The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire

1 A New Troy

THE ORIGIN OF ROME CAN BE TRACED BACK TO A giant of a wooden horse.

FOR TEN YEARS a coalition of Greek rulers besieged Troy, a mighty city-state at the foot of the Dardanelles, on the coast of what is now northwest Turkey. The expeditionary force was there largely thanks to the machinations of three deities: Juno, the wife of the king of the gods, Jupiter; Minerva, whose specialty was wisdom; and the goddess of sexual passion, Venus. They were competing for a golden apple inscribed with the words “A prize for the most beautiful.” Not even their fellow gods dared to judge among these potent and easily offended creatures, and so it was decided that the poisoned choice would be handed to a mortal, a young shepherd named Paris, who tended his flock on the slopes of Mount Ida, a few miles from Troy. His only qualification appears to have been astonishing good looks, for there was nothing in his character to mark him out from the crowd.

The goddesses duly turned up without a stitch of clothing on among them. Not being above bribery, they offered, respectively, the gifts of power, of knowledge—and of access to the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, the queen of Sparta. Feckless and randy, Paris accepted the third offer and awarded the apple to Venus. The losers stormed off, plotting vengeance.

It transpired that Paris was actually of royal blood. His father was Priam, the king of Troy. When his mother was carrying him, she dreamed that she would give birth not to a baby but to a flaming torch. This was a serious warning from the gods of future disaster, and the couple arranged for a shepherd to leave the baby exposed on a mountainside (a regular means of eliminating unwanted infants in the classical world), to be eaten by wild animals. The shepherd didn’t have the heart to obey, and brought the boy up himself.

Once the youth’s true identity was revealed, his parents put the bad dream to the back of their minds and acknowledged him as their son. Priam dispatched him with a fleet to conduct a friendship tour of the isles of Greece. Paris had a better idea. He made straight for Sparta and the court of Menelaus and his wife, Helen. Helen was even more beautiful than he had imagined. While Menelaus was away on a visit to Crete, he eloped with her and sailed back to Troy with his prize.

Although Priam recognized that his son had broken the laws of hospitality by stealing another man’s wife, he unwisely received the couple within his walls. He should have realized that he was welcoming a lighted torch into his city, just as his wife’s dream had foretold.

The cuckolded husband’s brother was the federal overlord of innumerable Greek statelets. Together they won the support of their fellow rulers and a combined army set off for Troy, to retrieve Helen and punish the city that had taken her in. Ten wearying years passed, full of incident but without a decisive victory for either side. The most notable event took place in the ninth year of the siege. This was a prolonged sulk by the Greeks’ greatest military asset, the youthful but hot-tempered Achilles.

A handsome redhead, he was brought up as a girl among a sisterhood of girls, according to one tradition. This was because his mother, Thetis, a granddaughter of the sea god Poseidon (the Roman Neptune), foresaw that his fate was either to win eternal fame and die early or to live a long life in obscurity. As a loving parent, she opted for longevity. Achilles, who was given a female name, Pyrrha (Greek for “flame-colored,” in tribute to his hair), was pretty enough for the ruse to go undetected for some time—until the boy got one of his fellow schoolgirls pregnant. Once permitted to be male, he rejected his mother’s wishes and opted for glory. He soon became known as a great warrior and went happily off to fight at Troy, in the full knowledge that he would never return.

Battles in this heroic age were not fought by disciplined groups of men, according to epic poets such as Homer, but were in effect a series of simultaneous individual combats or duels between kings and noblemen. The rank and file took their cue from the success or failure of their champions. After a quarrel with the commander-in-chief, Achilles stayed in his tent and refused to join the battle. However, he allowed his dear friend, and (some said) lover, Patroclus, to borrow his armor and fight on his behalf. Patroclus was killed, and his death brought the Greek hero raging back onto the battlefield, where he dispatched Hector, Troy’s bravest champion and Priam’s firstborn son.

Achilles was soon dead himself, shot by an arrow from the bow of Paris. Then Paris, the cause of all this woe, was felled, the victim of another archer. The war had arrived at a stalemate.

Openhearted and fearless, honorable but unrelenting in revenge, Achilles was an iconic figure in the ancient world. Young Greeks and Romans through the centuries admired him and wanted to be like him. The Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great kept by his bedside a copy of Homer’s Iliad, whose unparalleled poetry celebrates the wrath of Achilles.

ONE MORNING, TROJANS manning the walls looked seaward and were amazed by what they saw. The Greek camp alongside the beach was deserted and the fleet was gone. It was evident that the war was over and the invaders were on their way home. The people flooded out of the city in a state of great enthusiasm. They were puzzled by the sight of an enormous wooden horse, but a Greek deserter told them that it was an offering to Minerva. Apparently, a seer had announced that if the Trojans destroyed it they would provoke her resentment, but if they brought it inside the city she would become their protector, despite the unpleasant business of the golden apple.

A few voices argued that the horse should be burned or pushed into the sea, but it was eventually decided to drag it into Troy. The city gate was too small to admit it, so part of the wall had to be knocked down to make room. The evening was given over to feasting and drinking. Sentries were not posted, and when the revelers at last went to their beds the sleeping city lay defenseless beneath the stars.

OF COURSE, THE Greeks had not departed. Their fleet had harbored behind the offshore island of Tenedos, a few miles down the coast, and awaited nightfall before returning to Troy. Ulysses, the crafty ruler of Ithaca, an island in the Ionian Sea, had devised a cunning plan. The wooden horse was his idea, and it was designed with an internal compartment capable of housing twenty armed men. He briefed the soi-disant defector to tell his entirely fictional story. In the early hours, the man opened a hidden door and let out the soldiers who were locked inside. Meanwhile, a Greek force marched from the shore and entered the city without let or hindrance.

Aeneas, a member of a junior branch of the Trojan royal family and the son-in-law of Priam, had gone to sleep that night in the house of his father, Anchises, in a secluded quarter of the city. His mother was Venus, active as ever in the affairs, and the affaires de coeur, of Troy, who had seduced Anchises in his youth and detained him for nearly two weeks of nonstop lovemaking. Aeneas had a nightmare in which Achilles’ victim, his body covered with dust and blood, warned him that the city had been captured and was in flames; it was his duty to escape. He woke up to find that this was indeed the case. Climbing to the roof of the house, he saw fires blazing in every direction.

Aeneas realized that nothing could be done to reverse the catastrophe. As the dream had told him, it was his sacred obligation to lead a party of survivors, and refound Troy elsewhere. He took with him the city’s penates, images of its household gods, and (some said) the celebrated Palladium, an ancient, sacred wooden statue of Minerva that had fallen from the sky.

The small company, which included Aeneas’s aged father and his young son Ascanius, also known as Iulus, made its way to one of the city gates, using dark side streets and avoiding Greek marauders. The Trojan prince suddenly realized that his wife was missing, and rushed back to look for her, without success. Returning empty-handed at dawn, he was surprised to find a large crowd of refugees awaiting his orders.

According to another narrative, Aeneas was in charge of allied reinforcements that withdrew to Troy’s citadel and prevented the enemy from taking the entire city. He created enough of a distraction to allow much of the civilian population to escape and, after negotiating a cease-fire with the Greeks, marched his people out of Troy in good order.

One way or another, a fair number of Trojans had survived, and under Aeneas’s command a decision was taken to leave their native land forever. A fleet was built, and the party sailed away with no certain destination. The idea was to find somewhere to settle and establish a new national home.

This was more easily said than done. Abortive attempts were made to found a city in Thrace and Crete. Aeneas spent some time with a relative who had become ruler in Epirus, on the western coast of Greece, after the assassination of Achilles’ son, Pyrrhus, the country’s brutal young king. This relative advised Aeneas to make for Italy. However, the unforgetting goddesses Juno and Minerva were determined to prevent a rebirth of the hated Troy, and Aeneas was forced to undergo many dangerous adventures. Like Ulysses before him on his long journey back to Ithaca, he had a narrow escape from the one-eyed giant Polyphemus. Finally, the Trojans were blown off course by a storm and shipwrecked on the coast of North Africa.

THEY FOUND THAT they were not the only refugees seeking a new world. A group of Phoenician expatriates were building a settlement on a strip of coast leased from local tribes. They originated from the great island port of Tyre, in what is now Lebanon.

Tyre was a monarchy. Its unscrupulous ruler had arranged the murder of a wealthy landowner and confiscated his estates. The dead man’s widow, Dido, assembled a large community of people who either hated or feared their king and (prompted by her husband’s helpful ghost) unearthed a secret hoard of gold to fund her expenses. Seizing some ships in the harbor, she and her followers made good their escape.

They were building Carthage (Phoenician for “new city”) on part of a large promontory backed by two lagoons to the north and south when the Trojans arrived, storm-shaken, caked with brine, and exhausted. They were amazed, and doubtless a little jealous, at what they saw.

Virgil, Rome’s national poet and the author of the Aeneid, an epic poem on the adventures of Aeneas, imagines the scene:

Dido welcomed the strangers and, hearing their story, sympathized with Aeneas for his misfortunes. The goddess Juno now found herself in an uncomfortable position; if Aeneas could be persuaded to make Carthage his home, he would abandon the glorious future in Italy that had been prophesied for him and there would no longer be any risk of a new Troy rising from the ground. Unfortunately, though, the despised Trojan would have to marry Dido, a favorite of hers, as indeed was Carthage. This was a bitter sacrifice, but she had no choice but to make it.

Arrangements were made with the cooperation of Venus, and the queen of Carthage duly fell in love with the exile. On a hunting expedition in the hills, Juno arranged for a fortuitous thunderstorm and the couple took refuge in a cave, where nature followed its pleasant course. Dido called the encounter a wedding.

Unfortunately, a local African chieftain had had his eye on Dido for himself, and did not want to lose her. He was a great devotee of Jupiter and prayed to him for help. He complained, “Now this second Paris, wearing a Phrygian bonnet to tie up his chin and cover his oily hair, and attended by a train of she-men, is to become the owner of what he has stolen.”

Jupiter had known nothing of his wife’s plot and was furious. He immediately dispatched a messenger to warn the Trojan prince to remember his destiny and leave at once for Italy. Aeneas the True (so called because of his reputation for loyalty) was thunderstruck by the rebuke and abandoned Dido without delay.

Thoroughly embarrassed, he tried to justify himself to her, placing the blame on the king of the gods. “So stop upsetting yourself, and me too, by these protests,” he said. “It is not by my own choice that I voyage onward toward Italy.”

