SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  The Italian phrase coined in the 1930s to describe this period, ‘La Grande Roma dei Tarquini’ (‘The Great Rome of the Tarquins’), may not be so misleading – though it depends a lot, of course, on exactly what is meant by ‘Grande’. Rome was still, in absolute and relative terms, far from ‘great’. But it was a larger and more urban community than it had been a hundred years earlier, having profited, no doubt, from its prime position for trading and its proximity to wealthy Etruria. So far as we can judge the town’s extent in the middle of the sixth century BCE (part of that judgement inevitably comes down to guesswork), it was now substantially bigger than the Latin settlements to the south and at least as large as the largest Etruscan towns to the north, with a population of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000, although it had nowhere near the grandeur of some contemporary Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy, and was significantly smaller. That is to say, Rome must have been a major player in the region, but it was not yet in any way extraordinary.

  Not all the urban developments that Romans ascribed to the Tarquins were splendid in the obvious sense of the word. It was a characteristically Roman concern for the infrastructure of urban life that made later writers hail their achievements in constructing a drain: the Cloaca Maxima, or the ‘Great(est) Drain’. Quite how much of what survives of this famous structure goes back to the sixth century BCE is far from clear: the substantial masonry sections that it is still possible to explore, and that still carry part of the overflow from the modern city and the detritus from modern bathrooms, are from several centuries later, and it now seems likely that the earliest attempts at some kind of drainage system go back earlier, to the seventh century BCE. But in the Roman imagination the Cloaca was always a wonder of Rome that was owed to its final kings: ‘an amazing work and more than words can describe’ enthused Dionysius, who presumably had in mind what was visible in his day, in the first century BCE. Yet it also had a darker side: it was not just a wonder but also a reminder of the cruel tyranny that for the Romans marked the end of the regal period. In a particularly lurid, and gloriously fantastical, account, Pliny the Elder (that is, Gaius Plinius Secundus, the extraordinary Roman polymath now best remembered as the one celebrity victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE) describes how the people of the city were so exhausted by the construction work on the drain that many killed themselves. The king, in response, nailed the bodies of the suicides to crosses, in the hope that the shame of crucifixion would be a deterrent for others.

  22. A surviving section of the underground Cloaca Maxima. The original drain can have been nothing like as grand as this later construction but this is the image that Roman writers had when they wrote of Tarquin’s building project. Some Romans boasted of taking boats and rowing along it.

  It was, however, not the exploitation of the labouring poor that was supposed finally to have brought the monarchy down, but sexual violence: the rape of Lucretia by one of the king’s sons. This rape is almost certainly as mythic as the rape of the Sabines: assaults on women symbolically marking the beginning and the end of the regal period. What is more, the Roman writers who later told the story were probably influenced by Greek traditions, which often linked the culmination, and fall, of tyranny with sexual crimes. In sixth-century BCE Athens, for example, sexual advances by the ruler’s younger brother towards another man’s partner were said to have led to the overthrow of the Pisistratid dynasty. But mythic or not, for the rest of Roman time the rape of Lucretia marked a turning point in politics, and its morality was debated. The theme has been replayed and reimagined in Western culture almost ever since, from Botticelli, through Titian and Shakespeare, to Benjamin Britten; Lucretia even has her own small part in Judy Chicago’s feminist installation The Dinner Party, among some 1,000 heroines of world history.

  Livy tells a highly coloured tale of these last moments of the monarchy. It starts with a group of young Romans who were trying to find ways of passing the time while besieging the nearby town of Ardea. One evening, they were having a drunken competition about whose wife was best, when one of their number, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, suggested that they should simply ride back home (it was only a few miles away) and inspect the women; this would prove, he claimed, the superiority of his own Lucretia. Indeed it did: for while all the other wives were discovered partying in the absence of their menfolk, Lucretia was doing exactly what was expected of a virtuous Roman woman – working at her loom, among her maids. She then dutifully offered supper to her husband and his guests.

