The Romans may also have been let down by their strategy. Fighting a battle in front of a deep river was unwise. Livy wrote that their commander was worried that his army would be outflanked and so decided to split his forces in two, placing a force of reserves to their right where the ground was a little higher. The Gallic leader, Brennus – probably not his actual name, as it is very similar to the Gallic word for king – sent his full force tearing into the Roman reserves. The soldiers of the main Roman army watched as their comrades were cut down. As Livy relates, they did not wait to see if they would fare any better:
The main body of the army, at the first sound of the Gallic war-cry on their flank and in their rear, hardly waited even to see their strange enemy from the ends of the earth; they made no attempt at resistance; they had not courage even to answer his shouted challenge, but fled before they had lost a single man. None fell fighting; they were cut down from behind as they struggled to force a way to safety through the heaving mass of their fellow fugitives. Near the bank of the river there was a dreadful slaughter; the whole left wing of the army had gone that way and had flung away their arms in the desperate hope of getting over. Many could not swim and many others in their exhausted state were dragged under water by the weight of their equipment and drowned.1
Later that same day the Gauls reached Rome. The city was at their mercy. The stage was set for some of the most famous stories of antiquity, which would be told and retold over the centuries, shaping the Romans’ views of themselves, and others’ views of the Romans.
II
Before coming to these stories, and trying to piece together what really happened that summer, we should pause for a moment and see what kind of Rome the Gauls had reached. To modern eyes it hardly seems like a city that would grow into a great power. In the 380s BC it was still a small town with a population of probably no more than 25,000, and it may have been a good deal smaller. It was also primitive. At this time the Athenians had already built the Parthenon, a huge stone building with dazzlingly sophisticated friezes. By contrast, Rome, like other central Italian cities, was a city of bricks, timber and simple terracotta statues. Some parts were very simple indeed: archaeological excavations have revealed that only a century before the battle of the Allia, Rome had numerous daub and wattle, African-style huts with thatched roofs. Nearby cities had huts of this type around 387 BC and it is highly likely that Rome still had them, too. We know that at least one stood at this time: on the Palatine a hut was carefully maintained by priests as ‘The hut of Romulus’.
It was in huts of this kind that the very first Romans had lived. We can set aside the legends of Romulus and Remus, the royal princes turned shepherd bandits who were suckled by a she-wolf. Stories of newborn heirs to kingdoms cast adrift were fairly common in the archaic world, as were founder stories involving ferocious animals. Equally spurious is the later tradition that Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BC. Rome’s origins were both earlier and more gradual. People were already living on the site by 1500 BC, probably as itinerant pastoralists who stayed only for some seasons of the year. By 1000 BC they were more settled, and buried their dead in the marshy valley between the hills. They lived in two villages of huts on the Palatine and Esquiline hills. Far from being romantic shepherd bandits the first Romans were farmers who grew crops and kept pigs.
Whether they knew it or not, they could hardly have picked a better spot. Their villages looked down on one of Italy’s key trade routes, which led up the Tiber valley, and along which salt was carried from the coast to people in the hills. They also overlooked a place where the Tiber was both navigable and relatively easy to cross, by the Tiber Island. The high ground on which the villages were built – which later became known as the seven hills, though in reality some were more like ridges – offered protection from marauding enemies. And it was less prone than the lowlands to malaria, which, though it probably was not present in 387 BC, soon would be.
If the stories of Romulus and Remus are myths, one detail holds some truth. Rome’s first king Romulus is said to have shared power for several years with Titus Tatius, the king of the Sabines. Romulus and his Latins lived on the Palatine Hill and Titus Tatius’ Sabines lived on the Esquiline: two peoples, diverse yet united. Intriguingly, archaeological discoveries and early traditions support the idea that Rome was originally inhabited by two separate peoples. The hut village on Palatine Hill was populated by Latin speakers from the area south-east of Rome around the Alban Hills, while the Esquiline Hill was peopled by Sabines from hills to the north. In other words, from its very beginnings Rome was a cosmopolitan place formed of two nations.