Dido, spurned, chose to die. She had a great funeral pyre built, letting it be known that her purpose was to incinerate a sword Aeneas had left behind, some of his clothes, and his portrait. This was a ruse, for the pyre was for her own use. She climbed up onto it and stabbed herself. Before dying, she uttered a curse, predicting eternal enmity between her new city and the one her Trojan lover and his posterity would found in Italy:

At long last, Aeneas and his companions reached Italy. As they sailed along its western coast, a large wood came into view through which the yellow waters of the river Tiber poured into the sea; and here the Trojans disembarked. Their voyage was at an end. They were greeted by Latinus, the old and henpecked king of the Latini, a tribe living between the Tiber and Anio rivers, from which Latium (today’s Lazio) gets its name. He and his people were of Greek origin. Thanks to his wife’s influence, his daughter Lavinia had been promised to Turnus, the young and energetic chief of the Rutulians. The king for once stood up for himself; he now changed his mind and gave her to the Trojan newcomer.

War was the inevitable outcome, and Aeneas killed Turnus in single combat. Following this victory he founded the city of Lavinium, named after his wife. The Rutulians were down but not out. Hostilities were resumed and a great battle was fought beside the river Numicius, near Lavinium. There were many casualties, and when night fell the armies separated.

Aeneas, though, had vanished. Some thought he had been translated to the gods, others that he had drowned. His mother, never knowingly worsted, arranged for him to be deified. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, an antiquarian who flourished in the first century A.D., reports that, in his day, a memorial was still standing on the site of the battle. It was a small mound around which stood regular rows of trees. An inscription read, “To the father and god of this place, who presides over the waters of the river Numicius.”

Seven years had passed since Aeneas left the smoldering ruins of Troy.

2 Kings and Tyrants

THE RIVER TIBER ROSE FROM TWO SPRINGS IN A beech forest in the Apennine Mountains, which run down Italy like a rocky spine. In three great zigzags, it crossed a plain for some two hundred and fifty miles and emptied itself into the Mediterranean. About fifteen miles from the coast it wiggled into the shape of the letter s as it made its way around a cluster of wooded, sometimes precipitous hills. These overlooked and encircled a wide marshy space crossed by a stream, and on some of them stood poor-looking villages, each consisting of a handful of wattle-and-daub huts. These settlements were easily defended and enjoyed clean air, rather than the humid miasma of the valley. The semi-nomadic inhabitants mainly tended livestock, moving them upstream to summer pastures and back to the plain during winter.

It was here that one of the greatest heroes and demigods of the ancient world, Hercules, slew Cacus, a fire-breathing monster who lived on human flesh and made his home in a cave in one of the hills. A larger-than-life figure, Hercules had numerous lovers of both sexes. He was the son of Jupiter by a mortal woman and so incurred the hatred of Juno, seldom one to control her emotions. Driven mad at her instigation, Hercules killed his own children and in expiation undertook twelve “labors,” or feats requiring superhuman strength and bravery.

Hercules became known as a protector of Greek colonists and traders who voyaged dangerously across the Mediterranean, and the story grew of a long wandering, as labor succeeded labor. He began his journey in the city of Gades (today’s Cadiz), which he founded in southwestern Spain; this was a community of Phoenicians, merchants who competed with the Greeks and revered Hercules under the name of Melqart. He made his way up Spain, along the south of Gaul (today’s France), across the Alps, and down into Italy, then over the sea to Sicily and ending up in Greece. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus:

The hero arrived at the cluster of hills by the Tiber, driving the cattle of a fearsome, three-faced giant he had killed in his tenth labor. He crossed the river and, heavy with food and wine, fell asleep on a grassy bank. Cacus seized the moment and stole a number of the finest bulls. He dragged them into his cave by their tails, so that their hoofprints would point in the wrong direction. When Hercules woke up, he noticed that some cattle were missing but could not work out where they were (demigods were evidently of a dimmer wattage than mere mortals today). However, some heifers mooed when the herd moved off and the captive bulls lowed in response, betraying their location. Cacus tried to resist the infuriated hero but was struck down by his club. Hercules fortified the hill, later known as the Palatine, and went on his way.

THE RIVER, SWOLLEN by heavy rains, often flooded, transforming the hills into islands. On one such occasion, a wooden trough containing newborn twin boys could be seen, washed up against a slope. As the waters ebbed, it hit a stone and overturned, throwing out the babies, who whimpered and wallowed in the mud. They lay beneath a fig tree, a popular resort for animals seeking the shade.

A she-wolf who had just whelped appeared, her teats distended with milk. She licked off the mud and allowed the boys to suckle. A woodpecker arrived to lend assistance and stood guard. Now that the way was passable, some herdsmen came by driving their flocks to pasture and were dumbstruck by what they saw. Unabashed and unafraid, the wolf stared at the humans, then loped calmly off and vanished inside a cave, arched over by a dense wood, out of which a stream flowed.

THIS EXTRAORDINARY SCENE marked the next great step in the long process that culminated in the foundation of Rome. Three hundred years had passed since the arrival of Aeneas in Latium. The Trojan prince’s son, Ascanius, reigned for nearly forty years in a town he founded, Alba Longa, beneath the Alban Mount, an extinguished volcano (now called Monte Cavo). A line of kings ensued who accomplished little of note and eventually, in the early eighth century B.C., the succession devolved on two brothers, Numitor (the firstborn) and Amulius.

Amulius cheated his elder brother of his throne. He did not harm or imprison Numitor, but killed his son and took steps to prevent his daughter from having offspring who might challenge him for the kingdom when they grew up. He compelled her to become a priestess of Vesta, bound to spend her life as a virgin. The trick did not work, however, for the young woman attracted the attentions of Mars, the god of war, and nine months later she gave birth to healthy twins, Romulus and Remus. The boys were taken from her and a servant was ordered to do away with them by leaving them open to the elements somewhere in the countryside.

It was at this point that the she-wolf came across the boys. One of the shepherds passing by was named Faustulus, keeper of the royal flock. He brought up the infants, and as the years passed they grew into young men with attitude—risk-taking, fearless, and foolhardy. They had hot tempers. According to the biographer Plutarch:

When the brothers were about eighteen, a dispute arose between them and some of Numitor’s herdsmen. Each side accused the other of grazing meadowland that did not belong to them. They often came to blows. Numitor’s men, some of whom had been badly hurt, lost patience and decided to arrest Romulus and Remus and hand them over to the authorities.

Among the group of hills by the Tiber, the centermost, the Palatine, had steep sides, in one of which could be found the cave where the she-wolf had taken refuge. It was a place sacred to the god of shepherds, and every February an ancient festival in his honor was held. The local youths ran around the hill naked except for loincloths made from the skins of animals that had just been sacrificed. Amid much hilarity, they lashed out at bystanders with leather thongs. The purpose of the ritual was to purify the community’s flocks, but in later centuries, at least, it was believed that it also fostered human fertility: in Varro and Cicero’s day, women stood in the young men’s way, supposing that, if they were struck, sterility would be prevented and the pains of childbirth eased.

On this occasion, two groups of boys took part in the ceremonies, with Remus in the first and Romulus with the others, bringing up the rear. The angry herdsmen lay in wait at a narrow section of the roadway; with a loud shout, they rushed on the first group when it came up, throwing stones and spears. Remus and his companions were taken completely by surprise and, bereft of clothes and weapons, were soon overcome and taken prisoner. Romulus escaped and gathered a force with which to rescue his brother.

Remus and the others were brought before the king, who was happy to make an example of them. Wishing to please his brother, Numitor, who shared the herdsmen’s exasperation, the king remitted the punishment to him. Numitor watched the captives being led away, hands tied behind them, and was very struck by Remus’s good looks and his quiet dignity in misfortune. He could not believe the young man was anything but nobly born, so he took him aside and asked, “Who are you? Who are your parents?”

The young man replied that all he knew was that the man who had brought him up had found him and his twin brother exposed in a wood soon after their birth. Numitor suspected the truth of the matter and, after a short pause, reminded Remus that his punishment had yet to be decided, and that it could be a death sentence. “If I free you, would you be willing to help me in a project that could be to our mutual benefit?” he asked.

Numitor then explained how Amulius had stolen his birthright. He asked Remus to help him regain his throne. Remus, game for anything, jumped at the chance. He was told to await instructions and, in the meantime, to send a message to Romulus asking him to join them as soon as possible. When Romulus arrived, he confirmed his brother’s version of their origin.

Meanwhile Faustulus, fearing that Remus’s story would not be believed, decided to bring to Numitor as corroboration the trough in which the baby siblings had been placed. He carried it into Alba Longa hidden under his clothes, but as he walked through the town gate he aroused the suspicions of a guard, who could not understand why he was concealing such an everyday object. By an unhappy chance, the man who had originally taken the infants to the river was present and recognized the trough, and Faustulus was immediately hauled before the king to explain himself.

He revealed the whole story. Amulius reacted in a suspiciously friendly manner, so when he asked where the boys were Faustulus pretended that they were watching their flocks in the fields. The king sent him to find them and bring them to the palace, where they would be given a warm welcome. The old shepherd was joined by some guards, who had been given secret instructions to place Romulus and Remus under arrest. In the meantime, the king sent for Numitor, to keep an eye on him until the twins had been properly, and no doubt finally, dealt with.

However, the messenger told Numitor what was afoot and he alerted the boys, their companions, and his own retainers and friends. They forced their way into the town, which was poorly defended. Amulius was easily found and killed. His brother resumed the throne.

Skeptics who believed, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus noted, that “nothing bordering on legend or fable has any place in historical writing,” told a different tale. Numitor switched the twins with two changelings; he feared that Amulius would have them killed, and that was exactly what he did. He handed his real grandchildren to Faustulus and his wife. She was a woman of loose virtue and was nicknamed Lupa, or she-wolf, a slang term for a prostitute. The boys received a good education and were ready for public life when the coup against Amulius succeeded.

ONE WAY OR another, this brought to a satisfactory conclusion the story of one brace of brothers but left the future of the other pair in some doubt. What was to be done with these headstrong youths? They were eager for political power, but with the restoration of their grandfather that was not on offer at Alba Longa. However, the population in the kingdom was growing and there were enough adventurers to found a new city. Here was a suitable task for Romulus and Remus (and one that, one may guess, prompted Numitor to heave a sigh of relief).

The brothers decided that the group of hills on the Tiber would be an ideal place for a new city. The ford would allow those who controlled it to manage traffic going up and down the western plain; the hills would assure easy defense from attack; and the Tiber, navigable up to this point, would enable trade and access to salt flats where it met the sea; later, a road to the river mouth was to be called the via Salaria, the Salt Road.

Cicero, looking back from the first century B.C., was in no doubt that the choice of site was crucial to Rome’s later success:

The brothers decided that, as a start, they would fortify one of the hills, but they could not agree on which one. Romulus opted for the Palatine, and Remus the neighboring Aventine. Neither would give way, so they went back to Alba and asked their grandfather’s advice on how to resolve the quarrel. He proposed that each stand on his chosen hill and, after making a sacrifice to the gods, watch for the flight of birds, a traditional method of discovering the divine will. The decision would go to the one who saw the most auspicious kind of bird.

