The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The people had not elected him, the Senate had not sanctioned his accession. Without hope of his subjects’ affection, he could rule only by fear…. He punished by death, exile, or confiscation of property men whom he happened to suspect or dislike; he broke the established tradition of consulting the Senate on all matters of public business; he made and unmade treaties and alliances with whom he pleased without any reference whatever either to the commons or the Senate.

  All of these were serious offenses. But the last straw came when his son, putative heir to the Roman throne, raped a Roman noblewoman named Lucretia, the wife of one of his own friends. Shamed, Lucretia killed herself. Her body lay in the public square while her husband shouted out to his countrymen to help him avenge his wife’s death. It did not take long for indignation over the rape of Lucretia to morph into indignation over the tyrannical acts of the entire family.

  Tarquin the Proud himself was outside Rome at the time, leading a campaign against the neighboring city of Ardea. When news of the uprising reached him, he started back to Rome; but by the time he arrived, the rebellion was in full swing, “Tarquin found the city gates shut against him,” writes Livy, “and his exile decreed.” The army joined “enthusiastically” into the insurrection, and Tarquin was forced to flee north into Etruria with his son.

  Lucretia’s bereaved husband and one of his trusted friends were elected leaders of the city, by the popular vote of the army: only members of the divisions which had been formed by Servius Tullius were allowed to vote. The two men were given kinglike powers to declare war and make decrees—but with a difference. Their power would last only for a single year, and each man could veto the other’s decrees. They were now consuls: the highest office in Roman government. Rome had been liberated from its monarchy, and the Roman Republic had begun.162

  Livy, our most thorough source for these years, gives this story a heavy pro-Republic gloss. As far as he is concerned, once Tarquin the Proud was thrown out of the city, the entire history of Rome makes a right-hand turn: “My task from now on will be to trace the history of a free nation,” Livy declares, “governed by annually elected officers of state and subject not to the caprice of individual men, but to the overriding authority of law.”

  The expulsion of Tarquin the Proud probably does have a historical base, but it is unlikely that the Romans suddenly realized the shortcomings of monarchy. Rather, the driving out of the Etruscan king represents the throwing off of Etruscan dominance.

  Rome had been ruled by Etruscans since the accession of Tarquin the Elder a hundred years earlier. But since the sea victory at Alalia in 535, the Etruscans had been hard pressed to keep their power.

  The events following Tarquin the Proud’s expulsion show the slippage of Etruscan strength. In Etruria, he went from city to city, attempting to put together an anti-Roman coalition. “I am of the same blood as you,” was his most potent argument. The men of Veii and Tarquinii responded. A double army marched behind Tarquin, back towards Rome, in an attempt to reassert Etruscan power over the most important city south of Etruria.

  They were met by the Roman army and defeated in a fierce fight which was almost a draw; Livy remarks that the Romans won because they lost one fewer man than the Etruscans. The Etruscans then began to plan a second attack on Rome, this time under the leadership of Lars Porsena, the king of the Etruscan city of Clusium.

  News of the coming attack was received in Rome with something close to panic. They had barely managed to fight off Veii and Tarquinii, and Lars Porsena had earned himself a reputation as a fierce fighter. In terror, the farmers on the city’s outskirts abandoned their farms and fled inside the city’s walls.

  It was a peculiarity of the Roman defenses that the city was protected on three sides by walls, but on the fourth—the east side—only by the Tiber. The river was generally considered uncrossable, but there was one way that an army could get across the Tiber and directly into the city: a wooden bridge which stretched from the eastern lands outside the city, known as the Janiculum, across the river, right into the heart of Rome.

  Lars Porsena made his first approach from this direction, eschewing the walls in favor of the Tiber. The Etruscan army swept in like a storm, and took the Janiculum without difficulty; the Roman soldiers posted there threw away their weapons and ran across the bridge to safety.

