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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'King's supreme ability is to imagine himself into the past. The scope of his knowledge is staggering' JOHN CAREY, SUNDAY TIMES At its largest extent, the Roman Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Irish Sea, from North Africa to central Europe. A fifth of the world's population were Roman citizens. Even after the empire's dramatic decline and fall, its legacy continued to shape politics and laws, language and numerals, calendars and architecture. But what was Rome, who were the Romans, how did they achieve such domination – and why did their mighty empire fall? Ross King's cast of characters includes murderous emperors, rebellious women, remarkable thinkers, fugitive slaves and persecuted Christians. From the foundation myths of Romulus and Remus to the barbarian invasions, this is an unputdownable account of one of the greatest empires the world has seen.
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SELECTED PRAISE FOR ROSS KING
‘King is that ideal friend, stimulating rather than intimidating, who has seen everything, and doesn’t mind doing it again with you… a miracle of compression’
The Oldie on The Shortest History of Italy
‘A marvel of storytelling… dazzling, instructive and highly entertaining’
Wall Street Journal on The Bookseller of Florence
‘An adventure yarn set on the wild frontiers of human knowledge… abounding with excellent stories’
Financial Times on Brunelleschi’s Dome
‘Brilliant… seamlessly weaves together intellectual debate, technological exploration and the excitement of new ways of thinking’
rowan williams on The Bookseller of Florenceii
iii
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To Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson
Contents
PREHISTORIC ROME
c. 1000 BCEEvidence of early settlement on the Palatine Hill.c. 800–750 BCEFormation of small villages around the Tiber River.753 BCETraditional date for the founding of Rome by Romulus.753–509 BCERule of the seven legendary kings of Rome (Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, Tarquinius Superbus).THE ROMAN REPUBLIC (509–27 BCE)
509 BCEEstablishment of the Roman Republic after the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus.c. 450 BCECreation of the Twelve Tables, Rome’s first codification of laws.396 BCEConquest of the Etruscan city of Veii, significant expansion of Roman territory.c. 390 BCESack of Rome by the Gauls and the construction of the Servian Wall.343–290 BCEThe three Samnite Wars, including the Battle of the Caudine Forks (321 BCE) in the Second Samnite War.264–241 BCEFirst Punic War against Carthage, leading to Roman control over Sicily.218–201 BCESecond Punic War, highlighted by Hannibal’s invasion of Italy.146 BCEDestruction of Carthage and Corinth, establishing Roman dominance in the Mediterranean.133–121 BCEThe Gracchi brothers’ attempted reforms and subsequent social unrest.107–86 BCEMilitary reforms and the rise of Gaius Marius.91–88 BCEUprising of the socii against Rome in the Social War.82–81 BCEDictatorship of Sulla and subsequent constitutional reforms.60 BCEFormation of the First Triumvirate (Julius Caesar, Pompey, Crassus).49–45 BCECaesar’s civil war, leading to Julius Caesar’s dictatorship.44 BCEAssassination of Julius Caesar.43–33 BCESecond Triumvirate (Octavian, Mark Antony, Lepidus).31 BCEThe Battle of Actium, Octavian defeats Antony and Cleopatra. ix
THE ROMAN EMPIRE (27 BCE – 476 CE)
27 BCEOctavian becomes Augustus, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.c. 20 BCEConstruction of the Ara Pacis, an altar to Peace.9 CEThe Romans suffer a devastating defeat to the Cherusci at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.14 CEDeath of Augustus, Tiberius becomes emperor.37–41 CEReign of Caligula, known for his cruel and erratic behaviour.41–54 CEReign of Claudius, who expanded the Empire and built the Aqua Claudia.54–68 CEReign of Nero, known for the Great Fire of Rome and his artistic ambitions.64 CESt Peter executed in Rome.69 CEYear of the Four Emperors (Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian).70 CEDestruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by Titus.79 CEEruption of Vesuvius, with the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum.98–117Reign of Trajan, who expands the Empire to its greatest extent.113Trajan’s Column erected to commemorate his victories in Dacia.117–138Reign of Hadrian, known for Hadrian’s Wall in Britain and the Pantheon in Rome.161–180Reign of Marcus Aurelius, known for his philosophical work Meditations.180–192Reign of Commodus, whose rule marks the beginning of the Empire’s decline.212Caracalla’s edict granting Roman citizenship to all free men in the Empire.235–284Crisis of the Third Century, a period of military, political and economic turmoil.271–75Construction of the Aurelian Walls.284–305Reign of Diocletian, who introduces the Tetrarchy to stabilise the Empire.303Beginning of the Great Persecution, with thousands of Christians executed under the authority of imperial edicts. x306–337Reign of Constantine the Great, who endorses Christianity and founds Constantinople.312Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.378Battle of Adrianople, significant defeat of the Roman army by the Goths.410Sack of Rome by the Visigoths under Alaric.452Attila the Hun’s invasion of Italy.455Sack of Rome by the Vandals.476Fall of the Western Roman Empire, deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odovacar.