Or rather, three. Early Rome was a frontier city. Just across the river Tiber on the Gianicolo Hill – where, on a hot summer night, today’s Romans go for an ice cream and to enjoy the view – lived Etruscans. The Etruscans could hardly have been more different from the Romans. Their language, which is still little understood, was not Indo-European and so was as distant from Latin or Sabine as modern English is from Mandarin Chinese. It is thought that the Etruscans may, like the Basques, have been an ancient aboriginal people who inhabited Europe long before Indo-Europeans arrived. They would have a huge influence on early Rome, contributing kings, noble families and numerous cultural traditions, from the bundles of rods (fasces) that symbolized a state officer’s power, to purple-bordered togas for high officials, to gladiator fights.
If life were not already complex enough, two other peoples can also be added to the mix. Soon after the first villages grew up on the Palatine and Esquiline hills, Phoenicians from today’s Lebanon appeared on the Italian coast and they almost certainly traded with the Romans. Next came Greeks, who from 800 BC established cities in southern Italy and Sicily, and sold high-quality banqueting items across the peninsula. Pottery finds reveal that a small Greek colony may have existed below the Palatine Hill as early as the eighth century BC, when the Romans were still living in huts. Some of Rome’s earliest temples were to Greek gods.
It was almost certainly the Greeks who inspired the Romans to move on from village life and build a city. This did not happen through gradual evolution but seems to have been the result of an epic, planned effort. In the mid-seventh century BC the swampy valley between Rome’s first villages was cleared of huts, drained, filled with earth by the ton and paved over. The Roman Forum was born. At the time of the battle on the Allia, some 250 years later, many of the city’s first monuments – though some had burned down and been rebuilt – still existed. These included the Senate, a hall where Rome’s parliament of aristocrats met, the temple of Vesta – the goddess of the hearth and the family, whose staff of virgins were responsible for tending a perpetual fire to help keep Rome safe – and a complex of buildings that appears to have been a royal palace.
Yet the complex had no royal occupant at the time of the battle by the Allia. In the 380s BC Rome had been a republic for over a century. The fact that they had freed themselves from royal rule was a source of great pride to early Romans, much as it is to modern Americans. Livy, who wrote this first part of his great history in the early 20s BC, when Romans were slipping back into autocratic rule – now under emperors – did his best to glorify the moment when the city’s kings were thrown out. He depicted Rome’s last king, Tarquin, as a kind of Macbeth figure, brave but murderous and with an evil, scheming queen. When King Tarquin’s son raped the beautiful wife of a nobleman, Tarquin’s nephew, Brutus, led angry Romans in rebellion in 509 BC. Desperate to regain power, Tarquin treacherously allied with an enemy of Rome, the Etruscan warlord Lars Porsena, and fought against his own people, only to meet a well-deserved defeat.
The truth, as far as it can be reassembled, seems to have been rather less romantic. Rome’s kings were probably thrown out not by American-style popular patriotism but by the city’s rich, quite possibly in alliance with the same Lars Porsena with whom King Tarquin was supposed to have sided. Aristocratic takeovers were common in Italian and Greek city states in the la
te sixth century BC. The ranks of their heavy infantry armies were filled by the rich, as only they could afford the expensive equipment required. Knowing they were the power behind the state, aristocrats sought to flex their political muscles.
But that was probably not the only reason for the fall of Rome’s kings. Another could be seen from any part of Rome in 387 BC. Perched on the Capitoline Hill, it dominated the city’s skyline, as the Parthenon did Athens. The temple to Rome’s most celebrated god, Jupiter Best and Greatest, was built not from stone but from timber and brick, and was crude compared to Greek temples of the time – whose overall design it copied – but it made up for this in size. When first constructed it was one of the largest temples, if not the largest, in the central Mediterranean. It was built by King Tarquin, and, according to Livy, the Romans resented being forced to work on the building. No doubt they also resented paying for it. Livy describes how the temple was almost complete when Tarquin fell from power in 509 BC. He would not be the last ruler to fall victim to extravagant architectural ambitions.
