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

5 The Land and Its People

A SIDE FROM TARQUIN’S HAT, WHAT ELSE DID THE eagle see, on its unceasing search for prey, as it swooped and climbed, floated and dived in the humid air above Latium?

It was a countryside that for many ages had been unfit for human habitation. Until as late as 1000, volcanoes had spewed copious ash and lava over a coastal plain that was also prone to a contrasting peril, frequent floods. More than fifty craters can be found within twenty-five miles of Rome. When at last the eruptions fell silent (a shower of stones in the Alban Hills was recorded as late as the reign of Tullus Hostilius), a layer of ash rich in potash and phosphates covered the land. Forests spread quickly over the hills, and a rich surface soil was formed that contained nitrogenous matter. Farming, a new technology, was now possible, and here former nomads could settle, till the loamy earth, and flourish.

Today, cereal crops are harvested in June and during the summer months the sun is pitiless, the air parched, and the deforested hills and fields arid. The landscape is a nude, bony skeleton. Our eagle flew over a very different countryside—lush, fertile, and overgrown. Harvesttime was a month later, in July. Latium was well watered. Laurel, myrtle, beech, and oak grew on the plain, and evergreen pine and fir on the mountain slopes. Everywhere, dotted among the forests, were ponds, lakes, lagoons, and streams. The valley between hills that became the Roman Forum was typical of Latium, with its marshy soil and its transformation into a temporary creek when the Tiber regularly broke its bounds.

During its flight across Latium, the eagle could see fifty or more villages, probably protected by palisades, some of which were approaching the scale of small towns. They stood on cleared land where wheat, millet, and barley were planted. Domesticated animals were widespread—oxen, goats, sheep, and pigs. The fig was cultivated, as was the olive; the vine was new, having been introduced by the Etruscans. Demand for timber hastened the gradual process of deforestation. The geographer Strabo, writing in the first century A.D., observed: “All Latium is blessed with fertility and produces everything.” Malarial marshes in southern Latium were the single black spot.

However, farmers were only too well aware that rainwater dripping down the hillsides would gradually sweep away the fertile volcanic soil, on which their livelihoods depended. They constructed tunnels and dams, partly to irrigate the fields but, of equal importance, to stabilize the thin layer of earth. The Tiber poured so much mud into the sea that the new port at Ostia, founded not long ago by the first Tarquin’s predecessor on the throne at Rome, would soon begin silting up.

If our eagle spread its wings and ventured farther afield, it could patrol the narrow Italian peninsula, seven hundred miles long. The icebound Alps blocked it off from the European landmass; at their feet stretched a wide, flat plain through which the vast river Padus (today’s Po) wended its leisurely way. Cut off from the rest of Italy by the mountain range of the Apennines, running almost due east and west, the Romans saw this plain as part of Celtic Gaul and nothing to do with Italy proper.

Then the mountains turned southward and became a long limestone spine, crossed and broken up by narrow gorges. Terraces, high valleys, and grassy uplands made these highlands eminently habitable, and easily defended, by hardy, pastoral hill folk, who specialized in breeding livestock and selling such by-products as wool, leather, and cheeses.

On the eastern seaboard, there was sometimes hardly space for a road to run between steep heights and the sea. There was little good land and few harbors. Finally, as our eagle approached Italy’s boot and high heel, the chain widened out into the dry, windy prairies of Apulia.

The western coastline was a friendlier place. The beautiful hill country of Etruria, intersected and circumscribed by mountain ranges, contained few but extremely productive plains. Along with Varro, another first-century B.C. polymath, Posidonius, the Greek philosopher, politician, geographer, and historian, noted that the Etruscans’ very high standard of living was due in large part to the fecundity of their land, which nourished all manner of fruits and vegetables: “In general, Etruria, being altogether abundant, consists of extended open fields and is traversed at intervals by areas which rise up like hills and yet are fit for ploughing; also, it enjoys moderate rainfall not only in the winter season but in the summer as well.” To the south lay the broad, productive expanses of Latium and Campania. This is where Rome had the good fortune to be founded.

ITALY FACES WESTWARD. Its only disadvantage is that there are few navigable rivers and few good natural harbors along its littoral. Any great state to come into being there would have to be an agricultural land power rather than a nation of sailors.

This fact had a profound effect on a Roman’s idea of himself, on his collective identity. The teeming countryside of Latium was close to his deepest feelings about place and about the good life. When in the city, he longed for an idealized smallholding. Describing the happy man, the poet Horace (properly Quintus Horatius Flaccus), who flourished a little after Cicero’s day, gave this nostalgia its classic formulation:

Elsewhere, such a man gratefully acknowledges his good fortune when he acquires a small farm:

This taste for rural simplicity went hand in hand with a belief that, originally, Romans were brave and frugal. The neighboring Sabines, a different group from those who were now Roman citizens, were famous for maintaining a severe, old-fashioned morality for many centuries and ignored the comforts of a later, decadent epoch. The city of Rome itself was more virtuous and more admirable when it had hardly become a city. Propertius, a younger contemporary of Cicero and Varro, evoked a remote, admirable past:

In this golden age, there was little gold to be found. Politicians were poor and disinterested, and patriots. Only time would tell whether this ideal state of affairs would survive the growth of Roman wealth and power.

THE STONE AGE opened about two and a half million years ago, when early human beings began to use stone tools. An empty Italy, capable of supporting life, became a home for successive waves of incomers. Small bands, perhaps twenty-five to a hundred strong, roamed the peninsula, gathering edible plants and hunting, or scavenging, wild animals.

Around the year 10,000, the planet warmed markedly and sea levels rose. The conditions of life eased. Human beings learned to farm and began to give up their nomadic ways. They developed pottery, and ground and polished stone into sophisticated artifacts. Settled agricultural communities appeared here and there in the peninsula from about 5000. Evidence of their presence has been found in Liguria in the north, the foothills of the Apennines, and in the neighborhood of Rome. Immigrants from the east (perhaps crossing the Adriatic Sea) arrived in northern Apulia. They lived in villages surrounded by defensive ditches. A pastoral people, with goats, pigs, oxen, asses, and dogs, they moved on to new places when they had exhausted the land around their homesteads.

Sometime during the second millennium, stone tools and weapons gave way to bronze. Two predominant social groupings emerged; in the flatlands of the central Po Valley, the terramare (so named after the piles of black earth—terra mara, in modern local dialect—found in the low-lying villages of these Bronze Age communities), and to the south a less advanced Apennine culture. The population, though sparse, was growing.

Toward the end of the millennium, a series of tremendous convulsions shook the more advanced civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. At its largest extent, the great empire of the Hittites (properly, the Land of the City of Hattusa) controlled most of what is now Turkey and Syria. With a claim to have been the world’s first constitutional monarchy, it boasted a sophisticated legal system. After about 1180, the Hittite state disintegrated thanks to civil war and an external threat of some kind, of which we know next to nothing.

In about the same period, Troy was sacked; we do not have to rely on Homer for this information, since the work of archaeologists has unearthed the ruins of a burned-out city which have been dated to between about 1270 and 1190 (not far from the traditional date of the ten-year siege, as described in the Iliad, and where Homer placed it) and might as well be called Troy as anything else.

In mainland Greece, the Mycenaean civilization was predominant. The colossal ruins at Mycenae, in the Peloponnese, still amaze modern visitors, and were the setting of one of Greek myth’s tragic narratives, the fall of the house of Atreus. Atreus’s sons Agamemnon and Menelaus led the campaign against Troy, and on his return Agamemnon was assassinated by his unfaithful wife and subsequently avenged by his matricidal children. In about 1100, the Mycenaeans disappeared in a storm of violence. Many of their cities were sacked, and a subsequent lack of inscriptions suggests the onset of a “dark age.” It is not known who was responsible for the catastrophe, but it may have been invaders who were later called Dorians, one of the subgroups into which classical Greeks divided themselves.

Egyptian records report invasions by mysterious marauders, known as the Sea Peoples. Modern scholars are unsure who, exactly, they were, and it is possible that they played a part in the fall of the Mycenaeans and the Hittites. Whatever their origin, they brought havoc with them.

WHETHER OR NOT there really was a dark age, we have to wait a couple of centuries before there is evidence of an economic revival. From the mid-700s, seafarers began voyages of exploration and trade, as a great increase in pottery finds across the Mediterranean goes to show. The general direction of travel was from the wealthier and more advanced East to the less developed West—that is, along the North African coast to Italy and Spain. The Phoenicians, with their great commercial entrepôts at Carthage and Gades, led the way. As already noted, Greece emerged as a patchwork of small city-states, many of which sent groups of citizens to found “colonies”—that is, similar independent city-states, usually with sentimental links only to their founders. Within a hundred and fifty years or so, almost every likely region in the classical world saw the arrival of Greek settlers.

Sicily and southern Italy were especially popular destinations, and so many large city-states were founded there—among them Parthenope, or Neapolis (today’s Naples), and Cumae, both of them in Campania south of Latium, Tarentum (Taranto), Brundisium (Brindisi), and Syracuse—that the region was called Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece. As the name implies, the center of gravity for Hellenic culture shifted decisively westward—in much the same way that the growth of the United States in the nineteenth century came to overshadow the “old world” of Europe.

What the Greeks found in central and northern Italy when they arrived in the peninsula was what scholars today call the Villanovan culture (so named after an estate where an ancient cemetery was unearthed in 1853). All that we know about it is derived from grave goods. The Villanovans were not a people; rather, they were simply people who shared common cultural characteristics. Unlike other Italian communities, they cremated their dead. Most important, they learned the uses of iron. Their economy was based on hunting and stock-raising. By the eighth century, the high quality of their pottery and of bronze metalworking strongly implies that craft production was the specialized responsibility of professional artisans. The population continued to expand, and in some settlements could be numbered in the thousands.

THERE WERE VILLANOVANS in Etruria. Now what was it that transformed them into the sophisticated and unique civilization of the Etruscans, which came into flower from the eighth century? The ancient theory that the cause was a migration from Lydia, as set out in Chapter 3 [see this page], or, alternatively, of Pelasgians (a legendary people displaced from Greece by their successors, among them the Dorians and the Ionians), seems to have been invented to give the Etruscans a proper Hellenic pedigree.

In fact, a plausible answer to the question is looking the inquirer in the face. The Etruscans disposed of large reserves of iron ore, which was much in demand as the Iron Age gained speed. They traded ore with the Greeks and, in return, amassed wealth and acquired many of the appurtenances of Hellenic culture, in terms of both goods (such as Athenian ceramics) and attitudes (such as a taste for sexy dinner parties). The economy and the arts thrived. (This leaves unaccounted for the enigmatic Etruscan language, but we may surmise that it was a chance survivor from an age before the arrival in Italy of all the peoples who spoke the dominant Indo-European tongues.)

Although the Etruscans were a loose federation of independent cities rather than a unitary state, they made territorial gains outside Tuscany, taking over much of Campania. They even allied themselves with the superpower of the Western Mediterranean, Carthage, fighting alongside it in a great victory at sea in 535 against Greek traders and founders of the city of Massilia (today’s Marseille). The result was that the Carthaginians took control of Sardinia while they themselves claimed Corsica.

This glittering world on its doorstep was strongly attractive to provincial Rome at the very time that its villages were coalescing into a city. The notion that Rome was occupied by the Etruscans is unsubstantiated, but their influence was profound. They set an example in religious observance, agricultural improvement, large drainage works, metalwork, and the construction of public buildings. In Latium, the new cities of Etruria were an encouragement for villagers to join forces and create larger settlements. By the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins, in 509, the original fifty or so small communities had been transmuted into ten or twelve substantial towns. These dominated the region, and the most populous—Praeneste (today’s Palestrina), Tibur (Tivoli), and Tusculum (today a ruin)—dealt with Rome on equal terms.

Economic growth brought with it social stratification—or, in plain terms, a class system. An aristocracy emerged in Latium, and princely chamber tombs have been excavated that contained jewelry and treasure—armor and chariots, brass cauldrons and tripods, gold and silver vessels, pottery from Corinth, and Phoenician amphorae.

The magicians who brought about these extraordinary transformations both in Etruria (as already noted) and, more slowly, in Latium were the Greeks. Their traders introduced the idea of the alphabet (so, too, we may suppose, did the Phoenicians), advanced technology, art and architecture, the Olympian gods and goddesses, myths and legends—including, of course, the story of Troy. Homer probably wrote his great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a little earlier in the eighth century. They celebrate the virtues of aristocracy. Men such as Achilles had a pronounced sense of personal honor; in their eyes, they fought wars or engaged in politics in order to win glory, an imperishable name that was the nearest thing to immortality to which human beings could aspire. They were inordinately proud of their family trees (often fictional), and of their generous hospitality to strangers. They held that blood and bravery were qualities more desirable than the pursuit of wealth.

All of this the Romans digested and made their own. The patricians were Homeric in their pride and ambition for glory, in their hereditary claim to power in the state, and in their scorn for anything resembling a democratic form of government. In later ages, traditionalists liked to claim that Rome developed separately and only in its maturity discovered Hellenic civilization. Cicero has one of the speakers in his dialogue, The Republic, say, “We Romans got our culture, not from arts imported from overseas, but from the native excellence of our own people.” That could not be more wrong. Greece was in the room at the birth of Rome, and was in truth her midwife.

WE MAY SMILE at the legendary adventures of Romulus and Remus, but when classical authors imagined the site of Rome at its earliest beginnings they did not go far wrong. They pictured wooded hills and ravines, occupied by different villages, whose inhabitants were herdsmen and shepherds, although it was not long before they also included farmers. Virgil wrote in his national epic, the Aeneid, that the inhabitants

They were an “intractable folk.” The Capitol, “golden today, [was] then a tangle of thicket.… Cattle were everywhere, lowing in what is now the Forum of Rome.”

As already mentioned, the Romans believed that Romulus’s fortified town was built on the Palatine and regarded the Casa Romuli, Romulus’s house, on the western side of the hill, as a monument to those primal times. An assemblage of wattle and daub with a thatched roof, it survived for many centuries and often had to be repaired, either because it burned down, thanks to careless priests with their sacrificial fires, or to redress the ravages of weather and time.

It is here that the foundations of a village have been excavated. At the lowest strata, contemporary with the first huts, hearths have been found with pottery of a kind common in the eighth century—a happy coincidence with Varro’s date for Rome’s foundation, 753. There have been other suggestive finds—graves, for example, that contained pottery and bronze implements very similar to those of contemporary cultures south of Rome among the Alban Hills. Also, graves in the marshy land that was to become the Roman Forum are of two types: ditches (fossae), in which the bodies of the dead were buried in coffins; and pits (pozzi), in which after cremation their ashes were placed in urns. This tends to confirm the tradition that different groups with different customs occupied different hills.

However, as we have seen, Varro was too early. Evidence from under the ground has confirmed that a hundred years had to pass before the villages among the seven hills were amalgamated into a single settlement. It is only now, in the mid to late 600s, that Rome comes into being as an urban community and, in all probability, a monarchy was established.

How do we know this? In the marshy valley beneath the Palatine and the Capitol, there used to be a marketplace, doubtless consisting of little more than a few tables or carts. In about the middle of the seventh century, some huts were demolished, infill was imported to level the ground, and a rough, beaten floor was laid—the first public square, or Forum. Later, the pavement was extended to take in the Comitium, an open-air space for the holding of Assemblies. In its earliest phase, the Cloaca Maxima, or Great Drain, helped to dry out the land and make it usable for public meetings, shops, and temples. A building dating from about 600 has been identified as the Senate House.

At one end of the Forum, a small triangular edifice survives to the present day. Once larger than it is now, the structure was built on a site previously occupied by a group of ten or twelve huts, which were demolished to make way for it. This was Numa’s Regia, and its name suggests that this was the king’s official residence.

The foundations of a vast, archaic temple can still be seen on the Capitol. This was the Tarquins’ Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. It testifies to the magnificence of the Rome they governed.

The eagle that stole Priscus’s hat at the Janiculum saw across the river a patchwork of huts on the tops of wooded slopes. If the bird were to survive a normal span of thirty years and once again fly over the cluster of hills by the Tiber, it would be startled by the spectacle below—a busy market square, bright colored shrines and temples, shops and public buildings. A shiny, brand-new city.

6 Free at Last

HAVING DISPOSED OF THE TARQUINS, BRUTUS AND his fellow conspirators had to decide what to do next. In principle, each of them could very well have presented himself to the People as a successor king. That they did not do so, but instead established a republic, is a sign that this was not a revolt from “below” but a plot by resentful aristocrats, who wanted government by the élite.

We have already noticed that the last three kings were not patricians but outsiders, even foreigners; their power flowed from the People. According to the literary record, Superbus bullied the nobles mercilessly, and it looks very much as if they now took their revenge. That members of his family, Brutus and Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband, headed the coup, shows that even his core support broke with him—quite possibly because of a sex scandal rather than because of political disagreement. The Lucretia story reads rather like the plot of a stage play, but, as we have surmised, there may have been more than a germ of truth in it.

Traditionally minded as they were, Romans disliked abolishing constitutional institutions, and although the monarchy had to go, they replaced it with something similar but cut up into different pieces. The object was not to remove royal power but to tame it. The king’s religious duties were passed to a priest, the rex sacrorum, or king of sacred things. His executive power, his imperium, which gave him command of the army and authority to interpret and execute the law, went to two officials called consuls. Rather like the president of the United States, the consuls were not accountable to a representative assembly. These “magistrates,” as they were called, were elected, as the kings had been; they wore similar state robes, sat on the sella curulis, and were also attended by lictors. The first consuls took office in 509.

The nobility wanted to eliminate the risk that one ambitious man could restore the monarchy—hence the division of power between two officeholders. This has the appearance of being an eccentric decision, and one likely to foster inertia. But power-sharing of this kind was not unknown in the ancient world. Sparta, for example, the celebrated Greek city-state whose citizens had a well-justified name for self-discipline, boasted two kings, each from a different royal family.

Two other restraints were placed on the consuls. Their term of office lasted for only twelve months, and each could place a veto (intercessio) on the other’s decisions. In Rome “No” always trumped “Yes.” In alternating months, one consul took the lead. The lictors walked in front of him in single file, with their rods (and, when outside Rome, axes), while his colleague stepped back into second place. The designers of these new arrangements recognized that domestic or external crises might arise from time to time which demanded forceful emergency action. So they invented the post of dictator. He was to be appointed by the consuls and entrusted with supreme authority on his own. His term of office was limited to six months.

