The site of the city that the mythical Aeneas first set eyes on was located 24 kilometres (15 miles) inland near a river, the Tiber. Made up of seven compact hills, it seems today like a small, unprepossessing place for the capital of an empire that would rule over the known world. There was no immediate port giving on to the sea’s trade routes, and the marshes lying at the bottom of the hills, subject to overspills from the Tiber, had to be drained before settlement could spread there. Nonetheless, on the Palatine Hill, the future residence of Roman emperors, a series of stone and wooden shepherds’ huts formed the first settlement at the very start of the Iron Age in 1000 BC, and from that time on it would be continually inhabited. By the seventh century BC that community on the Palatine joined together with others on the Quirinal, Aventine and Caelian hills. Soon the Esquiline and Viminal hills also were deforested, levelled and terraced to make homes for other settlers. The Capitoline Hill, which was nearest to the river, became the settlement’s acropolis and the home for the temple of the shepherds’ principal deity, Jupiter. The area at the foot of these hills, once the place where the shepherds grazed their flocks, was drained and filled, and the meeting-place of the Roman Forum soon formed the city’s epicentre.
But while the site of the capital of the future Roman empire was perhaps unexpected, it did have natural advantages for an expansion into Italy. Those hills, for example, formed a natural defence against invaders, while the Tiber valley opened out on to the rich agricultural plain of Latium. The site also formed a natural bridging point between Latium (and hence the Greek colonies at the foot of Italy) and another region, called Etruria, to the north. Its sandwiching between these two civilizations is reflected in the language the Romans used: they spoke a dialect of the language of the Latins, but it was the Etruscans, themselves influenced by the Greeks, who predominantly gave the Romans their alphabet. However, the Etruscans gave the Romans much more than writing: they gave them their early rulers too.
Between 753 and 510 BC Rome was ruled by kings, the last three of whom were Etruscan. The first, according to legend, was Romulus, and his story is in keeping with the rootless, belligerent theme of his ancient ancestor Aeneas. Romulus and his twin brother Remus were the sons of Mars, the god of war. Abandoned by their jealous great-uncle and exposed to the wilderness of Latium, they were saved when a she-wolf, an ancient figure of ferocity, suckled them. Later the brothers were looked after and raised by shepherds. It was a start in life that made the twins tough but also unforgiving. When they were adults the brothers quarrelled over who should be the founder of the city they decided to establish. In the course of this argument Romulus killed Remus and became the first king. Although the Romans believed that after Romulus there were six more kings of Rome, the reality is that perhaps only the last three (Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius the Proud) were real historical figures. Under these Etruscan kings, key characteristics of the political system of early Rome were established, and these would resonate throughout the city’s history.
One political principle arose from a clash of loyalty among the leading aristocrats; they felt they owed their primary loyalty not to the state or the wider community, but to their clan. The noblemen were known to walk around the city with their associates, relatives and retainers, whose families could all trace their descent from one common ancestor. These dependants were known as ‘clients’, and the informal network of which they were part became a key nub of political power, status and influence in the state. This is reflected in the names of Romans then and through the centuries to come.3 Appius Claudius, for example, was a prominent politician in Rome of the 130s BC. His family name shows how, alongside his personal name of Appius, he could trace his ancestry back to Attus Clausus, the man who founded the clan. The Claudii would not only become the leading men of state throughout the Roman republic, but would also form one branch of Rome’s first dynasty of emperors, the Julio-Claudians.
But it was not just the ancient names and the associated prestige which began under the Etruscan kings that would echo through the centuries to come. The authority invested in the kings was their most important legacy. It was this that would become the foundation stone of the Roman imperial mentality. The Romans called the kings’ executive authority imperium. This was their right to give orders to ordinary people and to expect those orders to be obeyed. Imperium allowed them to punish and even to execute people for disobedience. Crucially, it also included the power to conscript citizens into an army and lead them to war on people outside the boundary of Rome who challenged that authority. The holder of imperium carried a symbol of his power, and this too was of Etruscan origin. The fasces was a bundle of elm or birch rods 1.5 metres (5 feet) in length; they were tied together with red leather thongs, and in among the rods was an axe. The authoritarianism symbolized by the rods survives today in our word ‘fascism’.
Long after the Etruscan kings had gone, the authority of imperium would remain. In Roman eyes it would legitimize and justify conquest. Be it Julius Caesar’s annexation of Gaul or the emperor Trajan’s invasion of Dacia, imperium carried with it the honourable appearance of the execution of justice. The first Roman emperor Augustus was also the first to regularly use the title of imperator, from which we get our word ‘emperor’, the man to whom that authority is attached. The reality of imperium, however, would be much more self-serving. It would result in the mass shedding of blood, not just within Italy, but throughout the entire Mediterranean world. How Romans other than the Etruscan kings came to hold the power of imperium is the central story of the first great revolution in Roman history: the foundation of the Roman republic in c. 509 BC.
CREATING THE REPUBLIC
The great revolution that spawned the political system of Rome is told in a famous story. Sextus, the son of the king Tarquinius the Proud, made sexual advances to Lucretia, the wife of a nobleman. When she resisted, Sextus threatened to kill both her and a slave in her company, and claim that he had caught her committing adultery with the slave. Lucretia gave in. Unable to live with the dishonour, however, she soon committed suicide. Personal tragedy quickly escalated into a very public revolution. A nobleman called Lucius Junius Brutus, enraged at the death he had just witnessed, was spurred to take action against the Tarquins. With a band of aristocrats, he drove Tarquinius the Proud and Sextus out of the city of Rome. While the details of the story might more comfortably belong to the world of romantic fiction, the fact remains that Roman nobles mounted a coup d’état in the final decade of the sixth century BC against the last of the Etruscan kings and crystallized a crucial political change. This revolutionary moment would become the most pivotal point in early Roman history. From it was forged another key cornerstone in the Roman mentality: a desire for political freedom and a hatred of domination by one man.
The solution the Romans devised to the problem of rule by kings was the republic. The word does not imply a democracy (although it would have democratic elements), but means literally the ‘public good’, the ‘state’ or the ‘commonwealth’. It was a system of government that evolved slowly over a long period of time, and was subject to continual tweaks and improvements as Rome’s influence and power in Italy and the Mediterranean world increased. Above all, the republic would see the power of imperium exercised not by kings, but by two annually elected office holders called ‘consuls’. Under the men who held this office and their powerful clan-networks of clients, the small city-state of the Roman republic would build an empire.