Remus struck lucky first, for six vultures flew past his vantage point. Romulus, not to be outdone, falsely claimed to have seen twelve vultures. Remus didn’t believe him. But when he walked over to the Palatine and challenged his brother, he saw that twelve vultures had in fact just put in an appearance. The question remained undecided, for both men had seen the same kind of bird. Remus claimed victory because he had been the first to spot vultures, and Romulus insisted that he had won because he had seen the largest number of vultures.

Remus lost his temper and made some unkind remarks about a defensive trench Romulus had begun to dig on the Palatine. He jumped scornfully across it, and his brother, now furious as well, attacked him. Their friends and followers joined in the fight. Faustulus, who was present, threw himself unarmed into the melée in an attempt to separate the combatants. He was struck down and killed for his pains. Remus, too, lost his life, at his brother’s hands. In Varro and Cicero’s day, an old stone lion in the Forum was believed to mark Faustulus’s grave.

As calm returned, Romulus realized what he had done. He had founded his new state on a crime. And not just any crime, for he had broken one of the most sacred taboos by committing fratricide. The rivalry of brothers was a common theme in the ancient world—the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, killed one another in a duel—and in the Bible story Cain murdered Abel. But it was something new when the foundation myth of a state originated in brotherly hatred and violence. For Romans in the dying years of the Republic, this was a fearful anticipation of the fratricidal civil wars that led to the decimation of Rome’s ruling class.

FILLED WITH GRIEF and remorse, Romulus lost all desire for life—at least for a while. Ambition returned, and he finally built his city on the hill. This was a religious as well as a political act. A foundation pit, the mundus, a symbolic entrance to the underworld, was dug, in which clods of earth and first fruits were deposited. Then Romulus, as leader or king, yoked a plow to a bull and a cow and drove a deep furrow around the boundary lines. This marked the pomerium, or city limits; it was sacred, and only from inside it could priests watch for the movement of birds and so determine the pleasure of the gods. The city walls, or fortifications, were laid out behind this line and the space on either side was kept free of buildings, graves, and plants. (This ceremony was repeated whenever Rome, in later times, founded a colonia, or colony town.)

Romans of the late Republic were eager to determine the date of the foundation of Rome. There was widespread agreement that it took place in the eight century B.C., but there was fierce argument about the exact year. Computations included 728 and 751 B.C., but the date that won the most support came from Cicero’s greatest friend, a learned multimillionaire named Atticus, and Varro, who proposed 753 B.C. Even today, this year appears in modern histories as Rome’s traditional birthday. Varro was the kind of antiquarian who was fascinated by obscure calculation; he once invited an astrologer to work out from the study of Romulus’s life the date of his birth. In what was in effect a reverse horoscope, the man concluded:

Or, in other words, 772 B.C.

This first Rome housed a preliminary population of little more than three thousand Latins. If Romulus was to build a viable community, able not only to man its defenses but also to supply labor for the variety of trades that people would expect of it, he needed more citizens. He established a policy of offering foreigners the gift of Roman nationality, a welcoming approach that lasted a thousand years.

His first measure was to open a sanctuary where exiles, the dispossessed, and criminals and escapees of every kind, freemen or slaves, could take refuge. A miscellaneous rabble soon collected. (The story bears some resemblance to the beginnings of Australia.) It now emerged that there were too few women to go around the growing number of male citizens. Something urgent and decisive had to be done to achieve a one-to-one gender balance.

The king issued a proclamation that an underground altar had been discovered at the racecourse (the Circus Maximus). It was dedicated to Consus, the god of good advice. Romulus proposed a splendid sacrifice, with games and a spectacle open to all the people. Not for the first time, Romulus was playing a trick. Once a large audience had gathered, not only Romans but also members of the neighboring tribe of Sabines, the king took his seat at the front. This was the signal for unleashing a large force of armed men, who kidnapped all the unmarried Sabine women who had come with their families to enjoy the show. Their menfolk were left unharmed and encouraged to make good their escape.

Roman historians could not agree on how many women were taken in this way: estimates varied among 30, 527 and 683. But one thing was clear: every one of them was a virgin.

The Sabines were a warlike people, but before taking military action they sent an embassy to Rome asking for the return of the women. Romulus refused, and counterproposed that marriage between Romans and Sabines should be permitted. Three indecisive battles ensued, and finally, under a general named Titus Tatius, the Sabines invaded Rome and captured its citadel, the Capitoline Hill (or Capitol). A young Roman woman, Tarpeia, betrayed her compatriots by opening one of the gates at night in return for “whatever the Sabines carried on their left arms.” By this she meant their golden armlets; instead, loving the treachery but hating the traitor, the men used their shields, worn on their left arms, to crush her to death. A steep cliff on the Capitol was named the Tarpeian Rock after her, from which those convicted of murder or treason were thrown to their deaths (and also people with serious physical or mental disabilities).

A fight ensued in the marshy valley between Rome’s hills (the present Forum). The Romans had the worst of it and withdrew toward the Palatine Hill. Romulus was hit on the head by a stone, but picked himself up and shouted to his men to hold their ground. This they did, at a spot by the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) where a temple was later built in gratitude to Jupiter the Stayer. The tide of battle turned and the Romans pushed forward to where the Temple of Vesta now stands.

At this point, an extraordinary thing happened. The Sabine women came pouring down into the valley from every direction. They had been kidnapped and forcibly married, but they now accepted their fate. Interposing their persons between the combatants, they imposed an end to the struggle. A treaty was formed, acknowledging that the Roman husbands had treated their Sabine spouses with due respect, and all who wished to maintain their marriages were allowed to do so. Most of the women stayed where they were.

Romulus (following his old policy) and the Sabines made an even more radical decision. They agreed on a merger of their two states. All Sabines would be awarded Roman citizenship and equal civic rights. Tatius was made co-ruler with Romulus.

ROMULUS WAS AN obstinate and self-willed man. As king, he expected to get his own way. His colleague on the throne died after five years. From then on, Romulus ruled alone. His achievements fall into two classes. First, he established a basic pattern of administration—the king commanded the army and the judiciary and was advised by a (possibly ad hoc) committee, the Senate (ultimately two hundred strong). Members were drawn from an aristocracy of birth—patricians, the fathers, or patres, of the state. They enjoyed important religious privileges. Only they could become priests, and they administered the major cults. They had the authority to consult the gods (by conducting the auspices, or auspicia), and they determined the yearly calendar, which included a large number of holy days on which public business could not be conducted. They also supervised the interregnum that followed the death of a king, organizing the election of a successor.

The citizenry was divided into three tribes based on kinship—two of which were composed of Latins and Sabines. Each tribe elected a tribune to represent its interests and commanded tribal levies in times of war. In turn, the three tribes were each subdivided into ten curiae, or courts, individually named after thirty of the kidnapped Sabine women. These formed a popular assembly, the comitia curiata, which voted by curiae on proposals that the king or the Senate placed before it. A curia was further subdivided into ten gentes, or clans. When considering a proposal, these assemblies cast one vote each, and so by a majority determined the curia’s one vote, a majority of which then determined the comitia curiata’s decision.

City-states in the Mediterranean in the early classical period tended to be direct democracies, where citizens met in assembly to make all the important decisions, one man having one vote; or oligarchies, where a minority ruling class managed the state; or monarchies or tyrannies (from turannos, the Greek for “autocrat,” and not necessarily a derogatory term). Quite often, they moved violently from one type of government to another. What was interesting about this early Roman constitution was that it found an ingenious, albeit complicated, formula for combining all three forms of government.

Romulus was as vigorous in the field as he was in the committee room. He set the tone of military aggression that marked Rome’s collective personality throughout its history. For more than twenty years, he fought wars with the new state’s neighbors, extending territory and expanding the population.

NONE OF THIS meant that the king’s fiat was entirely unchallenged. He was generous to his soldiers, assigning them land and giving them a share of the spoils of battle, but as the years passed he became more and more peremptory in manner, especially toward the Senate. On one occasion when they could not come to an agreement, he remarked, “I have chosen you, Senators, not for you to govern me, but for me to have you at my command.” He presented himself in public in some style, wearing a crown and carrying a scepter with an eagle on the top; he wore scarlet shoes and a floor-length white cloak with purple stripes.

In the thirty-seventh year of his reign, the king went to the Campus Martius, an open space north of the Capitol, and held a military review near the Goat’s Marsh (now the site of the Pantheon). Suddenly, a storm came up with loud thunderclaps and darkness fell from a clear sky (perhaps an eclipse). A thick mist formed, and Romulus disappeared from view. When the air cleared, he was no longer sitting on his throne and in fact was nowhere to be found. The senators who had been standing beside him claimed that he had ascended into the skies. One or two said that he had become a god, and soon all present hailed him as divine.

Another version of Romulus’s death gained currency. This was that patrician members of the Senate had become so disgusted with his tyrannical ways that they plotted his assassination. They struck him down in the middle of a Senate meeting. They then cut him up into pieces and each “father” carried a body part under his clothes when leaving the meeting. Hence the vanishing.

The Senate was unpopular with ordinary citizens, but their attention was distracted from rumors of conspiracy when, as the historian Livy put it, “the shrewd device of one man is said to have gained credit for the story [of the apotheosis].” A leading politician, he claimed at a People’s Assembly that Romulus had descended from heaven and appeared to him. The ghost said that he was to be worshipped under his divine name of Quirinus and promised that “my Rome shall be the capital of the world, so let the Romans cherish the art of war.” According to one of Rome’s earliest historians, this was a cynical trick, but it certainly worked.

The official version of a deified Romulus was the one that gained the greatest currency. Even experienced and skeptical commentators like Cicero were inclined to believe it. He observed that in the distant and uncivilized past there was a “great inclination to the invention of fabulous tales and ignorant men were easily induced to believe them … but we know that Romulus lived less than six hundred years ago when writing and education had long been in existence.”

Strangely, the unofficial account of the king’s passing was to receive an uncanny echo during Cicero’s own lifetime, when in 44 B.C. the great tyrant of his age, Gaius Julius Caesar, was struck down by his colleagues during a session of the Senate. Indeed, Cicero was present in the meeting hall at the time, and he must surely have wondered at the coincidence. Then, for seven days, a new comet was seen in the sky, which the common people held to be Caesar’s soul; like Romulus, he had ascended into heaven and joined the company of the gods. In Rome’s end was its beginning.

THE MONARCHY WAS not handed on by birthright but was an elective post in the gift of the People’s Assembly (with some input from the Senate). Most Roman kings were not related to one another and were foreigners or, at least, outsiders; this had the fortunate consequence of removing senators from competition and stabilizing the Senate as an institution.