Under the monarchy, the Senate was probably only an ad hoc collection of patricians and other leading personalities. Members were selected by the king and, under the early Republic, by the consuls. This state of affairs may have lasted until the fourth century, after which the Senate became a permanent, standing committee. Senators were expected to behave with probity; they were not allowed to engage in banking or foreign trade and were excluded from public contracts. They were unpaid. Not surprisingly, ways and means were found of bending the rules.

Although its function was to advise the consuls, the Senate possessed that weighty thing, auctoritas. A difficult word to translate, it referred to the influence that came with experience and high position. Theodor Mommsen writes that the force of auctoritas “was more than advice and less than a command, an advice which one may not safely ignore.” The Senate came to represent continuity, and its collective experience and expertise meant that its influence would only grow with the passage of time. There were no political parties and programs, but shifting networks of personal and collective alliances, often acting in the interest of aristocratic clans.

As we have seen, there existed a People’s Assembly, supposedly shaped by King Servius Tullius, the comitia centuriata. During the early Republic, the Assembly held supreme authority in the sense that it was the only body entitled to elect officials and pass laws. In practice, though, its democratic impact was limited, because its structure was skewed in a way that gave the “centuries” of the well-to-do more voting power than was allocated to the poor.

A system of patrons and dependents, the clientela, also cut across the democratic process. Freemen became the “clients” (through circumstance or choice) of wealthier people who were higher up on the social, economic, and political scale. They did everything they could to advance their patrons’ interests, and in return they received protection. When things went wrong, they could apply for assistance, usually financial or legal, in the sure knowledge that they would receive it. A patron’s son could expect to inherit his father’s list of clients. Like a feudal pyramid, the clientela brought signal benefits to the poor and financially insecure.

This web of interlocking obligations was tightly woven and made change difficult. It was one of the reasons that Rome became a conservative society and, in its constitutional arrangements, fought shy of revolutionary upheavals.

BRUTUS, WHO WAS one of the first-ever pair of consuls, persuaded an Assembly to swear an oath never again to allow any man to be king in Rome. An early law of the Republic made it a capital offense for anyone to become a leading official without being elected. Forever after, until the days of Cicero and beyond, Rome’s ruling élite were obsessed with a fear that one of their number would aim for royal power, regnum, and ruthlessly eliminate anyone suspected of meditating a coup. They liked to compete among themselves for a turn at the top, and although great families came and went through the centuries, a nobleman of any ability felt that public office was his birthright.

Brutus and his friends could not count on the People to support them, even if the Tarquins had lost popularity through high-handedness. If the fledgling Republic was to have a chance of surviving, they knew that something had to be done to reconcile them to the new order of things. When addressing the People, an early consul took the nervous precaution of ordering his lictors to lower their rods, as a gesture of submission, and had a law passed allowing the comitia centuriata to be the final court of appeal against a sentence of execution or whipping (if ordered inside the city’s pomerium). It was uncertain that this concession would be enough, for in the long run ordinary citizens would notice that, as Cicero remarked, “though the People were free, few political acts were performed by them.”

The crucial point to be made about this new constitution is that it would work only if there was give-and-take. To avert despotism, the forces in the state were almost too evenly balanced one against the other. A spirit of compromise and a refusal to resort to violence were essential to its success.

TARQUIN WAS NOT nicknamed Superbus for nothing. Pride had played a part in his and his sons’ fall, but pride also goaded him to resist and regain his power. Three stories are told about this desperate period during which the fate of the new Republic was in doubt; they are (surely) fictions, but they express, in their sensational way, what Romans viewed as good and bad behavior.

Superbus sent an embassy to the city, which announced his abdication and promised not to use military force to stage a comeback. In a tone of sweet reasonableness, he merely asked for the return of his and his family’s money and effects. His true purpose had nothing to do with his wealth but was meant to test public opinion and to identify supporters. At an assembly Collatinus, Lucretia’s widower and Brutus’s fellow consul, spoke in favor of granting Tarquin’s request, but Brutus, uncompromising as ever, argued vehemently against this. However, the plea was allowed, evidence (it may be) of a degree of continuing affection for Tarquin among the lower classes.

The envoys, under cover of cataloguing, selling, or dispatching the former monarch’s property, suborned some highly placed young men, nephews of Collatinus and, even more appallingly, two sons of Brutus. Treachery ate at the heart of the new state. The conspirators decided they should swear together a fearful oath and, after killing a man, pour a libation of his blood and lay hands on his entrails.

A slave happened to be in the room where the ceremony was to take place one night. He hid behind a chest in the dark when the young men entered and listened to their conversation. They agreed that they would kill the consuls and prepare letters, outlining their plan, for the envoys to take away with them when they went back to Tarquin. The slave reported what had been said and done to the authorities. After a struggle, the conspirators were arrested and the damning correspondence was discovered.

The question now was what to do with the culprits, coming as they did from such high and mighty families. At an Assembly, most people were embarrassed and silent, although a few, wanting to do Brutus a favor, suggested banishment as the most appropriate punishment.

The consul was having none of it. Having considered the evidence, he called each of his sons by name. “Come, Titus, come Tiberius, why don’t you defend yourselves against the charges?” he asked. They did not answer, so he asked them the same question two more times. When they still held their tongues, Brutus turned to the lictors and said, “It is now for you to do the rest.” They stripped the boys on the spot, tied their hands behind their backs, and beat them with their rods. Brutus watched the scene with a fixed, unflinching gaze, even when his sons were then flung to the ground and had their heads chopped off.

The case against the other conspirators was heard, and Collatinus, fearful for his nephews, called for a moderate punishment. When Brutus objected, he shouted sarcastically, “I have the same authority as you, and since you are so boorish and cruel, I order the lads to be released.” Uproar followed, and it looked as though Collatinus would be unceremoniously removed from office then and there. To take the sting out of this constitutional crisis, he agreed to resign peaceably and went into exile.

This belief in the rule of law coupled with an almost inhuman severity were typically Roman qualities. Self-esteem was the gloomy reward for this kind of self-sacrifice. The pragmatic and puzzled Greeks found Brutus’s behavior “cruel and incredible.” Plutarch, whose biographies of Greek and Roman generals and politicians explore the ethics of public life, was taken aback, although he was too polite to moralize. Brutus, he wrote, had “performed an act which is difficult for one to praise or to blame too highly … [it] was either god-like or brutish.”

SUPERBUS WAS DISMAYED by the turn of events. Halfheartedly, he led an army against Rome, fought an indecisive battle, and abandoned the enterprise. He took refuge at the court of Lars Porsenna, king, or lauchme, of the powerful Etruscan city of Clusium. Porsenna disapproved, as a matter of principle, of the expulsion of monarchs, felt solidarity with Tarquin, and feared a domino effect, for what had happened to Tarquin might one day happen to him. So in 507 he agreed to lead an expeditionary force against the new Republic.

When the enemy appeared on the far side of the Tiber, Romans in the fields withdrew into the city, which was soon surrounded. The river had been deemed a strong enough barrier in itself and no defenses had been built along its bank, so the Pons Sublicius, still Rome’s only bridge, was a weak point. If Porsenna’s men could cross it, the war would be lost and Superbus would be back in office.

The officer on guard at the bridge was a patrician, one Publius Horatius Cocles. He had lost an eye in battle—hence his last name, Cocles, which is Latin for “one-eyed.” The enemy suddenly captured the Janiculum Hill and ran down toward the bridge. All the guards panicked and fled except for Horatius and two companions, Spurius Larcius and Titus Herminius, both of Etruscan extraction. They strode to the head of the bridge on the Janiculum bank of the river and prepared to mount a defense. Their aim was to buy time for the men behind them to dismantle the bridge. The bridge was far too narrow for more than a few of Porsenna’s soldiers to advance across it at once, so the three men hoped they would be able to hold them up.

They had pluck and luck, and fought at close quarters, killing many Etruscans. Horatius ordered his companions to save themselves, and struggled on alone despite a spear having passed through one of his buttocks. At last, he heard the crash of the falling bridge behind him, and with a prayer to the god of the river he dived into the water and swam back to the Roman shore. The city was saved, at least for the time being.

In this second, less controversial instance of selflessness, Horatius’s conspicuous courage summed up everything that Romans understood by virtus—a word whose nest of interrelated meanings embraced manliness, strength, capacity, moral excellence, and military talent (from it our softer term virtue is derived). A statue of Horatius was erected in the Comitium. Once, it was struck by lightning, a bad omen, and moved to a lower, sunless spot on the dishonest recommendation of some nationalistic Etruscan soothsayers. When this was discovered, the men were put to death (an overly severe punishment, one may judge, but it illustrates the sacredness of Horatius’s memory). The statue was then moved up to the Volcanal; this terrace on the slope of the Capitol Hill, with an altar of the blacksmith god, Vulcan, was a prestige location where the consuls of the day conducted public business. It stood there for many years and its presence is attested to by the encyclopedia writer Pliny the Elder as late as the first century A.D.

Porsenna settled down to a long siege. Time passed. Food supplies were running low in the city, and the Etruscan king supposed that he would soon gain his objective by doing nothing. A young nobleman, Gaius Mucius, decided to take the initiative. Having obtained the Senate’s permission to attempt to assassinate Porsenna, he slipped into the enemy camp, wearing Etruscan clothes and speaking Etruscan fluently. A sword was concealed on his person. Unfortunately, he did not know the king by sight and dared not risk his cover by asking someone to point him out. But he saw the royal dais and joined a large crowd surrounding it.

It was payday and a well-dressed man on the dais, sitting beside the king, was busy handing out money. This was because he was the treasurer. As most people addressed themselves to him, Mucius could not be certain which was the man and which the master. He made the wrong choice. He jumped up onto the platform and stabbed the treasurer. He tried to make his escape through the crowd, but was caught and brought back before a furious Porsenna.

Mucius betrayed no hint of fear. “I am a Roman,” he said. “My name is Gaius Mucius. I can die as resolutely as I can kill. It is our Roman way to do and to suffer bravely.” He then hinted that there were many other would-be assassins who would follow in his footsteps.

In rage and alarm, Porsenna ordered the prisoner to be burned alive unless he revealed full details of the plot to which he had alluded. Mucius cried out, “See how cheap men hold their bodies who fix their eyes on honor and glory!” He then put his right hand into a fire that had been lit for a sacrifice, and let it burn there as if he felt no pain. The king was deeply impressed and had his guards pull Mucius from the altar. He then set him free, as an honorable enemy.

But Mucius had no intention of letting Porsenna off the hook. Lying with conviction, he said, “I will tell you in gratitude what you could not extract from me with threats. There are three hundred young Romans in your camp, disguised as Etruscans, all of whom have sworn to attempt your life. I happened to draw the shortest straw!” The shaken king decided to abandon Tarquin, negotiate a peace, and go home. Mucius was given the additional name, or cognomen, of Scaevola, meaning “left-handed”—an indirect reference to the fact that his right hand was now unusable.

Like its predecessors, this third heroic anecdote promoted self-sacrifice, but with a curious twist. In principle, Romans disparaged trickery in war—ambushes and similar underhanded behavior. They were realists, though, and regularly practiced deceit without always acknowledging it. Here Mucius, although in agony from his charred hand, still had the presence of mind to lie about the number of Roman assassins lurking in the Etruscan camp—an unchivalrous response, one might think, to Porsenna’s generosity in freeing him.

Scholars are unsure of the historicity of this tale. Perhaps it originated in a trial for perjury, for a hand placed in a fire was the established penalty for breaking an oath or a pledge. Entry into an enemy camp in disguise recalls a Greek legend about an Athenian king who dressed as a peasant in order to reach the camp of an invading army. Part or all of the incident may well be a fabrication. However, its melodramatic quality does not disqualify its moral from being taken seriously.

That said, the idea that Mucius’s valor was enough to persuade Porsenna to give up the war is inherently improbable. In fact, a few clues suggest a completely different sequence of events. In a passing reference, a great Roman historian, probably using old Etruscan sources, reveals that the king did not abandon his siege but actually captured Rome. Reporting the destruction by fire of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol during a civil war six hundred years later, he notes that even “Porsenna, when the city gave itself up to him,” did not harm the building. Also, Pliny the Elder, who has something to say about everything, informs us: “In a treaty granted by Porsenna to the Roman People after the expulsion of the Kings, we find it specifically stated that iron shall be used only for agriculture.” This was a humiliating condition, for it meant that the Romans had to disarm. Another report claims that the Romans gave Porsenna a throne of ivory, a scepter, a crown of gold, and a triumphal robe—in sum, the insignia of kingship. An act of homage, if ever there was one. This is all we are told, but it is a reasonable deduction that, far from seeking to restore Superbus, Porsenna was the agent of his expulsion.

It was Rome’s great good fortune that soon afterward the king of Clusium, continuing his aggression against neighbors, suffered a decisive (and historical) defeat near the Latin town of Aricia at the hands of the Latin League, a federation of Latin city-states, with help from the powerful Greek foundation of Cumae, then under the eccentric but highly effective rule of an effeminate despot who first made his name as a male prostitute, Aristodemus the Queen. Porsenna was killed in the battle, and any threat he posed vanished with him.

Two echoes of these events can be detected in the city. Once the fighting was over, the Romans tended the Etruscan wounded and, in a rare gesture of altruism, brought them back to Rome, where they settled. They were given permission to build houses along a street that led from the Forum around the Palatine to the Circus Maximus; according to the common belief, it was named after them, vicus Tuscus, or Etruscan Street. Second, an old custom at public sales of captured booty survived into the first century B.C.; the auctioneer always included in a sale, as a formality, “the goods of king Porsenna.” This must refer to property the captor of Rome left behind in his new base, before he marched out to meet his unexpected doom.

One way or another, though, the Roman Republic now no longer faced any challenge to its constitutional authority.

7 General Strike

IT WAS THE STRANGEST SPECTACLE SEEN SINCE THE foundation of Rome. A long stream of families could be observed leaving the city in what looked like a general evacuation. They walked southward and climbed a sparsely populated hill, the Aventine, which stands across a valley from the Palatine, the site of Romulus’s first settlement. They were, broadly speaking, the poor and the disadvantaged—artisans and farmers, peasants and urban workers. They carried with them a few days’ worth of food. On arrival they set up camp, building a stockade and a trench. There they stayed quietly, like a weaponless army, offering no provocation or violence. They waited, doing nothing.

This was a mass protest, one of the most remarkable and imaginative in world history. It was like a modern general strike, but with an added dimension. The workers were not simply withdrawing their labor; they were withdrawing themselves.

Of course, some people remained—the rich and those members of the lower classes who for one reason or another could not or would not join their fellows, but Rome was half deserted. The Senate was at its wits’ end. What should, or could, be done if one of Rome’s numerous enemies among its neighbors in central Italy seized the moment and launched an attack? Were the rabble planning violence after a pretense of passivity, and if so how should the Senate respond? Were those who had stayed put secretly mutinous or not, a fifth column? How could civil war be avoided?

As has been noted, all citizens had to buy their own military equipment. Only the wealthy could afford the heavy armor of the legionary soldier and everyone else served as light-armed troops and skirmishers. So, in a set-piece battle with the lower classes, affluent supporters of the status quo were likely to carry the day. But such a victory would be counterproductive. Rome could not survive on the strength of the rich alone. Every state needs its workers.

The ruling élite felt very alone. The decision was taken to send an embassy of older and more tolerant senators to parley with the protesters and persuade them to end their secession, as it was called, and come home. Their spokesman was a former consul, Gaius Menenius Agrippa, a man of moderate views.

He entered the temporary camp on the hill and addressed the crowd. According to ancient sources (as ever, prone to an amusing fiction), he issued no threats and made no concessions. In fact, he appeared to speak off the point, for he launched into a fable:

Menenius Agrippa compared this intestine revolt of the body to the current political crisis and the People’s rage against the state of things, and persuaded his hearers to change their minds. Negotiations opened to find a settlement that the secessionists would accept.

WHAT, THEN, WAS their complaint? These were no revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the constitution. In its first years of freedom, the Republic went through an economic crisis. What caused the slump is uncertain, but a series of military reverses may have had something to do with it. (See the following chapter.) There seem also to have been food shortages. Another long-standing problem was land hunger. Freehold properties for peasants were very small, although they had access to publicly owned land, ager publicus, for grazing or cultivation; however, the rich and powerful tended to control public land, ruthlessly crowding out the smallholder. Archaeologists tell us that fewer public buildings were put up at this time: a Temple of Mercury, the god of business, was a telling exception, but he was to be placated at a time of commercial failure.

But perhaps the itchiest cause of discontent was identified by Cicero. “The People, freed from the domination of kings, claimed a somewhat greater measure of rights,” he noted, adding sourly, “Such a claim may have been unreasonable, but the essential nature of the Republic often defeats reason.”

The poor were burdened with debt and arbitrary treatment by those in authority; they sought redress. Many had reached a point where the only thing they owned with which to repay their debts was themselves—their labor, their bodies. In that case, they were able to enter into a system of debt bondage, known as nexum, literally an interlacing or binding together. In the presence of five witnesses, a lender weighed out the money or copper to be lent. The debtor could now settle what he owed. In return he handed himself over—his person and his services (although he retained his civic rights). The lender recited a formula: “For such and such a sum of money you are now nexus, my bondsman.” He then chained the debtor, to dramatize his side of the bargain.

This brutal arrangement did not in itself attract disapproval, for it did provide a solution, however rough-and-ready, to extreme indebtedness. What really aroused anger was the oppressive or unfair treatment of a bonded slave. The creditor-owner even had the right to put him to death, at least in theory. Livy tells the story of a victim, an old man, who suddenly appeared one day in the Forum. Pale and emaciated, he wore soiled and threadbare clothes. His hair and beard were unkempt. Altogether, he was a pitiable sight. A crowd gathered, and learned that he had once been a soldier who commanded a company and served his country with distinction. How had he come to this pass? He replied:

Uproar followed, and any senator who happened to be in the Forum quickly made himself scarce. Other bonded men identified themselves. When the mob surrounded the Senate House and demanded that the consuls convene the Senate, it began to look as if a popular insurrection was under way. The consuls complied, but it proved difficult to persuade enough nervous senators to turn up and make a quorum.