1
The City on the Hills: The Origins of Rome
after suffering through heat so intense that the ground burned their feet and the solder in their drinking cups melted, an expedition of Roman legionaries exploring the Nile found themselves in an overgrown marsh. They had reached the vast Sudd swamp in present-day South Sudan, almost 2,500 kilometres south of Alexandria. Despite the impenetrability of these wetlands, which baffled even the local guides, the expedition somehow pushed upstream for another 800 kilometres, ultimately reaching a waterfall thundering between two immense rocks – what is now known as Murchison (or Kabalega) Falls in Uganda.1
This was the remarkable tale that two centurions who took part in the expedition in about 60 CE told the philosopher and statesman Seneca the Younger following their return to Rome. The party had been sent by the Roman emperor, Nero, to discover the source of the Nile, and possibly also to gather information for Nero’s planned invasion of Ethiopia. Although Nero’s death precluded any further progress in this African odyssey, elsewhere around the known world the Roman imprint, the 2result of comparable struggles and endurance, was much deeper and more lasting. The Roman Empire stretched enormous distances across both time and space. It lasted for more than 500 years, from the reign of Augustus (begun in 27 BCE) until the fall of the Western Empire in 476 CE. At its peak it would extend from the Irish Sea all the way round the Mediterranean Basin to the shores of both the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. It encompassed all or part of what are today more than twenty-five different countries, including such remote (from Rome) places as Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Ukraine and England, the latter of which was, according to an incredulous Roman historian, ‘outside the limits of the known world’.2 Archaeologists have found Roman coins and artifacts scattered from the north of England, south to Timbuktu and east to the hoard of coins discovered in al-Madhāriba in Yemen, at the very bottom of the Arabian Peninsula. Pots that once contained a favourite Roman condiment, the fermented fish sauce known as garum, have been found in Tamil Nadu, in the hinterlands near the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Here, the Tamils knew the Romans as ‘Yavanas’.
Evidence for the scale and reach of ancient Roman commercial, cultural and industrial activity has been found in many other places, from the top of the world to the bottom of the sea. Scientists studying core samples from the ice sheet in Greenland and other locations in the High Arctic have found that, in Antiquity, lead pollution – produced by smelting ores in clay furnaces – peaked during the height of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, more shipwrecks dating from between 100 BCE and 100 CE have been discovered (no fewer than 600 of them) than for the thousand years that followed the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. These abundant wrecks are testament not 3to poor Roman navigational or shipbuilding skills but, rather, to the massive amount of seaborne trade conducted during the glory days of the Empire.3
The Romans left behind much more than air pollution, silver coins and sunken treasure. They also bequeathed us their politics, their laws, their philosophy, their architecture and – in many countries – the underpinnings and vestiges of their language. They gave us Roman numerals, the days of the week, the months of the year, aqueducts, underfloor heating and concrete. Along with the Greeks, with whom they enjoyed a cultural symbiosis, they laid the political, intellectual and artistic foundations of Western civilisation. They were skilled engineers and brilliant military tacticians. Their physicians, accustomed to dealing with the wounds of gladiators and victims of plagues, were medical pioneers. Their invention of hydraulic concrete – made with the ash from volcanoes such as Vesuvius – allowed them to raise magnificent, shock-and-awe buildings as well as to construct harbours and ports that enabled and expanded trade in far-off lands.
But what was Rome, and who were the Romans? The beginnings of Rome were, as we shall see, a mixture of mystery and myth. All that can be said for certain, thanks to archaeological finds, is that the Romans arose more than two and a half millennia ago from among a group of Iron Age communities scattered through central Italy. Although they eventually conquered their enemies on the battlefield, their greatest feats were not military but political and cultural, as they assimilated and absorbed the diverse tribes of peninsular Italy. They created for their conquered foes, no less than for themselves, an identity as ‘Romans’. This pattern would be repeated as their legions spread inexorably – and often brutally – outwards in a conquest of the 4far-flung territories that became known as the orbis Romanus (the ‘Roman world’). By the first century CE, the phrase civisRomanus sum (‘I am a Roman citizen’) had become a boast heard from Rome to Jerusalem. In 212 CE, Roman citizenship would be extended to virtually all free people across the Empire, making ‘Romans’ out of much of the known world. Indeed, by the third century, as much as 20 per cent of the world’s population (possibly more) counted as Roman – at least 65 million people, slightly more than the population of Italy today.
