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
had no settled
Way of life, no civilization: ploughing, the formation of
Communal reserves, and economy were unknown then.
They lived on the produce of trees and the hard-won fare of the hunter.
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 TARQU
INS, 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. Tre
achery 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 Rise of Rome Page 9