When the meeting eventually started, news arrived that a Volscian army was marching on the city. There was no alternative but to meet the mob’s demands. One of the consuls issued an edict to the effect that it would be illegal to fetter or imprison a Roman citizen and so prevent him from enlisting for service and, second, to seize or sell the property of any soldier on active duty. This calmed opinion and the protesters willingly joined a military force that marched out of Rome to confront and defeat the invaders.

This did not end the matter, thanks to a contemptuous and choleric consul, Appius Claudius, founder of an immigrant Sabine family that won a name over the centuries for high-handedness. He insisted on pursuing debtors with the utmost rigor of the law, and gave no consideration to the riots that resulted. Leaders of the People began meeting secretly at night to plan their response.

This was the background of the general strike and the withdrawal to the Aventine, which took place in 494, a little more than ten years after the expulsion of Superbus. Those involved saw themselves as members of a gathering called the plebs. In later centuries, the word came to include everyone who was not a patrician or a nobleman—the common people as a whole. But, at this early stage, the evidence suggests that it signified a political or campaigning movement, recruited from the masses but not identical with them. It was not unlike a trade union, but representing all crafts and workplaces.

And, like a trade union, the plebs wasn’t interested in the armed overthrow of the state or in a constitutional upheaval. It did not set itself in opposition to the dominant patrician class. It existed simply to protect and advance the interests of its members, the plebeians. This it did with extraordinary success. The consuls and the Senate had lost their nerve, at least for the time being.

The leadership understood the need to organize. A special assembly was created, the concilium plebis, or Plebeian Council, which voted on tribal lines. At this time, the Roman population was (probably) divided into twenty-one local tribes, to which citizens belonged by virtue of residence. The plebeians decided on resolutions by tribe, with each tribe exercising one vote (a fairer system than voting by centuries in the comitia centuriata). The council’s enactments—plebiscita, whence our plebiscite—were not binding on the Republic itself but were difficult for the consuls and the Senate to ignore. As time passed, the plebs became a state within a state.

The negotiations with Menenius Agrippa and the other senatorial envoys saw a further strengthening of the influence of the plebs. It was agreed that the concilium plebis could elect extra-constitutional officials (probably two in the first instance), tribuni plebis, or tribunes of the plebeians. (By the middle of the fifth century, their number had risen to, and remained at, ten.) The first tribunes to take office were Lucius Sicinius Vellutus, the leader of the encampment on the Aventine, and Lucius Junius Brutus, a vain and pretentious man who so admired the Republic’s first consul that he added the cognomen Brutus so that he could share the same name.

The tribunes’ task was to defend the interests of plebeians within the city’s pomerium. They drew their authority from a lex sacrata, a solemn oath taken by the plebs that they would obey their tribunes and defend them to the death. Anyone who harmed them would be sacer.

This rich and potent word has two definitions, one positive and the other negative. It can signify sacred or holy, consecrated to a deity; thus, the via Sacra, a street that led into the Forum, translates as the Sacred Way. Or it can mean consecrated to a deity for destruction. In this sense, the nearest synonym in English is the much weaker accursed or impious. The sentence Sacer esto—“Be accursed”—was pronounced on a man who by his actions harmed the gods. Such a person was forfeit to the gods, and when he died he fell under their unforgiving care. Anyone who killed him was fulfilling a holy task, committed no crime, and was free of blood-guilt. This was a fearful spell, and it enveloped the tribunes in the invisible but inviolable armor of sacrosanctity.

It was an armor that enabled them to defend plebeians from oppression by the rich and powerful and from arbitrary treatment by a magistrate by bringing them auxilium, assistance. This meant that a tribune could intervene in person and rescue a put-upon ordinary citizen. He enforced his will by coercion, coercitio. He could fine, imprison, or execute anyone who challenged his authority or, even, merely bad-mouthed him. If he was confronted with force, he could threaten the terrifying consequences of the lex sacrata. As one contemporary scholar has neatly put it, this was “lynch law disguised as divine justice.”

At first, the authority of the tribunes was extralegal and formed no part of the Roman constitution. Many unreconciled patricians refused to recognize the new plebeian institutions, and it was not for another two decades that a law gave the plebs the official right to hold its own meetings and elect its own officers. In the middle of the century or later, the tribunes won their greatest and unparalleled power—the right to “intercede” in the business of government. Intercessio, as previously noted, was a polite word for “veto.” A tribune could quite simply cancel any act by an elected official (except a dictator, until the year 300), any law, and any election. He had the authority, if he so wished, to bring the state to a standstill.

EVEN WHEN THE first secession was over (it is unreliably reported that there were to be more of them until a last one in about 287), the plebeians maintained their link with the Aventine. In fact, the hill became a memorial to the plebeian cause, a center for activism and a symbolic alternative city, an anti-Rome. In 493, a couple of years after the crisis, a temple to Ceres, the goddess of grain and fertility, was built. It had been vowed a few years earlier during a famine, and soon became a plebeian stronghold.

The shrine was a small but competitive copy of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, which could be seen in the distance. The resemblance can have been no accident. Like its counterpart on the Capitol, it was built in the old Etruscan manner, with deep eaves and colorful terra-cotta statues on the roof; there were chambers for three divinities, housing not only a statue of Ceres but also one of her daughter, Proserpina, and Father Liber, an Italian version of the Greek god of fertility and wine, Dionysus. It was a rich endowment where many works of art were assembled over the years. The walls were decorated with frescoes, and a famous painting of Dionysus, looted from Greece in the second century, was displayed there.

The plebs used the building for distributing food to the poor during times of shortage, and (along with the neighboring Temple of Diana, whose cult was especially popular with slaves) it was a safe sanctuary for runaways. Temple administrators were appointed, who reported to the tribunes; they were called aediles (after the Latin for temple, aedes).

The aediles soon had an addition to their job description. The consuls and the Senate understood that one way of preserving their power was to ban information about their activities. No reports of their proceedings were published, and the consuls suppressed or even falsified senatorial decrees. By the middle of the fifth century, pressure from the plebs opened up the proceedings of government to general scrutiny. The aediles were authorized to take charge of all the records of the plebs, of the People’s Assemblies, and of the Senate, which they archived at the Aventine, “so that nothing that was transacted should escape their notice.”

IN THE REPUBLIC’S early days, the surviving lists of consuls, the fasti, show that men who were not of the patrician class could be, and were, elected to the chief magistracy. But as time passed the consulship became in practice a patrician prerogative—a bitter response, perhaps, to the advances made by the plebs. The plebs reacted strongly, and what had begun as a campaign against unfair treatment gradually turned into a political struggle between the patrician aristocracy, with its inherited authority and control of the state religion, and the rest of society, spearheaded by the plebeians. It was at this point that plebs came to mean “the People.”

This growing antagonism is well illustrated by an exemplary story of unbending pride and its consequences. Once again, it is an incident that tells a symbolic truth; we do not know how much, if any of it, actually took place. Gnaeus Marcius, a patrician, was a brave soldier and in his youth won the Civic Crown. This treasured honor, a garland of oak leaves, was awarded to anyone who saved the life of a fellow citizen in battle.

In the early fifth century, a war broke out with the Volsci in the south, constant as ever in their belligerence. The Romans laid siege to the enemy town of Corioli. All at once, a Volscian force appeared on the scene and, simultaneously, there was a sortie from the town. Marcius happened to be on guard at the time. He took a specially selected body of men and not only drove back the sally but managed to enter the town himself. He seized a firebrand and threw it into some houses overhanging the city wall. The flames and the wailing of women and children convinced the Volscians outside that Corioli was lost and they withdrew from the fray. The Roman army turned its attention back to the siege, and the town was soon theirs.

The consul in command showered praise on Marcius and, as a reward for his valor, offered him one-tenth of the captured booty—equipment, men, horses—before it was shared out, as was the practice, among the soldiers. He declined, saying fiercely that that would be a payment, not an honor. He accepted only a single horse, and asked that a prisoner, who was a Volscian guest-friend, be released. In response, the consul awarded him the cognomen of Coriolanus, to mark his leading role in the victory.

Back in Rome, Coriolanus stood for the consulship. His distinguished military service made it highly probable that he would be elected. He canvassed for votes in the Forum as candidates were expected to do, and made a good impression by showing off his battle scars. Unfortunately, on election day he made a pompous entry into the Forum accompanied by the Senate and crowds of patricians, and the popular mood swung against him.

Furious at having been rejected, Coriolanus decided to punish the voters. He surrounded himself with some arrogant and showy young patricians and did his best to annoy the tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius. He taunted them: “Unless you stop disturbing the Republic and stirring up the poor by your speeches, I’ll not oppose you with words but with actions.” There was a food shortage, and when a large delivery of grain arrived from Sicily the People assumed that it would be sold cheaply. Coriolanus spoke out against the proposition. “Any such measure on our part would be sheer madness,” he said. “If we are wise, we shall take their right to have Tribunes away from the People, for it makes the Consulship null and void, and divides the city.”

Wiser heads among the nobility felt that Coriolanus was going too far, but he was carried away by his hotheads. The tribunes impeached him at an Assembly, but he refused to come and answer the charges. When the aediles tried to arrest him, patricians drove them away. Evening put an end to the disturbances.

The next day, crowds again gathered in the Forum. The alarmed consuls gave reassurances about the price of market supplies, and the mood in the square lightened. Brutus and Sicinius, however, insisted that Coriolanus should answer accusations that he wanted to abrogate the powers of the People and had offered violence to the aediles. They calculated that either he would humiliate himself by apologizing or, more likely, he would do or say something unforgivable.

They knew their man, and his ungovernable temper. When Coriolanus appeared, he spoke with his habitual scorn and scuffles broke out. Once again, he was whisked away by patricians. It was agreed by all sides that there should be a proper trial. Coriolanus was indicted for planning to usurp the government and appeared before the popular Assembly, which acted as a jury. The prosecution was unable to prove its case and dropped the charge, but another last-minute allegation of wrongful distribution of campaign spoils was added. This threw the accused, who was not immediately ready with an answer. The Assembly voted its verdict by tribes, and Coriolanus was found guilty by a majority of three. He was sentenced to perpetual banishment.

Determined to avenge himself, he left Rome for the Volscian capital, where he volunteered his services. The Volsci were delighted and commissioned Coriolanus, with full powers, to lead an expedition against his former homeland. He carried all before him and soon appeared at the head of the Volscian army outside the gates of Rome. It seemed that the Republic was doomed.

Inside the city all was confusion. The plebs, unnerved, were eager to rescind their sentence, while the Senate, reluctant to pardon treason, rejected the proposal. An embassy was sent to the Volscian camp and a truce agreed, but Coriolanus insisted on harsh terms. The stalemate was broken when his mother, Volumnia, accompanied by his wife, Vergilia, with his children, unexpectedly appeared before him. She pleaded with him to spare the city and negotiate an equal settlement.

He stood stock-still and wordless for some time. “Why have you nothing to say?” asked Volumnia. “It would have been a mark of a son’s respect for his mother to give me what I asked without the need for any pressure. Since I can’t persuade you, I must use my last resource.” With that, she and his wife and children flung themselves onto the ground at his feet, in a humiliating act of self-abasement.

“What have you done to me, mother?” he replied, lifting her up. “You have won. You’ve saved Rome, but you’ve finished me.”

And so she had. As she requested, Coriolanus signed a peace and the Volsci returned home with their now discredited Roman commander. He began giving an account of his conduct of the war before a Volscian assembly, when some men, enraged by his betrayal, cut him down. Not a single person present came to his aid.

BY THE MIDDLE of the fifth century, the conflict between the patricians and the plebs was the major domestic political issue confronting the Republic. Livy has a conservative politician complain, “You were elected as Tribunes of the plebs, not enemies of the Senate.” True enough, but the times were changing. The class of patricians began to react against the advances made by the plebs by transforming themselves into an exclusive hereditary caste with a monopoly on government. Richer non-patricians who had served as consuls in the early years of the Republic found themselves squeezed out. They, in turn, reacted to the patricians’ reaction by joining with the plebs and forming a united front. This union of forces should not be allowed to conceal the fact that the two groups ultimately had different objectives—one sought access to fair treatment, and the other access to high office.

A leading statesman, three times a consul, Spurius Cassius, fell foul of the growing and mutual antipathy. An able negotiator, he brought about a durable peace with thirty Latin cities, the famous Foedus Cassianum (see the next chapter on this page); its text could still be seen and read in Cicero’s day, cut into a bronze column behind the speakers’ platform in the Forum.

Cassius supported the plebeian cause and was the first to put forward a land-reform program. This was unforgivable to the nobles, in possession, as they were, of an unfairly large quantity of ager publicus. In 485, Cassius was accused of seeking to be king, in what looks like a thin case, but once his father had given evidence against him he was found guilty of this most heinous offense against the Republic and put to death. He was declared sacer to Ceres, patron saint of the plebs. It is rather odd that the plebeian leadership did not rescue him from patrician attack, but perhaps the tribunes weren’t self-confident enough to defend him. His house was pulled down, and word has it that the land was never built on again. Livy writes that in his day the site was supposedly the open space in front of the Temple of Tellus, the goddess of Mother Earth. As luck would have it, it commanded a fine view of that populist hill, the Aventine.

For a while, the democratic process was stymied. Beneath the surface, though, pressure began to build toward another explosion. Having won a victory over the records of the Senate, the tribunes pursued their struggle for greater governmental transparency. One of the means by which oligarchies keep power in their hands is by controlling the legal system. In Rome, the laws were not published. They were in the care of the pontifices, who kept them under lock and key as sacred books, and only patricians were allowed to read them. In 462, a tribune launched an attempt to prevent the consuls from acting arbitrarily and demanded that legislation governing the powers of the consuls be fully disclosed. The campaign soon widened to embrace all the Republic’s laws. Magistrates and the Senate mounted a spirited resistance, but in 451 both sides, exhausted by the long quarrel, came to a very remarkable agreement.

The constitution was suspended and the posts of consul and tribune were abolished—but for one year only. A new Board of Ten, the decemvirs, or decemviri legibus scribundis (that is, “ten men for writing the laws”), took charge of the state; they were given plenary powers, and there was no right of appeal against their decisions. Their task was to review, codify, and then publish Rome’s laws. This they did, producing Ten Tables of laws. The next year, the first slate of decemvirs, all of them patricians, retired and were replaced by another, which included some plebeians. Only one man was reappointed: Appius Claudius, grandson of the founding immigrant, with whom he shared the same high temper. The second Decemvirate published two additional Tables and ran into a storm of protest when it decided not to retire at the end of its year but to remain in office for a third year.

This is all very mysterious. Why hand over the Republic and its constitution to a group of people who are in effect a commission of inquiry into one particular topic? They would have been able to get on with their work much more easily if they were not at the same time tasked with running the country. On the other hand, it may be that the decemvirs were meant to be a permanent reform, presumably bringing the plebeians and their “state within a state” inside the constitution. In that case, the election, after one year, of a new college makes perfect sense (although one wonders why the first decemvirs were all patricians). The main problem here is that the literary sources insist that the new magistrates had a temporary role and were to hand over power to consuls and tribunes when their legal review was complete; according to them, the second college was elected only because the first one had not done its job to everyone’s satisfaction.

It is evident that the ancient historians were confused, and modern scholars have indulged themselves with ingenious speculations. The most plausible solution of the riddle—that is, the account that explains most of the data and is consistent with the realities of political life—is that the Decemvirate was intended as a permanent new system of government and that the legal codification was the first major item on its agenda.

One way or another, the reform failed. Livy writes: “The Decemvirate, after a flourishing start, soon proved itself a barren tree—all wood and no fruit—so that it did not last.” His account of what happened next is one of the finest episodes in his long history, although (as ever) it is unclear how much of it is fact and how much fiction or imaginative reconstruction.

After elections were held for the second year, the new decemvirs, informally headed by Appius Claudius, took office. Once in place, they behaved brutally and irresponsibly, and it was whispered that they had bound themselves by oath to hold no more elections and to retain their power indefinitely. One of their two additional legal Tables included a ban on intermarriage between patricians and plebeians—tantamount to a declaration of war by the former against the latter.

The date for new elections in May 450 (then the beginning of Rome’s political year) came and went. Technically, the decemvirs’ term was over, but no new magistrates were nominated. Appius and his colleagues continued in power as if nothing untoward were happening.

A declaration of war by the Sabines and then the Aequi transformed the situation. The shaken decemvirs, well aware of their unpopularity, had no alternative but to consult the Senate. Lucius Valerius Potitus, a senior patrician who sympathized with the plebs, called for an open debate on the political situation, and an angry senator, Marcus Horatius Barbatus, said that the decemvirs were “ten Tarquins.” A motion was put to take no action on Appius’s proposal to raise troops, on the grounds that he held no official position. Eventually, though, after more hard words the Senate gave way and raised no objection to the holding of a levy.

THE WAR WENT badly, and disaffection spread among the soldiery. However, the final crisis, when it came, was neither military nor political in character. As with the fall of the kings, it apparently stemmed from a sex scandal. Appius fancied a beautiful young woman from a plebeian family. The daughter of Lucius Verginius, a serving centurion in the army, she was the fiancée of a former tribune, Lucius Icilius. Roman girls married young, and we may assume that she was in her early teens. She resisted Appius’s blandishments, so he decided on an ingenious kind of compulsion.

He told a dependent or client of his to claim Verginia as his slave and seize her. One morning, the man laid hands on her in the Forum as she was on her way to school. He claimed that, like her mother before her, she was his slave and instructed her to follow him. The girl was dumbstruck with shock and fear, but her nurse had her wits about her and shouted for help. A crowd quickly gathered.

Appius, who was sitting on a nearby platform presiding over a law court, saw that abduction was now out of the question. He therefore summoned Verginia to appear before him and assured everyone that the affair was completely aboveboard. He had excellent evidence, he said, that she had been stolen from his house, where she was born, and palmed off on Verginius.

The mood in the Forum grew ugly, and Appius reluctantly agreed to postpone the hearing until Verginius could be recalled from the front. He insisted that in the meantime Verginia should be cared for by the claimant. By this time, Icilius had arrived and after angry exchanges Appius gave way again and surrendered the girl to her fiancé. The following morning, father and daughter appeared before the court. The proceedings had hardly begun when Appius interrupted and gave his judgment. Verginia was a slave and should be handed over to her rightful owner.