How this astonishing domination came about is one of history’s greatest stories. As the ancient historian Polybius asked in the second century BCE, long before the Romans had reached their dizzy peaks of conquest and supremacy: ‘For who is so indifferent or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans … succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government – a thing unique in history?’ His question is surely every bit as pertinent and compelling today.4
*
In both ancient legend and the popular imagination, the story of Rome often begins with Romulus and Remus. The outlines of this foundation myth are familiar to many of us. Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of Rhea Silvia, the daughter of Numitor, king of an ancient city in central Italy called Alba Longa. On orders of their great-uncle, Amulius, who had usurped Numitor, they were taken away as infants to be drowned in the Tiber. The men forced to carry out this deed were either compassionate or less than conscientious, merely placing the basket containing the boys into a sluggish stretch of water, which, as it 5ebbed, left them high and dry. Suckled by a passing she-wolf, they were rescued and raised by a benevolent swineherd named Faustulus and his wife, Acca. As the boys grew to manhood they proved themselves courageous and strong, performing such heroic antics as chasing off robbers and foiling cattle thieves. After crossing swords with the usurper Amulius, they killed him and, their true identities triumphantly revealed, restored their grandfather to his rightful place. Leaving Alba Longa in his capable hands, the young twins set off to found a new city: one that, beginning in 753 BCE, would rise along the Tiber near the spot where the she-wolf had found them.
No details of this action-packed plotline are above suspicion. In the first place, the motif of castaway heroes suckled by animals and raised by kindly rustics is found in numerous foundation myths of the ancient world: from Babylon (where the infant Gilgamesh, thrown from a tower on orders of his grandfather, was caught by an eagle and then raised by a gardener) to Persia (where the infant Cyrus the Great, abandoned in the wilds by his grandfather, was suckled by a dog and rescued by a shepherd) and Greece (where Paris was suckled by a she-bear and rescued by a shepherd after his father, King Priam, left him exposed on a mountainside). Wolves sometimes came to the rescue, as in the case of Miletus, founder of the Greek city that bore his name. And often the story featured twins, such as Amphion and Zethus, the sons of Zeus who were raised by a shepherd after their abandonment; or Aeolus and Boeotus, the twin sons of Poseidon: they were nurtured by a cow and then discovered and raised by – what else? – a shepherd.5
The story of Romulus and Remus therefore bears all the hallmarks of a folktale of widespread diffusion. What’s more, in ancient times it was not the only explanation of Rome’s founding. 6In fact, there were at least twenty-five different versions of how Rome was founded, who the founder was, and from whom or what it took its name.6 The story of the outcast twins suckled by a she-wolf did not actually appear until around 300 BCE. Dubious as it must have seemed, the story quickly caught on. The image of the two babies suckled by a wolf thereafter became emblematic of Rome’s beginnings. In 296 BCE a bronze statue of the she-wolf and the twins was placed beside the Tiber, and three decades later coins were minted showing the trio. Early historians of Rome such as Quintus Fabius Pictor developed the legend of Romulus and Remus over the course of the third century BCE. They were followed (albeit with some scepticism) by two of the most important historians of Ancient Rome: Titus Livius (or Livy) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, both writing in the last decades of the first century BCE. Livy pointed out that the story of Rome’s beginnings was ‘adorned with poetic legends’ that bore little relation to verifiable facts. But there could be no doubting, he noted, that this city, however inscrutable its origins, had become ‘the mightiest of empires, next after that of Heaven’.7
A famous bronze statue depicting Romulus and Remus nurtured by a she-wolf. The wolf is probably Etruscan, from the fifth century BCE – before the Romulus and Remus story was popularised. The twins were added in the late 1400s. 7
*
One of the few aspects of the Romulus and Remus story that rings true is the description in the sources of how Rome was laid out. The boundaries and streets of cities in the ancient world, such as those of the Greeks and the Etruscans, were plotted by means of important rituals. The first step was to establish a perimeter by ploughing a furrow, the boundary known to the Romans as the pomerium(from the Latin postand moerium, beyond the wall). According to the legend, Romulus chose a spot on the Palatine Hill, and accordingly began marking off his territory. We must imagine him using a bronze plough pulled by an ox (on the outside edge) and a cow (on the inside), moving anticlockwise along the slopes of the Palatine. When he came to places where he intended to raise a gate, he would have lifted and lugged the plough through the air: an act of carrying (portare in Latin) that is the root of the Latin word porta (gate or door) as well as the English words portable, portal and porter.
As Romulus went to work, these same rituals were being performed about 800 metres away on another hill. One constant of Roman history will be family squabbles and, indeed, familicide, especially fratricide. We have already seen fraternal strife in the rivalry between Romulus and Remus’s grandfather and his brother. Now, at the very moment of Rome’s foundation, internecine conflict re-emerges. While Romulus had picked the Palatine, Remus had decided on a location a short distance to the southwest, on the Aventine Hill, where he planned to establish the city of Remonium. In order to resolve their disagreements, 8the twins turned to auguries, which involved interpreting divine will through natural signs, such as the movements of birds (the term ‘augur’ seems to derive from the Latin avis, meaning bird). Remus was the first to receive a sign: six birds flying over the Aventine. However, Romulus, situated on the Palatine, then spotted a dozen birds. Which omen indicated the gods’ favour: the sign received first or the one with more birds? Angry taunts led to a violent altercation in which Remus, after leaping over Romulus’s freshly ploughed furrow on the Palatine, was struck and killed by his brother.
