Draco himself, asked why so drastic a set of punishments, is reported to have said, “Even petty crimes deserve death, and I cannot find a more serious penalty for the greater crimes.” It is a severity which gives us our English words draconian and drastic; and in its relentless expectation that men can be made perfect, it is oddly reminiscent of the Spartan view of crime.147
Plutarch writes that a Spartan, asked by another Greek how adultery was punished in Sparta, remarked, “He would have to pay a fine—a bull from his herd, large enough to reach over Mount Taygetus and drink from the Eurotas.” “How could there be a bull that big?” the visitor protested, to which the Spartan replied, “How could there be an adulterer in Sparta?”24 The laws were intended to eliminate all wrongdoing because they were engraved only on Spartan hearts. In Athens, that otherwise very different Greek city, the leaders also believed that in a just society, where the citizens are properly trained and warned, there will be no crime. Both cities had gotten rid of the power of their kings; both found the need for some other law-keeper to stand in the monarch’s place.
And in both, the desire to give every citizen the ability to reach perfection led to a city in which citizens policed each other’s lives. A stele uncovered in the ruins of Athens makes it clear that Draco’s death penalty could be exercised by the Athenian citizens themselves: any man could kill a kidnapper, adulterer, or burglar caught in the act.25 The laws which were intended to bring equality had made each citizen an enforcer.
Around 600 BC, an Athenian named Solon stepped forwards to make a second stab at establishing a fair law code. He was a young man from a good family, but his father had spent most of the family wealth in ill-judged generosity, forcing the son into the merchant trade. He was a lover of luxury, of good food and drink, and notorious for his love affairs: “Solon was not immune to good-looking young men,” Plutarch remarks, primly.26
His business prospered, and like many later business luminaries, Solon got involved in local politics. Plutarch, from whom we have most of the details of Solon’s life, writes that when it became clear that Athens was headed towards civil war, “the most sensible Athenians began to look to Solon” because he was respectably middle-class: “He had no part in the wrongdoing of the rich, and was not caught up in the afflictions of the poor either…. The rich found him acceptable because of his wealth, and the poor because of his integrity.”27
Solon, elected archon, revoked the laws of Draco (except the penalty for homicide) and set about relegislating. He wrote new regulations that covered everything from the qualifications for holding public office to acceptable boundaries for mourning the dead (grief was fine, but sacrificing a cow, lacerating oneself, or visiting the tombs of people who weren’t actually family members was over the top).
But the touchiest issues had to do with righting the inequalities of wealth in the city, which was a predictably thankless task. “Both sides had high hopes,” Plutarch points out, which meant Solon was bound to disappoint someone. Which he did, almost at once, by cancelling the overwhelming debts of the poor, and by redistributing land so that the farmers who had cultivated it for generations now owned it.28
This didn’t please the Athenian aristocracy. Nor did it please the debtors, who had hoped for a good deal more than debt cancellation; they had wanted land redistributed equally to all, but the poorest still had no holdings of their own. “We have his own words on the fact that he offended most of the people of Athens by failing to fulfill their expectations,” Plutarch writes, and quotes a poem attributed to Solon: “Once their minds were filled with vain hopes, but now / In anger all look askance at me, as if I were their foe.”
This state of affairs had actually been predicted by an acquaintance of Solon’s, a stranger to Athens, who had visited the city earlier and found Solon busily writing out laws. The visitor laughed: “These decrees of yours are not different from spiders’ webs,” he said, according to Plutarch. “They’ll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they’ll be torn to shreds by people of power and wealth.”29
Solon disagreed. No one would break the laws, he insisted, if they were properly fitted to the needs of each citizen. It was an idealistic view of human nature, and Solon himself put it to the test by departing from Athens for ten years, as soon as the laws were enacted, in order to let them do their work free from any appeals to his person. “He claimed to be travelling to see the world,” Herodotus writes, “but it was really to avoid the possibility of having to repeal any of the laws he had made.”30 (And also, possibly, from sheer annoyance: “Once his laws were in force,” Plutarch writes, “not a day passed without several people coming up to him to express approval or disapproval, or to recommend the insertion of some point or other into the statutes, or the removal of something from them…. They would question him about it and ask him to explain in detail the meaning and purpose of every single point.”)31
And how did this work?