Supporters standing around the girl refused to let her go. An officer of the Decemvirate blew a trumpet for silence, and Appius spoke. “I have incontrovertible evidence,” he said, “that throughout last night meetings were being held in the city for seditious purposes. I have therefore brought an armed escort with me to check disturbers of the peace. It will be wiser to keep quiet. Lictor, clear the crowd. Let the master through to take possession of his slave.”

Until this point, Verginius had been loudly protesting, but he now changed tack. He apologized to the decemvir for his behavior. “Let me question the nurse here, in my child’s presence,” he said. “Then if I find I am not her father, I shall understand and be able to go away in a calmer frame of mind.” Permission was granted, and he led the two women to a row of shops, called New Shops, near the shrine of Venus Cloacina, tutelary spirit of the Cloaca Maxima, the drain that crossed the Forum.

He then grabbed a knife from a butcher. “This is the only way to make you free,” he said, stabbing his daughter to the heart. “Appius, may the curse of this blood rest on your head forever.”

Undismayed, the decemvir summoned Icilius. The crowd was now at fever pitch. Valerius and Horatius joined the press around the young man and ordered the lictors to refuse service to Appius, as he had no official position. At this point, the decemvir’s nerve failed him and, afraid for his life, he wrapped his head in his cloak and disappeared into a nearby house.

The decemvirs refused to resign, and the Senate could not make up its mind what to do. A Roman army in the field made it up for them. They returned to the city and encamped on the Aventine, where they were joined by much of the civilian population. This second secession did the trick. The decemvirs resigned, hoping not to be punished. Appius, though, remarked, “I know well enough what is coming to us.”

He was right. The old constitution was restored. New consuls, Horatius and Valerius, who, in Cicero’s words, “wisely favored popular measures to keep the peace,” were elected, and so was a full roster of tribunes and aediles. Appius was summarily flung into jail. He appealed to the People and a trial was agreed. He kept up the typical haughty manner of a Claudian, but he could sense the rising anger in the city as the day of the hearing approached. He decided not to face his day in court and killed himself.

For a Roman, suicide was an appropriate act in the face of a hopeless situation—nulla spes. But a Claudian was expected to show contempt for circumstance, and Appius’s family pretended that he had died a natural death. His son was in charge of the funeral arrangements, and asked the tribunes and the consuls to convene an Assembly in the Forum, as was the custom with the famous dead, at which he could deliver a eulogy. Permission was refused.

THE FATE OF the decemvirs had important consequences. First of all, it offered future generations a striking moral and human example. Verginius joined Brutus as another heroic killer of his own offspring—bloodshed as virtus. On this occasion, the lesson to be drawn is the high priority the Roman family placed on the purity of its daughters. Sex with an unmarried and freeborn young woman was absolutely prohibited, because it interfered with the hereditary bloodline. (By contrast, going to bed with a non-citizen, whether male or female, was acceptable, if not exactly admirable, behavior).

The collapse of the Decemvirate and the second secession marked a further triumphant phase in the advance of the plebs. The consuls had three important laws passed by the official, constitutional general assembly, the comitia centuriata. The first one endorsed the sacrosanctity of the tribunes of the People and perhaps their power of veto; until now, their status had been guaranteed only by an oath taken by the extraconstitutional concilium plebis, the Plebeian Council. In future, the Republic itself would stand guarantor of the tribunes’ safety. The state within a state had at last joined the state.

The second law concerned citizens’ right of appeal. The basic principle had been dealt with in 509, but the decemvirs had been created specifically without a right of appeal against their decisions. The loophole had to be plugged, and Valerius and Horatius prohibited the Republic from bringing into being any new magistrates not subject to appeal.

Finally, and most controversially, proposals approved by the Plebeian Council were given the force of law, although probably on condition of some kind of external validation. This was a significant advance, for it will be recalled that the council voted by tribes and not according to the unfair division into centuries, which heavily favored the voting power of the wealthy.

ALTHOUGH THE DECEMVIRS came to grief, they had a signal achievement of which they could be justly proud—the Twelve Tables (as the Ten plus the Two came to be called). These codified customary law into statutes, and opened the administration of justice to public scrutiny, at least in principle. Livy writes that they are “still today the fountainhead of public and private law, running clear under the immense and complicated superstructure of modern legislation.” Cicero recalls having to learn them by heart when he was a schoolboy.

Curiously, for a document so highly valued and widely distributed, no text has come down to us. A number of quotations survive here and there in an archaic Latin, but one cannot be quite sure how accurately they have been remembered and how characteristic they are of the whole. The plebs quickly ensured the repeal of the offensive ban on marriage between noble and commoner, but the rest of the Twelve Tables were well received. A strengthening of the rights of wives moderated the domestic despotism of patria potestas, a father’s authority over his family. Other rules facilitated the emancipation of slaves and regulated inheritance, debt, and nexum, interest on loans, contracts, and conveyancing. Extravagance was discouraged.

The emphasis was on day-to-day exchanges between individuals, and there is little concerning the relation of the individual and the community. Thus: “A man might gather up fruit that was falling down onto another man’s farm,” and “Let them keep the road in order. If they have not paved it, a man may drive his team where he likes.”

The sheer strangeness of some of Rome’s early laws puzzles the mind. Here is the grisliest: “Where a party is delivered up to several persons, on account of a debt, after he has been exposed in the Forum on three market days, they shall be permitted to divide their debtor into different parts, if they want to do so; and if anyone of them should, by the sharing out, receive more or less than he is entitled to, he shall not be responsible.” This means, literally, what it says: if there was more than one creditor, they were entitled to cut a debtor’s body into different bits, the shares reflecting the amounts of debt owed.

Shylock would have felt vindicated, with Portia straining for the quality of mercy.

THESE WERE FAMOUS victories for the People, but it was soon obvious that the game was not yet over. Within a few years, there was another dramatic but mysterious upheaval. In 444, the consuls were swept away and replaced by military tribunes with consular powers (tribuni militum consulari potestate). In any given year, there were not fewer than three of these new officials, and often as many as six.

The purpose of this reform is hidden in fog. Some sources say it was a compromise by the patricians, who refused to accept that a consul could be a plebeian but would not object in the case of a governing committee; unfortunately for this theory, plebeians were seldom elected to the new posts, at least at the outset. Others claim that Rome needed more than two army commanders; so why, as sometimes happened, were tribunes elected in years when there was no campaigning to be done? And why did the Republic switch unexpectedly from year to year between tribunes and consuls? The second explanation is perhaps the more convincing, if we add a probable increase in official domestic duties. We should also remember that the decision whether or not tribunes were to be elected, and if so how many, had to be taken in the year preceding the period of office. So guesswork, well-informed, doubtless, but sometimes off the mark, would have been the order of the day.

The struggle between the rich and the poor, the nobility and the People, the patricians and the plebs, called the Conflict of the Orders, had a century and more yet to run. But despite setbacks for the popular cause, most Romans could see that the pendulum of power was swinging irreversibly toward the plebs.

8 The Fall of Rome

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON OF THE FIFTEENTH OF JULY in the year 496 two tall, preternaturally handsome young men, just growing their first beards, were spotted in the Forum at Rome. They were washing their sweaty horses in the spring that rose just by the Temple of Vesta and formed a small but deep pool. They were dressed in armor, and it looked very much as if they had just come from a battlefield. People gathered around them and asked if there was any news, for Rome had dispatched an army against the city’s Latin neighbors.

The youths replied that, yes, there had been a great battle on this day at Lake Regillus and that Rome had been the winner. Then they left the Forum and, although a great search was made for them, they were never seen again.

On the following day, letters arrived from the army reporting on the victory. Old Tarquin Superbus had been present, fighting alongside the Latins, and was wounded in the side. The enemy camp was taken. Apparently, two young men on horseback had suddenly appeared at the head of the Roman cavalry, spearing down every Latin soldier they encountered and driving the enemy into headlong retreat. Clearly they were gods, and the same ones who had appeared a little later in the Forum. Everyone agreed that they must have been the Heavenly Twins, Castor and Pollux, also known as the Dioscuri, or “sons of Zeus.” Helen of Troy was their sister, and they were among Jason’s Argonauts in the search for the Golden Fleece. They acted as helpers of mankind, typically intervening at times of crisis. They had an important shrine near Lake Regillus, so the battle had been fought on their doorstep.

The Roman commander vowed to found a temple in thanksgiving to the brothers and, although the story of their apparition is of course mythical, archaeologists have confirmed that it was built around this time in the Forum, near where they had been seen with their horses. The Romans revered the Heavenly Twins and the temple was twice rebuilt, each time more grandly. The massive ruins of the final version, commissioned by the emperor Tiberius in the first century A.D., can still be seen in the Forum today. The building stood on a high podium; the Senate frequently met inside it and its front steps were topped by a platform, much used for rabble-rousing open-air speeches during the riotous politics of the late Republic.

Every year on the date of the battle, a splendid ritual was conducted in honor of Castor and Pollux. Rome’s official cavalry processed into the city as if coming fresh from a battle and marched past the temple. They were crowned with olive branches and dressed in purple robes with scarlet stripes, along with their military decorations. “It made a fine sight,” wrote a witness of the ceremony in the first century, “and worthy of Roman power.”

TWO HUNDRED YEARS of class struggle at home did not deter the Romans from fighting an almost continuous series of military campaigns abroad. Described in the ancient histories as if they were the wars of a great nation, these campaigns were in fact for the most part raids and counter-raids, state-sponsored brigandage. This was why, to Livy’s “great astonishment,” seemingly decisive victories apparently had no effect, and the Aequi and the Volsci returned fresh to the fray with every new campaigning season. However, in the long run the fighting was destructive and exhausting, for year after year harvests were trashed and buildings burned.

Under the kings, Rome had dominated Latium, but the arrival of the Republic coincided with a debilitating economic crisis. With their victory over Lars Porsenna, the Latins had removed Etruscan influence in the region and they were determined to cut the inexperienced regime at Rome down to size, too. However, the Republic’s new rulers gave notice that they intended to maintain Superbus’s expansionist foreign policy.

The first consuls negotiated a treaty with Carthage. It was a considerable achievement to obtain the recognition of such a great Mediterranean power. The text of the treaty sets out Carthage’s sphere of influence, including Sicily, while also revealing Rome’s (much more modest) pretensions in Latium:

The Romans were exaggerating the extent of their influence. Antium, Circeii, and Tarracina were outside the boundaries of Latium at this epoch and fell squarely inside Volscian territory. But the treaty illustrated Rome’s aggressive intentions, and by implication its desire to regain the ascendancy lost during the upheavals attendant on the fall of the monarchy. Adventures abroad would be a welcome diversion from poverty and indebtedness at home.

The Latins shared a mutual solidarity. Every spring they held a “national” festival, the Feriae Latinae, at which they celebrated their kinship. The central feature was a banquet. Each community brought to the party lambs, cheese, milk, or something similar; a white bull was sacrificed, and its meat was shared among all those attending. The Latin states formed a league from which Rome was excluded, and war soon broke out between them.

Hostilities were not long-lasting. For all the efforts of the Heavenly Twins, the Battle of Lake Regillus was not necessarily the success the Romans claimed it to be. And the opposing forces came to realize that they shared an important interest. They both faced a ring of hostile tribes and communities. Clockwise from the north, there were the Etruscans, especially the rich and powerful city of Veii. Then came the Sabines, the Aequi, the Hernici, and the irrepressible Volsci. Swaths of territory were being lost. Latium was in grave danger of being overrun unless Rome and the Latins reconciled their differences.

In 493, that is what they did. The consul Spurius Cassius (who, as we have seen, was later to be executed for aiming at regnum) negotiated a peace treaty, the Foedus Cassianum, named after him. Its terms were inscribed on a bronze pillar in the Forum, which was still there in Cicero’s time. At its heart lay a commitment to mutual help:

A few years later, the Hernici were brought into the entente. They and the Latins fought in separate contingents under a unified, Roman command. At last, sufficient military force had been assembled to meet the omnipresent threats of invasion from every quarter of the compass.

The background of these small-scale quarrels was a vast movement of peoples from the beginning of the fifth century into Italy and down the peninsula’s Apennine spine. Facing overpopulation and, possibly, pressure from Celts who were beginning to cross the Alps into the Po Valley, Sabellians, mountain dwellers who spoke a language called Oscan, began to migrate southward from their habitat in the central Apennines in search of living space.

The migrations were governed, we are told, by a religious ritual called ver sacrum, the Sacred Spring. A year’s generation of animals and humans was dedicated, or made sacrati, to the god Mars. The animals were sacrificed and the young people, when they had reached the age of twenty or twenty-one, were sent away from their community to look for somewhere else to live. Under a leader they followed an animal, such as a bull, a wolf, or a woodpecker. Where it stopped to rest, there they founded a new settlement or colony.

These bands of young shepherd fighters set off a chain reaction, knocking onto the toe of Italy and threatening the Hellenic cities of Magna Graecia. Oscan-speaking Samnites (a group of Sabellian tribes) flooded down from the hills and invaded fertile Campania. They took over the main cities and set themselves up as a new nation, giving up stock-keeping for farming. The Etruscan ruling class of Capua unwisely let the newcomers in and made them members of the community, only to be butchered en masse after a drunken festival one black night in 423.

For many years Rome only just held its own, much assisted by the Latins, against the Aequi and the Volsci, but in the second half of the fifth century the tide slowly began to turn. A decisive battle against the Aequi was fought on 19 June 431: the fact that the precise date stuck in the Republic’s collective memory suggests how precious the victory was. Lost Latin cities were recovered, and Roman forces at last moved onto the offensive.

IT WAS DURING one of these scrappy campaigns, half skirmish, half full-dress battle, that the story of the staunchly anti-plebeian Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is set. This elderly and distinguished patrician and politician had fallen on hard times and farmed a smallholding of four acres. One day, a delegation arrived from the city and found him at work on his land, perhaps digging a ditch or plowing a field. “Is everything all right?” he asked. No, it was not, but the formalities had to be observed. After a prayer for the gods’ blessing on him and his country, he was invited to go and put on his toga, the uniform of the freeborn Roman.

It was no wonder that he was not wearing it, for it was among the most inconvenient garments ever devised by the mind of a tailor. A vast semicircle of heavy cloth, about ten by twenty feet in extent, it was draped over the body and worn without a fastening. Considerable skill was required to stop it from falling off, and it was drafty in winter and stifling in summer.

Cincinnatus returned duly garbed. Only then was he informed of a grave military crisis. A consular legion was besieged in its camp by an Aequian army. Cincinnatus was to serve as dictator and had been commissioned to march to its relief. He quickly accomplished the task. He made a lenient peace with the Aequi, but only after forcing a ritual humiliation on them; a yoke was set up, consisting of three spears under which the entire defeated enemy was obliged to pass, bowing down and so admitting defeat. Mission accomplished, Cincinnatus resigned the dictatorship a fortnight later and returned to his plow.

Although he is not a fully historical figure, Cincinnatus represented a combination of qualities that the Romans greatly admired, even if they were seldom honored in the observance. These were a simple life, commitment to country values, unquestioning patriotism, even-handedness, and disdain for riches. As usual, this admiration found a topographical expression: the old man’s farm, which lay west of the Tiber and opposite the shipyards at the foot of the Palatine Hill, was preserved, at least in name, as the Quinctian Meadows.

As late as the eighteenth century A.D., Cincinnatus was still regarded as a moral model. The American city Cincinnati was so called as a compliment to George Washington, who was considered a latter-day Cincinnatus for his indifference to power. The example has been followed as frequently in recent times as it was in ancient Rome.

SOME TEN OR so miles north of Rome, at the confluence of two small rivers, a large grassy plateau stands on a tall rocky outcrop. Nearly five hundred acres in extent, it has been farming and grazing land for the past two millennia. Closer inspection points to a hidden, long-lost history. In the summertime, aerial or satellite photographs have revealed discolored markings on the fields, the ghostly patterns of lost edifices, and, here and there, ruined walls and the domes of tombs have broken through the earth.

Here once flourished the famous city of Veii, the southernmost outpost of the Etruscan federation (today bordering on the modern village of Isola Farnese). The plateau at the top of precipitous cliffs was probably covered with loosely scattered buildings. In the center, city blocks were arranged in a grid around a central square. Fine chamber-tombs have been excavated in the nearby hills. The city was easy to defend and amply supplied with water; it could sustain a lengthy siege.

Religion was important to the people of Veii. At its southern extremity a high citadel (today’s Piazza d’Armi) contained a sanctuary in honor of the Queen of Heaven, Juno. A temple complex was built in a cutting on the western side of the Veii hill, where a wonderful terra-cotta statue of Apollo, or Apulu, in Etruscan, was discovered in the early twentieth century. The god, a little more than life size, sports a tunic and a short cloak. His hair is tightly plaited on the head and ends in what look very much like dreadlocks. He smiles the mysterious formal smile, each end of his lips pointing upward, of an archaic Greek statue. He was almost certainly made by the most famous of Etruscan sculptors, Vulca, whom the Tarquins commissioned to decorate the Temple of Jupiter on Rome’s Capitol.

Evidently, Veii was a place of power and wealth, and Livy claimed that it was the “most opulent of all Etruria’s cities.” Well positioned strategically, it controlled wide and fertile lands, covering more than 340 square miles, most of which were kept under cultivation or used for grazing. A network of well-engineered roads linked the center to peripheral bases, facilitating the passage of trade, and a complex system of drainage tunnels (cuniculi, or “rabbit holes”) fertilized a well-populated countryside. The tunnels collected surface water from marshy land and diverted it into another valley: one remarkable cuniculus, the Fosso degli Olmetti, extends for about three and a half miles. Within the city itself, conduits gathered, channelled, and stored water in cisterns. Here was an orderly, productive, and well-managed society.

Sited on the right bank of the Tiber, Veii had been a rival to Rome since the days of Romulus, competing for control of the salt industry and the trading routes up and down the peninsula. If it could cut its commercial links, the city threatened to strangle the newborn Republic. There was no way of avoiding a life-and-death struggle and, as well as routine raiding, serious hostilities broke out from time to time. Veii often had the best of the fighting; on one occasion, its forces reached Rome and alarmingly set up a fortified post on the Janiculum Hill across the Tiber.