  There was, however, a terrible sequel. For during that visit, we are told, Sextus Tarquinius conceived a fatal passion for Lucretia, and one evening shortly afterwards he rode back to her house. After being politely entertained again, he came to her room and demanded sex with her, at knifepoint. When the simple threat of death did not move her, Tarquinius exploited instead her fear of dishonour: he threatened to kill both her and a slave (visible in Titian’s painting [see plate 4]) so that it would look as if she had been caught in the most disgraceful form of adultery. Faced with this, Lucretia acceded, but when Tarquinius had returned to Ardea, she sent for her husband and father, told them what had happened – and killed herself.

  Lucretia’s story remained an extraordinarily powerful image in Roman moral culture ever after. For many Romans, it represented a defining moment of female virtue. Lucretia voluntarily paid with her life for losing, as Livy put it, her pudicitia – her ‘chastity’, or better the ‘fidelity’, on the woman’s part at least, that defined the relationship between Roman wife and husband. Yet other ancient writers found the story more difficult. There were poets and satirists who predictably questioned whether pudicitia was really what a man wanted in a wife. In one bawdy epigram, Marcus Valerius Martialis (‘Martial’ for short), who wrote a whole series of clever, sparky and rude verses at the end of the first century CE, jokes that his wife can be a Lucretia by day if she wants, so long as she is a whore by night. In another quip, he wonders whether Lucretias are ever quite what they seem; even the famous Lucretia, he fantasises, enjoyed risqué poems when her husband wasn’t looking. More serious was the issue of Lucretia’s culpability and the reasons for her suicide. To some Romans, it looked as if she was more concerned with her reputation than with real pudicitia – which surely resided in the guilt or innocence of her mind, not her body, and would not have been remotely affected by false allegations of sex with a slave. In the early fifth century CE, St Augustine, who was well versed in the pagan classics, wondered if Lucretia had been raped at all: for had she not, in the end, consented? It is not hard to detect here versions of some of our own arguments about rape and the issues of responsibility it raises.

  23. Pudicitia, as an important virtue in a woman, was stressed in many contexts. This silver coin of the emperor Hadrian, minted in the 120s CE, shows the personification of Pudicitia modestly sitting as a good Roman wife should. Around her, the words ‘COS III’ celebrate Hadrian holding the consulship for the third time, hinting at a connection between public male prestige and the proper behaviour of women.

  At the same time, this was seen as a fundamentally political moment, for in the story it leads directly to the expulsion of the kings and the start of the free Republic. As soon as Lucretia stabbed herself, Lucius Junius Brutus – who had accompanied her husband to the scene – took the dagger from her body and, while her family was too distressed to speak, vowed to rid Rome of kings for ever. This was, of course, partly a retrospective prophecy, for the Brutus who in 44 BCE led the coup against Julius Caesar for his kingly ambitions claimed descent from this Brutus. After ensuring the support of the army and the people, who were appalled by the rape and fed up with labouring on the drain, Lucius Junius Brutus forced Tarquin and his sons into exile.

  The Tarquins did not give up without a fight. According to Livy’s implausibly action-packed account, Tarquinius Superbus made an abortive attempt to stage a counter-revolution in the city and, when that failed, joined forces with King Lars Porsenna of th
e Etruscan town of Clusium, who mounted a siege of Rome with the aim of restoring the monarchy – only to be defeated by the heroism of its newly liberated inhabitants. We read, for example, of the valiant Horatius Cocles, who single-handedly defended the bridge across the Tiber to block the advance of the Etruscan army (some said he lost his life in the process, others that he returned home to a hero’s welcome); and of the bravery of Cloelia, one of a group of young hostages taken by Porsenna, who daringly made her way back home by swimming across the river. Livy suggests that the Etruscans were eventually so impressed by the character of the Romans that they simply abandoned Tarquin. There were, however, less patriotic versions. Pliny the Elder was not the only ancient scholar to believe that Lars Porsenna became the king of Rome for a while; if so, he might have been another of those lost kings, and there might have been a very different end to the monarchy.