  Except for one: the soldier Horatius, who took up his position at the western edge of the bridge, ready to hold it alone: “conspicuous amongst the rout of fugitives,” writes Livy, “sword and shield ready for action.”14

  According to Roman legend, Horatius held off the Etruscans long enough for Roman demolition forces to arrive to destroy the bridge. Ignoring their shouts for him to retreat back across the bridge before it was taken down, he went on fighting until the supports were cut to pieces. “The Etruscan advance was suddenly checked by the crash of the falling bridge and the simultaneous shout of triumph from the Roman soldiers who had done their work in time,” Livy writes. Horatius, now cut off from the city, plunged into the river in full armor and swam across. “It was a noble piece of work,” Livy concludes, “legendary, maybe, but destined to be celebrated in story through the years to come.”

  Like Sennacherib’s withdrawal from the walls of Jerusalem, Horatius’s defense of the bridge was a minor military engagement that stands out in memory because of a poem; in this case, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, in which Horatius becomes the model of patriotic British bravery:

  Then out spake brave Horatius,

  The captain of the gate:

  “To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  And the temples of his gods?”15

  Gallant though it may have been, the defense of the bridge did not end the Etruscan attack. Porsena spread his forces across the Janiculum, barricaded the river so that Rome could not be supplied with food by ships, and besieged the walls. The siege, supplemented by various indecisive battles, dragged on until Porsena finally agreed to withdraw in return for Roman concessions. The two cities swore out a peace treaty that did little to change the relationship between the two cities, but at least halted hostilities.

  The treaty revealed that the Etruscans and Romans were now balanced in power. Given that the Etruscans had been dominant for so many decades, this was a defeat for the cities of Etruria. And Rome made its own treaty with Carthage, sworn out in the same year, which recognized the coast south of the Tiber not as Etruscan, but as Roman territory.

  Polybius records this treaty in his Rise of the Roman Empire. As he understands it, Rome and Carthage agreed to friendship on certain conditions, the most important being that Roman ships were not to sail farther west than “Fair Promontory,” the modern Cape Bon.163 A Roman captain who was blown off course and landed in the forbidden territory was to repair his ship and leave within five days, without buying or carrying away “anything more than is required for the repair of his ship or for sacrifice.”16 Any trade that took place east of Fair Promontory had to be carried out in the presence of a town clerk (presumably to keep the Romans from trading arms close to Carthaginian land). In return, the Carthaginians agreed to leave the entire Latin population alone, to build no forts near them, and to refrain from entering Latin territory with weapons. Clearly the Romans were most concerned for their future political expansion, while the Carthaginians had their eye on a trading empire.

  The Etruscans, on the other hand, were nowhere in sight. They were also just about to lose their grip on the land around the Po river; groups of Celtic warriors were on their way over the Alps, down into northern Italy.

  According to Livy, they were driven by a population explosion; Gaul had become “so rich and populous that the effective control of such large numbers was a matter of serious difficulty.” So the king of the Celts in Gaul sent his two nephews out, wit
h two groups of followers, to find new lands. One nephew went north, into “southern Germany,” while the other went south with a “vast host” towards the Alps. They crossed the mountains and “defeated the Etruscans near the river Ticinus, and…founded the town of Mediolanium”—that is, the city of Milan.

  Nor was that the end of the invasion. Livy goes on to describe at least four successive waves of Gaulish invasion, each maurading tribe driving away the Etruscan inhabitants who lived in the cities south of the Alps, and building their own towns in the Po river valley. The fourth wave of arriving Celts found “all the country between the Alps and the Po already occupied” and so “crossed the river on rafts,” expelled the Etruscans between the Po and the Apennine ridge, and settled there as well.17

  The Celts must have been a fearsome sight, charging down the mountain slopes towards the walls of the Etruscan cities. The word “Celt,” given to these tribes by the Greeks and Romans, comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to strike,” and the weapons found in their graves—seven-foot spears, iron swords with thrusting tips and cutting edges, war chariots, helmets and shields—testify to their skill at war.18 “They slept on straw and leaves,” Polybius remarks, “ate meat, and practised no other pursuits but war and agriculture.”19