With Solon gone, Athenian politics soon fell back into its old divisive squabbles. “The result of the laws,” Plutarch says, regretfully, “justified the visitor’s conjecture, rather than Solon’s expectations.” The Athenian experiment had again failed to bring justice, let alone peace; and a small group of Athenians began to plan for the inevitable tyranny.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The Beginnings and End of Empire
Between 650 and 605 BC,
Rome becomes Etruscan,
and Babylon becomes queen of the world
ON THE TIBER RIVER, the two-hill settlement of Rome had grown. The mythological Sabine co-ruler Titus Tatius, killed in a riot, had not been replaced; Romulus ruled alone. The dual population of Latial tribesmen and Sabine immigrants was now dominated by the Latials.
Rome’s growth had not gone unnoticed by its neighbors. Not long after Titus Tatius’s death, the men of Fidenae, just above Rome on the Tiber, sacked Roman farms along the river. Then the city of Veii, on the river’s other side, started burning fields as well. Romulus fought off one threat and negotiated a peace with the other. But these attacks were signs of a bigger problem. “Veii,” Livy observes, “like Fidenae, was an Etruscan town.”1
The Etruscan towns stretched in a loose network of alliances up to the north. The Etruscans and Latials had once shared common customs, but the villagers north of the Tiber had been altered by newcomers. The Cimmerian sweep into Asia Minor had sent Phrygians and Lydians scrambling away into Thrace, across the narrow waters of the Bosphorus Strait and the Hellespont. This began a chain reaction of peoples shifting west; tribes driven into northern Italy filtered down into Villanovan land, where they mingled and traded and intermarried.2 They were joined by refugees directly from Asia Minor, fleeing from cities that had fallen to fire, siege, and invasion. Roman legend told of the Trojan hero Aeneas carrying his father on his back away from the shattered city of Troy, making his way as an exile through Thrace, and then sailing to Sicily and from there to the Italian coast, where he settled and took a wife, sired sons, and became a king in his own right: a mythical reflection of real immigration from the east.3 This meld of Villanovans and newcomers was an alchemy of native tradition and eastern skills that produced a new people: the Etruscans, strong builders and wealthy merchants who did not intend to let the Latial upstarts to the south expand without challenge.
57.1 Rome and Her Neighbors
Etruscan hostility was not the only cloud on Romulus’s horizon during his forty-year reign. “Great though Romulus was,” Livy remarks, “he was better loved by the commons than by the senate, and best of all by the army.”4 The early kings of Rome were no more able to rule autocratically than the Greek monarchs were; Livy’s use of the term “senate” is probably an anachronism, but some council of elders was keeping watch on the king’s power. Even the semidivine Romulus had to reckon with them, as the circumstances of his death make clear: Livy writes that he was reviewing his troops one day when
a storm burst, with violent
thunder. A cloud enveloped him, so thick that it hid him from the eyes of everyone present; and from that moment he was never seen again upon earth…. The senators, who had been standing at the king’s side…now declared that he had been carried up on high by a whirl wind…. Every man hailed him as a god and son of a god, and prayed to him…. How ever, even on this great occasion there were, I believe, a few dissenters who secretly maintained that the king had been torn to pieces by the senators.5
Whether or not Romulus had been assassinated by the senators, they were not long in asserting their power. They took control of the throne themselves, and declared a rule by committee. But the Sabine population of the city objected loudly. No Sabine had held power since the death of Romulus’s co-regent, decades before, and they wanted a Sabine king.
