SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  Conflicts of this kind form one important theme in the chapters that follow. But before we explore the history of Rome in the first centuries of the Republic – the warfare at home, the victories for ‘liberty’ and the military victories over Rome’s neighbours in Italy – we must look a little harder at the story of the birth of the Republic and the invention of the consulship. Predictably perhaps, it was not quite as smooth a process as the standard story, which I have given so far, makes it appear.

  CHAPTER FOUR

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  ROME’S GREAT LEAP FORWARD

  Two centuries of change: from the Tarquins to Scipio Long-Beard

  HOW DID THE Republic really begin? Ancient Roman historians were experts at turning historical chaos into a tidy narrative and always keen to imagine that their familiar institutions went back much further than they really did. For them the transition from monarchy to Republic was as smooth as any revolution could be: the Tarquins fled; the new form of government emerged fully formed; the consulship was instantly established, providing the new order with its chronology from year one. In reality, the whole process must have been more gradual than that story suggests, and messier. The ‘Republic’ was born slowly, over a period of decades, if not centuries. It was reinvented many times over.

  Even the consuls did not go back to the beginning of the new regime. Livy hints that the highest official in the state, and the one whose job it was to bang the nail into the Temple of Jupiter each year, was originally called the chief praetor, although the word ‘praetor’ was later used for a junior official below the consuls. There are other early titles recorded for those at the top of the political hierarchy, which only complicate the picture. These include ‘dictator’, usually described as a temporary position to cope with a military emergency, and without the decidedly negative modern connotations of the word; and ‘military tribunes with consular power’, a mouthful aptly translated by one modern historian as ‘colonels’.

  There is still a big question mark over when exactly the defining office of the Republic was invented, or when and why some other office was renamed ‘consul’, or even when the fundamental Republican principle that power should always be shared was first defined. ‘Chief praetor’ smacks of hierarchy, not equality. But whatever the key date or dates, the list of consuls on which the chronology of the Republic was based – going back in an unbroken series to Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus in 509 BCE – was in its earliest parts the product of a good deal of adjustment, imaginative inference, clever guesswork and most likely outright invention. Livy conceded, looking back from the end of the first century BCE, that it was next to impossible to sort out with confidence the chronology of officeholders in this early period. It was, he wrote, simply too long ago.

  There is also a question mark over how violent the fall of the monarchy was. The Romans envisaged a fairly bloodless regime change. Lucretia was the most prominent, tragic casualty, but, though warfare was to follow, Tarquin was allowed to escape unscathed. The archaeological evidence suggests that the process of change within the city was not quite so peaceful. At least, layers of burnt debris have been excavated in the Forum and elsewhere that are plausibly dated to around 500 BCE. They could be no more than the traces of an unfortunate series of accidental fires. They are enough to hint, however, that the overthrow of Tarquin might have been a bloody, rather than bloodless, coup, and that most of the internal violence was patriotically written out of the standard narrative.

  The earliest known use of the word ‘consul’, in fact, dates from two hundred years later. It turns up in the first surviving example of those thousands upon thousands of loquacious Roman epitaphs carefully carved on tombs all over the empire, both extravagant and humble, which tell us so much about the lives of the deceased: the offices they held, the jobs they did, their aims, aspirations and anxieties. This one commemorates a man called Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (the last name means ‘bearded’, ‘long-beard’ or perhaps ‘beardy’) and was displayed on the front of his oversized sarcophagus, which once lay in the family tomb of the Scipios just outside Rome, as burials were not usually allowed within the city itself. Barbatus was consul in 298 BCE, died around 280 BCE and almost certainly founded this ostentatious mausoleum, an unashamed promotion of the power and prestige of his family, one of the most prominent in the Republic. His seems to have been the first of more than thirty burials in it, and his coffin-cum-memorial was placed in the most prominent position, opposite the door.

  The epitaph was composed soon after his death. It is four lines long and must count as the earliest historical and biographical narrative to survive from ancient Rome. Short as it is, it is one of the major turning points in our understanding of Roman history. For it provides hard, more or less contemporary information on Barbatus’ career – quite different from the imaginative reconstructions, faint hints buried in the soil or modern deductions about ‘what must have been’ that surround the fall of the monarchy. It is eloquent on the ideology and world view of the Roman elite at this period: ‘Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, offspring of his father Gnaeus, a brave man and wise, whose appearance was a match for his virtus. He was consul and censor and aedile among you. He took Taurasia and Cisauna from Samnium. He subdued the whole of Lucania and took hostages.’

  25. The imposing sarcophagus of Barbatus dominated the large Tomb of the Scipios. The rough local stone (or tufa), and its simple, slightly rustic look, makes a strong contrast with the elaborately sculpted marble sarcophagi of the rich in later Roman centuries. Yet in the third century BCE this was the best and most sophisticated that money could buy.

  Whoever wrote it – presumably one of his heirs – extracted what seemed to be the highlights of Barbatus’ career. At home (‘among you’) he had been elected consul and censor, one of the two officials responsible for enrolling citizens and assessing their wealth; and he had held the more junior office of aedile, which by the first century BCE, and probably earlier, was largely concerned with the upkeep and supply of the city and with organising public shows and games. Further afield, the boasts were of his military successes in southern Italy, a couple of hundred miles from Rome: he had captured two towns from the Samnites, a people with whom the Romans were repeatedly in conflict during Barbatus’ lifetime; and he had subdued the region of Lucania, taking hostages from the enemy, a standard Roman method of guaranteeing ‘good behaviour’.