One of Rome’s leading clans, the Fabii, dominated the consulship. In the 480s, one Fabius or another was consul for eight successive years. They owned an estate on the border with Veii, and so had an interest in keeping the old enemy firmly in its place. A spokesman for the clan made the Senate a generous offer:

Senators, facing wars at the same time against the Aequi and the Volsci, felt unable to refuse. The clan marched proudly out of Rome and built a stronghold beside the river Cremera, near Veii. Their aim was to reduce Veian raids on Roman (and Fabian) territory. But two years later, in 479, the move misfired. Lured from the safety of their fortification by a tempting and cleverly placed herd of cattle, the tiny Fabian army was enticed into an ambush. The entire Fabii, one hundred and six of them (probably including dependants and hangers-on), were wiped out. Only one member of the clan, a youth, survived.

The story has about it a touch of the celebrated Battle of Thermopylae, in which three hundred Spartans fought to the death against the Persian king Xerxes. Nationalistic historians wanted to show the Greeks that Romans, too, could sacrifice themselves in a high but suicidal cause. Interestingly, though, the Fabii now vanish from the annual list of consuls for well over a decade, when the survivor of Cremera became old enough to hold the supreme office. So the disaster would appear to have some backing in circumstantial fact. Often enough, history throws up accidents that propagandists go on to exploit for their own purposes.

AS THE FIFTH century proceeded, Etruscan power began to wane. A fleet from the Sicilian city-state of Syracuse defeated the Etruscans in a sea battle and harried the Tyrrhenian coast. In the north Gauls crossed the Alps, settled in the Po Valley, and were pressing the once expansionist Etruscans back into their homeland. Veii’s fellow cities failed to help it in its hour of need (perhaps because they had replaced their kings with elected officials, whereas Veii had restored its monarchy), and for much of the long struggle it stood alone against the Romans.

Veii’s war plan was to establish itself on the left bank of the Tiber, threatening Rome and blocking the Via Salaria, the Salt Road. The small town of Fidenae commanded the road and changed hands more than once.

Battles were fiercely fought, and one remarkable act of valor still glitters across time. A consul, Aulus Cornelius Cossus, struck down the king of Veii and won the Republic’s highest award for courage in the field—the spolia opima, “splendid spoils,” awarded to an army commander who personally killed in hand-to-hand combat his opposite number in the field. Cossus struck and unhorsed the king, jumped on his body, and stabbed him repeatedly. Then he stripped the corpse of its armor, cut off its head, stuck it on a spear, and rushed at the enemy, who stepped backward in alarm and dismay.

Cossus carried the spoils in the triumphal procession that was later held in Rome. He then deposited them in the tiny Temple of Jupiter Feretrius, Subduer of Enemies, on the Capitol. The shrine had been dedicated by the legendary King Romulus, the only man previously to have won spolia opima (after Cossus, one final award was made in 222). There the Veian king’s outfit remained on display for hundreds of years, until the end of the first century.

By this time the temple had fallen into disrepair. The roof had collapsed and the interior was open to the elements. Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, was a religious traditionalist. He visited the temple and inspected what was left of the spoils, including a linen corselet on which Cossus’s achievement was inscribed. He had the temple fully restored.

The year 426 saw the start of a twenty-year truce between Rome and Veii. In the last decades of the fifth century, military activity by the Aequi and the Volsci tailed off. It is not clear why. Maybe Roman endurance was at last winning through. Maybe the spread of malaria, plagues, and repeated food shortages took their toll. Maybe fierce tribesmen were dwindling into pacific cultivators. One way or another, there was a breathing space and Rome was able to recoup her energy.

Once the truce had expired, Rome looked for an excuse to deal with Veii once and for all. An insulting remark happened to be made in the Veientine Senate. The reply was a demand for reparations. To no one’s surprise, the ultimatum was refused and, on this slightest of pretexts, Rome declared war and proceeded to lay Veii under siege. To meet the demands of the coming struggle, the army was apparently expanded from four thousand to six thousand men.

At first, the campaign was a failure. The Veientines had stocked their city with military equipment, missiles, and plenty of grain; they had every reason to expect a fortunate outcome. The siege went on and on. The soldiers were accustomed to brief summer campaigns that ended before harvesttime. They were then able to go home and reap the produce of their fields. Stuck permanently in front of Veii’s invulnerable cliffs year in and year out, they simply could not afford the war. Hitherto, every man had served at his own expense. The Senate was now forced to pay them for their service (and levy taxes to cover the cost). A citizens’ militia was beginning the long journey to becoming a professional army.

AN EVENT TOOK place that caused great anxiety among the superstitious Romans. The water level of a lake, a small volcanic crater in the Alban wood, rose much above its normal height despite the fact that there had been no unusual rainfall. This was an alarming prodigy, and the Senate sent a delegation to ask the oracle at Delphi what the gods meant by it.

One day, Roman and Veientine soldiers were exchanging light-hearted insults from their respective guard posts when an old man from Veii unexpectedly appeared and burst into prophecy. Rome would never take Veii, he said, until the water of the Alban Lake had been drained. A Roman sentry said that he wanted to consult the old man on a private matter and persuaded him to come out and talk with him in confidence. Once they were together, the sentry picked up the aged soothsayer bodily and carried him to the guard post.

The old man was then taken to Rome, where he advised the Senate on how to drain the lake. Not surprisingly, he recommended the technology of his homeland—the exacavation of a cuniculus. This was confirmed by Delphi, where the Pythia was for once remarkably un-Delphic; the priestess straightforwardly suggested that the excess water from the lake be used to irrigate the fields. Once that was done, Veii would fall. The Romans swiftly complied and drained the lake down to its original level.

It is hard to know what to make of this tale. At first sight, it seems preposterous and obviously legendary; but, as so often with early Roman history, a substratum of fact can be detected. There is indeed an ancient outflow tunnel from the Alban Lake that can be seen to this day, although exactly when it was originally constructed is uncertain. (It is not far from Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence.) If there was a rationale for the drain, apart from the musings of an antique seer, it may have been designed to prevent seepage into a malaria-generating bog. In other words, it was a health and safety project that, for some unguessable reason, imaginative Roman authors translated into a prediction of Veii’s doom.

We have not heard the last of cuniculi. One of Rome’s most celebrated heroes was elected to the emergency post of dictator and entrusted with the task of bringing the siege to a successful conclusion. This was Marcus Furius Camillus, who, during a long career, was the holder of every senior office in the Republic and five times a dictator. He arranged for the digging of a tunnel underneath Veii’s central fortress, no easy task, as Livy describes it:

The crisis of the campaign was approaching. Like most of his compatriots, Camillus was plagued by superstitious fears. For him, it was crucial that he win over to his cause the gods of Veii and, in particular, the city’s divine protectress (and his own favorite in the Olympian canon), Juno, known in Veii as the Etruscan Great Goddess, Uni Teran. Her shrine in the citadel housed an archaic wooden statue of her, a highly prized object of reverence. The Romans had a ceremony for every occasion, and at this crucial juncture Camillus conducted an evocatio—a calling out of the deity from her home at Veii. At an army parade, he called on Juno to “leave this town where you now dwell and follow our victorious arms into our city of Rome, your future home, which will receive you in a temple worthy of your greatness.”

The tunnel was a great success. It was said that the ruler of Veii was offering a sacrifice, and a priest declared that he who carved up the victim’s entrails would be victorious in the war. The diggers overheard the remark and immediately broke through the floor into the fortress, snatched the entrails, and took them at once to Camillus. Even Livy’s credulity was stretched. He wrote that this tale was “too much like a romantic stage play to be taken seriously. I feel it is hardly worth attention either for affirmation or denial.”

However, once again, archaeologists have found a pea of fact beneath a mattress of invention. Excavations at the spot on the Veian peninsula where the Romans must have encamped have shown that the rampart ran over some earlier drainage cuniculi. They had been filled in with tightly packed shards, stone, and earth, presumably with defense in mind. It is hard to resist the conjecture that the Romans discovered one or more of these tunnels, emptied them out, and went on to storm the city.

Whatever the case, Veii fell to a determined assault. There was much slaughter, but Camillus ordered his men to spare everyone not bearing arms. He was not sentimental, though, and Veii was emptied and destroyed. On the following day, all movable goods were taken from the city and the surviving townsfolk were offered for sale as slaves. (In fact, it would seem that the market could not absorb such a large number of people. Now that the Veientine state had been abolished, there was nothing else that could be done with the unsold remainder but to give them the only civic status available, Roman citizenship.)

Then it was time to transport Juno and the temple treasures to Rome. Young soldiers were detailed to lift the statue from its pedestal, an act that seemed to them like sacrilege. For a lark, one of the boys shouted, “Juno, do you want to go to Rome?” The statue nodded its head in awe-inspiring reply. Livy was having none of this, either:

Juno was given a temporary base, probably the plebeian sanctuary of Diana, while Camillus lived up to his word and built a new temple nearby, which he dedicated to the Queen of Heaven a few years after the destruction of Veii. We can only presume that, for the time being, the goddess had set aside her long enmity of Rome, mollified by an attractive new home.

The city became completely uninhabited, as a first-century poet lamented: “How sad, ancient Veii! You were once a mighty kingdom and a throne of gold was set in your market place. Now inside your walls the shepherd loiters and sounds his horn. Men reap cornfields above your graves.”

The Romans were hugely proud of their victory. Claiming that the siege had lasted ten years, they presented the long campaign against Veii as their version of the Trojan War. And, strategically, it was indeed a great achievement. It signaled the weakening of Etruscan power and the emergence of Rome as the leading state in central Italy. There was also a large domestic benefit. Allotments of the ager Veientanus were distributed to Roman citizens, alleviating plebeian claims of poverty and perhaps helping, at least for now, to mitigate the problem of indebtedness.

But, as so often happens, pride was followed by a fall—in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the fall of Rome itself. Even Livy, who loyally took the edge off every Roman misfortune, admitted, “Calamity of unprecedented magnitude was drawing near.”

IN 390, A rumor spread that a vast horde of barbarians was moving down Italy—with what purpose in mind nobody knew, but everyone agreed that they posed a terrible threat. For two centuries and more, Celtic tribes had overflowed from their heartlands in central Europe and Asia, crossed the Alps, and (as already noted) poured down into northern Italy, where they settled, and looked covetously at the lands of their southern neighbor, the Etruscan Empire.

The civilized world—that is to say, the Greeks and their admirers the Romans—did not know what to make of these rough, unpredictable tribesmen. The usually reliable Polybius, a Greek who spent much of his life in Rome, wrote:

The Celts, or (as the Romans liked to call them) the Gauls, were usually tall, well-built, and blond. They wore their hair long, whitening and stiffening it by frequent washing in limewater. They then pulled it back over the head so that the general effect was of a horse’s mane. They let their mustaches grow over their lips so that “when drinking the beverage passes, as it were, through a kind of strainer.” It is reported that male homosexuality was very common, and that men particularly liked to have two boys at a time in bed with them: “Young men offer themselves to strangers and are insulted if the offer is refused.” Women, too, enjoyed considerable sexual freedom, and were entitled to divorce husbands who failed to perform their marital duties. Unlike Greek or Roman women, they played a respected part in public life, acting as ambassadors and, on occasion, fighting in battles.

The Celts were undisciplined, gorged themselves on food and drink, and were always quarreling with one another. Politically they seemed to be fickle and inconsistent; they found it difficult to take a long-term view and stick to it.

It is hard to know how much weight to place on these accounts, for we have no counterbalancing records from the Celts themselves. Taken as a whole, the portrait of a race of noble savages is coherent, but we must not forget that it reflects the fears of the observer as much as it does the quality of life as experienced by a Celt. It is telling that the Greco-Roman authors pay no attention whatsoever to the extraordinary skill and beauty of Celtic metalwork and crafts.

What is certainly the case is that the Celts were fine warriors and knew how to frighten an enemy army out of its wits. Completely fearless, they rushed naked into battle, with their long hair streaming and strange war cries, accompanied by harsh trumpet blasts. Their cavalry rode with iron horseshoes, a military innovation, and the infantry carried finely tempered slashing broadswords. The Celts were able to muster very large forces and were hard to defeat. The news of their imminent arrival in central Italy was seen, rightly, as an emergency order.

Myriad warriors and even greater numbers of women and children arrived before Clusium, an important Etruscan city and once Lars Porsenna’s base. A foolish story is told that they were tempted there with a promise of Clusium’s large supplies of wine, and that, responding to an appeal from the city, the Romans sent some ambassadors, who met and remonstrated unsuccessfully with the Celtic king, Brennus. The ambassadors then fought alongside the army of Clusium in a vain attempt to repulse the Celts. This broke the principle of diplomatic neutrality, and infuriated Brennus, who ordered a retaliatory march on Rome, only eighty miles away.

What really seems to have happened is that Brennus led a band of marauders intent on plunder, not a people in search of Lebensraum. It is very possible that they were in the pay of the turannos of Syracuse, Dionysius, whose principal aim in these years was to undermine Rome’s ally, the Etruscan trading entrepôt of Caere, and the Greek cities of Magna Graecia. If that was so, the Celts were passing through on their way to southern Italy.

The Romans may have sent an advance force north to discover the truth behind the reports of a Celtic advance, but what is certain is that a hastily assembled Roman army confronted the invaders in a great battle at the little river Allia, a tributary of the Tiber. The numbers on each side are uncertain, but perhaps two legions, or about ten thousand Romans faced thirty thousand Celts. To avoid being outflanked, the Roman commander stretched his line out, but too thinly. Presumably, the well-to-do heavily armed legionaries were posted in the center, with the poorer citizens as light-armed troops on each wing. The center could not hold, fractured, and gave way.

It should have been a rout with high casualties, but Brennus had expected a larger enemy army. Suspecting an ambush, he held his men back. Many Romans were able to get away, and a good number escaped to nearby Veii, whose citadel was eminently defensible.

However, the way to Rome lay open.

LIVY DESCRIBES WHAT happened next in one of his great set pieces. It was a mark either of overconfidence or carelessness or both that Rome was not encircled by a protective wall. Earthen ramparts and hills were deemed a sufficient defense. Even worse, most of the army was either dead or cowering in the ruins of Veii. The city was undefended. There was nothing to stop Brennus from marching in and giving the Romans the treatment they had meted out to the people of Veii.

The Celts could hardly believe their eyes and, once again, feared a trap. They watched and waited until evening fell. Inside the beleaguered city, the most was made of a night’s reprieve. The handful of remaining troops took up position on the Capitol, where they should be able to hold out indefinitely. Civilians were allowed to take refuge there, too, but many others, especially of the poorer sort, poured out of the city gates across the wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, to the Janiculum Hill and vanished into the countryside. Vesta was goddess of the civic hearth and guarantor of Rome’s permanence. Her priestesses, who were vowed to chastity, the Vestal Virgins, debated what to do with the sacred emblems. It was decided to bury those that could not be moved and to travel with the remainder to the friendly Etruscan city of Caere. The Vestal Virgins’ main task was to tend the goddess’s eternal flame, and presumably they took it with them in the shape of a torch or a brazier. Abandoning their native land, they set off on foot but were given a lift by a patriotic carter. Rome was dead.

With morning came the Celts. The citadel was now safe, but, rather than hide away, senators decided to consecrate themselves to the underworld and death in a strange ritual called devotio (whence, in passing, our word devotion). The sacrifice of their lives would bring the same devotio onto the heads of their enemies—in other words, it would consecrate the Celts to their destruction, too. Only a current holder of state authority (a consul, say) could devote himself, but a former public official could regain his imperium by the ritual gesture of clasping his chin. The senators went home and dressed themselves in their old robes of office. They sat quietly, awaiting their fate in the courtyards of their houses.

The porta Collina, the Colline Gate, at the northern tip of the city, had been left open, and it was here that the Celtic invaders made their entry. They proceeded coolly and calmly down the long, straight street that led from the gate to the foot of the Capitol and then the Forum. They wandered around the square, gazing at the temples and the citadel. After sightseeing, they fanned out through the city in search of booty. To their surprise, they found that while the dwellings of the poor were locked and barred, the mansions of the rich lay unprotected.

They were startled by the senators, sitting stock-still, and one Celt touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirius, thus interrupting the ritual devotio gesture. The offended Papirius at once hit the man on the head with his ivory staff. The furious Celt butchered him on the spot, and the other senators soon met the same fate. The devotio was complete.

Looting now began in earnest. Houses were ransacked and set on fire. Many public and private records were consumed in the conflagration, greatly hindering the work of Roman historians like Livy. But the citadel held out. The Celts settled down for a siege.

CAMILLUS WAS NURSING mixed feelings. The victor of Veii had been sent into exile because of a disagreement over distribution of the booty. Sensing that he had become old and useless, he seethed with resentment at his lot. He lodged in a small town not far from Rome and watched events from an impotent distance.

Some lucky star brought Celtic raiders to his vicinity, for it aroused his patriotic wrath and he led the townsfolk in a successful sortie. News of this small victory spread quickly. At Veii, the site of his most famous exploit, the Roman soldiery were coming to regret Camillus’s absence, and after consultation with the Senate he was recalled to become dictator for the second time, the Republic’s fatalis dux (its predestined leader), and resume command of the army.

He was lucky not to have arrived too late, for the Capitol very nearly fell to the invaders. What happened was one of the most delightful stories of Roman history. The Celts noticed that the rocky ascent up the hill from where the Temple of Carmenta, the goddess of childbirth, stood could be easily climbed. One starlit night, an unarmed man was sent to reconnoiter the route and a scaling party followed after him. Although it was a scramble, they made it to the top of the cliff not far from the huge Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. The Roman guards heard nothing, and sleeping dogs lay undisturbed.

Livy continues the narrative:

Time passed slowly in the heat of summer. Good hygiene was always difficult to maintain in an ancient army, and an infection spread through the Celtic camp. The invaders lost the energy to burn corpses separately at individual funerals and piled them up in heaps for mass cremation in the Forum Boarium, near the city end of the Pons Sublicius. As late as Livy’s day, the spot was still known as Busta Gallica, or the Celtic Pyres.

As for the defenders on the Capitol, time was no less an enemy. In their case, the challenge was hunger rather than disease. They disguised their shortage of supplies by flinging loaves of bread down into the Celtic outposts. But hope as well as food was beginning to fail. Men were hardly strong enough for guard duty. If only Camillus would arrive soon and relieve the city. But although he was believed to be near at hand, there was neither sight nor sound of him.