  24. The three surviving columns, from a later rebuilding of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, still make their mark in the Roman Forum. The rest of the temple is largely destroyed but the sloping base of its steps, often used as a place for speakers to address the people, is still visible (bottom left). The little door is a reminder that the basements of temples were used for all sorts of different purposes. Excavations have shown that there was once a barber’s shop/dentist in the basement of this one.

  Deserted by Porsenna, as the standard story runs, Tarquin looked elsewhere for support. He was finally defeated in the 490s BCE (exact dates differ) together with some allies he had made in the nearby Latin towns, at the Battle of Lake Regillus, not far from Rome. It was a triumphant, and certainly partly mythic, moment in Roman history, for the gods Castor and Pollux were supposed to have been seen fighting on the Roman side and later watering their horses in the Roman Forum; a temple to them was erected there in gratitude for their help. Though many times rebuilt, this temple is still one of the landmarks of the Forum, a lasting Roman monument to getting rid of kings.

  The birth of liberty

  The end of the monarchy was also the birth of liberty and of the free Roman Republic. For the rest of Roman history, ‘king’, or rex, was a term of loathing in Roman politics, despite the fact that so many of Rome’s defining institutions were supposed to have their origins in the regal period. There were any number of cases in the centuries that followed when the accusation that he was aiming at kingship brought a swift end to a man’s political career. His royal name even proved disastrous for Lucretia’s unfortunate widower, who, because he was a relation of the Tarquins, was shortly sent into exile. In foreign conflicts too, kings were the most desirable of enemies. Over the next few hundred years, there was always a particular frisson when a triumphal procession through the streets of the city paraded some enemy king in all his regal finery for the Roman populace to jeer and pelt. Needless to say, plenty of satire was also directed at those later Romans who happened to be landed with the surname (cognomen) ‘King’.

  The fall of the Tarquins – sometime, as the Romans had it, at the end of the sixth century BCE – amounted to a new start for Rome: the city began again, now as ‘the Republic’ (or in Latin res publica, meaning literally ‘public thing’ or ‘public affairs’) and with a whole series of new foundation myths. One powerful tradition, for example, insisted that the great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, a building that came to be a major symbol of Roman power and was later replicated in many Roman cities abroad, was dedicated in the very first year of the new regime. True, it had been vowed and, so it was often said, largely built under the kings, by Etruscan craftsmen; but the name of the formal dedicator blazoned across its façade was that of one of the leaders of the new Republic. And whatever the exact chronology of its construction, which is, to be honest, irrecoverable, it came to be seen as a building that shared its birth with the Republic and was a symbol of Republican history itself. Indeed, for centuries there was a Roman custom of each year hammering a nail into the temple’s doorpost, not only marking the passing of Republican time but also physically linking that time to the temple’s structure.

  Even apparently natural features of Rome’s cityscape were thought to have their origin in the Republic’s first year. Many Romans knew, as well as modern geologists do, that the island in the middle of the river Tiber where it flows through Rome was in geological terms a relatively recent formation. But how, and when, did it emerge? Even now there is no definitive answer to that; but one Roman idea dated its origin to the very beginning of Republican rule, when the grain that had been growing on the private land of the Tarquins was thrown into the river. Because the water level was low, this piled up on the riverbed and gradually, as it collected silt and other refuse, formed an island. It is as if the shape of the city was born only with the removal of the monarchy.