The senators agreed to a Sabine king, as long as they could choose him. The Sabine they picked was Numa Pompilius. He was not a great general but a wise man, famous for his justice. “Rome had originally been founded by force of arms,” Livy concludes; “the new king now prepared to give the community a second beginning, this time on the solid basis of law and religious observance.”6 Like Romulus, Numa Pompilius is probably legend, but his rule stands for a transition: Rome was moving from its roots as a colony established by war, towards a settled and mature existence as a city. Under Numa Pompilius, the gates to the Temple of Janus, god of war, were shut for the first time, symbolizing that Rome was at peace with the outside.
But the city continued at odds with itself. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (a Greek historian who went to Rome in the reign of Augustus Caesar and spent twenty-two years writing a history of the city) tells us that the “Alban element, who together with Romulus had planted the colony, claimed the right [of]…enjoying the greatest honours…. The new settlers thought that they ought not…to stand in an inferior position to the others. This was felt particularly by those who were of the Sabine race.”7
None of the people who lived in Rome thought of themselves as Romans; they lived within the same walls, but that was their only point of agreement. This left “the affairs of State,” in Dionysius’s vivid phrase, “in a raging sea of confusion.”
In addition, the peace with the outside was only temporary. The next two kings after Numa—the Latin Tullus Hostilius and the Sabine Ancus Marcius, both appointed by the Senate—led campaigns against the surrounding cities and tribes, doubling the size of Rome by force. If Rome ever did experience a time of tranquillity, it was brief; Rome had gone quickly back to its identity as an armed camp, threatening the peace of its neighbors.
The neighbors were not helpless, though. A native of the Etruscan city Tarquinii, on the northern coast above the Tiber, had set his sights on control of Rome.
This man, Lucumo, was mixed race by birth. His mother was Etruscan, but his father was a Greek from Corinth, a man named Demeter who had (according to Livy) been “forced by political troubles to leave his country.”8 Lucumo found himself facing the scorn of the “full-blooded” Etruscans around him, and with his wife decided to go to Rome, where race mattered less than opportunity: “There would be opportunities for an active and courageous man in a place where all advancement came swiftly and depended upon ability,” Livy writes. After all, more than one Sabine had risen to be king over the Latins; foreign blood was no bar to ability.
Settled in Rome, the Etruscan Lucumo worked energetically (and scattered money around) until he became the right-hand man of the king himself. Ancus Marcius even appointed Lucumo guardian of the royal princes. When the king died, the two princes were still young: “one still a child in years,” Dionysius records, “and the elder just growing a beard.”9 Lucumo sent the princes out of town (“on a hunting expedition,” Livy remarks) and began at once to canvass for votes. He was proclaimed king by an overwhelming majority and, in 616, ascended the throne of Rome. Later historians knew him as Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, or Tarquin the Elder.
After nearly forty years of reign, he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Servius Tullius, whose destiny as king had been revealed to the Roman people when, as a child, his head burst into flame. (He was sleeping at the time; a servant offered to throw water on his head, but when he woke up of his own accord, the fire went out. “From that time,” Livy explains, “the child was treated like a prince of the blood…he grew to be a man of truly royal nature,” and Tarquin the Elder betrothed his own daughter to him and made him heir.)
Servius Tullius, like his father-in-law, was an Etruscan. These two kings stand for a historical truth: the city of Rome, quarrelsome and pious by turns, constantly at war with its neighbors, throwing its walls around the nearby hills one by one, was itself swallowed by the greater, stronger, and older culture to its north. Etruscan cities had already spread up all the way up to the Bottomless River: the old name for the Po, across the Apennines. To the northwest, Etruscan cities controlled the copper, iron, and silver mines in the so-called Metal-Bearing Hills.10 This metal was traded to the Greek colonies along the Italian coast, and contact with the Greek trading cities brought the Etruscans face-to-face with the Greek writing system. The Etruscans began to use the Greek alphabet to label their own goods, using their own language written in Greek characters.148 Despite the recognizable letters, the language itself remains a puzzle: it appears almost entirely in brief inscriptions which have not been decoded.11
Rome did not become part of some entity called “Etruria.” There was no “Etrurian empire,” merely a set of Etruscan cities that shared a language and certain customs and were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. The Etruscan move into Rome was the infiltration of a city already occupied by several different national groups by one more group—this one more influential than the rest.