When the dust settled on this deadly skirmish, Romulus found himself the sole leader of the new city. The date was 21 April 753 BCE, still commemorated each year on the ‘Natale di Roma’ with parades and floats along Via dei Fori Imperiali and gladiatorial battles in the Circus Maximus. The date is, however, as fictional as the rest of the story: it was calculated in the first 9century BCE, during the time of Julius Caesar, by a mathematician and astronomer named Sosigenes.8
A new city needs people. Livy described how, having constructed his walls and other defences, Romulus set about populating Rome. He did so by operating an open-door policy that in the space of a short time attracted ‘a miscellaneous rabble’ – a ragtag band of runaway slaves and fugitives from justice.9 Most of these new residents were male, which meant that Romulus, if he were to build and sustain the Roman race, needed to find women for them. He sent envoys to the nearby towns to extol the benefits of intermarriage with the Romans. These appeals fell on deaf ears. ‘Nowhere’, reports Livy, ‘did the embassy obtain a friendly hearing,’ for the people of the neighbouring towns were loath to offer their daughters in marriage to Romulus’s band of outcasts and ruffians.10
Faced with this intransigence, Romulus hit upon a desperate and brutal strategy. He invited the people from nearby towns, as well as the Sabines, a neighbouring tribe, to celebrate a harvest festival in Rome. Eager to see what Rome had to offer, these neighbours arrived en masse, husbands, wives and children, in anticipation of a pleasing day out. They were hospitably received and suitably impressed. Then, at a prearranged moment, Romulus gave the signal for his men to unsheathe their swords and begin carting off any nubile females among the guests. After this mass abduction, war broke out between the Romans and the Sabines but ceased some nine months later when the bridenapped Sabines – many by now pregnant with, or even clutching in their arms, their Roman babes – pleaded for peace. The two communities, Roman and Sabine, thereafter struck an alliance, with Romulus and the Sabine leader, Titus Tatius, ruling jointly over the city of Rome. 10
This last part of the story – the political union of the Romans and the Sabines – no doubt reflects a historical reality. The Romans’ act of fighting and then joining forces with another tribe, assimilating them into their own culture and identity, was to be repeated numerous times in the centuries that followed. It would become, indeed, one of the secrets of Roman success.
Such, then, were the foundations of Rome: abandoned children; a bloody brawl ending in fratricide; a population of bandits, slaves and renegades; a mass kidnapping; and a battle that tore families apart, pitting father against son-in-law, brother against sister. Taken as a whole, the story is so unedifying that Rome’s enemies would later mock the Romans for it. One of Rome’s greatest foes, Mithridates of Pontus, would claim that the ‘wolfish spirit’ of the Romans – their bloody and inexhaustible greed for empire and riches – could be explained by the fact that Romulus had been suckled by the she-wolf.11 A historian writing in the 1960s even tried to argue that the story was so insulting to the dignity of the Romans that it could only have been invented as propaganda by their enemies.12 This intriguing theory fails to explain why the Romans themselves should have so enthusiastically embraced various elements of the story.
Whatever the case, Rome got off, in these legends, to what might have seemed an inauspicious start. And yet, as Livy wrote, despite these ‘lowliest beginnings’ the city came to enjoy the ‘favour of Heaven’.13 For this community that included misfits, kidnappers and captives would become the forefathers of the greatest power the ancient world had ever seen.
*
11So much for the mythology. Archaeology tells a story that often varies from the literary tradition. The truth is that Rome did not need founding in 753 BCE because by that time the slopes of its hills were already home to clusters of inhabitants. Archaeological relics (in the form of pottery) show a human presence on the Palatine Hill dating from roughly 1500 BCE. No evidence of permanent human settlement appears until around 1000 BCE, which, coincidentally or not, was the time when volcanic activity in the area ceased (there are fifty craters in the vicinity of Rome) after showering the landscape with a phosphate-rich ash that made for abundant agricultural opportunities.
A bronze ‘hut urn’ from the sixth or seventh century BCE.
If we could transport ourselves back to around 900 or 800 BCE, we would find a number of villages and hamlets perched on the hilltops and clinging to the slopes overlooking the Tiber. The villagers cultivated barley, spelt and millet, raised pigs, sheep and goats, and wove their clothes on looms. They buried their dead in graves after cremating them and then placing the ashes in urns shaped, charmingly, like the primitive wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof huts in which they lived. The departed were sent away on their voyages to the underworld with a few utensils 12and storage containers for food and drink, as well as, for the women, loom weights and spindle whorls: women were evidently expected to continue performing their domestic chores in the afterlife.