Brennus let it be known that he and his horde would abandon Rome for no very great sum of money. So the Senate met and authorized the military tribunes to arrange the terms. A price—a thousand pounds of gold—was agreed. Livy writes:

At the eleventh hour, Camillus turned up at the head of his army. He ordered the gold to be removed and the Celts to leave. As he was dictator, the military tribunes had lost their imperium and their entente with Brennus was null and void. A confused engagement followed, and the surprised Celts withdrew from Rome. A more regular battle was fought eight miles or so east of Rome, on the road to the town of Praeneste. The Celts had had time to reorganize themselves, but for all that the omnicompetent Camillus was again victorious. The Gallic camp was captured and the army annihilated. The greatest danger in which the Republic had ever found itself had passed.

THIS EXCITING NARRATIVE is a blend of fact and fiction. The basic theme, the sack of Rome by the Celts, is indisputable. The humiliation was never forgotten, and Brennus’s proud taunt, vae victis, was an indelible affront. Worse, the barbarians may have gone, but not forever.

For many generations, they remained just beyond the range of peripheral vision, their possible return an abiding nightmare. And, as we shall see, from time to time throughout the history of the Republic the Celts did march down again into the peaceful Italian peninsula. During the prolonged death throes of the Roman Empire many hundreds of years later, successive waves of barbarians followed one after another, and in the fifth century A.D. the much feared calamity occurred. Rome was sacked for a second time, at the hands of a new Brennus—king of the Visigoths, the fearsome Alaric. It would not be long thereafter before the Western Empire itself collapsed.

Elements of the story are not to be trusted, though. The exile of Camillus was probably an invention, to give him an alibi during the sack. His final victory over the Celts and the saving of the gold sound very much like false excuses. We may guess that in fact the invaders left at their leisure, with the classical equivalent of Danegeld in their pockets. Polybius says that “at that moment an invasion of their own territory by the Veneti [a tribe in the area where today’s Venice is located] diverted their attention, and so they made a treaty with the Romans, handed back the city and returned home.”

It took a surprisingly short time for Rome to recover. Having your city looted and burned is obviously a cataclysm. It is reported that some traditional enemies—the Etruscans, the Aequi, and the Volsci—tried their luck and attacked Rome when it was down, but to little effect. Some members of the Latin League suspended or abandoned their alliance with Rome, which dominated the federation. The fact that the city still had most of its army intact, and that Veii and its territory remained in the Republic’s hands, was of far greater importance. New grants of citizenship were awarded to people in the Veii region and in two neighboring towns. Land was distributed to Roman citizens, and in 387 four new tribes were created in the newly conquered territory. None of these measures sound like the actions of a state in crisis.

As for the Celts, they had not disappeared, but it was thirty years before they returned. By that time Rome had fully reestablished its power. The city was quickly, although haphazardly, rebuilt. According to Livy:

Greater efficiency marked the building of a wall around the city’s perimeter to insure against another invasion. Its circuit ran for about seven miles, longer than the earlier earthworks. In later times, as we have seen, it was attributed to King Servius Tullius, but in fact work began in 378. Up to twenty-four feet high and twelve feet wide, the wall consisted of large rectangular blocks of tufa from the annexed quarries of Veii. On a plateau running southward behind three of the city’s hills—the Quirinal, the Viminal, and the Esquiline—the wall gave way to a vast earthen rampart, revetted with stone, which stood behind a ditch 100 feet wide and 30 feet deep. This ambitious and costly enterprise was funded by an unpopular tax, which bore down heavily on the poor, but once complete Rome was as good as impregnable.

These great Servian fortifications survive in part to this day, but they long ago lost their defensive importance. By the first century, suburbs extended far beyond them, “giving the beholder the impression of a city stretching out indefinitely.” The walls themselves, smothered by buildings, became almost invisible.

9 Under the Yoke

HALF A CENTURY AFTER THE CELTIC INVASION CAME another disaster, as humiliating and apparently as complete as the first. An entire Roman army surrendered, en masse, to the enemy, Samnite hill-tribesmen from the central Apennines. This was a more serious threat to Rome’s existence than the fact that the city had been without walls when the barbarians came.

In 321, both consuls led their legions, one each probably, southward along the route of what in a few years’ time would be Rome’s first great road, the Appian Way. The Samnites had recently suffered a heavy defeat and disconsolately sued for peace. The Senate had refused to negotiate, and the Samnites were so furious that they recovered their morale. They laid a trap for the approaching Romans at a place called the Caudine Forks (furculae Caudinae).

According to Livy, this was a small, grassy, and well-watered plain surrounded by steep wooded hills. Two narrow defiles at its western and eastern ends were the only means of entry. The very able Samnite leader, Gaius Pontius, advanced his army in the greatest possible secrecy and set up camp nearby. He sent out ten soldiers disguised as shepherds, with orders to scatter and graze their flocks not far from Roman outposts. Whenever they came across enemy raiding parties, they were all to tell the same story—that the Samnite army was campaigning miles away to the south, in Apulia. A rumor had already been spread to this effect, and the shepherds’ reports would be convincing confirmation.

The ruse worked, and the consuls decided to make their way to the Samnite legions by the shortest route, even though it meant marching, via the Caudine Forks, straight across the middle of enemy territory. They entered the first, western gorge and were shocked to find the second obstructed by a barricade of felled trees and huge boulders. Samnite troops were seen at the head of the pass.

The Romans turned back, only to realize that the road by which they had arrived at the Forks was now blocked with its own barricade and armed men. They were trapped. The consuls ordered their legionaries to set up a full Roman camp, with trenches, ramparts, and palisades, although this seemed a pointless exercise.

Meanwhile, the Samnites could not believe their luck, and were unsure what to do next. Pontius sent a letter to his father, Herennius Pontius, elderly and astute, asking for guidance. Herennius replied, “My advice is that you should let all the Romans go away free.” His opinion was brusquely rejected and he was asked to think again. In that case, he said, “they should all be put to death, down to the last man.”

Pontius feared that his father’s once acute mind was softening, but he gave way to a general wish that the old man be brought to the camp for a consultation in person. He declined to change his opinion, but gave his reasons. Livy writes:

But what if the Samnites took a middle course, letting the Romans go unhurt but imposing terms on them as defeated men according to the laws of war? Herennius would have none of it. “Your idea will neither win friends nor remove enemies,” he said. “The Roman People does not know how to lie down under defeat.” His advice was rejected for a third and final time, and he went home.

The Romans made a number of unsuccessful attempts to break out. Food stocks began to run very low, and the consuls sent a delegation to Pontius to seek terms. If they failed to win a peace, they would challenge the enemy to fight. “You Romans never admit catastrophe even when conquered and taken captive,” the Samnite leader responded. “So I will send you under the yoke unarmed, with a single item of clothing each.” (By “yoke,” he meant the arch made of three spears beneath which defeated and captured soldiers were obliged to walk in return for their freedom.) He added that the Romans should immediately evacuate Samnite territory and withdraw its two forward colonies at Cales and Fregellae.

It was self-evidently a disgraceful settlement, but, thought the consuls, better than the alternative—the complete destruction of their army. However, Livy assures us, they were only in a position to offer a personal guarantee that Rome accepted the terms (a sponsio). A final treaty (or foedus) would have to await approval by the Assembly at Rome. The trusting Pontius took the point and allowed the legions to depart in return for a sponsio, to which the consuls and senior officers subscribed. However, he demanded six hundred Roman cavalry as hostages. A dramatic scene ensued:

Once the troops were back in Rome, the public mood darkened. Many people went into mourning, feasts and marriages were canceled, shops closed, and official business in the Forum suspended. New consuls were elected, and the Senate held a debate on whether or not to endorse the sponsio. One of the defeated commanders advised his colleagues, self-sacrificially, to reject it on the bare-faced excuse that he and his fellow consul had not acted of their own free will but from necessity, thanks to the enemy’s treacherous ambush. But as a matter of honor, he went on, he and all the other army officers involved should be handed over to the Samnites.

This was agreed, but, on their arrival at the Samnite camp, Pontius refused to accept their surrender. He argued that if the treaty was refused everything should revert to the status quo ante. In other words, the legions should go back to the Caudine Forks. “You are never without a reason for not keeping your word in defeat?” he asked. “You agreed with us on a peace, so that we should return you the legions we had captured. Now you have nullified that peace. And you always give your fraud some semblance of legality.”

It is hard to disagree with this judgment, which is remarkable in that it is Livy, the most patriotic of authors, who put these words into the mouth of the Samnite commander. The Romans placed a very high value on fair dealing. On this occasion, they claimed to be keeping to the letter of the law, but one has the impression that they sensed, guiltily, that they were not keeping to its spirit. According to one report, the Romans, far from being grateful to the Samnites for letting their soldiers go, “actually behaved as if they had been the victims of some outrage.”

In any event, war resumed and the Romans allegedly won a resounding victory, after which they compelled Pontius and his fellow captives to submit to the yoke themselves, a remarkable example of instant and mirror-imaged retribution that probably never took place.

In fact, we have good grounds for supposing that the official version of the affair does not square with what actually occurred. Some ancient writers asserted that the agreement between the warring parties was in fact a foedus, not a sponsio, and that Roman apologists tried to hide the fact. Cicero, for example, an intelligent and thoughtful voice, twice speaks of a foedus.

What happened to the six hundred hostages? These are the dogs not barking in the night. Were they killed, or released? A suspicious silence hangs over their fate. They are needed to back up a sponsio, but once a foedus was in place they would become superfluous and be handed back. But if the sponsio was rejected, the presumed consequence would be their execution. From the fact that nothing is said about them, we may infer that a treaty was approved by the Roman Assembly. It looks very much as if the aborted sponsio was a later invention designed to excuse Roman bad faith.

A further problem muddies the narrative. The description of the Caudine Forks is only very roughly right. We are not absolutely certain where they are, but the only plausible candidate is a pass in Campania between the two modern Italian towns of Arienzo and Arpaia, which was helpfully known in ancient times as Furculae or Furcae—namely, “forks.” Here there were two entrances leading into an area surrounded by mountains and steep hills, as Livy says. However, while the eastern gorge was narrow enough to be easily blocked, the western defile was two miles wide—far too long for the Samnites to have erected barricades capable of bottling in a Roman army. There must have been a battle of some sort that led to a surrender. Why the inaccuracy? Perhaps because it was less shameful to capitulate to deceit and trickery than to do so after a straightforward defeat in the field.

It is certain that the Romans suffered a devastating military setback at the Caudine Forks. It is now too late to establish the details of what took place beyond doubt, but a plausible scenario might run as follows: The Samnites forced a battle by blocking the eastern defile of the Caudine Forks and then turning up en masse at the western entrance. A battle ensued and the Romans were routed but had nowhere they could escape to, so they surrendered. A sponsio was agreed while Rome was informed and approved a foedus.

It is likely that the terms of the foedus were abrogated and hostilities resumed. This was a dishonorable thing to do (and something, as far as possible, to be hidden from posterity), but there is evidence of continued fighting (in 319, a Roman general is recorded as celebrating a triumph de Samnitibus). Alternatively, it has been contended that Rome in fact abided by the treaty it had accepted and that hostilities ceased for a few years. But if that was the case it is difficult to explain why some ancient authors should concoct a canceled sponsio and others a broken foedus, for both of these acts are more to Rome’s discredit than a perfectly respectable truth.

The debacle of the Caudine Forks and its aftermath is a useful reminder, if that were needed, that, whatever their high principles, the Romans were more than capable of cynical and self-interested behavior. They criticized Pontius for outmaneuvering an army by a trick, but throughout their history many of their own generals acted just as deceitfully. Cassius Dio judged that the Samnites were unfairly treated, and his assessment is not far off the mark: “It is not inevitable that those who are wronged should conquer; instead, war, in its absolute sway, adjusts everything to the advantage of the victor, often causing something that is the reverse of justice to go under that name.”

THE FIFTY-YEAR INTERVAL between Rome’s two massive setbacks illustrates its capacity to regenerate after failure. The Republic, battered but unbowed, pressed ahead with its program of reconciliation at home and expansion abroad.

The Conflict of the Orders had not gone away. Once the dust had settled after the Celtic invasion, domestic hostilities resumed, with a vengeance. Debt remained a crushing burden for the poor, whose landholdings were too small to make even basic subsistence easy, and wealthy plebeians were still finding it hard to gain access to high office. In effect, the patricians maintained their monopoly on power.

Some fifty-three patrician clans, or gentes, are known to have existed during the early Republic, making a closed community of not more than a thousand families. There was a small inner ring of especially powerful clans—in particular the Aemilii, the Cornelii, and the Fabii. To them can be added the immigrant Claudii. In total, the patricians amounted to one-tenth of the citizen population of Rome and possibly not more than one-fourteenth.

A revolutionary moment seemed to be approaching, but once again the Romans found their way to a workable compromise. Plebeians wanted the state to release plots of ager publicus, public land, to individual farmers rather than hold it as common land. We do not know how much of Veii’s land was expropriated by the Republic, but it may have been half or even two-thirds. Two tribunes of the plebs, Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextius, got themselves reelected year after year and argued for root-and-branch reform. In 376, they put forward three bills, the Licinio-Sextian Rogations (a rogation is a proposal placed before the People’s Assembly for its decision), aimed at breaking the dominance of the patricians. The first one dealt with debt: interest already paid should be subtracted from the original debt, and what remained should be paid in three equal annual installments. The second forbade anyone to own more than five hundred iugera (one juger was about two-thirds of an acre) of public land. The third abolished the post of military tribune and brought back the system of two consuls. The real innovation here was that, in future, one consul was always to be a plebeian.

As Livy tells the story, the tribunes repeatedly called an assembly, but a body of armed patricians refused to allow the voting to go ahead. “Very well,” shouted Sextius. “As you are determined that a veto shall be so powerful, we will use that very weapon to protect the People. Come on, Senators, call an assembly for the election of Military Tribunes. I’ll see that you get no joy out of that word ‘veto,’ which now so delights your ears.” This was not an idle threat, for the tribunes aborted the elections, at least for a year.

The crisis trundled on angrily for a decade. In 368, the number of commissioners who looked after the Sibylline Books and organized the annual Games of Apollo was increased from two patricians to ten men, five of whom had to be plebeians; these were the decemviri sacris faciundis. It was clear which way the wind was blowing, and the following year the aged Camillus presided over a historic compromise. The Licinio-Sextian Rogations were finally passed and, as a concession to the opposition, the post of praetor was created as a junior colleague for the consuls to be reserved for patricians. The praetor became the acting chief magistrate in Rome when the consuls were away on military business, as they often were, and came to specialize in running the law courts.

It is perhaps no accident that in this year Camillus promised a Temple of Concord, for the new legislation went a long way toward pacifying the plebeian movement. The poet Ovid wrote:

A small mystery adheres to this gift: the grateful People absolved the old dictator from his pledge and said they would fulfill it in his place, but for some reason failed to do so. Its site, in the Forum just below the Capitol, was designated for the temple and kept as an open space. The temple was finally built in the second century, following the violent death, at the hands of senators, of a turbulent tribune—a bitter irony.

The Rogations did not finally settle the great quarrel between patricians and plebs, and further measures of social appeasement were undertaken. Above all, the problem of indebtedness remained despite the lawgivers’ best intentions. In 326, a scandal led to the reform of debt bondage, the nexum. An attractive youth sold himself into bondage to a creditor of his father. The creditor regarded the youth’s charms as an additional bonus to sweeten the loan and tried to seduce his new acquisition. Meeting resistance, he had the boy stripped naked and flogged. Bleeding from the lash, the boy rushed out into the street. An angry crowd gathered and marched on the Senate House for general redress.

The consuls, taken aback, conceded the point. They won the People’s approval of a law limiting the nexum to extreme cases, which, in addition, had to be adjudicated by a court. As a rule, to repay money lent him, a debtor’s property could be seized, but not his person. This was tantamount to abolition, and, in Livy’s slightly overheated opinion, “the liberty of the Roman People had, as it were, a second birth.”

IT IS AT this point that we meet the first truly historical, truly alive personality in Rome’s story so far. This was Appius Claudius Caecus, or the Blind (he lost his sight toward the end of a long life). He was as arrogant and awkward as most of his clan. An individualist to the core, he wrote a series of sharply turned moral sayings in verse. The most famous asserts, “Every man is the maker of his own luck.”

A wealthy patrician, Appius Claudius served twice as consul and once as dictator. A radical populist who aimed to win a following among the masses, he was a ferocious partisan for the plebs, as he made clear during his famous censorship of 312. Every four years or so, two censors were elected to hold office for eighteen months. They were usually former consuls, and although they did not have imperium, they wielded great influence. The post was regarded as the pinnacle of a Roman’s career.

Censors had two main tasks. Their primary function was to make up and maintain a comprehensive list of Roman citizens. They were also charged with the supervision of morals; if they agreed that a citizen deserved censure, they set out their reason and marked his name on the list. This had the effect of disqualifying him from his tribe and removing his voting rights. Sometime in the second, third, or the fourth century, the censors took over from the consuls the responsibility for appointing senators, who served for life. (Over time, membership became ex officio for present and former public officials.) They also reviewed the behavior of senators and excluded those they deemed guilty of serious misconduct.

Appius Claudius seized the hour. His basic aim was to bring plebeians into public life, and he particularly wanted to further the interests of the lowest of the low, the landless urban population. These were the capite censi, the “head count”; they were so poor that they did not have any property to be assessed in the census and so were disqualified from military service. No reformer had ever tried to help this group before.

Some were not necessarily without funds but owned no land or property—for example, freedmen and their sons. With astute generosity, the Romans often liberated their slaves (although they remained in the owner’s clientela), and so, in effect, gave them citizenship. However, they were not allowed to run for elective office. Scandalously, the radical new censor enrolled some sons of freedmen in the Senate. His colleague as censor resigned in disgust, but Claudius obstinately stayed in office and, indeed, did not step down until well after the eighteen-month limit had expired. The concession was quickly revoked by the following year’s consuls, and for centuries afterward it remained only a revolutionary idea.

Appius Claudius also distributed landless city dwellers among all Rome’s thirty-one tribes, not simply the four urban ones. This was a most ingenious move, for they would then have an advantage over their rural fellow tribesmen because they were on the spot and some of the latter would be unlikely to bother traveling to Rome to cast their votes (despite the impact of the Via Appia—see below). The reform significantly enhanced the power of the urban proletariat.