According to Cicero, the Senate tried for a while to rule without a king, but the People wouldn’t have it. An election was held, and the winner was Numa Pompilius, a Sabine from outside the city. If Romulus had been a warrior king, he was a priest king. He distributed land to every citizen, writes Cicero, to discourage brigandage and to foster the arts of peace. He was especially interested in religion, which he envisaged as a complex system of rules, ceremonies, and superstitions designed to discover the will of the gods and to ensure their favor. He was advised on these matters by a friendly water nymph named Egeria, whom he consulted privately in her sacred grove (near where the Baths of Caracalla were built in the third century A.D.), but many of his innovations were drawn from Etruscan religious observance. Cicero wrote:

“Laborious” is the word. Senior Romans holding public office spent much of their time on ceremonial business. If any error was made—misspoken or forgotten phrases or interruption of any kind, even the squeaking of a rat—the whole rigmarole had to be repeated until the performance was perfect. On one occasion, a sacrifice was conducted thirty times before the priest got it right.

Numa was followed by a king, Tullus Hostilius, who was even more warlike than Romulus. His reign was marked by a long struggle with Alba Longa, the city built by Aeneas’s son and from which Romulus and Remus had emerged to found Rome. It was, in effect, Rome’s first civil war. The two sides agreed on a treaty according to which the loser of the conflict would consent to unconditional surrender. The Romans placed a high value on their collective word and, typically, devised an elaborate religious ritual for treaty-making. The king swore that if the Roman People departed in any way from the terms of an agreement with a foreign power he would implore Jupiter, king of the gods, to smite its members, just as he smote a sacrificial pig. With these words, he struck down the pig with a flint.

To avoid a full-scale battle with all the attendant casualties, a duel was agreed on between two sets of triplet brothers—the Curiatii for Alba and the Horatii for Rome. In the fight, all of the Curiatii were wounded, but two of the Horatii were killed. The surviving Horatius, Publius, then reversed the fortunes of battle by killing all his opponents. He was able to tackle them one by one, for they had become separated because of their wounds.

Publius was the hero of the hour, and he marched back to Rome carrying his spoils, the three dead men’s armor. At the city gates, he was greeted by his sister. She happened be betrothed to one of the Curiatii, and when she noticed that Publius was carrying his cloak she let down her hair, burst into tears, and called out her lover’s name.

In a fit of rage, Publius drew his sword and stabbed his sister to the heart. “Take your girl’s love and give it to your lover in hell,” he shouted. “So perish all women who grieve for an enemy!”

He was condemned to death for the murder but reprieved by the People, which refused to countenance the execution of a national hero. However, something had to be done to mitigate the guilt of such a notorious crime. The Horatius family was obliged to conduct expiatory ceremonies. Once these had been performed, a wooden beam was slung across the roadway under which Publius walked, with his head covered as a sign of submission.

Typically, two ancient memorials survived that were believed to mark the event. Livy, writing at the end of the first century, observed:

For men like Cicero and Varro, Rome was a stage on which great and terrible deeds had been done. People of the present were energized and uplifted by the invisible actors of a glorious past. Horatius did a very Roman thing: he committed a crime that illustrated not vice but virtue—in this case, the noble rage of valor.

The war with Alba stimulated not only individual but also collective rage. After a resumption of hostilities, the war eventually ended in a Roman victory. The enemy population was brought to Rome and, as usual with defeated foes, given Roman citizenship. But its city was destroyed. Livy wrote: “Every building, public and private, was leveled with the ground. In a single hour the work of four hundred years lay in utter ruin.” It was as if Alba Longa had never existed. This would not be the last time that Rome annihilated an enemy city, giving full rein to the hatred caused by fear.

THERE WERE TWO ways of crossing the Tiber. One could walk or drive a vehicle across a ford that led to a river island, the Insula Tiberina, and then another ford by which one reached the far bank. This was not very convenient, though, and the alternative was a ferry much used by traders in salt on their way to and from the salt flats at the river mouth.

One of the achievements of Ancus Marcius, Tullus’s successor, was to replace the ferry with Rome’s first bridge, the Pons Sublicius. It was made of wood and, for some forgotten ritual scruple, the use of metal in its construction was strictly forbidden. Its repair was the responsibility of Rome’s leading college of priests, the pontifices (the name means “bridge builders”). It was frequently destroyed by floods, and its rebuilding was a religious duty. The bridge survived for about a thousand years and was probably not removed until the fifth century A.D.

Religion also entered into the process of declaring war. The Romans believed that they would arouse divine anger if they went to war on a false prospectus. The cause had to be just. Ancus Marcius was credited with devising a ritual formula that kept Rome on the right side of the law.

When some offense, some casus belli, had been committed, the head of a delegation, or the pater patratus (“father in charge”), accompanied by three other colleagues (drawn from a college of priests called fetiales) traveled to the border of the state from whom satisfaction was sought. He covered his head in a woolen bonnet and announced, “Hear me, Jupiter! Hear me, land of So-and-So! I am the accredited spokesman of the Roman People. I come as their envoy in the name of justice and religion, and ask credence for my words.” He then spelled out the particulars of the alleged offense and, calling Jupiter as witness, concluded, “If my demand for the restitution of these men, or those goods, be contrary to religion and justice, then never let me be a citizen of my country.”

The embassy then crossed the frontier and the pater patratus repeated the formula to the first (presumably somewhat startled) person he met, and again at the state’s city gates, and one final time in the marketplace. If his demands were not conceded within thirty days, he proceeded to a formal declaration of war, calling on not only the leader of the gods but on the god of gates and doorways, of beginnings and endings: “Hear, Jupiter; hear, Janus Quirinus; hear, all you gods in heaven, on the earth and under the earth: I call you to witness that the people of So-and-So are unjust and refuse reparation. But concerning these things we will consult the elders of our country, how we may obtain our due.”

If their complaint was not accepted, the envoys returned home and discussed the position with the Senate. Each member was asked his view and, typically, replied, “I hold that these things be sought by means of just and righteous war. Thus I give my vote and my consent.” If a majority agreed, then one of the fetiales returned to the enemy frontier and formally declared war. He flung a spear across the frontier as a sign that hostilities had begun.

In later years, with the enlargement of Rome’s territory this procedure became increasingly difficult to apply. A piece of land was therefore acquired in the city which was symbolically designated as hostile soil and into which the spear could be thrown. A specially appointed senator replaced the fetiales. But the principle of ensuring that a war was just remained obligatory, at least in theory.

Ancus Marcius was also responsible for enlarging the city by bringing two hills inside its boundary, the Aventine and the Caelian. He founded the port of Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, a clear sign that Rome was developing trade.

The tiny settlement on the Palatine Hill was beginning to find its feet.

3 Expulsion

NORTH OF ROME LIVED A MYSTERIOUS AND HIGHLY cultivated race. These were the Etruscans and their homeland, Etruria, occupied, roughly speaking, modern Tuscany. They first appeared on the scene between 900 and 800 B.C. Their language used a form of Greek script, but it was not an Indo-European tongue, as in most Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies, and has not yet been fully deciphered. To this day, its origin is unknown.

In fact, it is still not altogether clear whence the Etruscans themselves originated. Some said they came from Lydia, a kingdom on the Turkish coast (where later, in the sixth century, Croesus ruled, a byword for enormous wealth), and were led by the king’s son, Tyrrhenus. The Greek for Etruscan is Tyrrhenian. This account is perfectly plausible; for hundreds of years, the Italian peninsula was an archaic America, a new world open to successive waves of colonists. Enterprising Phoenician and Greek traders patrolled the seas looking for business. Aristocrats saw themselves as an international class and networked with one another across state borders. There is no particular reason that a force of Lydians (or, more generally, Asiatics) should not have invaded Italy—in much the same way that Duke William and his handful of Norman knights expropriated Anglo-Saxon England.

It is tempting to envisage a melting pot in which the native population was enriched by Greek and Phoenician aesthetic styles, new techniques in metalworking, and a sophisticated knowledge of town planning. However, modern scholars have been more skeptical, supposing the slow indigenous development of a community of villages into a loose federation of small city-states. Others have thrown up their hands and walked away from the debate, seeing the question as being on a par with the name of Hecuba’s mother—“neither capable of being known nor worth knowing.”

One way or another, by the eighth century the Etruscans had graduated from being simple farmers into an urban society of merchants and craftspeople. They were organized as a federation and each of their city-states was ruled by a king, or lauchme, who governed with much pomp, donning a purple robe and a gold crown. He was attended by servants, who carried fasces, bundles of rods tied around a one-headed ax. The Etruscans were militarily active and built up a sizable empire in central and northern Italy that reached Bononia (today’s Bologna) in the north and parts of Campania in the south. Rome seems to have retained its independence, however, although much influenced by Etruscan art and architecture, and, above all, by its religious practices.

According to Livy, Etruscans, “deeply learned as they were in sacred lore of all kinds, were more concerned than any other nation with religious matters.” Their doctrines were set out in a series of books much used by their disciples at Rome, called Etrusca disciplina (The Etruscan System); these covered such topics as the scrutiny of the entrails of animals, the interpretation of thunder and lightning, and “rules concerning the founding of cities, the consecration of altars and temples, the inviolability of ramparts, the laws relating to city gates, the division into tribes, curiae and centuriae, and all other things of this nature concerning war and peace.”

Inside every ordinary object or event lay a secret and sacred meaning. It followed that the world was a forest of symbols. The most innocent animals or plants concealed unexpected threats or promises. So, for instance, some kinds of tree were ill-wishing and flourished under the protection of the underworld powers. The eglantine, the fern, the wild pear, the black fig, and any bush that produced black fruits or berries had to be rooted out and destroyed as soon as they were seen to sprout. By contrast, the laurel brought good fortune. The dreams of pregnant women could foretell triumph or disaster, as could eccentricities in the internal organs of sacrificed animals. A model bronze liver has been found divided into forty-four areas, marked with the names of the gods, showing the place allotted to each god in the Etruscan cosmos. Celestial phenomena required particular attention. Storms, rain (especially if of an unusual color or consistency), comets, and the flights of birds and bees all called for careful study and required expert interpretation. Etruscan nobles were trained as haruspices, or diviners, and were much in demand in Rome throughout most of its history.

The Etruscans laid out their cemeteries as well as their towns in orderly grids. In their heyday, the tombs of the rich were reconstructions of the houses they lived in when alive, containing corridors and rooms. All kinds of household objects were stored in them. In the burial chamber of one great lady, archaeologists found

Bright-colored frescoes on tomb walls illustrate the daily life of the Etruscans. Although these sometimes depict frightening demons of the underworld, they mostly evoke with beguiling joie de vivre all manner of humane fun—banquets, young men dancing and making music, horse racing, fishing, wrestling, and other athletics.

One of the most widely read and influential historians of the ancient world, Theopompus, has left a frank, if overly graphic, description of sexual intercourse Etruscan style. Apparently, women took gymnastic exercise naked. They were very good-looking, he wrote, but drank too much wine. Children were brought up by a woman’s family, whoever their father was. Men waxed and shaved themselves at establishments that were as common as barbershops.