The miniature swords and spears likewise found in these graves tell us that the villagers fought skirmishes with neighbours who may well have coveted this enviable location. The hills with their steep sides provided the villagers with natural protection, while the Tiber gave fresh water and access to the sea, 30 kilometres downstream at what would become Ostia. The site was located along natural arteries for trade and travel: not only the Tiber – the widest river valley in Italy, featuring forty tributaries along its 400-kilometre stretch – but also a series of roads that intersected at the site, including the one running north into Etruria, land of the neighbouring Etruscans.
These hill-dwelling villagers were the remote descendants of migrants who, centuries earlier, had arrived on the peninsula during the prolonged Indo-European migration out of eastern Europe and central Asia. They were Latini, or Latins, one of the many ‘Italic tribes’ (the Sabines were another) that had settled central and southern Italy by around 1500 BCE (possibly earlier). The Latins lived in settlements scattered through the territories south of the Tiber, in an area known as Latium that stretched some 100 kilometres along the coast and through the hinterland. Rome was at Latium’s extreme northern edge, bordering the mineral-rich lands of the Etruscans on the north side of the Tiber and the Sabines to the east. The most important of the early Latin communities were south of Rome, in the Alban Hills. The Latin settlements that huddled on the future site of Rome were smaller, and included Velienses (occupying a ridge connecting the Palatine and the Esquiline hills) and 13Querquetulanus (in effect, ‘Oakville’, found on the Caelian Hill).
Archaeology offers little evidence of anything as dramatic as the founding of the new community of Rome on the Palatine Hill in the middle of the eighth century BCE. However, in 2005 the archaeologist Andrea Carandini announced his discovery of the remains of a palace 10 metres beneath the pine-clad surface of the north slope of the Palatine Hill. Complete with a banqueting hall and courtyard, it appeared to be a regal dwelling dating from the middle of the eighth century BCE: the putative time, in other words, of Romulus and Remus. It was contemporary with, and close to, a dozen metres of an ancient wall (the course of the original pomeriumploughed by Romulus?) that Carandini had discovered in 1988. Although no one doubts their importance, archaeologists are divided over the meaning of these finds, which Carandini has controversially promoted as proof of the Romulus legend.14
However that may be, over the course of the eighth century BCE the Latin communities on the future site of Rome and elsewhere appear to have gradually become more populous and prosperous, with a wealthy elite emerging. By about 700 BCE the local Latins (or at least the elite among them) were burying their dead not with spindle whorls and eating utensils but rather with gold and silver jewellery, bronze shields, fine ceramics and even, in some cases, chariots – like a rich man today passing to his eternal reward in the reassuring company of his Rolex and his Ferrari.
This prosperity and the ostentatious new aristocratic culture came about in large part because of contact between the Latins and recent immigrants who called themselves Hellenesbut whom the Romans called Graeci (Greeks). Greek-speaking colonists had begun settling on the southern reaches of the 14Italian peninsula from the beginning of the eighth century BCE, growing in number such that the south of the peninsula became known as MegaleHellas(or in Latin MagnaGraecia) – that is, ‘Greater Greece’. These Greek immigrants imported into Italy not only their pots, vases and the custom of burying their dead in elaborate tombs, but also the political and cultural values of their homelands. They brought their religion, by means of which gods from the Greek pantheon, such as Aphrodite, Hermes and Hephaestus, were translated into, or equated with, Latin ones, such as Venus, Mercury and Vulcan. Crucially, the Greeks brought the concept of the city-state, and for the bureaucratic regulation of these enlarging and increasingly complex political communities they brought something else the Latins would also adopt: their alphabet.
During the 600s BCE, political communities on the pattern of Greek ones therefore began developing up and down the Italian peninsula. The hills on which Rome was built, separated by valleys, initially obstructed an easy unification of the scattered settlements. But as the population increased, the people dwelling there coalesced into a more unified settlement with, in place of the primitive huts, more durable houses with stone foundations and tiled roofs. Public buildings were eventually constructed, squares laid out, temples and sanctuaries raised, and the Cloaca Maxima (a sewer carrying effluent into the Tiber) excavated. In about 625 BCE the Forum, the most important public space, was paved. At some point during this time – it is impossible to give an exact date – the Latins from villages such as Querquetulanus would have begun regarding themselves as Romans and their expanded political community as Rome. They may have taken the name of their new city from the Greek word ῥώμη (Rhome), which meant ‘stronghold’ or ‘strength’. 15Other possible origins of the name are the Etruscan word rumonor rumen(river), or else the Latin ruma(breast) – a possible reference to the she-wolf that suckled the twins or even, perhaps, the ‘breast-like’ shape of the Palatine and Aventine hills. What is certain, however, is that the name did notcome from Romulus, who was much more likely to have taken hisname – when it became necessary to invent a creation myth – from the burgeoning new city.
