Before building began, the augurs investigated the opinions of deities who already had holy places on the site. They all agreed to be resettled elsewhere—except for Terminus, the god of boundaries, so a special shrine in his honor was incorporated into the temple. His lack of cooperation was regarded as a good omen, for it signified the permanence of Rome’s borders.
The temple quickly became the center of Rome’s religious life. It was the repository of treasures donated by victorious generals, dedications, and military trophies. The rooms got so cluttered that in 179 B.C. numerous statues and commemorative shields fastened to the columns were cleared out.
A development of more practical value was the transformation of the brook that crossed the Forum into the city’s main drain, the Cloaca Maxima. Various smaller streams debouched into it. In Tarquin’s day, it was an open sewer, crossed by a bridge that doubled as a shrine to Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings and endings. As a result, the Forum finally lost its marshiness, and large-scale building became possible.
* * *
A TERRIBLE PORTENT appeared. A snake was observed to glide out of a crack in a wooden pillar in the palace. Everyone ran away in a panic. Even Tarquin was alarmed, although in his case the emotion was not so much fright as foreboding. He decided to consult the oracle at Delphi, and ask for an authoritative explanation.
Delphi was a town in central Greece, occupying a series of terraces along the slopes of Mount Parnassus. In this precipitous location stood a shrine to Apollo. It was the home of an oracle, one of the sacred places scattered throughout the Mediterranean where a god would respond to inquiries about the future. The oracle at Delphi was world-famous and was consulted by states as well as individuals.
The king did not dare to entrust the oracle’s reply to anyone but his closest relatives, so he commissioned two of his sons, Titus and Aruns, to journey to Greece, in Livy’s words, “through country which Roman feet had seldom trod and over seas which Roman ships had never sailed.” They were accompanied by the king’s nephew, Lucius Junius Brutus, a descendant of one of Aeneas’s companions. He was a strange young man, who deliberately assumed a “mask” to conceal his real personality. His family’s great wealth had attracted the unwelcome interest of the king, who had had his elder brother killed. Brutus was well aware that Tarquin had no hesitation in putting aristocrats to death, and feared that his turn would be next. So he pretended to be a simpleton and allowed the king to seize his estate without protest. He even accepted the additional cognomen of Brutus, the Latin for “stupid.”
Delphi was a spectacular destination. As the party neared the end of its journey, the road dwindled to a steep path and, according to Pausanias, the author of a celebrated guidebook to ancient Greece, became “difficult even for an active man.” Once arrived in the town, the visitors walked up a processional avenue, the Sacred Way, to the Precinct of Apollo, a walled enclosure at the top of the city filled with monuments and dedications, gifts in return for favors received. There were twenty Treasuries, small buildings that resembled miniature Greek temples and contained splendid offerings to Apollo, often works of art, including the Bronze Charioteer, one of the greatest masterpieces of Greek sculpture to have survived to the present day, and a bronze version of the wooden horse of Troy. Everywhere were nude statues of victorious athletes.
The Tarquin boys made their way to the Temple of Apollo, which stood at the center of the Precinct. Carved on the temple’s exterior were three famous maxims, epitomizing the Greek idea of the good life: “Know yourself” (); “Nothing in excess” (); and, somewhat mean-spiritedly, “Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens” (). Here they paid a consultation fee and made a sacrificial offering. All having gone well, and the animal having behaved as it should when sprinkled with water, they went inside the temple and sacrificed again, placing the victim, or parts of it, on an offertory table. Hieratic spokesmen (the Greek word is , from which we have our prophet) then ushered the Romans into a space where they could hear but not see the Pythia, a priestess who delivered her prophecies in an inner sanctum.
The Pythia was a local woman of a certain age, who served for life and was sworn to chastity. Before a séance, she purified herself by washing in the nearby Castalian Spring, and burned some laurel leaves (the laurel was Apollo’s plant) and barley meal at a symbolic hearth inside the temple. She then sat on a tripod and, crowned with laurel and holding a dish of sacred spring water, became possessed by the god. In this probably self-induced trance, she “raved”—that is, spoke in some form of fragmentary and ecstatic speech.
The spokesmen translated the ravings into elegant hexameters. These oracular messages were often fork-tongued, and those who consulted the god needed to consider their meaning with great care before taking any consequential action. It does not follow that the Pythia was hedging her bets. If she wished, she could speak clearly and authoritatively; she and the temple personnel were well-informed on international politics and, when it came to personal consultations, they doubtless built up experience of human psychology. However, the Greeks believed that divine messages were in the nature of things ambiguous. There was a limit to human beings’ access to sure knowledge of the future.
Brutus knew how to get on the right side of the Pythia. He produced a wooden stick as an offering; Titus and Aruns had a good laugh at his expense for having made such a paltry gift. They did not realize that the stick had been hollowed out and that inside it Brutus had hidden a rod of gold. After the Tarquins had received an answer from the oracle (we are not told what it was), they decided to ask another question: Which of them would be the next king of Rome? The oracle’s typically equivocal answer was “He who shall be first to kiss his mother shall have supreme authority in Rome.”