There is evidence that women were respected members of Etruscan society. They were given personal as well as family names, unlike their Roman counterparts. Tomb frescoes show wives attending dinner parties, something that would shock a Greek, and depict apparently happy marriages. This is not necessarily inconsistent with general licentiousness and, in its way, Theopompus’s X-rated account does tend to confirm women’s relative independence.

IT WAS FROM this sophisticated, culturally somewhat overwhelming society that a complete stranger arrived in Rome and won the throne. The surprising thing was that he was not even of Etruscan descent but the son of an aristocratic Greek exile from Corinth, a powerful and famous city in Greece.

Greece was a snake pit of tiny, fiercely competitive states, of which Corinth was the wealthiest at the time. Standing on the narrow isthmus connecting mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, it was ideally situated as an international entrepôt and its merchants traded eastward with Asia Minor and westward with Italy. Corinthian pottery and perfumes were famous throughout the Mediterranean and much sought after among the Etruscan upper classes.

The city was governed by a ruling clan, the Bacchiads, but between about 620 and 610 they were overthrown by a dissident member. This was Cypselus, who set himself up as a popular leader: he was a tyrant, or turannos, who opposed the aristocracy and ruled in the interest of the lower classes, especially small farmers. He confiscated the wealth of his opponents and extended the civil rights of the masses.

The Bacchiads bitterly resisted their expulsion, and many of them were executed. One of those who escaped the bloodbath was Demaratus, a rich merchant-noble who had sailed to Etruria, where he had commercial contacts. He arrived with a treasure chest and a large entourage, including a famous painter and some ceramic artists. He began producing fine pottery in the Corinthian manner and established himself in the major Etruscan city of Tarquinii (today’s Tarquinia), or possibly neighboring Caere. He received a warm welcome, and the geographer Strabo even claims that he became the city’s ruler.

This international career was not as astonishing as might be imagined. Inscriptions have revealed the presence in Etruria of high-ranking individuals of Greek, Latin, and Italic origin. A man’s wealth and family tree were more important than loyalty to a particular community, city, or homeland.

Demaratus married a local woman, of noble birth but poor, with whom he had two sons, Aruns and Lucumo (this latter name may be a mistake, for it is close to Lauchme, or “king”). He taught his boys all the arts according to the Greek system. When he grew up, Lucumo decided to emigrate to Rome, where he fancied that a man of energy, like himself, might find more opportunities to better himself than were possible in his hometown. He changed his name to Lucius Tarquinius (or, in English, Tarquin); he was later given the additional title of Priscus, or the Elder, to distinguish him from the next king but one, another Tarquinius. For Cicero, his arrival was a historic turning point, for it introduced Hellenic ideas and artifacts into a provincial backwater—everything from an inexhaustible curiosity about the world to political theory, from beautiful pottery to the poetry of Homer, whose epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were regarded as authoritative guides to the good and courageous life. Above all, they glowed with what seemed to Romans the glamour of a higher civilization. Cicero remarked, “It was indeed no little rivulet that flowed from Greece into our city, but a mighty river of culture and learning.”

Lucius’s move to Rome met with the warm approval of his highborn Etruscan wife, Tanaquil. She resented snobbish disdain of her marriage to an exile and a foreigner. She felt that in Rome, a new foundation where there were no old families, she would receive the respect she deserved.

Her optimism received a boost when the couple, en route from Tarquinii, were traveling in a covered wagon on the Janiculum Hill on the far side of the Tiber from Rome, not far from the new bridge. An eagle hovered above them, then dived down and plucked off Lucius’s cap. The bird soared into the sky, then swooped again and deftly replaced the cap on its owner’s head. Tanaquil, who, like most Etruscans, was an expert interpreter of portents and prodigies, saw this as a sign of imminent greatness.

She did not have to wait long to be proved right. The arrival in town of a man as wealthy as Lucius attracted attention, and he was presented to the king. Genial, well-informed, and with great personal charm, he soon became a trusted friend and counselor, and helped finance Ancus Marcius’s military campaigns.

The king had two sons, who were approaching manhood and expected to inherit the throne. Tarquin had other ideas. On Ancus Marcius’s death, according to the king’s will, he was appointed the boys’ guardian. He immediately arranged for them to be sent off on a hunting expedition. Having got them out of the way, he persuaded an assembly of the People to elect him as the new king.

Like his predecessors, Tarquin fought wars with his neighbors, and defeated an alliance of Etruscan cities. Plucky and aggressive, Rome was becoming a force to be reckoned with. Its rising wealth relied on military victories over its neighbors, the enlargement of its territory, and the expansion of its citizen base. Plunder enriched the city, and a number of important construction projects were begun. These included Rome’s great racetrack, the Circus Maximus, in the valley between the Aventine and Palatine hills, and work began on draining the valley between Rome’s hills. The king had made a vow during a battle to build a temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitoline Hill, and now he could discharge it. Where there were gaps in the city’s fortifications, walls were erected, laid with huge, carefully squared blocks of stone.

Tarquin was the first Roman commander to hold a triumph, a military procession to celebrate a victory. He entered the city, riding a four-horse chariot at the head of his troops. He wore magnificent clothes and insignia, consisting of a toga and tunic, purple all over and shot through with gold, a crown of precious stones set in gold, and an ivory scepter and chair. His face was daubed with cinnabar (red lead, poisonous if a regular cosmetic), reddening his features like those of the statue of Jupiter on the Capitol. Like an Etruscan king, he was attended by twelve lictors, men who carried the fasces, symbols of punishment and execution.

All these emblems of power were the natural marks of self-assertion by an autocrat who relied on the People’s support. Splendor awes and attracts. As an Italian version of the Greek turannos, we may wonder whether Roman patricians—“old blood” from the time of Romulus—were any more enthusiastic about their king than the Bacchiads of Corinth had been when confronted with Cypselus. Tarquin was surely trying to weaken their position when he recruited an additional hundred senators from outside the patriciate.

He also enlarged the number of cavalrymen, or equites, in the army; these citizens were wealthy enough to pay for their own horses and represented another nonpatrician power center. He tried to bolster their position further by enrolling them into three new “tribes” or voting groups, in the Assembly. A leading patrician, Nevius, opposed the reform. The king was infuriated and decided to take his revenge.

Nevius was an augur, a priest responsible for the interpretation of the flight of birds. Tarquin wanted to show him up as a charlatan who did not speak a word of truth. He summoned Nevius into his presence and said, “I have a project in mind and would like to know if it is feasible or not. Please take the auspices and come back quickly. I will sit here and wait for you.”

The augur did as he was told and reported that he had obtained favorable omens and that the undertaking was possible. “You have convicted yourself of openly lying about the will of the gods,” crowed the king. “I wanted to know whether if I strike this whetstone with a razor I will be able to cut it in half.” This feat was obviously out of the question, and a watching crowd laughed.

Unabashed, Nevius replied, “Go ahead, strike it and you will cut it in half. If not I will submit to any punishment you choose.” Tarquin did so, and the steel sliced so easily through the stone that it nicked the hand of the man holding it.

Wisely, the king acknowledged defeat. He canceled his planned reform and had a bronze statue of Nevius erected in the Forum as recognition of his accomplishments. Dionysius of Halicarnassus recalled: “This statue remained down to my time. It stands in front of the Senate House near the sacred fig tree. It is less than life-size and the head is covered with a mantle [like a priest at a sacrifice]. A little way off, the whetstone and the razor are said to be buried under an altar.”

LUCIUS TARQUINIUS HAD not touched Ancus Marcius’s sons. Over the years, their sense of grievance grew and from time to time they plotted unsuccessfully against him. Loyal to their father’s memory, he always pardoned the offense. Now, when Nevius unexpectedly disappeared from the city, the sons drew the obvious conclusion that there had been foul play and the king was to blame. They financed bands of partisans who accused Tarquin of murder. Such a man, they said, should not be allowed to pollute the religious rituals over which he presided as king. It only made matters worse that he was “not a Roman, but some newcomer and a man without a country.”

Tarquin, now an old man in his eighties, went to the Forum and defended himself vigorously against the charge. The public supported him, viewing the accusation as self-interested slander. Ancus Marcius’s sons apologized to the king, who, as usual, forgave them. Three years passed without incident, and then they entered into a new conspiracy.

They dressed up two of their most fearless accomplices as shepherds, armed uncontroversially with billhooks, and gave them instructions on what to do and say. Then they sent them to the palace at midday. As the men approached the building, they apparently fell into an argument and came to blows. A crowd, ostensibly of people from the countryside, gathered and cheered on the quarrelers.

Eventually, Tarquin had the two men brought before him. They pretended that their dispute was about some goats, and bawled at each other, saying nothing to the point. Amid much laughter at the horseplay, they suddenly attacked the king and one of them hit him on the head with his billhook, a mortal blow. Leaving the weapon in the wound, the assassins ran out of doors but were caught by the lictors. Under torture, they revealed the authors of the plot, who fled into exile, and were then executed.

The king was dead, but the regime was more than capable of handling the crisis. Tanaquil, the queen, closed the palace doors and ejected all witnesses. She then sent out for medical supplies, as if Tarquin were still alive, and hastily summoned her son-in-law for an urgent consultation.

This was Servius Tullius, about whose origins there are various traditions. According to most acccounts, he was the son of a slave woman who belonged to the queen; his father was unknown or quickly forgotten. Cicero writes:

Portents added to the favorable impression that the boy made on the king and queen. Some report that Servius’s mother had a very surprising experience when sacrificing at the palace’s hearth. A phallus rose up from the hearth and inserted itself inside her. She told Tanaquil what had happened. The queen realized at once that a god must have been responsible. She watched over the woman’s pregnancy and tried to ensure that her baby’s divine parentage was kept a secret. This was no easy task, for portents continued to intervene. Once, when the child was asleep, his head burst into flames without his being harmed in any way, and from time to time people noticed a nimbus around his head. It was generally understood that his father must have been the fire god, Vulcan.

Tanaquil advised her husband that young Servius obviously had great promise (greater than that of their own children, incidentally). The boy was brought up as their son, and in due course the adult Servius married the king’s daughter.

In the wake of Tarquin’s murder, his widow advised Servius Tullius to seize the throne. Outside the palace, a crowd was shouting and pushing, so she went to a first-floor window and gave a short speech. “The king has been stunned by a sudden blow, but the steel has not sunk deep into his body,” she announced. “He has already recovered consciousness, the blood has been wiped off and the head examined. I assure you that you will soon be able to see him. In the meantime everyone should obey Tullius, who will dispense justice and perform the other duties of the king.”

For the next few days, Servius acted as regent. This gave him time to strengthen his political position and appoint a strong guard. When everything was ready, lamentations were heard from inside the palace, signaling Tarquin’s death. Although he had not yet been endorsed at an assembly of the People, Servius’s claim to the throne was backed by the Senate and from then onward he acted as king both in name and in deed. He later took care to win popular endorsement and astutely married his two daughters to the dead king’s sons, Lucius and Aruns, hoping by this precaution to avoid his predecessor’s fate.