*
The ancient historians agreed that Rome between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE was ruled by a line of kings. These sources described the ‘seven kings of Rome’ who ruled before the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE. This lineage is suspect (and a number of the kings no doubt largely fictitious) because each reign must have lasted, on average, thirty-five years – suspiciously long at a time when life expectancy (if infant mortality is factored out) was fifty at most.15
Traditional accounts claimed that Romulus died – or, in some accounts, vanished into thin air during a fierce storm – after almost forty years in power. Kingship in Rome then passed, according to legend, to Numa Pompilius, a Sabine originally from the town of Cures, in Sabine territory some 40 kilometres northeast of Rome. Kingship in Rome was not hereditary. A new monarch was elected by constituent assemblies of both patricians – that is, the leaders of the wealthy and aristocratic clans – and those from the lower orders, the plebeians. Before the choice became official, the gods were consulted in a ritual known as the inauguratio, by which a religious dignitary, the augur, sitting on a special stone with a hood over his head and a staff in his hand, 16appealed to the gods for signs that the candidate put forward was the right one. If a flock of birds appeared from the proper and reassuring direction, the new king was ‘inaugurated’.
Numa Pompilius evidently came to power in such a manner. But even if he never existed, the fact that Roman legend would happily cast a Sabine as the second king of Rome shows, even at this early stage, the permeable margins of what it meant to be Roman. Nor would Numa be the last ‘foreign’ king of Rome. Besides the Sabines, the Romans had close (and occasionally combative) relations with another neighbour, this one to the north. The Etruscans occupied ancient Etruria, the beautiful and fertile lands in central Italy that by and large are presentday Tuscany. They were known for their expertise in crafts, metalworking and navigation. Preoccupied with social status and indulging in luxury and enjoyment, they practised elaborate burial customs, adorning their tombs and sarcophagi with intricate decorations. Like the Greeks, with whom they did brisk business trading copper and tin in return for pottery, they were an urban people whose autonomous city-states featured fortified walls, stone temples and houses with courtyards and tiled roofs laid out along grids of stone-paved streets.
According to legend, the last three kings of Rome were Etruscans. Over the past century, historians have debated whether Rome, during the 500s BCE – the period, in other words, of its formation as a city-state – was an ‘Etruscan’ city. The Etruscans were certainly expanding their influence on the peninsula during this time, though the theory of an Etruscan conquest and decades-long domination of Rome lacks supporting evidence. The Etruscan kings appear to have come to power in Rome not as conquering invaders but as immigrants. Notably, the fifth king of Rome and the first of the three ‘Etruscans’, Lucius Tarquinius 17Priscus, whose reign began (according to the traditional chronology) in 616 BCE, was actually Greek rather than Etruscan: he was the son of a trader from Corinth who had fled political turbulence in his homeland and set up his business in the Etruscan city of Tarquinii (a story made plausible by the strong trade links between Etruria and Corinth). Tarquinius Priscus in turn emigrated from Tarquinii to Rome with his wife, Tanaquil. She encouraged the move after she saw an eagle pluck the cap from her husband’s head and then replace it – an omen that she believed (correctly, as it happened) foretold how Tarquinius Priscus would become king.
Tarquinius Priscus’s successor, Servius Tullius, may or may not have been Etruscan. Some sources claim that Servius was actually an Etruscan adventurer named Mastarna, others that he was the son of a former slave in the household of Tarquinius Priscus. The name Servius references servus, Latin for ‘slave’ – which seems to indicate a remarkable upward mobility. Regardless, like Numa he was a character that, largely invented or not, represented an outsider, perhaps a foreigner, who rose to power in a city that valued ability over both bloodlines and ethnic origins. Alas for him, his reign was cut short when he was murdered by his successor, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, or Tarquin the Proud.
The spectre of Tarquin the Proud, a brutal autocrat, would haunt Roman history for many centuries as an example of a rapid and perilous descent into tyranny. The son of Tarquinius Priscus, he married one of Servius Tullius’s two daughters. In Ancient Rome, a daughter was given the feminine version of her father’s name (Marcia for Marcus, Gaia for Gaius). The system was simple enough unless there were multiple daughters – in which case, as with Servius Tullius’s girls, they were known as 18Tullia Major (Tarquin’s first wife) and Tullia Minor (wife of Tarquin’s brother). The latter sister, ruthlessly ambitious, encouraged the equally merciless Tarquin to – in what was to become a familiar and ghastly motif in Roman history – carry out familicide: she urged him to kill her father, her older sister and her husband, then to marry her and make her queen. Tarquin obliged, and the slaughter ended with Tullia Minor running over the murdered corpse of her father in her chariot, splashing her clothes with his blood. The narrow lane where the savage episode took place subsequently became known as Vicus Sceleratus, or Evil Street.