Titus and Aruns made the obvious, literal interpretation. They decided that the prophecy should be kept a secret, so that at least their brother Sextus would be out of the running; they themselves would decide by lot which one would kiss his mother when they got back to Rome. But Brutus guessed that Apollo was being tricky. He pretended to stumble, and fell flat on his face, his lips touching the earth, the mother of all things.
This would by no means be the last time that senior Romans made their way up the steep path to the shrine of the god, in urgent need of his guidance.
IT WAS A sex scandal, not a political or military crisis, that brought the dynasty down. A long siege of the town of Ardea, the capital of a Latin tribe, the Rutuli, was loosening discipline in the Roman camp. Applications for leave from the front were rather easily granted, especially to officers. The young princes staged lavish entertainments in their tents. On one occasion, everyone was drinking heavily in the quarters of Sextus Tarquinius. Someone happened to raise the subject of wives, and each man praised his own in extravagant terms. A member of the royal family, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, broke in: “Stop! Why do we need words, when in a few hours we can prove beyond any doubt the superiority of my own Lucretia?”
He proposed that they all ride off to Rome, arrive at their houses without warning, and see what their wives were doing. They drunkenly agreed and galloped to the city, where they found the princes’ wives thoroughly enjoying themselves with a group of young friends at an extravagant dinner party. They then journeyed on to Collatinus’s house in his hometown some miles north of the city, Collatia. A very different sight greeted them. Although it was late at night, they found Lucretia, surrounded by busy maidservants, at work spinning. It was conceded by one and all that she had won the contest for female virtue hands down.
Collatinus asked the party to have supper with him. Nothing further occurred, and the men rode back to camp. It was at the meal, though, that Sextus was struck both by Lucretia’s beauty and by the challenge of her chastity. He decided that he would bed her.
His plan was a simple one. A few days later, he rode back to Collatia with one attendant, without mentioning the expedition to Collatinus. Lucretia welcomed him and gave him supper. Afterward, Sex
tus was assigned a bedchamber and the household retired for the night. He waited eagerly till quiet had fallen and, as far as he could judge, everyone was fast asleep. Drawing his sword, he let himself into Lucretia’s room. Holding her down with his left hand on her chest, he whispered, “Don’t make a sound. I am Sextus Tarquinius. I have a weapon and if you say a word you will be dead.”
Lucretia woke up with a start. Sextus did his best to persuade the terrified woman to consent to sex. She refused, even when threatened with death. Sextus then played his ace. If she would not let him sleep with her, he said, he would kill her and then his slave, whose naked body he would lay in her bed. He would then claim that he had caught her having sex with a servant, and put both of them to death. (An adulteress could be slain on the spot, without much danger of her killer’s being convicted in a court of law.)
The thought of a posthumous reputation as a slut was too much for Lucretia, and she gave in. Sextus enjoyed her, and then rode exultantly back to camp. Meanwhile, the abused woman sent messages to her father in Rome and to her husband at Ardea, telling them that something terrible had happened and they must come to her at once, each bringing with him a trustworthy friend. Brutus happened to be with Collatinus when the messenger arrived, and agreed to be his companion on this mysterious mission.
Lucretia was found sitting sadly in her room. She burst into tears when Collatinus and Lucretius entered and told them all that had happened. She said, “My body only has been violated. My heart is innocent and death will be my witness. Give me your solemn promise that the adulterer shall be punished. He is Sextus Tarquinius.”
They all gave their word, and then did what they could to comfort Lucretia. She replied, “I am free of guilt, but must take my punishment.” She drew a knife that she had concealed in her dress, drove it into her heart and, bending forward over the wound, died as she fell.
A sudden and extraordinary transformation took place. Brutus withdrew the knife from Lucretia’s body and, dropping his disguise of stupidity, spoke with intelligence, force, and feeling. His listeners were shocked.
Swearing a great oath on Lucretia’s blood, he cried, “I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, his wicked wife and all his children, and never again will they or any other man be king in Rome.”
Lucretia’s body was carried into the public square, where a crowd swiftly gathered. Brutus stirred them up to anger against the Tarquins and headed a march on Rome. He addressed the People’s Assembly in a packed Forum. He painted in vivid colors Sextus’s crime and from there went on to attack the king’s tyrannical behavior. He recalled the undeserved murder of the good king, Servius Tullius, and the cruelty of his daughter, Tarquin’s wife, Tullia, who had ridden over Servius’s corpse. The Assembly demanded the king’s deposition and the exile of him and his family.
News of these events soon reached Tarquin, who immediately left camp at Ardea for the city to restore order. At the same time Brutus, with a force of armed volunteers, made for Ardea to incite the army to revolt. Learning of the king’s whereabouts, he made a detour to avoid meeting him and arrived at the camp at about the same time that Tarquin reached Rome. They received very different welcomes. The troops greeted Brutus with great enthusiasm, while the authorities at Rome closed the city gates against the former despot. The king withdrew to Etruria with two of his sons; Sextus made for the town of Gabii, where he was quickly put to death by relatives of those he had massacred.