Tarquin would have built the temple to give him and his city prestige, yet, like Rome’s other temples, it also had a practical role: it was expected to give the Romans insider knowledge of the future and help them avoid nasty surprises. Like other early societies, Romans did not believe in paradise. Their religion was concerned firmly with the here and now. They hoped their gods would give them information to help them make good decisions, whether in their personal lives, their politics, their farming or their military campaigns. Roman priests looked for signs from the gods, which might be found by looking into the sky and watching in which direction birds flew, or by sacrificing animals on temple altars and then carefully studying their intestines.
Like those of other early religions, Roman beliefs had a distinctly anxious side. Bad omens were constantly watched for and could be found in anything from the birth of a deformed lamb to a fox straying into the city. Rituals to placate the gods and ward off threatened disaster were complex and if a single mistake was made then all had to be redone. Romans also feared one another. They feared their neighbours might chant an evil charm that would harm them, or make someone close to them fall in love, or that would steal the fertility of their land. The classical era is often seen as a time of rationalism, at least compared to the medieval period that followed, and so it was for some of the educated elite, but for many sorcery was – and would continue to be – a cause of profound unease.
Early Rome’s priests were responsible for trying to ease people’s fears. The city’s first kings may have evolved from priest kings and in the early 380s BC their successors came from the Roman nobility, some of whom would have lived in the city’s most desirable area, on the Palatine Hill. One home of this era has been excavated and it was palatial: a spacious villa with a garden, a reception room and a vast hall with an opening in the roof so rainwater landed in a pool, from which it was stored in a cistern below. The design became a classic in Italy and wealthy Pompeiians were still living in homes like it six centuries later, when Vesuvius erupted. In 387 BC, Rome was already a city of the very rich and the very poor: a pattern which was distinctly Italian. Excavations of another fourth-century city, Olynthos in Greece, have revealed an arrangement that is, to modern eyes, rather suburban: long rows of houses identical in shape and size. The free inhabitants of Olynthos – and many were not free – lived in relative equality. Not so the Romans. Little is known of the homes of Rome’s poor but they would have been modest. As we have seen, some were almost certainly daub and wattle huts.
Strange though it may seem, the wide gap between rich and poor was probably widened by Rome’s revolutionary ejection of its kings. The city’s kings were not members of the wealthy patrician class and so would have felt a certain kinship with the poor, who were their natural allies against powerful nobles. After the kings, Rome entered economic hard times and many of those who were outside the noble elite – the plebeians – struggled badly. Crippled by debts and barred from many political offices, they fought back as best they could, using a tactic that seems distinctly modern: strike action. They abandoned Rome en masse and camped out on a hill outside the city. They also formed themselves into a kind of state within the state, with their own organization and even their own temples where they kept their records.
Among the concessions that the plebeians managed to squeeze from reluctant patricians, one in particular offers a fascinating glimpse of Roman life in these early times. This was Rome’s first written law code: the Twelve Tables. Compiled around 450 BC, or sixty years before the battle on the Allia, it was written in an archaic Latin that was hard even for classical Romans to understand, but it is comprehensible enough to reveal what seems, to our eyes, a rather brutal society.
Roman life was intensely male-controlled and the eldest male in every family – the paterfamilias – ruled over his relatives like a king ruling over slaves. He owned all the family’s property and made all key decisions. He could lawfully sell members of his family or kill them, if he chose. On the birth of a new child he decided whether it would live or die and if the child was deformed he was expected to select death. For all the efforts of the plebeians, the Rome of the Twelve Tables was still very much a rich man’s world. Any debtors who could not pay their debts became bonded labourers of their creditor, who could take them abroad – just across the Tiber – and sell them into slavery. Rome would have had its own slave market where foreigners could be bought and sold, though it was still a long way from the fully-fledged slave society it would become in later centuries. The great majority of the city’s inhabitants were still free.