Tarquin was successful as a king insofar as he conquered various Latin towns in the vicinity of Rome. He also constructed great buildings such as the temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a massive building that stretched more than 60 metres along the Capitoline Hill and featured columns measuring 2.5 metres in diameter. However, Tarquin made himself odious to his subjects by centralising power in his own hands and dealing harshly with political opponents. The final straw came when Sextus Tarquinius – his son by Tullia Minor – raped Lucretia, the virtuous wife of a Roman named Collatinus. Lucretia told her husband about the rape, along with his friend Lucius Junius (who had earned the nickname Brutus, or ‘stupid’, because he had been feigning idiocy to survive Tarquin’s tyrannical rule). As Lucretia plunged a dagger into her own heart, Roman history reached a turning point. Brutus displayed her corpse in the Forum, calling on the people of Rome to avenge her suicide and expel the tyrants. Tarquin was duly overthrown and the monarchy abolished. It was, according to legend, 509 BCE. For the next 482 years, Rome would be a republic, with the powers of the kings devolving onto, and shared by, a pair of annually elected consuls (Brutus 19and Collatinus supposedly served as the first pair) who could command the army and summon a 300-strong advisory body, the Senate. The name of this institution, which would survive for the better part of a millennium, derived from senex, ‘old man’, because it was staffed, in theory at least, by wise, grey heads.
Lucretia prepares to plunge the fatal dagger in this 1627 painting by Artemisia Gentileschi. Political change in Rome was often connected, at least in myth, to violence against women.
The date of 509 BCE, the rape of Lucretia and the ousting of the Tarquins: all stand on the same uncertain foundations as the Romulus myth. In fact, the transition from kingship to republic may have taken a more orderly, prolonged and even peaceful course whereby the powers of the king were gradually assumed, through a series of reforms, by the consuls and magistrates. But such a sedate narrative makes for bad box office, and Rome’s history, in the usual telling, was to feature many further blockbuster storylines. According to the legend, familial rivalries 20continued unabated into the new regime, and the Republic survived its infancy thanks to yet more bloodshed. In another example of fractured families and divided loyalties, Brutus was the nephew of Tarquin, the man he overthrew. When his two sons sided with the deposed king, Brutus had them beheaded, even watching the gory spectacle himself – a steely act that later impressed Niccolò Machiavelli, for whom ‘to kill the sons of Brutus’ became the catchphrase for the unflinching brutality that political leaders needed in order to make tough decisions, maintain their power and preserve the state. The pages of Roman history would fill with many examples – for good or ill – of this kind of murderous resolve.
2
‘The Favour of Heaven’: The Rise of the Roman Republic
at the time of the founding of the Roman Republic, the Italian peninsula had an estimated population of about four million people. Rome itself ranged over some 800 square kilometres (roughly the same surface area as the five boroughs of New York City today) and counted around 35,000 people. Over the next five centuries the population of the peninsula would double. What’s more, it would be transformed from a land of Greek and Etruscan cities and scattered settlements, populated by tribes speaking dozens of languages and dialects, practising different customs and forging shifting alliances, into more of a political, cultural and linguistic unity as the Romans gradually subjugated the surrounding peoples.
One of the first conquests made by the new Roman Republic was over the neighbouring Latin League, an alliance of people who shared their language, religion and customs. The Romans had established military authority over them during the regal period, but in 499 BCE the Latins rebelled, led by the exiled Tarquin the Proud in his latest bid to regain power. They were defeated by the Romans when, according to legend, a pair of 22giants, the twins Castor and Pollux, heroically intervened on behalf of the Romans.
Rome steadily expanded its territory over the course of the following century. One of its greatest acquisitions came in 396 BCE with the capture and subsequent destruction of a long-time rival, the Etruscan city of Veii, only 15 kilometres to the north. Veii was the wealthiest, the most southerly and, in terms of surface area (almost 350 square kilometres), the largest of the Etruscan cities. Following various battles and truces, the Romans began a long siege of the city in 407 BCE, ultimately sacking it in 396. They slaughtered much of the population, sold the remainder into slavery and helped themselves to plunder so astonishingly copious that a ‘vast throng’ of Romans greedily made their way to Veii to claim their share of the spoils.1 Among the plunder was a statue of the goddess Juno, ‘Queen of Veii’, who was taken to Rome and given new lodgings in a purposebuilt temple on the Aventine Hill.
