the state, he inaugurated a massive programme of public works, lavishing the spoils of a successful campaign aginst the Volscians upon the enlargement and adornment of the magnificent Temple of Jupiter which his father had begun, and settling to work upon it not only builders and craftsmen from all over Etruria but also hunderes of labourers from the proletariat of Rome. Work also began on improvements to the Circus where new tiers of seats were constructed, and upon the excavation of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer of the city.