Livy credits the Etruscan Tarquin the Elder with the planning of the Circus Maximus, the great Roman stadium that lay between the Palatine and Aventine hills, and the laying of the foundations for the Temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol; Dionysius adds that he squared off the walls and began the digging of sewers to drain the city’s waste (a less dramatic but infinitely more useful accomplishment). The Etruscan Servius Tullius is praised for claiming the Quirinal and Viminal hills, and building trenches and earthworks to reinforce Rome’s walls. These real structures were indeed built by Etruscans. Romans had little talent for building, but in Etruria, religious rituals governed the founding of towns, the laying out of walls, and the placement of gates.12 Etruscan cities, excavated, show planned streets, laid out in a grid (something which the Romans had not yet considered). Like the long-ago cities of the Harappan Indians, Etruscan streets had standardized widths for main streets, the secondary roads that crossed them, and the minor roads that lay between. In Rome itself, excavation shows that sometime around 650, the huts in which most Romans lived (made of branches woven together, with walls of mud packed into the interstices) began to be knocked down in favor of stone houses. The huts on the western side of town were cleared away, and the open space was packed down hard, to serve as a city gathering place: later, this square became known as the Roman Forum.13
The very material of Rome was gaining an Etruscan stamp. So was its monarchy. Dionysius writes that Tarquin the Elder introduced to Rome the Etruscan symbols of kingship: “a crown of gold and an embroidered purple robe…[he] sat on a throne of ivory holding an ivory sceptre in his hand.” He was attended, when he went out, by twelve bodyguards (known as lictors), each of whom carried an axe bound into the middle of a bunch of rods: the fasces, which represented the power of the king both to discipline wrongdoers and execute serious criminals.14
57.2 The City of Rome
Under Servius Tullius, “the size of the city was greatly increased,” and he reigned forty-four years as king, Etruscan monarch over a mixed population of Etruscans, Latins, and Sabines. And Rome went on fighting: the city’s soldiers fought with Sabine cities and Latin cities, and warded off assaults from other Etruscan kings who resented Roman control of the important ford at the Tiber river. Dionysius and Li
vy both tell the story of war after war, between Rome and Collatia, Rome and Fidenae, Rome and a five-city coalition of Etruscans, Rome and Eretum: unending war.
WHILE ROME struggled for its beginnings, an old empire was crashing to the ground to the east.
The three-way fighting in Assyria had continued. Ashurbanipal’s heir at Nineveh, Ashur-etillu-ilani, had mobilized the Assyrian army against his brother Sin-shum-ishkun, now in command of a mixed Assyrian and Babylonian force headquartered at Babylon. The Chaldean king Nabopolassar, meanwhile, was driving his way up against the Babylonian forces from the south, taking away one ancient Sumerian city after another.
After years of fighting (how many is completely unclear, since the various Babylonian king lists differ), Sin-shum-ishkun was forced to give up the defense of Babylon, and Nabopolassar marched into the city. But the confused accounts of the outcome suggest that Sin-shum-ishkun may have surrendered the south, only to go north and seize his brother’s throne; Ashur-etillu-ilani disappears from the accounts from this point on. The heartland was in disarray, and now a Chaldean sat on the throne of Babylon.
Once established, Nabopolassar took up the fighting again—against the Assyrian empire itself. He had already planned his strategy: to fight his way first all the way up the Euphrates river, “liberating” one province after another, and then to turn and fight his way towards the Tigris to the east, towards Nineveh itself.
In this, he had help. Cyarxes, the Median king of the Medes and the Persians, knew an opportunity when he saw one. He offered his friendship to Nabopolassar, who accepted. They agreed to divide the Assyrian provinces, once Assyria had fallen; and Nabopolassar married off his son, the Babylonian crown prince (and his father’s most trusted general) Nebuchadnezzar, to the Median princess Amytis, the daughter of Cyarxes.15
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 44