The fate of the Juno statue from Veii matched that of the rest of Etruscan culture, likewise commandeered by the Romans. Over the next century and a half, the great Etruscan civilisation would steadily be absorbed into the Roman one. Many of their ceremonial trappings were taken over by the Romans, from the purple-trimmed robe and ivory-inlaid throne of the Etruscan kings to their triumphal chariots and eagle-topped sceptre. The Romans likewise adopted the fasces, the axe bound in a bundle of rods that was carried before the Roman magistrates: the rods represented their power to inflict chastisement, the axe their authority to behead. The Etruscan language would disappear apart from certain words adopted by the Romans, such as autumnus (autumn), catamitus (catamite), ferrum (iron) and idus (ides, as in the ides of March). 23
One recurring feature of Roman history, as we’ll see, is a stunning reversal of fortune – a dramatic victory following a crushing defeat or (as in this case) vice versa. Recently victorious over the Etruscans at Veii, Rome soon suffered a shocking setback when the city was sacked by a renegade band of Gauls. Numerous Celtic tribes inhabited northern Italy, having migrated across the Alps from their middle and eastern European homelands as early as the thirteenth century BCE. They settled in areas such as the Po Valley and along the Adriatic coast, and founded settlements such as Mediolanum (Milan). The Romans called them Gauls, a catch-all term for Celtic tribes such as the Boii, the Cenomani and the Insubri (whose name meant ‘ferocious’). By about 400 BCE they occupied most of the lands east of the Apennines once controlled by the Etruscans. This area became known as Gallia Cisalpina, or Cisalpine Gaul – Gaul on ‘this side’ of the Alps (as opposed to Gallia Transalpina, or Transalpine Gaul, on the other side of the Alps, in what is now southern France).
The gradual Gallic drift southwards and the Roman expansion northwards inevitably brought the two cultures into conflict. According to legend, around 390 BCE a Gallic tribe, the Senones, defeated the Romans at the Battle of the River Allia, then marched the 15 kilometres to Rome, which they sacked and burned, slaughtering many of the inhabitants. The sack persuaded the Romans to prolong and enhance the fortification (the Servian Wall, named for Servius Tullius) constructed in the sixth century BCE. Parts of this fortification, originally more than 10 kilometres in circumference and in places more than 10 metres high and 3.5 metres thick, still survive. One short stretch of these sturdy blocks can be seen outside Rome’s Termini railway station; another is inside the station itself, beneath 24platform 24, where passengers disembark after arriving from Fiumicino Airport on the Leonardo Express.
The other legacy of the sack was a lingering terror that in 1985 a German scholar called a metus Gallicus, or ‘fear of Gauls’.2 This irrational, paralysing panic would last for centuries and encompass any sort of invader coming from the north – of which there were destined to be many.
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The sack by the Gauls did little to check Roman expansion. Two years later the Romans attacked Tarquinia, a flourishing Etruscan city 95 kilometres north of Rome. Then in 381 BCE they captured and annexed Tusculum, an important Latin settlement 25 kilometres southeast of Rome. Many other cities in Latium, often allied to Rome but increasingly uneasy about its expanding influence, rose in rebellion in 340 BCE. Livy claimed that the conflict, which lasted two years, amounted to a civil war, ‘so little did the Latins differ from the Romans’.3
The war ended with the Romans and the Latins coming even closer together as the inhabitants of a number of defeated Latin cities were granted Roman citizenship, earning them the right to vote and hold office in Rome, as well as, crucially, the obligation to provide military service. The inhabitants of more distant defeated cities, such as Capua and Cumae, received partial citizenship (known as civitas sine suffragio, or ‘citizenship without a vote’), whereby they provided arms for Rome but – as the name suggests – enjoyed no political rights. All were known as socii, a word derived from socius, or partner (the root of our words ‘society’ and ‘associate’).
The Romans therefore developed a system of alliances with 25these erstwhile foes in cities and ethnic communities up and down the peninsula, creating a kind of federation of tribes and city-states with Rome at its head. The main obligation of the socii was to provide manpower to Rome in times of warfare, for which they received protection as well as a share of booty and plunder. Roman territory expanded dramatically to encompass almost 8,000 square kilometres and an estimated population of 484,000. Over the following decades, and then centuries, Rome, already the supreme military power in Italy, enjoyed the benefit of formidable military reserves thanks to the large contingents of socii, who in some campaigns outnumbered the troops fielded by the Romans themselves. This coalition forged between Rome and its allies was one of the most important reasons for its success. By increasing its manpower pool and gaining access to skilled soldiers and diverse military tactics, Rome quickly developed a formidable fighting force, vital for both conquest and defence.
The Romans still faced stiff challenges and suffered defeats, sometimes spectacular ones. By the middle of the 300s BCE their most implacable foe had become a tough, mountain-dwelling, Oscan-speaking people known as the Samnites, an offshoot of the Sabines. The Oscan-speaking tribes had gradually spread through the central and southern lands of the peninsula thanks to a ritual known as the Ver Sacrum