  Also born was a new form of government. As Tarquinius Superbus fled, the story goes, Brutus and, before his imminent exile, Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, straight away became the first consuls of Rome. These were to be the most important, defining officials of the new Republic. Taking over many of the duties of the kings, they presided over the city’s politics at home and they led its soldiers in war; there was never any formal separation in Rome between such military and civilian roles. In that sense, despite being paraded as the antithesis of the kings, they represented the continuation of their power: one Greek theorist of Roman politics in the second century BCE saw the consuls as a ‘monarchical’ element in the Roman political system, and Livy insists that their insignia and badges of office were much the same as those of their kingly predecessors. But they embodied several key, and decidedly unmonarchical, principles of the new political regime. First, they were elected entirely by popular vote, not the half-and-half system of popular involvement that supposedly characterised the choice of king. Second, they held office for only a single year at a time, and one of their duties was to preside (as we saw Cicero doing in 63 BCE) over the election of their successors. Third, they held office together, as a pair. Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared. As we shall see, through the centuries that followed these tenets were increasingly reiterated, and became increasingly difficult to uphold.

  The consuls also gave their names to the year in which they held office. It goes without saying that the Romans could not have used the modern Western system of dating that I have been adopting in this book – and for the sake of clarity, readers will be relieved, will continue to use. ‘The sixth century BCE’ would have meant nothing to them. Occasionally they calculated dates ‘from the foundation of the city’, when they had reached some kind of agreement about when that was. But usually they referred to years by the names of the consuls in office. What we call, for example, 63 BCE was for them ‘the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida’; and wine made ‘when Opimius was consul’ (121 BCE) was a particularly famous vintage. By Cicero’s day, Romans had worked out a more or less complete list of consuls going back to the beginning of the Republic, and it was soon put on public display in the Forum along with the list of triumphing generals. It was largely this roster that enabled them to pinpoint the precise date of the end of the monarchy, as by definition it had to correlate with the date of the first consul.

  The Republic, in other words, was not just a political system. It was a complex set of interrelationships between politics, time, geography and the Roman cityscape. Dates were directly correlated with the elected consuls; years were marked by the nails hammered into the temple whose dedication was traced back to the first year of the new regime; even the island in the Tiber was a product, quite literally, of the expulsion of the kings. Underpinning the whole thing was one single, overriding principle: namely, freedom, or libertas.

  Fifth-century BCE Athens bequeathed the idea of democracy to the modern world, after the Athenian ‘tyrants’ were deposed and democrati
c institutions established at the end of the sixth century BCE – a chronological match with the expulsion of the Roman kings that was not lost on ancient observers, who were keen to present the history of the two places as if they ran in parallel. Republican Rome bequeathed the equally important idea of liberty. The first word of the second book of Livy’s History, which begins the story of Rome after the monarchy, is ‘free’; and the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ are together repeated eight times in the first few lines alone. The idea that the Republic was founded on libertas rings loudly throughout Roman literature, and it has echoed through radical movements in later centuries, in Europe and America. It is no coincidence that the slogan of the French Revolution – Liberté, égalité, fraternité – puts ‘liberty’ in pride of place; nor that George Washington spoke of restoring ‘the sacred fire of liberty’ to the West; nor that the drafters of the United States Constitution defended it under the pseudonym of ‘Publius’, taken from the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, another of the earliest consuls of the Republic. But how was Roman liberty to be defined?

  That was a controversial question in Roman political culture for the next 800 years, through the Republic and into the one-man rule of the Roman Empire, when political debate often turned on how far libertas could ever be compatible with autocracy. Whose liberty was at stake? How was it most effectively defended? How could conflicting versions of the freedom of the Roman citizen be resolved? All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold ‘democracy’. But there were repeated and intense conflicts over what that meant. We have already seen that, when Cicero was sent into exile, his house was demolished and a shrine of Libertas erected on its site. Not everyone would have approved. Cicero himself tells how during the performance of a play on the theme of Brutus, the first consul of the Republic, the crowd burst into applause at a line spoken by one of the characters: ‘Tullius, who underpinned the citizens’ liberty’. The play was actually referring to Servius Tullius and suggesting that liberty might have had a prehistory at Rome before the Republic, under a ‘good king’, but Marcus Tullius Cicero, to give him his full name, was convinced – maybe rightly – that the applause was for him.