  This particular invasion, which began around 505 BC, was part of a larger movement in the entire Celtic culture. Right around this time, new customs begin to overlay the old Hallstatt settlements; this was a culture that used knots, curves, and mazelike lines as decorations, and which buried leaders not with wagons, as in Hallstatt graves, but instead with two-wheeled war chariots. This was not a peaceful takeover. The Hallstatt burial ground at Heuneberg, in southern Germany, was thoroughly looted; the fortress on the Danube was burned.20

  Archaeologists have given this next phase in Celtic culture the name “La Tène,” after one of its most extensive sites, just west of the southern Rhine. In some places La Tène sites lie south of Hallstatt sites, or overwhelm them (as at Heuneburg and Dürrnberg), but generally they lie a little to the north.21 It is the La Tène style of art which we now identify as “Celtic,” and the characteristics of the La Tène culture which replaced those of the Hallstatt. This was not a foreign invasion, but a homegrown shift in power: one Celtic culture overwhelming another.

  This internal struggle for dominance gave rise to the invasions southwards into Italy; its reality is preserved in the later account of the Roman historian Justin:

  The reason the Gauls came to Italy and sought new areas to settle in was internal unrest and ceaseless fratricidal strife. When they tired of this and made their way to Italy they drove the Etruscans from their homeland and founded Milan, Di Como, Brescia, Verona, Bergamo, Trento, and Vicenza.22

  The unrest may have driven some of the Celts as far over as the western coast of Europe, and perhaps even across the water to the island of Britain. Britain had been inhabited for some centuries by a people we know almost nothing about, except that they dragged together huge rings of standing stones for a purpose which had something to do with the sky. Construction on Stonehenge, the most famous of these huge monuments, probably began around 3100 BC and continued over the next two thousand years.164 But these people were soon infiltrated by the same warlike Celts who were pushing south against the Etruscans. Right around 500 BC, graves in Britain begin to contain war chariots for the first time, just like the La Tène graves in southern Germany.

  THE ROMAN REPUBLIC responded to the invasions in the north by altering its new government. “In these circumstances of mounting anxiety and tension,” writes Livy, “…the proposal was made, for the first time, of appointing a dictator.” The year was 501, only eight years after the Republic began.

  Livy chalks up the willingness of the voting populace (which is to say, the army) to pass this proposal to a whole constellation of military emergencies: war with various nearby cities, hostility from the Sabines, looming attack from other Latin towns, unrest from “the commons.” But certainly the ripples of displacement from the north, reverberating down south, put the entire peninsula on edge.

  The office of dictator was not, as in modern times, license for unlimited power. The Roman dictators had power for only six months at a time, and had to be appointed by the ruling consuls. Often the dictator was one of the consuls. His role was to keep Rome secure in the face of extraordinary outside threats, but he also had unusual powers inside the city. Consuls were allowed to impose the death penalty on Romans outside the walls of Rome, in connection with military expeditions, but inside Rome they had to submit criminals to the will of the voting population for punishment. The dictator, though, was allowed to exercise that power of life and death inside Rome itself, with no obligation to consult the people.23

  This first dictator may have been appointed to deal with marauding Gauls, Latins, and Etruscans, but getting Rome’s unruly population back under control was also part of his job, as Livy makes clear. “The appointment of a dictator for the first time in Rome,” he writes, “and the solemn sight of his progress through the streets preceded by the ceremonial axes, had the effect of scaring the commons into a more docile frame of mind…. From a dictator there was no appeal, and no help anywhere but in implicit obedience.”24

  Implicit obedience: Rome’s first defense. It was the first time that the rights of the Republic were suspended for the sake of expediency, but not the last.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Kingdoms and Reformers

  Between 560 and 500 BC,

  India divides into kingdoms and alliances,

  and the kingdom of Magadha begins its rise

  BETWEEN THE MYTHICAL BATTLE of the Mahabharata and the middle of the sixth century BC, the warlike clans of India had battled, negotiated, and treatied their way into a semistable arrangement of kingdoms.