Yet most Romans were not from the city at all. In the 380s BC most were farmers who lived in the nearby countryside. Rome was a country town and its main market, the Forum Boarium, beside the river just below the Palatine Hill, sold every kind of animal – from horses to ride, to oxen to pull one’s plough and sheep to sacrifice. Most Romans would have purchased animals as investments not food, as their daily diet was plain and largely vegetarian. They ate cereal raw or cooked into polenta gruel or unleavened bread, along with herbs, hazelnuts, chestnuts, figs, olives and grapes. If the rich enjoyed meat at banquets, for most Romans it was a rare treat that was eaten only after a sacrifice, and even then it would have been tough, as it was the meat of working animals.
Another rare treat could be found just round the corner from the Forum Boarium, in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine hills. Here, on simple wooden stands, Romans watched chariot races in the Circus Maximus, perhaps making a bet or two. In the early 380s BC races were rare events, held to celebrate a military victory, but within a few decades they would be held regularly, for several days each September. The games were closely tied to religion. The Circus Maximus was lined with temples and shrines, while in later centuries – and probably already in 387 BC – races were preceded by a procession of floats carrying images of gods, which set out from the great temples on the Capitoline Hill and wended its way down Via Sacra to the chariot course.
Among the gods closest to Roman hearts was Victory, which takes us to an aspect of early Rome that would eclipse all others in later memory. It was a city that was extremely interested in war, and as early as the 380s BC it had an impressive record in this area. In some ways Rome’s successes were not so very surprising. Though it would have seemed a small, primitive town to modern eyes, it was already the largest city in central Italy and had long dominated other Latin-speaking city states to the south. In 396 BC, only nine years before the disaster at the Allia, Rome had achieved what was easily its greatest military triumph to date, when it defeated the Etruscan city of Veii.
It is worth pausing for a moment to take a look at the Veiian war, as it says much about what kind of people the Romans were. The Veiians, like other Etruscan peoples, were skilled in the arts – never the Romans’ strong point – and were responsible for some of Rome’s finest landmarks. The terracotta god in Rome’s great temple to
Jupiter Capitolinus was made by a Veiian sculptor, Vulca, as were the statues that decorated the temple’s roof. For the most part, though, the two cities regarded one another as enemies. They had far too much in common. Veii lay just fifteen kilometres north of Rome – not far from the Allia battlefield – and both cities sought control of the same trans-Italian trade route along the Tiber: Rome controlled the left bank and Veii controlled most or all of the right. Veii was in Rome’s way, blocking her so effectively that the city’s expansion had been pushed in the other direction: south towards the Latins. Veii was much more of a force to be reckoned with than Rome’s smaller Latin neighbours. Its location, on a rocky plateau surrounded on almost all sides by sheer cliffs, was defensively far superior to that of Rome. Rome, though, was larger and stronger. At the beginning of the fourth century BC, when the two cities began their third and final war, Rome had close to twice the land territory of Veii.
Today Veii, or what is left of it, is preserved in a small national park surrounded by outer Rome commuter settlements. It is a rather haunting spot, reached by a bridge over a small waterfall that plunges into a deep chasm. Walking into the site one soon comes across a clue as to how Veii met its end: a tunnel cut into the cliff. The volcanic rock that Veii was built upon is soft and easily mined. The Etruscans were masters at digging water channels and one of these, over half a kilometre long, passed directly under the place where the Romans probably set up their camp. Livy describes how, frustrated by a long siege, the Romans dug a tunnel into the city. When it was ready they launched an attack on Veii’s walls, and while the city’s defenders were distracted, Rome’s soldiers poured out from their tunnel:
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