Censors had other duties—certain kinds of tax collection and the letting of contracts for public works. Appius Claudius commissioned two vastly expensive building projects that emptied the treasury—Rome’s first aqueduct (aqua Appia) and the Appian Way (via Appia). The aqueduct is evidence of the growing size of Rome and the probable overuse of the city’s wells. For most of its ten-mile course, it ran underground, partly because of the layout of the land and partly to protect the water supply from enemies. The builders may have borrowed the tunneling techniques of Veii’s irrigation experts. The aqueduct dropped only 30 feet over its entire length and delivered 240,000 cubic feet of water every day—a remarkable feat of engineeering.

The Roman road was the outcome of military necessity. At the time of Appius’s censorship, the Republic was absorbed in a life-and-death struggle with the Samnites. The Via Appia led south to Capua, in Campania, and was an invaluable communications link, facilitating resupply and reinforcement of Rome’s armies in the field, its bases, and coloniae (settlements of Roman citizens or Latins in former enemy territory); the road also made it easier for voters living in outlying areas to get to Rome for Assembly meetings and elections. Over the years, it was extended across the Apennines to the Greek seaport of Tarentum. It finally reached Brundisium, today’s Brindisi, the customary port of departure for sea voyages to the Eastern Mediterranean. Originally surfaced with gravel, its first few miles from the city were paved and became an ideal place for wealthy families to memorialize their dead. By Cicero and Varro’s day, two long lines of grand marble tombs and mausoleums bordered the road and stretched far into the distance. They can still be visited today.

Appius Claudius had not finished. Despite the publication of the Twelve Tables, the system of law and government was still infuriatingly opaque, and the Senate was unwilling to go to the trouble of cleaning its windows. So some years after the censorship, a secretary of his, a freedman’s son who had become a state official, leaked a confidential manual of legal procedures, the legis actiones. He also posted in the Forum a list of the days on which official business could be conducted, whether the courts could sit, and when the Senate and the Assembly could meet. These things were decided behind closed doors by the patrician college of pontifices. The disclosures, no doubt inspired by Claudius, created a furor, but once out the cat could not be put back into the bag. The secretary was pleased with himself and marked his achievement by erecting a shrine, not altogether appropriately, to the spirit of Concord in the Comitium, the assembly area in the Forum. Respectable opinion disliked being teased in this way, and a law was quickly passed forbidding anyone in future to dedicate a temple or an altar without the Senate’s permission or that of a majority of the tribunes of the plebs.

The great censor was a man of contradictions. Despite his political beliefs, he remained a noble snob at heart. He vigorously opposed the admission of plebeians into the two senior religious colleges, the pontifices and the augurs, and on two separate occasions he tried to exclude plebeians from the consulship. It is this inconsistency that allows us to detect in Appius Claudius a genuine human being, warts and all.

His career was spectacular, but it ended in failure. The reforms of his high-handed censorship were unpicked by his opponents in the Senate. His attempts to empower the Assembly turned out to be fruitless, and until the end of its days the Republic was never anything more than a partial democracy. However, his two astonishing construction projects are a lasting monument to one of Rome’s most remarkable characters.

ROMANS WERE FINE builders and engineers, and much of their work still survives (in particular, structures dating from the imperial period—i.e., the first century A.D. onward). Dionysius of Halicarnassus was not far wrong when he wrote:

The Aqua Appia was the first of eleven aqueducts that were constructed over the centuries, channeling water into an ever more thirsty Rome. They provided drinking water and supplied the city’s many public baths and elaborate fountains. They complemented the complex sewage system, which (as we have seen) originated in the sixth century, when the first Tarquin built the Cloaca Maxima to drain the marshy Forum. By the first century A.D., “gray,” or used, water was being channeled into the sewers, clearing out wastes and emptying into the Tiber.

Fresh running water became a symbol of civilized urban living. Among Rome’s greatest accomplishments, especially in western Europe, was the promotion of the pleasures and uses of towns and cities. Wherever the legions marched and conquered, temples, amphitheaters, forums, triumphal columns, and arches sprang up, and, of course, as the necessary precondition for health and happiness in crowded conurbations, aqueducts and drains. From the second century, vast utilitarian edifices—warehouses, basilicas, and apartment blocks—also became routine features of the built landscape. Such large-scale developments were made possible by technical advances, especially the introduction of concrete during the third century, which allowed architects to cover wide spaces with domes and vaults.

None of this was done purely from kindness of heart but from imperial self-interest. Monumental architecture became a powerful and persuasive tool of Romanization.

The Via Appia opened the way to the construction of a web of roads, throughout Italy and later farther afield. Their purpose was primarily military, but they also linked communities and facilitated trade. They were punctuated by milestones, which enabled a more accurate measurement of distance and of the size of Rome’s territory than had been possible in the past.

Wherever feasible, the engineers who built roads made them run showily straight, bullying and overriding the landscape through which they passed rather than working cooperatively with its hills and valleys. A Roman road was well designed, and typically consisted of two parallel trenches and a well-drained core. Packed stones allowing water to run away formed the foundation. These were covered with layers of concrete and concrete gravel, and topped off by gravel, packed stones, or sometimes paving stones. Roads were made to last, and some of them have, to the admiration of the modern tourist.

When searching for the origins of Rome’s power, we should not forget its engineering record, evidence as it is (alongside its commitment to legal process) of an energetic, practical orderliness.

THE CONFLICT OF the Orders was at last nearing its conclusion. Long years of war meant that farms and smallholdings had fallen into decay, and their owners into debt. In 287, the plebs seceded again, this time to the Janiculum Hill across the Tiber. A dictator, one Quintus Hortensius, took some economic measures to ease the crisis. What these were we do not know, but he also passed a remarkable constitutional law. This gave the resolutions of the Plebeian Council—that institutional symbol of estrangement and revolt, of the state within the state—the full force of law. At last, a right that had been claimed for one and a half centuries was conceded. The long bipolar episode was over, and Rome’s fragmented persona re-formed into an integrated whole.

Not that the results were neat. The Romans were no theorists and, constitutionally speaking, they hated throwing anything away. So, for example, they now had four popular assemblies: the comitia curiata, from the days of the kings (by the first century, its duties had dwindled to confirmation of official appointments and the authorization of adoptions and wills); the loaded-against-the-poor comitia centuriata, which decided elections of senior officials; the concilium plebis; and, a new institution, the comitia tributa, which imitated the concilium but was convened by consuls and praetors, incorporated the entire male adult population, patricians as well as plebeians, and approved bills.

However, the fruits of victory were not exactly what might have been expected. It became clear that the different components of the plebeian movement did not share the same fundamental interests. The poor were concerned to improve their financial situation by means of the assembled People. The wealthy plebeians had now achieved their goal, access to public office, and gradually made common cause with their old enemies, the patricians. A new mixed nobility came into being, and the tribunes of the plebs were absorbed into the official processes of the state, cooperating with the Senate and introducing agreed legislation.

There are two ways of looking at this development. On the one hand, it was a betrayal of the head count, of the oppressed and the dispossessed. Ordinary people could vote on legislation and elected officials, but the rules of procedure forbade debate and access to the levers of executive power was denied them. The confident senatorial oligarchy adjusted itself to the new political situation and remained in charge. One step back, two steps forward.

On the other hand, there was no denying that reconciliation of warring interests had taken place, and without bloodshed. Greeks, who were beginning to be aware of this new aggressive state in central Italy, looked on with a certain jealousy, for the popular and aristocratic factions in Hellenic city-states had a habit of butchering one another, whereas the Romans solved their political difficulties by painful give-and-take.

Writing in the first century B.C., Cicero has one of the speakers in his fine dialogue, The Republic, make the explicit comparison: “Our own commonwealth was based upon the genius not of one man [sc., as often in Greece], but of many; it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men.” A well-informed Greek observer commented that the Romans arrived at their form of government “not by abstract reasoning, but rather through the lessons learned from many struggles and difficulties.” They were the complete pragmatists.

THE LATINS HAD jumped at the chance to free themselves from Roman dominance after the Celtic invasion. The Latin League was broken up. It took some time for its members to be brought to heel, but by 358 the Republic had reasserted its authority. The confederacy was reconvened, but with a difference. The post of commander-in-chief no longer alternated yearly between Rome and the Latins. Now it was controlled by two praetors who were accountable to the consuls in Rome.

The Latins deeply resented being treated as subjects rather than as partners, and in 341 their simmering feelings boiled over into open revolt. Four years of bitter campaigning followed. The consuls for 340 were remarkable men. The first of them, Titus Manlius, acquired the cognomen of Torquatus after having killed in battle an enormous Celt and stripped him of his torque. He sent some cavalry off to reconnoiter in all directions, but strictly enjoined them not to take part in any fighting. Among the squadron leaders was his son Titus. The young man managed to ride with his men beyond the enemy camp until he was hardly a spear’s throw from their nearest outpost. Here he was jeered at by some enemy horse from Tusculum and its commander challenged him to a duel. He shouted, “The outcome will show how much better a Latin cavalryman is than a Roman.”

Titus’s blood was up and, forgetting his father’s orders, he threw himself into a fight that had little tactical point. The rest of the cavalry were made to stand back as if to watch a riding display. The two men rode at each other, spears leveled. Manlius’s spear glanced off the helmet of his opponent, whose own missed the mark altogether. As they wheeled for a second encounter, Titus pricked with his spearpoint the forehead of the Tusculan’s horse, which reared up and threw its rider. As the man struggled to his feet, Titus ran through his throat, so that the spear came out between his ribs and pinned him to the ground. The brief fight was over.

Titus rode back to camp, surrounded by his cheering men. He proudly presented the dead man’s armor. The consul abruptly turned away from his son and gave orders for a trumpet to summon an assembly. “Titus Manlius, you have respected neither Consular authority nor your father’s dignity,” he said. “I believe that you yourself, if you have any drop of my blood in you, would agree that the military discipline you undermined by your error must be restored by your punishment. Go, lictor, bind him to the stake.”

The ax struck and blood gushed from the severed neck. The army was horror-struck, but it was noticed that from then on better attention was given everywhere to guard duties, night watches, and picket-stationing. The execution of Titus Manlius on his father’s orders was one of the most celebrated morality tales in Rome’s history, matching the examples set by Brutus and Verginius. It was a reminder that a father had the power of life and death over his children, and that virtus trumped parental love.

Soon afterward, another never-to-be-forgotten case of self-sacrifice took place. It so happened that both consuls, Manlius and his colleague Publius Decius Mus, dreamed that a man of superhuman size told them that, if either army’s general should “devote” to death the enemy’s army and himself, his side would win the coming battle. Shortly afterward, an engagement was fought near the foot of Mount Vesuvius. As usual, before the opening of a battle an animal was sacrificed in the name of each consul. An Etruscan diviner scrutinized their livers for any abnormality that might reveal the displeasure of the gods. He gave Manlius a clean bill of health; however, he pointed out that the head of Decius’s liver had been cut in the wrong place. Otherwise, the victim was acceptable to the gods.

Decius replied coolly, “If my colleague’s sacrifice went well, then that should be all right.” The army advanced, with Manlius on the right wing and Decius on the left. The lines clashed and the Romans were pushed back. In this moment of crisis, Decius called to a priest from the college of pontifices, who presided over the army’s religious rituals, “We need the gods’ help. Come on now, you are a state pontiff of the Roman People. Dictate to me the form of words by which I may ‘devote’ myself to the legions.”

The priest told him to put on his purple-edged toga, veil his head, and, with one hand protruding from the toga, touch his chin, stand on a spear laid under his feet, and repeat the following words:

Decius then sent a message to his colleague telling him what he had done. He reorganized his toga so that his arms were free, leaped on a horse, and rode directly into the enemy’s ranks. He fell under a hail of missiles.

In due course, the battle was won and the Latins fled. The spell had worked. Decius was found under a pile of corpses and given a hero’s funeral (if he had survived, the rules of devotio dictated that an effigy of him would have been buried instead, for the gods of the Underworld could not be cheated of their dead man). Did these episodes take place? We cannot be absolutely sure, but they probably have a basis in fact. The ancient accounts of events in the fourth century that have come down to us are on the cusp of genuine historical memory.

HARD FIGHTING CONTINUED, but by 338 the war was over and the Latins had definitively and permanently been defeated. The League was dissolved forever. The settlement that followed was of historic importance, for the Romans established a system of governance that gave them security but was also acceptable to the Latins. Rather than echo the Celtic leader Brennus’s vindictive cry of triumph, vae victis, they devised ways and means of binding conquered peoples to them. They invited their victims to join them in their enterprise of territorial expansion. The prudence of this policy is borne out by the fact that never again would the Latins rebel.

Just as in the distant mythical past Romulus granted citizenship to the Sabines, so now the Republic offered the Latins civic rights. In this way, it enlarged the pool of potential military recruits to the legions. A human reservoir was created that gave Rome a unique staying power in times of war. Defeat could follow defeat, if the Fates willed it, and still there would be new conscripts to replace lost armies.

In place of a federation in which each member was connected to one another, Rome set up bilateral relations with individual communities, which were forbidden to undertake treaties among themselves. They were also compelled to surrender substantial tracts of land. The Latins and some others were divided into three different constitutional and legal classes. First of all, some defeated statelets were incorporated as municipia, or free towns, in the Republic and their inhabitants given full Roman citizenship. One example was Antium (today’s Anzio), the onetime Volscian capital, but not before it was obliged to surrender its fleet after a sea battle. Some ships’ prows or “beaks” (rostra, in Latin) were displayed in the Roman Forum on the main speakers’ platform, thereafter known as the Rostra.

The second category consisted of communities that kept their independence—at least in theory, for they forfeited the power to conduct their own foreign policy. These “allies” had rights of connubium and commercium—that is, their citizens were allowed to marry Romans and enter into contracts with them, according to Roman law. When asked, they had to supply troops.

Finally, for those more distant communities in the new Roman “commonwealth” that lay beyond the borders of Latium, such as the Campanian cities of Capua and Cumae, partial enfranchisement was granted: civitas sine suffragio, or citizenship without the vote. This included the rights of connubium and commercium, and liability to the obligations of full Roman citizenship, especially military service. They were entitled to move to Rome, if they so wished, and in that case could acquire full Roman citizenship. The duty to fight alongside the legions sounds more punitive than it actually was, for, as when Rome won its wars, these compulsory comrades would have their share of the spoils of victory.

Another innovative device helped the Romans not only to secure their conquests, but to unify them with their conquerors. This was the foundation of coloniae, “colonies,” by which small groups of Latin, Campanian, and Roman settlers established their own townships on annexed enemy territory; sometimes these were new foundations, but on occasion they were attached to existing settlements. They were useful watch posts that could detect early signs of trouble in the surrounding population; they also alleviated economic pressures at Rome by providing farms and jobs for the landless poor. Coastal coloniae relieved the Republic of the need to build a fleet to defend home waters. Above all, this colonial system, as it developed over time, contributed powerfully to the cultural Romanization of Italy.

It took some time for the settlement to bed down. Many Latin communities resented the loss of their age-old freedoms, and Rome took care to leave them free to run their own local affairs. Their city walls were not leveled but left standing—clever and persuasive symbolism.

It has been estimated that the extent of territory now occupied by Roman citizens of every kind, the ager Romanus, was 3,400 square miles, and that of the larger Roman commonwealth as a whole 5,300 square miles. According to a modern calculation, the total population of the ager Romanus was 347,300 free persons and that of the commonwealth 484,000 free persons.

Rome had become a substantial state, by Greco-Roman standards; it was a token of its growing power that a second treaty of friendship with Carthage was negotiated in 348. Its conquests meant, among other things, that the problem of poverty and indebtedness that beset the young Republic was alleviated, although it never vanished. As we have seen, an indigent Roman would be paid a salary if he fought in the army. He might be allocated a smallholding in freshly conquered territory and, if he was willing to leave the city, he could join a colonia and make a new life for himself.

IF EVER A landscape made its people, it was Samnium.

This is a mountainous, landlocked plateau in central Italy. Here the Apennines are not so much mountains as a tangled maze of massifs, spurs, and reentrants. The region is roughly rectangular and is cut through by steep valleys often ending in culs-de-sac, down which rivers or seasonal torrents cascade. Here and there gray limestone mountains push up toward the sky, and are covered in snow for most of the year. Much of the usable land is suitable only for grazing, but there are many fertile pockets where earth can be tilled and crops grown. Rich, narrow fields lie alongside streams. Winters were wild and austere, summers arid and baking hot. Earthquakes racked and eroded the hills.

As we have seen, the Samnites were among the infiltration southward, propelled by Sacred Springs, of Oscan speakers in previous centuries. By 500, if not earlier, they had settled in their new rugged homeland. They coveted the flat, fertile earth of Campania and its cultured cities. Some of them descended from their aeries, conquered the inhabitants, and took over the territory. They soon learned to enjoy an easier way of life and forgot their highland ancestry.

The Samnites were fierce and hardy mountaineers. Excavated skeletons show that they were ethnically homogeneous and dolichocephalic (that is, their heads were unusually long from front to back), from which we can infer that, isolated among their peaks, they did not intermarry with their Latin neighbors. Pre-urban, they lived in scattered villages and built many small stone forts on remote hilltops (about ninety of which have been located by archaeologists); most were not for living in but were a temporary refuge in times of trouble.

There were four Samnite tribal groups, each forming a community called a touto. The Hirpini lived in the south, the Caudini in the west, the Carracini in the northeast, and the largest, the Pentri, occupied the center and east of Samnium. The total number of inhabitants was surprisingly high for a remote rural area and is estimated at about 450,000 persons.

In general, the Samnites were poor and relatively unsophisticated, with no coinage and little trade. There seems to have been an aristocracy with large landholdings, but their politics were democratic and simply organized. One or more villages made up a pagus, an economically self-sufficient and independent-minded canton. It elected a governing official called a meddis. A group of pagi made up the tribal touto, whose annually elected chief magistrate was a meddis tovtiks. There appears to have been a council that magistrates were obliged to consult. Despite their decentralized political system, Samnites possessed a powerful sense of cultural identity.

The economy—landlocked as it was, and lacking in raw materials for industries—was centered on animal husbandry and peasant farming. The Samnites raised horses, poultry, pigs, and goats. Above all, they were sheep breeders. In the summer, their animals grazed on high ground; for the winter months, they were taken down to the plains along wide drovers’ trails, which doubled as the main means of human communication in Samnium. Among the region’s specialties were fine wines and sweet Sabellian cabbages.