The year was 509 B.C., the kings were gone, history was about to take over from legend, and Rome was ready to embark on its great adventure.
4
So What Really Happened?
THE STORY SO FAR IS WHAT THE ROMANS WANTED TO be told, and how they believed it should be told. But to what extent is the account of Rome’s foundation and the monarchy in the previous chapters true? It is hard to be quite sure, but the question seems to have two answers: on the one hand, very little and, on the other, quite a lot.
The Romans themselves recognized that some elements of the tradition were not to be trusted. Livy refers forgivingly to “old tales with more of the charm of poetry than of sound historical record” and goes on to say, “It is the privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things with human; it adds dignity to the past and if any nation deserves the right to a divine origin, it is our own.”
The link with Troy was foisted on the Romans by Greek historians, who liked to bring interesting new foreign powers within their cultural net, but this was not an unwelcome gift. The Greeks saw the Trojans not as slippery Asiatics but as honorary Greeks. Indeed, some said that they were “a nation as truly Greek as any and formerly came from the Peloponnese.” This meant that the Romans, much in awe of Hellenic culture and suffering from an inferiority complex regarding their own, could award themselves a Greek identity. Their admiration concealed envy and hostile emulation; by associating themselves with the Trojans, they cast themselves as rivals who might one day conquer Greece and so avenge their ancestors.
It is possible that there was a war of some sort at Troy around the traditional date, 1184 B.C. The city certainly existed, and its remains have been uncovered by modern archaeologists. Even at this early stage, Greeks and Phoenicians sailed around the Mediterranean and eventually founded “colonies,” independent city-states, but most of this happened four centuries or so later. Aeneas can hardly have called in at Carthage, for it did not then exist. (The Greek historian Timaeus believed that Dido founded the North African city in 814.) But then Aeneas did not exist, either. The panoply of gods and heroes whose adventures are described in Homer’s Iliad is invented.
As for Romulus and Remus, they are equally fictional. In essence, Romulus means “founder of Rome” (the “-ulus” is Etruscan and denotes a founder), and Remus may be etymologically connected with the word Rome. Tales of exposed infants who rise to greatness are familiar features of ancient mythology (remember Moses, Oedipus, and, of course, Paris of Troy).
The real difficulty the Romans faced was that there were two contradictory foundation stories that ostensibly took place hundreds of years apart, the one about a wandering Trojan hero, and the other about local boys Romulus and Remus. They decided to accept both, and were then faced with reconciling them and knitting them together in a plausible narrative. Aeneas was limited to having discovered Italy and setting up house in Latium, so that Rome itself could be given to the twins. In order to fill the long time gap, a catalog of totally imaginary kings of Alba Longa was cooked up to link the two legends.
Roman historians in the last days of the Republic did not necessarily imagine things, but they tended to see remote and legendary events through the eyes of their own time. The fact that Romulus developed despotic tendencies and was assassinated in the Senate House may very well reflect a response to the traumas of their own day. Hence the uncanny pre-echoes in Livy of Caesar’s death.
There was much discussion about the date of Rome’s foundation. Most commentators favored a year sometime in the eighth century. As we have seen, 753 was the choice of Varro. It became the generally accepted date. This led to a second chronological conundrum. Only seven kings reigned between Romulus and the expulsion of the Tarquins. This meant an implausibly long average reign of thirty-five years apiece.
The Romans accepted this, but modern scholars have been more skeptical. Perhaps there were additional kings, of whom no record survives. Archaeologists seem to have settled the question: slight traces of primitive settlements have been found that go back many hundreds of years, but solid evidence of city as distinct from village life begins only in the middle of the seventh century. So the real foundation date was about one hundred years later than originally believed. This has helped, for although some monarchs may have slipped from view, the canonical number now fits comfortably into the time available. Also, bits of dug-up evidence begin to fall into place alongside the literary tradition. Thus, the Regia, or palace, in the Forum was constructed in the late seventh century, just where the new chronology
places the reign of Numa Pompilius, who is credited with having commissioned it. Rome’s first Senate House was attributed to Tullus Hostilius (hence its name, the Curia Hostilia): its remains have been identified, dating to the early sixth century, when we now suppose that Tullus ruled Rome.
It is a long time before we meet personalities who are (more or less) certain to have lived in history as distinct from myth. The first four kings seem to be largely if not entirely fictional, even if events in their reigns did actually take place. They were each given specialist tasks, which were in truth accomplished during the monarchy, but not necessarily by one particular king.
Romulus established an orderly social and political system with tribes and curiae; the un-warlike Numa was allocated everything concerning religion and (in Cicero’s phrase) “the spirit of tranquillity”—cults, priestly colleges and a public calendar of sacred and secular days; the untranquil Tullius Hostilius and Ancus Marcius fought expansionist wars with an effective conscript army. Whether or not Ancus himself had anything to do with it, Ostia and the Pons Sublicius were certainly built. However, we can say with confidence that the two Tarquins and Servius Tullius lived real lives (although, because their recorded achievements are very similar, the Tarquins may have been only one person). The best estimate proposes that Priscus came to power between 570 and 550 B.C.
The Rise of Rome Page 7