  Sixteen of these kingdoms are mentioned in tales preserved by Buddhist oral tradition and later set down in writing.165 Among them are the states of Kuru, Gandhara, and Pancala, kingdoms grown from the roots of the ancient clans that had fought in the Bharata War; the far southern state of Ashuaka, down below the Vindhya and Satpura mountain ranges, on the dry plateau now known as the Deccan; and the state of Magadha, below the curve of the Ganga.166

  The sixteen kingdoms were called mahajanapadas, a word rooted in much older times. The early nomadic Aryan warrior clans had called themselves jana (Sanskrit for “tribe”); the warrior clans that had settled in the Ganga river valley and claimed land for themselves extended this word and called themselves janapada, tribes with land. The sixteen mahajanapada, or “great janapada,” were tribes with land who had absorbed other tribes and become kingdoms. In these kingdoms, the king himself, his relatives, and his warriors remained the ruling clan. To be born into the ruling clan was to be kshatriya and to belong, by right, to the elite and powerful.

  The kshatriya held political power, but the priests wielded a peculiar power of their own. Sacrifices and offerings had been part of the daily life of the Aryans since their journey south into India: “Indra helps, by his aid, the one occupied with sacrifice,” reads one of the earliest hymns in the Rig Veda, “the one who chants hymns, who cooks the sacrificial food, who is strengthened by holy utterance…and by the gifts to the officiating priests. He, O people, is Indra.”1 Wound together with elements from the Harappan peoples and the other indigenous tribes, the old Aryan practices became the core of the most ancient form of practices later known as Hinduism. The priests who performed the sacrifices had been the first aristocracy of Indian society, and they continued to hold their influence in the sixteen mahajanapas. Like the ruling kshatriya, the priests had their own clans: to be born into a priestly family was to be brahman and to inherit the privilege of sacrifice.

  This three-way division of society—priests, warrior-chiefs, and everyone else (the “everyone else” families were vaishyas, common people)—was far from unknown in ancient times. But in India, the priests dominated the rest. In most other ancient societies,
the kings and warriors were at the top of the power heap; even those who paid lip service to the importance of the gods were likely to throw their prophets and priests in jail, or even execute them. And in almost every other ancient society, the king was able to carry out certain sacred functions, and sometimes held the highest religious office in the land.

  But the brahman had an unshared power. During the days of the sixteen kingdoms, a man who had not been born kshatriya could still become king if the priests carried out a ritual to bestow sacred power upon him, but no one who was not born brahman could take up the job of a priest.2 The brahman was, according to the later Hindu text The Laws of Manu, “the lord” of all other created orders, the most excellent of men: “born as the highest on earth, the lord of all created beings, for the protection of the treasury of the law; whatever exists in the world is the property of the brahman…the brahman is, indeed, entitled to all.”3

  61.1 Indian Kingdoms

  By the time of the sixteen kingdoms, the animal sacrifices which had been so important to the wandering nomadic tribes had slowly fallen out of favor with the growing urban populations of India. But a power awarded by the universe itself to those “born as the highest on earth” could hardly be abridged. The importance of the priests was so built into the entire consciousness of the warrior clans that the brahmans—far from losing their job—kept their central role. Rather than sacrificing, they governed the proper performance of the bloodless rituals which now occupied the place of offerings: rituals carried out to honor the flame of the hearth, to acknowledge the coming of dusk, to honor deities by caring for their images, to mark marriages and funerals.4

  AROUND THE EDGES of the sixteen states lay a ring of tribes who still resisted being enfolded into any one of the sixteen mahajanapada. Instead of coalescing into kingdoms, these tribes formed independent alliances, called gana-sanghas.