Only glimpses of daily life have come down to us. Oscans, such as the Samnites, were known for their barbaric and uncouth ways, although their addiction to obscenity may, as often happens, have been a jokey stereotype attributed to them by their neighbors and based on an ecccentric etymological derivation of obscenus, from O(b)scan. They appear to have had some odd habits. They had their pubic hair shaved off in barbershops, in full view of passersby, for example. According to Strabo the geographer:

Little is recorded of the place of women in Samnite society, but the first-century poet Horace, who came from the southern Samnite town of Venusia and was in a position to know, implies that they exercised authority in the household; they brought up the children and had a reputation for severity.

In their scant leisure time, Samnites hunted, as much for food as for amusement. They were very fond of the theater, with a pronounced taste for farce, satire, and crude invective. A fresco of dancing girls has survived, and perhaps folk dancing was among their entertainments. It is said that the bloodstained diversions of the arena were invented by Oscans. It cannot be proved that gladiators derive from Samnium itself, but their emergence in Campania coincided suspiciously with the Samnite invasion in the fifth century. It may be no accident that, in later times, the most popular type of gladiator, equipped with a short sword, a rectangular shield, a greave, and a helmet, was called a Samnite.

THESE WERE THE people with whom Rome found itself in a long life-and-death duel in the latter part of the fourth century. To begin with, the two nations were friends, signing a treaty in 354. However, Rome wished to expand, and the Samnites were compelled to do so as well. Their growing population spilled out in all directions of the compass, into adjoining lands. Rome’s new dominance in Campania was a particular affront. A collision was inevitable.

A short first war only temporarily interrupted the alliance. Then, in 328, the Romans planted a colonia, Fregellae, in the western valley of the river Liris, a provocative act because this territory was claimed by the Samnites and led up into their heartland. Then, in the following year, the Samnites could not resist taking advantage of internal dissension at the port of Neapolis, in Campania, and occupying it. The Romans reacted strongly to this challenge to their authority; they drove out the occupiers and thus precipitated the Second Samnite War.

This was a long and bitter struggle that lasted on and off for more than twenty years. Samnium was a vast natural fortress, with few points of access. Any army determined enough to enter it was confronted by a labyrinth of narrow valleys and tight gorges—ideal terrain for the layer of ambushes. Not unnaturally, the Romans fought shy of a direct assault and much of the fighting occurred on or near the Samnite borders. The Caudine catastrophe of 321 was an example of this, taking place as it did on one of the two main routes that led from Samnium and Campania to Latium. Although it was a grave setback, recovery was swift.

Rather than seek to invade Samnium itself, with all the risks that entailed, Rome’s strategy was to surround the Samnites with enemies. Alliances were struck with communities in Apulia, on the eastern seaboard, and Lucania in the foot of Italy, thus opening up a second front. In 315, a Roman consul captured the key town of Luceria on the far side of Samnium, near the Adriatic coast, a potential third front. The enemy counterattacked in the west, threatening Latium. They successfully pushed down the river Liris valley—and took Fregellae, the cause of all the trouble. They reached the coast, where they inflicted a heavy defeat on the Romans near the seaside city of Tarracina. The road to Rome lay open, and it may be that only the new walls dissuaded the Samnites from marching up to it.

The important city of Capua revolted, and other Campanian towns wavered. The Republic was shaken but unbowed. The wisdom of its generous Latin settlement now became clear, for no Latin community changed sides. They remained loyal to their conqueror. In the following year, the legions regrouped and doggedly went on the offensive. A second hard-fought battle was waged near Tarracina. One Roman wing was nearly put to flight but was rescued by the prompt arrival of the other. This time the Romans gained a famous victory and, according to tradition, thirty thousand Samnites were killed or captured—almost certainly an exaggeration, but a sign of the importance of the engagement.

The first stretch of Appius Claudius’s great strategic road, 132 miles long, from Rome to the gates of Capua, was completed; rapid communication was now ensured between the capital and any recrudescence of trouble in Campania.

The Samnite moment had come, and now it had gone. Capua was brought to heel, and Fregellae resettled. Perhaps inspired by their new Greek friends in Naples, the Romans created a small sea squadron, but they did not really understand ships and fighting at sea, so little came of the experiment. Nevertheless, all things considered they had seized back the initiative.

For many years, little had been heard from the Etruscans, now in a condition of decay. Veii, of course, had been lost and the Celts were harrying the northern outposts of their empire. They had contentedly watched the conflict between Rome and Samnium from the sidelines. They had little sympathy with the latter, who had, after all, driven them out of Campania a hundred years earlier. However, the apparently irresistible growth of Roman power was alarming. Taking advantage of the fact that a forty-year truce between Rome and the Etruscan city of Tarquinii had expired, they threw in their lot with the Samnites.

To dampen down this fire, in 310 a Roman consul boldly forced his way through the unbroken, primeval Ciminian Forest into central Etruria. A natural barrier between the two nations, this trackless wilderness was believed to be impassable, and the news alarmed public opinion at home. Another Caudine Forks was predicted. In fact, the consul won a battle, Etruscan towns made peace, and the treaty with Tarquinii was renewed.

The struggle with the Samnites dragged interminably on. In 305, they launched an attack on the wine-rich ager Falernus, in northern Campania. They were repulsed and a relieving army was defeated. By the next year, after further setbacks, the Samnites had had enough and accepted not ungenerous terms. They were made to withdraw into their own territory. Their onetime allies were to transfer their allegiance to Rome, and would lose some of their land. Rome made solid but not spectacular gains, winning a number of frontier towns and completing its hold over Campania. But one thing was clear beyond any doubt. The Republic was now the first state in Italy and, it followed, a power to be reckoned with on the Mediterranean political stage.

At the beginning of the war, Livy had made a Samnite ambassador tell his Roman counterparts, “Let us pitch camp facing each other, and determine whether the Samnite or the Roman shall govern Italy.” That question had now been settled, except for the awkward fact that it was not in the former’s character to accept the decision of history. When he said pax, he plotted war.

In 298, Roman attention was distracted by a new Celtic incursion, probably only marauding bands and mercenaries but dangerous nonetheless. The Samnites indulged themselves with one last throw of the dice. They attacked a new Roman ally, the Lucani, on their southern border. During this third war, the legions did not linger on the edges of Samnium but marched directly into enemy territory.

Nothing daunted, the Samnite commander-in-chief, Gellius Egnatius, assembled a remarkable pact. Its members had little in common, apart from fear and hatred of Rome and a sense that this would be their last chance to destroy the monster before it grew too great ever again to be suppressed. Egnatius’s bold plan was to join forces with the Etruscans, the Umbrians (a long-standing enemy), and the Celts in the north and launch a combined attack against the irrepressible Republic.

The existence of this alliance became a matter of common knowledge in 296 and caused a panic at Rome. One of the consuls, the democratic reformer Appius Claudius Caecus, was in command of an army commissioned to keep a watch on the Etruscans, and he warned the Senate to take the threat posed very seriously. Every category of men was called up, even former slaves, and special cohorts of older citizens were formed. The two consuls for the following year commanded an army of four legions, and a special force of two legions guarded Campania from Samnite incursions. If they were at full strength, that added up to 25,200 legionaries, as well as a strong contingent of cavalry. Also, two legions were dispatched to ravage the Etruscan countryside, to discourage the Etruscans from marching to Egnatius. This wasn’t all. The citizen legions were accompanied by a greater number of troops contributed by the allies and the Latins—further witness, if it were needed, of the success of the Latin settlement. In total, this was the largest force Rome had ever assembled.

The consuls hurried to prevent the Celts from joining up with the Samnites. But they arrived too late and their advance guard was badly mauled. However, the Etruscans and the Umbrians were absent and, when the two armies met for a full-scale battle at Sentinum (near the modern town of Sassoferrato, in the Marche), they were probably evenly matched.

The hour of reckoning had arrived and, to mark it, a portent occurred. A female deer was chased by a wolf across the open space between the front lines. Then the animals veered off in opposite directions. The wolf ran toward the Romans, who opened a pathway for it to pass through. The deer rushed into the arms of the Celts, who struck it down. A Roman front ranker made the obvious connection. “On that side lies flight and slaughter,” he shouted. “The deer, the goddess Diana’s beast, is dead, but here on this side the wolf is the winner, whole and untouched. He reminds us of our descent from Mars, god of war, and of Romulus our founder.”

It does not matter much whether or not this incident is a historical event, for, one way or another, it is evidence that the Romans saw this day as a turning point in their history. The battle at Sentinum, like Waterloo, was the “nearest run thing.” The Roman left, commanded by Publius Decius Mus, the son of the commander who had “devoted” himself during the Latin war, was hard-pressed by the Celts and their chariots. In a bid to redeem the situation, Mus followed his father’s example. After saying the ritual prayers, he galloped on his horse into the Celtic lines, to his death. The army’s priest cried out that the Romans had won the day, now that they were freed by the consul’s fate. Meanwhile, the Roman right wore down and eventually routed the Samnites. They then turned back and smashed the Celts from the rear.

Victory was complete, but it came at a cost. According to Livy, 25,000 of the enemy were killed and 8,000 taken prisoner, while the Romans lost 8,700 men. The decision of Sentinum was permanent: Egnatius’s grand alliance was broken for good, and its inventor lay dead on the field of battle.

The Samnites still would not give up. Even the ultra-patriotic Livy acknowledged their stamina. He wrote:

Fighting continued for a few years, and finally Samnium was penetrated by Roman forces and ravaged from one end to the other. Resistance was no longer possible. To judge by the amount of loot seized and the number of captives enslaved, little mercy was shown: auctions of booty and prisoners raised more than three million pounds of bronze—a windfall that funded the Republic’s first ever issue of coinage. For the fourth time, the Samnites signed a treaty with their conqueror. They became “allies” of the Republic—in other words, a vassal nation liable to send its young men not to fight its conqueror but to help it win its future wars.

The struggle had lasted half a century. The Samnites were down, but even now they refused to be counted out. Sullen, resentful, and subjugated, they nursed their grievance against Rome and awaited an opportunity for revenge.

FOR AN INDIVIDUAL Roman soldier, a battlefield was a narrow and constricted place, electric with fear and tension. As most fighting took place in the summer, the air would be filled with dust raised by thousands of tramping feet, the ancient equivalent of von Clausewitz’s fog of war. Rain brought no relief, for an army soon turned wet ground into a quagmire. Sharp and repulsive smells spread through the armies—caused by sweaty unwashed men, the panicked loosening of sphincters and bladders, and, in due course, the cutting open of guts. There was a tremendous noise of metal on metal, of war cries and screams, of regimental trumpet blasts. The soldier was surrounded by comrades but could not see anything that was going on beyond them, nor easily hear orders. He had no idea how the battle as a whole was going. At best, he might glimpse his general riding past, himself hardly able to descry events. In the middle of a crowd, our Roman was fearfully on his own.

In modern warfare, combatants are often more or less remote from their opponents, and so are insulated from the terrors of hand-to-hand fighting. For the Roman, a javelin could perhaps be thrown thirty meters, but once two armies collided he was in touching reach of his enemy. His duty was to try to kill or disable him with his trusty gladius, a short cut-and-thrust sword, and to avoid getting killed by use of his shield, or scutum, two and a half feet in width and four feet in height.

In the fourth century, military reforms improved the effectiveness of Roman arms but probably made the battlefield a more frightening place than it had previously been. Originally, a legion fought as a phalanx. A phalanx was a tight infantry formation, eight and, later, twelve or sixteen ranks deep. It was a Greek invention that the Romans copied. As if they were a single invincible organism, soldiers marched close together shield to shield. They carried long spears thirteen to eighteen feet in length that, like a lethal porcupine, presented an impenetrable thicket of shafts. The phalanx crashed into the enemy line and usually prevailed by virtue of its sheer momentum and perfect drill. Not for nothing is the word phalanx the Greek for “roller,” or heavy tree trunk.

However, the phalanx had weaknesses. It was vulnerable to attack from the sides and men found it hard to stay in formation on rough ground. Once broken up, this monument of human solidarity disintegrated into a collection of individual soldiers, easily picked off and put to flight. Except in the Po Valley, Italy is not a land of flat plains, and during the fourth century Rome found that the phalanx was at a disadvantage when confronting the loose, open tactics of the Celts, with their terrifying chariots, or the guerrilla tricks of Samnite mountaineers.

So the Romans abandoned the phalanx for a more flexible arrangement. Rather than form a single deep rectangle, a legion’s heavy infantry was divided into three successive lines. The first consisted of hastati, young soldiers; the second, principes, men in their prime; and, finally, the triarii, mature veterans in reserve. The hastati and the principes carried two throwing javelins a man, six feet long and made from wood and iron, and the triarii one long thrusting pike. Each line was broken down into ten subunits, or maniples (from the Latin manipulus, or “handful”) of about 120 men. Maniples were separated from one another by intervals equal to their own frontage. The gaps in the front line were protected by the maniples of the second, and those in the second line by the third.

The formation resembled a checkerboard and allowed fighters in the first line to withdraw and be replaced by fresh troops. The task of the triarii was defensive. If both the hastati and the principes had been forced to retreat, they were the last obstacle before an ignominious defeat. They knelt down beneath their banners, held up their shields, and pointed their pikes into the air, a kind of human barbed-wire entanglement. The phrase “to have come to the triarii” was a common expression that things were going badly.

Severity was essential if men were to be serious about fighting. We have no eye-witness testimonials to the experience of battle in classical times, but research into modern warfare offers findings that doubtless have a general application. It seems that comparatively few soldiers put their heart into fighting. Battles often have a rhythm, with waves of men pushing forward, feinting, and then rushing back. Men are usually capable of facing the danger they are in, but only a quarter of them actually attack with a will to kill. A paralysis of terror overtakes some soldiers; they are unable even to surrender, much less fight back, and are killed where they stand or lie.

Joy in combat and the taking of an almost sexual pleasure in killing occurs but is rare. In a modern survey, about one-third of combatant soldiers show strong or mild fear, another third are “in the middle ground of tension and concentration,” and about one quarter are “calm and neutral”: these last may be presumed to be the effective combatants. A small number are stunned or incapacitated.

According to a recent sociological study of violence, “in ancient and mediaeval warfare, there appears to have been a high degree of incompetence in the use of … weapons.” As is usually the case, most wounding and killing took place when the opposing forces were unequal—for example, during a rout or an ambush. “Forward panic” is a kind of fever that maddens advancing troops, who may then commit atrocities. Likewise, after victory in the field or the capture of a besieged city, soldiers allow themselves a temporary moral holiday. Individuals feel protected by the crowd and behave with great cruelty to the vanquished. When normal social controls have resumed, the same men may share their rations with surviving victims.

One way of reducing fear and tension has been to put troops into massed formations, such as the phalanx, where they must act in concert and there is little or no room for individual initiative. Rome’s new manipular formation offered more scope for individual initiative but also (it follows) for cowardice or, at least, ineffectiveness in the face of the enemy.

So it is no surprise that, to maximize fighting efficiency, discipline had to be fierce. Two centurions stood at either end of a maniple’s front row, each commanding one half of the unit, while a third officer, an optio, kept watch in the rear. Great care was taken in appointing men to these crucial positions. According to Polybius:

It was an understood right of war for the winner to take as booty anything of value that could be found. A Roman soldier, both citizen and ally, could count on a fair share of the spoils. But the most persuasive encouragement to valor was the fact that Rome established a habit of winning its wars. Yes, there could be terrible setbacks and high casualties, but the Roman Republic now controlled most of central Italy; its territory had grown to more than 6,000 square kilometers at the turn of the century and ballooned to more than 15,000 square kilometers by the 280s. There was an unparalleled increase both in public and private wealth.

The wars of the fourth century made Rome into a warrior state. Campaigns took place more or less every year. The regular annual levy rose from two to four legions during the Samnite Wars—that is, about eighteen thousand men—and during the Sentinum crisis six legions were under arms, perhaps twenty-five percent of all adult male citizens. However nerve-racking the experience of battle, warfare paid, and there was now no other power in the peninsula that dared challenge Rome’s supremacy.

SO WHAT WAS it like to be a Roman, as the Republic found itself on the threshold of history and greatness? And how did he or she see the world? It is hard to be certain in the light of an unreliable written record that later imaginative historians tampered with and “improved,” but a recognizable personality begins to emerge into the light of day.

The vast majority of people were poor and scratched a hard living from the land. Although Latium was fertile, hostile marauders trashed crops and burned down huts and houses. Smallholders were often absent on service with the legions. Women and children presumably worked the fields when not forced to make their escape to nearby strongpoints. However, with the expansion of Rome’s territories, fighting increasingly took place on the territory of others.

The problem of indebtedness remained endemic, and it was many years before the humiliation of debt bondage, the nexum, was outlawed. Economic hardship was never totally dispelled, but foreign conquests relieved its worst symptoms. As the Republic became wealthier, rural austerity, exemplified by the experience of Cincinnatus, came to be regarded with a certain nostalgia.

With migrants moving about the peninsula and rising populations, war was a way of life in central Italy. The Romans learned to be extraordinarily aggressive. There were few periods in their early centuries when the Republic was not invading its neighbors or resisting invasion by them. Little wonder that a constitution was devised which intermingled the military with the political.

A fierce culture of self-sacrifice developed, at least in the ruling class, illustrated not only by such legends as Brutus’s execution of his delinquent sons but also by the (apparently historical) deaths of Decius Mus père et fils—suicide for the greater good, negation of the individual for the deliverance of the collective.

Two factors kept the Roman’s instinct for aggression under control: religion and the law. Both were systems of regulation. Spiritual experience was regarded with deep suspicion; what was required was a ritual formula for ascertaining the will of the gods and averting their displeasure. Likewise, the Twelve Tables set out in grinding detail rules for managing relations between citizens.

These two systems helped to ensure good behavior, dutifulness, trust, fides. Bad faith brought with it divine disappproval and legal sanctions. But the Roman was crafty and, while very free with his condemnation of others, was willing enough to favor the letter rather than the spirit of the law in his own affairs; on occasion, he might even rewrite the letter.

Prescription is insufficient by itself; goodwill has to be added to the mixture. The remarkable story of how Rome’s class struggle was resolved is evidence that generation after generation of pragmatists were willing to compromise, to make do and mend, to strike deals with their political opponents.

THESE WERE THE people who were about to encounter, for the first time, the armed might of Greece.