Servius Tullius, like great men later in Rome’s history, believed devoutly in his luck. He claimed a special relationship with Fortuna, the goddess of chance, to whom he dedicated numerous shrines throughout the city. An ancient temple has been discovered in the Forum Boarium, or Ox Forum (a traffic hub where various streets met, it was so named after the statue of a bronze ox, not because it was a cattle market), and may be one of the king’s foundations. The goddess was said to visit him at night, climbing through a window to enter his bedroom. He may have conducted a ritual called “sacred marriage,” whereby a ruler had sex with a divinity in her temple, legitimizing his authority and ensuring the fertility and well-being of his realm. (Naturally, a female slave or temple prostitute would stand in for the goddess.)

IT IS WRONG to suppose that Rome at this early stage in its history was a primitive society. City-states like Rome could not develop without widespread literacy, at any rate among the élites. Servius Tullius is known mainly for his bold reforms of the state. These were absolutely dependent on the information technology of the time—not simply writing (both alphabet and numerals) but a technical capacity to store data in an archive and to access and manipulate it for many different purposes. Otherwise, the central management of military and political activity would have been next to impossible. Nor would it have been easy to establish the complicated institutions of government for which Rome became famous.

The king abolished the three tribes and thirty curiae of Romulus and replaced them with territorial tribes—four for the city and an additional number in the surrounding countryside. Managed by a senior official, or “commander,” these individuals were responsible for organizing local defense, the payment of taxes, and army recruitment.

Tribes also conducted a regular census. An ingenious method was found for counting the population. The commander of each tribe held a sacrifice and festival, and everyone was asked to contribute to its cost. Men gave a small coin of a certain value, women one of another, and children of a third. In this painless way, when the coins were added up, the number of tribe members, by age and gender, was ascertained.

Also, all Romans were obliged to register their name and that of their father, their age, and the names of their wives and children. On oath, they had to assign a monetary value to their property. Anyone found to have made a false declaration forfeited all his goods and was sold into slavery.

With even greater ingenuity, Servius Tullius devised a system that simultaneously controlled voting at popular assemblies and decided citizens’ military responsibilities. The idea was, while maintaining the democratic vote, to give more voting power to the rich—and also to require a substantial financial outlay when the rich served in the army.

How was this achieved? We begin with the word centuria, or “century”—literally, a group of one hundred men (although, in practice, not necessarily so many). This was the smallest unit of the army’s main military force, the legion; sixty centuries, or up to six thousand men, made one legion. (This number fell over the years to between four thousand two hundred to five thousand men in the second century.) It was also the name given to the voting units of the Assembly. There were eighteen centuries of horsemen and a hundred and seventy of foot soldiers (pedites). The foot soldiers were divided into five classes, according to their wealth and ability to pay for armor and weapons. The first and richest class was allocated eighty centuries, the second, third, and fourth twenty each, and the fifth class thirty. (Noncombatants such as trumpeters and carpenters were allocated to one or another of the five classes.) In each class one half of the centuries were made up of older men between forty-seven and sixty, and the other half of younger men between seventeen and forty-six: The age range was much smaller in the first group than in the second—an arrangement that privileged years and experience. Anyone with property below a minimum level was listed separately and was not allowed to serve in the army.

When it came to voting at the Assembly, each century balloted its members and then cast a single vote for or against the motion. The count began with the first class, and so on down. As soon as a majority had been reached, the voting stopped. The arrangement meant that the rich controlled more centuries than the poor. Indeed, centuries in the lower classes found that they seldom had a chance to cast a vote at all.

But if the wealthy won more power in the assembly than was equitable, they had more duties on the battlefield. They were subject to frequent conscription and, serving as heavily armed troops, had to buy their own expensive equipment (bronze helmets, greaves, breastplates, and spears and swords). The lower classes fought as light-armed skirmishers. The principle underlying the Servian reforms was timocratic—that is, they were a property owner’s charter. The idea was that only those with much to lose would make careful and well-considered decisions. It goes without saying that the patricians were not pleased with these reforms, for their ascendancy rested on birth, not money; they claimed the exclusive right to compete for power.

For Cicero and moderate conservatives hundreds of years later, Servius Tullius was a second founder (conditor) of Rome, for he had discovered a way of taming the revolutionary forces of democracy. “[The king] put into effect the principle which ought always to be adhered to in the commonwealth, that the greatest number should not have the greatest power,” he noted approvingly. “While no one was deprived of the suffrage, the majority of votes was in the hands of those to whom the highest welfare of the State was the most important.”

ACCORDING TO LIVY, Servius’s census revealed about 80,000 citizens—that is, adult men capable of bearing arms. This was a substantial number, and the king extended Rome’s boundary and the pomerium, the sacred space behind the city walls, or ramparts, to accommodate a growing population and the seven hills now contained in Rome with a continuous wall. These great Servian fortifications survive in part to this day. (The dating is a mistake; in fact, the walls were constructed in the late fourth century, and before then Rome had little in the way of adequate defenses. Servius Tullius probably merely erected some form of rough-and-ready rampart).

The census number is problematic, too, and modern scholars propose a population of about 35,000 at the end of the sixth century B.C. Nevertheless, this would allow a force to take the field of more than 9,000 men of military age—in other words, one legion of 6,000 plus 2,400 light-armed troops and 600 cavalry. By the standards of the time, this was no mean army. So Rome had become a substantial power to deal with, and Servius is even reported as having conducted a war against the powerful Etruscans, including Veii, the richest city of the Etruscan federation.

ONCE AGAIN, THE offspring of a previous king stirred up trouble for the current ruler. As we have seen, Servius tried to ensure the loyalty of the sons of Tarquinius Priscus by marrying them to his two daughters. Both unions were unhappy. The eldest boy, Lucius, was a hothead, eager for the throne; his wife loved her father and did her best to calm her husband. By contrast, the second daughter despised her consort, Aruns, who was a peace-loving youth, and bitterly regretted that she had not been allotted Lucius.

A prototype of Lady Macbeth, this second daughter arranged secret meetings with Lucius at which she upbraided him for his lack of ambition and encouraged him to plot against her father. Their first step was to arrange their own affairs; the two did away with their respective spouses and, without any pretense of mourning and with the aged Servius’s reluctant consent, they married.

The couple then proceeded to the main action. Lucius was in and out of the houses of the patrician families, reminding them of favors his father had done them and insinuating that now was the time to show their gratitude. Young men he swung to his side with money.

When he felt that the moment had come, he forced his way into the Forum with an armed guard, marched into the Senate House, sat himself down on the throne (this was the curule chair, or sella curulis, a sort of grand stool, ivory-veneered and with curved legs forming a wide X, with low arms and no back), and ordered a crier to summon the Senate to meet King Tarquin. He then delivered a tirade against Servius Tullius. The main charge, according to Livy, was that

In other words, like Priscus, Servius was a Greek-style turannos and an enemy of the patricians. Just as he himself had every intention of becoming, he might have admitted to himself.

Tarquin was still in mid-flow when a report reached the king of what was afoot. Angry and alarmed, Servius hurried to the Forum and, standing in the antechamber of the Senate House, interrupted the speaker.

“What is the meaning of this, Tarquin? How dare you, while I am alive, to summon the Senate and sit in my chair?”

“It is my father’s chair. A king’s son is a better heir to the throne than a slave.”

Confusion. Opposing cheers. A riotous mob rushed the Senate House. Tarquin had gone too far to pull back now. A strongly built man, he lifted up the old king by his middle and flung him down the entrance steps into the Forum before turning back to the meeting. Meanwhile, Servius’s retinue had fled, leaving him alone and unattended. Stunned, he was making his way back to the palace when some of Tarquin’s men caught and killed him.

It was said that the murder was committed on his daughter Tullia’s suggestion. She drove into the Forum in a carriage, called her husband out from the Senate House, and was the first to hail him as king. Tarquin advised her to go home, as the crowd might be dangerous. So she started off and, Livy writes:

MANY YEARS IN the mythical past, Apollo, beautiful god of the sun, music, and archery, was trying to persuade a young woman to have sex with him. He promised to grant her a wish. She grasped a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as the grains in her hand. The wish was granted, but, like so many other mortals who attracted the lecherous attention of classical divinities, she forgot to include undying youthfulness in her request. As time passed, she gradually withered away. A prophetess, or Sibyl, she lived in a cave at Cumae. She predicted the future by writing on oak leaves, which she arranged at the entrance. According to the novelist Gaius Petronius Arbiter in the first century A.D., the Sibyl used to sit in a bottle suspended from the roof, and when someone asked what she wanted she replied, “I want to die.” (The actual cave was discovered by a modern archaeologist, and in Cicero and Varro’s day was used as a shrine tended by a priestess.)

The Sibyl was somewhat more mobile when Rome was young. One day she presented herself at court, looking like an old woman. She brought with her nine books filled with prophecies, and offered to sell them to King Tarquin for a certain sum. He refused, and the Sibyl went away and burned three of the books. Shortly afterward, she returned and offered Tarquin the six remaining books for the same price. Laughter greeted the offer. So off she went again, burned three more books, and came back, offering the final three—for the same price.

By now, the Sibyl had won the king’s full attention. He asked the augurs to advise him. They warned him that his failure to purchase the complete set of books spelled disaster for Rome, and that he should at least secure those that were left. He paid up and stored the books in a cellar under the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, the construction of which he was superintending at the time. There they stayed, consulted during state emergencies, until the first century B.C., when the temple burned down and the books with it.

The story reveals contrasting dimensions of Tarquin’s character—hastiness and arrogance, but also a realistic response to a check. Not surprisingly, he won the nickname of Superbus, the Proud. Cicero once remarked that the foundation of political wisdom is to understand “the regular curving path through which governments travel.” In Superbus’s case, the curve led inexorably from assassination to despotism. Cicero went on: “[He] did not begin his reign with a clear conscience and, as he feared suffering the death penalty for his crime, he wished to make himself feared by others.”

Tarquin was no delegator, and he kept public business either in his hands or in those of his three sons, Titus, Aruns, and Sextus. Access to his presence was strictly controlled, and he behaved with great haughtiness and brutality to all and sundry. He once, arbitrarily and against convention, had a number of Roman citizens stripped and bound to stakes in the Forum, where they were then beaten to death with rods.

In spite of his violent personality, Tarquin’s reign was in many ways a successful one. Like previous kings, he conducted an expansionist foreign policy, deploying a combination of military force and guile. His main object was to establish Rome as the leader of the confederacy of the tribes of Latium, and he also moved farther down the peninsula to attack the Volsci, a tribe to the south of Latium. The city’s territory now stretched to the sea, where the port of Ostia enhanced trade and, thanks to Superbus, was encroaching southward into the lands of its Latin neighbors. Here we see the beginnings of Rome’s imperial career.

On one occasion Tarquin was besieging the town of Gabii, which refused to join the confederacy. Making little progress, he devised an ingenious stratagem. His son Sextus, pretending that he had been badly treated by his father, fled to Gabii, bearing on his back the marks of a heavy beating. He soon won the confidence of the inhabitants and was appointed the town’s commander. He then sent for his father asking what he should do next. Tarquin, suspicious of the messenger’s loyalty, said nothing but, seeing some poppies, simply walked up and down striking off the tallest heads.

The bemused messenger returned to Gabii and reported the king’s curious behavior. Sextus immediately got the point. He was to rid himself of the town’s leading citizens. Some were openly executed; others, who could not plausibly be charged with any offense, were put to death in secret. Still others were allowed to go into exile, forfeiting their property. Sextus distributed the profits of this exercise in liquidation. Livy neatly observes: “In the sweetness of private gain public calamity was forgotten.” Without complaint or resistance, Gabii let itself be handed over to the Romans.

The king was a busy builder. He installed tiers of seating for the Circus Maximus and completed the vast Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the lower crest of the Capitol. (Priscus had, at most, laid only the foundations.) Standing on a massive platform fifty-three meters wide and sixty-two long, it was a proud assertion of the magnificence of the Rome of the Tarquins. Probably made from mud brick faced with stucco, it contained three cellae (inner chambers) dedicated, respectively, to Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and Minerva. (Here the goddesses were on their best behavior, the scandalous judgment of Paris a distant memory.) The cult image of Jupiter was made of terra-cotta and showed him brandishing a thunderbolt. He wore a tunic and a purple toga (as we have seen, the costume worn by generals celebrating a triumph, when they processed through the city to the Capitol). The roof was wooden, with bright, multicolored terra-cotta decorations, and on the peak of the triangular façade stood another terra-cotta statue of Jupiter riding a four-horsed chariot.

Before building began, the augurs investigated the opinions of deities who already had holy places on the site. They all agreed to be resettled elsewhere—except for Terminus, the god of boundaries, so a special shrine in his honor was incorporated into the temple. His lack of cooperation was regarded as a good omen, for it signified the permanence of Rome’s borders.

The temple quickly became the center of Rome’s religious life. It was the repository of treasures donated by victorious generals, dedications, and military trophies. The rooms got so cluttered that in 179 B.C. numerous statues and commemorative shields fastened to the columns were cleared out.

A development of more practical value was the transformation of the brook that crossed the Forum into the city’s main drain, the Cloaca Maxima. Various smaller streams debouched into it. In Tarquin’s day, it was an open sewer, crossed by a bridge that doubled as a shrine to Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings and endings. As a result, the Forum finally lost its marshiness, and large-scale building became possible.

A TERRIBLE PORTENT appeared. A snake was observed to glide out of a crack in a wooden pillar in the palace. Everyone ran away in a panic. Even Tarquin was alarmed, although in his case the emotion was not so much fright as foreboding. He decided to consult the oracle at Delphi, and ask for an authoritative explanation.

Delphi was a town in central Greece, occupying a series of terraces along the slopes of Mount Parnassus. In this precipitous location stood a shrine to Apollo. It was the home of an oracle, one of the sacred places scattered throughout the Mediterranean where a god would respond to inquiries about the future. The oracle at Delphi was world-famous and was consulted by states as well as individuals.

The king did not dare to entrust the oracle’s reply to anyone but his closest relatives, so he commissioned two of his sons, Titus and Aruns, to journey to Greece, in Livy’s words, “through country which Roman feet had seldom trod and over seas which Roman ships had never sailed.” They were accompanied by the king’s nephew, Lucius Junius Brutus, a descendant of one of Aeneas’s companions. He was a strange young man, who deliberately assumed a “mask” to conceal his real personality. His family’s great wealth had attracted the unwelcome interest of the king, who had had his elder brother killed. Brutus was well aware that Tarquin had no hesitation in putting aristocrats to death, and feared that his turn would be next. So he pretended to be a simpleton and allowed the king to seize his estate without protest. He even accepted the additional cognomen of Brutus, the Latin for “stupid.”

Delphi was a spectacular destination. As the party neared the end of its journey, the road dwindled to a steep path and, according to Pausanias, the author of a celebrated guidebook to ancient Greece, became “difficult even for an active man.” Once arrived in the town, the visitors walked up a processional avenue, the Sacred Way, to the Precinct of Apollo, a walled enclosure at the top of the city filled with monuments and dedications, gifts in return for favors received. There were twenty Treasuries, small buildings that resembled miniature Greek temples and contained splendid offerings to Apollo, often works of art, including the Bronze Charioteer, one of the greatest masterpieces of Greek sculpture to have survived to the present day, and a bronze version of the wooden horse of Troy. Everywhere were nude statues of victorious athletes.

The Tarquin boys made their way to the Temple of Apollo, which stood at the center of the Precinct. Carved on the temple’s exterior were three famous maxims, epitomizing the Greek idea of the good life: “Know yourself” (); “Nothing in excess” (); and, somewhat mean-spiritedly, “Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens” (). Here they paid a consultation fee and made a sacrificial offering. All having gone well, and the animal having behaved as it should when sprinkled with water, they went inside the temple and sacrificed again, placing the victim, or parts of it, on an offertory table. Hieratic spokesmen (the Greek word is , from which we have our prophet) then ushered the Romans into a space where they could hear but not see the Pythia, a priestess who delivered her prophecies in an inner sanctum.

The Pythia was a local woman of a certain age, who served for life and was sworn to chastity. Before a séance, she purified herself by washing in the nearby Castalian Spring, and burned some laurel leaves (the laurel was Apollo’s plant) and barley meal at a symbolic hearth inside the temple. She then sat on a tripod and, crowned with laurel and holding a dish of sacred spring water, became possessed by the god. In this probably self-induced trance, she “raved”—that is, spoke in some form of fragmentary and ecstatic speech.

The spokesmen translated the ravings into elegant hexameters. These oracular messages were often fork-tongued, and those who consulted the god needed to consider their meaning with great care before taking any consequential action. It does not follow that the Pythia was hedging her bets. If she wished, she could speak clearly and authoritatively; she and the temple personnel were well-informed on international politics and, when it came to personal consultations, they doubtless built up experience of human psychology. However, the Greeks believed that divine messages were in the nature of things ambiguous. There was a limit to human beings’ access to sure knowledge of the future.

Brutus knew how to get on the right side of the Pythia. He produced a wooden stick as an offering; Titus and Aruns had a good laugh at his expense for having made such a paltry gift. They did not realize that the stick had been hollowed out and that inside it Brutus had hidden a rod of gold. After the Tarquins had received an answer from the oracle (we are not told what it was), they decided to ask another question: Which of them would be the next king of Rome? The oracle’s typically equivocal answer was “He who shall be first to kiss his mother shall have supreme authority in Rome.”

Titus and Aruns made the obvious, literal interpretation. They decided that the prophecy should be kept a secret, so that at least their brother Sextus would be out of the running; they themselves would decide by lot which one would kiss his mother when they got back to Rome. But Brutus guessed that Apollo was being tricky. He pretended to stumble, and fell flat on his face, his lips touching the earth, the mother of all things.

This would by no means be the last time that senior Romans made their way up the steep path to the shrine of the god, in urgent need of his guidance.

IT WAS A sex scandal, not a political or military crisis, that brought the dynasty down. A long siege of the town of Ardea, the capital of a Latin tribe, the Rutuli, was loosening discipline in the Roman camp. Applications for leave from the front were rather easily granted, especially to officers. The young princes staged lavish entertainments in their tents. On one occasion, everyone was drinking heavily in the quarters of Sextus Tarquinius. Someone happened to raise the subject of wives, and each man praised his own in extravagant terms. A member of the royal family, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, broke in: “Stop! Why do we need words, when in a few hours we can prove beyond any doubt the superiority of my own Lucretia?”

He proposed that they all ride off to Rome, arrive at their houses without warning, and see what their wives were doing. They drunkenly agreed and galloped to the city, where they found the princes’ wives thoroughly enjoying themselves with a group of young friends at an extravagant dinner party. They then journeyed on to Collatinus’s house in his hometown some miles north of the city, Collatia. A very different sight greeted them. Although it was late at night, they found Lucretia, surrounded by busy maidservants, at work spinning. It was conceded by one and all that she had won the contest for female virtue hands down.

Collatinus asked the party to have supper with him. Nothing further occurred, and the men rode back to camp. It was at the meal, though, that Sextus was struck both by Lucretia’s beauty and by the challenge of her chastity. He decided that he would bed her.

His plan was a simple one. A few days later, he rode back to Collatia with one attendant, without mentioning the expedition to Collatinus. Lucretia welcomed him and gave him supper. Afterward, Sextus was assigned a bedchamber and the household retired for the night. He waited eagerly till quiet had fallen and, as far as he could judge, everyone was fast asleep. Drawing his sword, he let himself into Lucretia’s room. Holding her down with his left hand on her chest, he whispered, “Don’t make a sound. I am Sextus Tarquinius. I have a weapon and if you say a word you will be dead.”

Lucretia woke up with a start. Sextus did his best to persuade the terrified woman to consent to sex. She refused, even when threatened with death. Sextus then played his ace. If she would not let him sleep with her, he said, he would kill her and then his slave, whose naked body he would lay in her bed. He would then claim that he had caught her having sex with a servant, and put both of them to death. (An adulteress could be slain on the spot, without much danger of her killer’s being convicted in a court of law.)

The thought of a posthumous reputation as a slut was too much for Lucretia, and she gave in. Sextus enjoyed her, and then rode exultantly back to camp. Meanwhile, the abused woman sent messages to her father in Rome and to her husband at Ardea, telling them that something terrible had happened and they must come to her at once, each bringing with him a trustworthy friend. Brutus happened to be with Collatinus when the messenger arrived, and agreed to be his companion on this mysterious mission.

Lucretia was found sitting sadly in her room. She burst into tears when Collatinus and Lucretius entered and told them all that had happened. She said, “My body only has been violated. My heart is innocent and death will be my witness. Give me your solemn promise that the adulterer shall be punished. He is Sextus Tarquinius.”

They all gave their word, and then did what they could to comfort Lucretia. She replied, “I am free of guilt, but must take my punishment.” She drew a knife that she had concealed in her dress, drove it into her heart and, bending forward over the wound, died as she fell.

A sudden and extraordinary transformation took place. Brutus withdrew the knife from Lucretia’s body and, dropping his disguise of stupidity, spoke with intelligence, force, and feeling. His listeners were shocked.

Swearing a great oath on Lucretia’s blood, he cried, “I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, his wicked wife and all his children, and never again will they or any other man be king in Rome.”

Lucretia’s body was carried into the public square, where a crowd swiftly gathered. Brutus stirred them up to anger against the Tarquins and headed a march on Rome. He addressed the People’s Assembly in a packed Forum. He painted in vivid colors Sextus’s crime and from there went on to attack the king’s tyrannical behavior. He recalled the undeserved murder of the good king, Servius Tullius, and the cruelty of his daughter, Tarquin’s wife, Tullia, who had ridden over Servius’s corpse. The Assembly demanded the king’s deposition and the exile of him and his family.

News of these events soon reached Tarquin, who immediately left camp at Ardea for the city to restore order. At the same time Brutus, with a force of armed volunteers, made for Ardea to incite the army to revolt. Learning of the king’s whereabouts, he made a detour to avoid meeting him and arrived at the camp at about the same time that Tarquin reached Rome. They received very different welcomes. The troops greeted Brutus with great enthusiasm, while the authorities at Rome closed the city gates against the former despot. The king withdrew to Etruria with two of his sons; Sextus made for the town of Gabii, where he was quickly put to death by relatives of those he had massacred.

The year was 509 B.C., the kings were gone, history was about to take over from legend, and Rome was ready to embark on its great adventure.

4 So What Really Happened?

THE STORY SO FAR IS WHAT THE ROMANS WANTED TO be told, and how they believed it should be told. But to what extent is the account of Rome’s foundation and the monarchy in the previous chapters true? It is hard to be quite sure, but the question seems to have two answers: on the one hand, very little and, on the other, quite a lot.

The Romans themselves recognized that some elements of the tradition were not to be trusted. Livy refers forgivingly to “old tales with more of the charm of poetry than of sound historical record” and goes on to say, “It is the privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things with human; it adds dignity to the past and if any nation deserves the right to a divine origin, it is our own.”

The link with Troy was foisted on the Romans by Greek historians, who liked to bring interesting new foreign powers within their cultural net, but this was not an unwelcome gift. The Greeks saw the Trojans not as slippery Asiatics but as honorary Greeks. Indeed, some said that they were “a nation as truly Greek as any and formerly came from the Peloponnese.” This meant that the Romans, much in awe of Hellenic culture and suffering from an inferiority complex regarding their own, could award themselves a Greek identity. Their admiration concealed envy and hostile emulation; by associating themselves with the Trojans, they cast themselves as rivals who might one day conquer Greece and so avenge their ancestors.

It is possible that there was a war of some sort at Troy around the traditional date, 1184 B.C. The city certainly existed, and its remains have been uncovered by modern archaeologists. Even at this early stage, Greeks and Phoenicians sailed around the Mediterranean and eventually founded “colonies,” independent city-states, but most of this happened four centuries or so later. Aeneas can hardly have called in at Carthage, for it did not then exist. (The Greek historian Timaeus believed that Dido founded the North African city in 814.) But then Aeneas did not exist, either. The panoply of gods and heroes whose adventures are described in Homer’s Iliad is invented.

As for Romulus and Remus, they are equally fictional. In essence, Romulus means “founder of Rome” (the “-ulus” is Etruscan and denotes a founder), and Remus may be etymologically connected with the word Rome. Tales of exposed infants who rise to greatness are familiar features of ancient mythology (remember Moses, Oedipus, and, of course, Paris of Troy).

The real difficulty the Romans faced was that there were two contradictory foundation stories that ostensibly took place hundreds of years apart, the one about a wandering Trojan hero, and the other about local boys Romulus and Remus. They decided to accept both, and were then faced with reconciling them and knitting them together in a plausible narrative. Aeneas was limited to having discovered Italy and setting up house in Latium, so that Rome itself could be given to the twins. In order to fill the long time gap, a catalog of totally imaginary kings of Alba Longa was cooked up to link the two legends.

Roman historians in the last days of the Republic did not necessarily imagine things, but they tended to see remote and legendary events through the eyes of their own time. The fact that Romulus developed despotic tendencies and was assassinated in the Senate House may very well reflect a response to the traumas of their own day. Hence the uncanny pre-echoes in Livy of Caesar’s death.

There was much discussion about the date of Rome’s foundation. Most commentators favored a year sometime in the eighth century. As we have seen, 753 was the choice of Varro. It became the generally accepted date. This led to a second chronological conundrum. Only seven kings reigned between Romulus and the expulsion of the Tarquins. This meant an implausibly long average reign of thirty-five years apiece.

The Romans accepted this, but modern scholars have been more skeptical. Perhaps there were additional kings, of whom no record survives. Archaeologists seem to have settled the question: slight traces of primitive settlements have been found that go back many hundreds of years, but solid evidence of city as distinct from village life begins only in the middle of the seventh century. So the real foundation date was about one hundred years later than originally believed. This has helped, for although some monarchs may have slipped from view, the canonical number now fits comfortably into the time available. Also, bits of dug-up evidence begin to fall into place alongside the literary tradition. Thus, the Regia, or palace, in the Forum was constructed in the late seventh century, just where the new chronology places the reign of Numa Pompilius, who is credited with having commissioned it. Rome’s first Senate House was attributed to Tullus Hostilius (hence its name, the Curia Hostilia): its remains have been identified, dating to the early sixth century, when we now suppose that Tullus ruled Rome.

It is a long time before we meet personalities who are (more or less) certain to have lived in history as distinct from myth. The first four kings seem to be largely if not entirely fictional, even if events in their reigns did actually take place. They were each given specialist tasks, which were in truth accomplished during the monarchy, but not necessarily by one particular king.

Romulus established an orderly social and political system with tribes and curiae; the un-warlike Numa was allocated everything concerning religion and (in Cicero’s phrase) “the spirit of tranquillity”—cults, priestly colleges and a public calendar of sacred and secular days; the untranquil Tullius Hostilius and Ancus Marcius fought expansionist wars with an effective conscript army. Whether or not Ancus himself had anything to do with it, Ostia and the Pons Sublicius were certainly built. However, we can say with confidence that the two Tarquins and Servius Tullius lived real lives (although, because their recorded achievements are very similar, the Tarquins may have been only one person). The best estimate proposes that Priscus came to power between 570 and 550 B.C.

As we approach the end of the monarchy, the picture comes more and more sharply into focus. Although the story of Lucretia was “written up,” its melodramatic trappings may conceal a true-life scandal. Even if we are suspicious of his antic disposition, Brutus is a major historical figure who helped establish the republican institutions that lasted for more than five hundred years.

Once we lift the mists of myth, we can make out a landscape of fact. Having comprehensively rubbished the traditional narratives, we have to concede that they do, after all, contain important ingredients of historical reality. During the monarchy, Rome did grow from being a small town beside a ford into a power in central Italy, extending its territory by countless miniature wars with local tribes in Latium. Political institutions such as the Senate and the People’s Assembly were developed, and it is almost certainly the case that some method of linking wealth to political influence and military obligation was invented by the kings, and very probably by a ruler named Servius Tullius. (However, the details of the complicated centuriate system refer to a later period, for Romans tended toward a modernizing fallacy; namely, they supposed that the early Republic was identical to, if smaller than, its more elaborate incarnation in subsequent centuries.)

So a recognizable constitution evolved, as did an unresolved conflict between ordinary citizens and the lordly patricians. The later kings were indeed very like turannoi, who claimed a popular mandate, carried out aggressive foreign policies, and invested in the arts and architecture.

The grand public edifices that a thriving and ambitious city-state demanded were indeed built; the Forum was transformed from a muddy bog into a great public square. Some have argued that, for a time, Rome was forcibly enlisted as an Etruscan city, but recent scholars have demurred for lack of evidence. It seems that, although deeply influenced by the imperial Etruscan civilization to the north, where it obtained two of its kings, Rome retained a fierce independence.

It developed its own culture as a diverse community, welcoming to outsiders but proud of its own, traditional way of doing things. These two character traits were as old as the earliest stories about Rome. After all, it was Romulus who made a point of inviting foreigners to become citizens, and his successor Numa Pompilius, who, so Cicero claimed, introduced “religious ceremonial [and] laws which still remain on our records.” Indeed, a cosmopolitan openness to the world and fidelity to the mos maiorum, the Latin term for “ancestral custom,” may have been interrelated: if social cohesion was to be maintained, the one needed to be corrected by, or balanced with, the other. In any event, this was a tension that would mark Rome’s subsequent history.

AS ROMANS OF the first century—Cicero and his friends, for instance—looked at themselves in the mirror of a distant, royal past, what did they see? First and foremost, they were a chosen people. It was their destiny to found the world’s greatest empire. By their feats of arms, they would outdo the Mediterranean’s dominant power, the Greeks, whose arts and culture and military successes were unparalleled. As Trojans, they were not barbarians beyond the pale of civilization but guest Hellenes. And, as Trojans, they would at last make good the fall of Troy.

Rome was not built in a day. In many foundation myths, cities suddenly appear from nowhere, fully grown and ready to go. Not so with Rome: Romulus, the official founder, was merely a milestone in an immensely long process that began in the embers of Troy and ended in Lucretia’s bedroom. The story really gets going properly only with the expulsion of the Tarquins and the arrival of the Republic.

The Romans were deeply religious, but their religion, much influenced by the Etruscans, was little more than a complex web of superstitions. The gods were incalculable powers who had to be placated at every turn. Every aspect of life was governed by ritual procedures, whether it be the repair and maintenance of a bridge or the business of making a treaty.

This was a highly aggressive society, but one that understood a vital political truth: military victory can be secured only by reconciliation with the defeated. Although most empire-builders in the ancient world were cruel and unforgiving, this was not altogether an original insight. Thus, after his conquest of the Persian Empire in the fourth century, and much to the fury of his trusty Macedonians, Alexander the Great promoted leading Orientals to positions of power in his new administration and insisted on harmony between victor and vanquished. In a move that recalls the rape of the Sabine women, he even forced his soldiers to marry local women. What was remarkable about the Romans was the consistency, over many centuries, with which they pursued their policy. They could see that it enabled them not only to foster consent to their rule among their former enemies but also to constantly enlarge their population and, by the same token, the manpower available to their armies.

There was a difficulty, though. A war had to be just, a response to someone else’s aggression. That was what religion and the law said. Romans believed, self-righteously, in the sacredness of treaties. But it was obvious even to them that they did not always live up to expectations; the rape of the Sabine women was a clear example of bad behavior (albeit redeemed by the women themselves).

By the same token, Rome’s mixed constitution, a product of the collective wisdom of generations, was an achievement to be very proud of. It was a bitter paradox, then, that right from the outset great men undermined it. Romulus was the city’s founder, but he also set a precedent for tyrannical behavior. The Romans were very skilled at doing exactly what they wanted, while at the same time, and with the straightest possible face, convincing themselves of the propriety of their deeds.

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic quality of Roman life was the way that it brought together three very different functions that are, in most societies, kept apart. Political, legal, and religious activity was completely fused: there was no separate priestly class, for the priest and the politician were one and the same person. So were the politician and the general, and the politician and the advocate. Above all, political activity was inflected by, and embodied in, hallowed ceremony. The Romans took very great care to ensure divine endorsement.