  These exploits underline the importance of warfare in the public image of leading Romans, but they also point to the military expansion of Rome at the beginning of the third century BCE, now extending a long way from the city’s back door. In a battle in 295 BCE in which Barbatus served three years after he was consul, Roman forces defeated an Italian army at Sentinum, not far from modern Ancona. This was the biggest and bloodiest battle fought in the peninsula up to that date and was so far from being of merely local concern that the news travelled widely and quickly, even by the rudimentary methods of ancient communication (messengers, word of mouth and on rare occasions a system of beacons). Sitting in his study on the Greek island of Samos, hundreds of miles away, the third-century BCE historian Duris decided that it was an event worth recording; a brief snatch of his account still survives.

  Just as revealing are the other characteristics that the epitaph singles out for praise: Barbatus’ bravery and wisdom and the fact that his outward appearance was equal to his virtus. That may mean ‘virtue’ in the modern sense, but it was often used more literally, to refer to the collection of qualities that defined a man (vir), virtue in Roman terms being the equivalent of ‘manliness’. Either way, Barbatus was a man who displayed his qualities on his face. Although the popular image of the Roman man is hardly of someone much bothered with his appearance, in this open, competitive, ‘face to face’ society, the public figure was expected to look the part. As he walked through the Forum or stood up to address the people, his inner qualities were clearly revealed in how he looked. In Barbatus’
case, unless he had simply inherited the name from his father, he sported a splendid beard, which may have been increasingly unusual at the time. One story has it that barbers first started to work in Rome in 300 BCE, and that for several centuries after that most Romans went clean-shaven.

  Barbatus’ Rome was very different from the Rome of the earliest Republic, two hundred years before, and it had ceased to be ordinary. Vast by the standards of the time, the city was home on a reasonable guess to something between 60,000 and 90,000 people. That put it roughly in the same bracket as a handful of the biggest urban centres in the Mediterranean world; Athens at this point had a population of considerably less than half that number, and never in its history had more than 40,000 in the city itself. What is more, Rome controlled directly a large swathe of land stretching from coast to coast, with a total population of well over half a million, and indirectly, by a series of agreements and alliances, much more – foreshadowing its later empire. It was a place whose organisation Cicero and his contemporaries, more than two centuries away, would have recognised. As well as the two annual consuls, there was a series of junior positions, including praetors and quaestors, beneath them (Romans usually called these officials ‘magistrates’, but their function was not principally legal). The senate, made up largely of those who had previously held public office, operated as a permanent council, and the hierarchical organisation of the citizens and the Centuriate Assembly, falsely attributed to King Servius Tullius and warmly approved by Cicero, underpinned the working of Roman politics.

  There were other familiar aspects. These included an army organised in legions, the beginnings of an official system of coinage and signs of an infrastructure to match the city’s size and influence. The first aqueduct to bring water into the growing conurbation was constructed in 312 BCE, a watercourse that ran mostly underground for some 10 miles from the nearby hills, not one of those extraordinary aerial constructions that we often now mean by ‘aqueduct’. This was the brainchild of a contemporary of Barbatus, the energetic Appius Claudius Caecus, who in the same year also launched the first major Roman road, the Via Appia (the Appian Way, named after him), leading straight south from Rome to Capua. For most of its length its surface was, at best, gravel, not the impressive paving slabs we can still tread. But it was a useful route for Roman armies, a convenient means of more peaceful communication and in symbolic terms a stamp of Roman power and control over the Italian landscape. It was no coincidence that for his great family tomb Barbatus chose a prime position right beside it, at the city limits, for travellers going into and out of Rome to admire.

  It was at some point during this crucial period between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, between the end of the Tarquins and the lifetime of Scipio ‘Long-Beard’, that many of Rome’s characteristic institutions took shape. Romans not only defined the basic principles of Republican politics and liberties but also began to develop the structures, the assumptions and (to put it no more grandly) a ‘way of doing things’ that underpinned their later imperial expansion. This involved a revolutionary formulation of what it was to be Roman, which defined their ideas of citizenship for centuries, set Rome apart from every other classical city-state and eventually informed many modern views of the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. It was not for nothing that both Lord Palmerston and John F. Kennedy proudly broadcast the Latin phrase Civis Romanus sum (‘I am a Roman citizen’) as a slogan for their times. In short, Rome for the first time began to look ‘Roman’ as we understand it, and as they understood it. The big question is, how did that happen, when and why? And what evidence survives to help explain, or even describe, Rome’s ‘great leap forward’? The chronology remains murky, and it is absolutely impossible to reconstruct a reliable historical narrative. But it is possible to glimpse some fundamental changes both at home and in Rome’s relations with the outside world.

  Later Roman writers presented a clear and dramatic story of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. On the one hand, they told of a series of violent social conflicts within Rome itself: between a hereditary group of ‘patrician’ families, who monopolised all political and religious power in the city, and the mass of the citizens, or ‘plebeians’, who were completely excluded. Gradually – in a vivid tale that involves strikes, mutinies and yet another (attempted) rape – the plebeians won the right or, as they would have put it, the freedom to share power on more or less equal terms with the patricians. On the other hand, they stressed a series of major victories in battle that brought most of the Italian peninsula under Roman control. These started in 396 BCE, when Rome’s great local rival, the Etruscan town of Veii, fell after decades of warfare, and ended roughly a hundred years later, when victory against the Samnites made Rome by far the biggest power base in Italy, and caught the attention of Duris on Samos. Not that this was a story of unchallenged expansion. Soon after the defeat of Veii, in 390 BCE a posse of marauding ‘Gauls’ sacked Rome. Exactly who these people were is now impossible to know; Roman writers were not good at distinguishing between those whom it was convenient to lump together as ‘barbarian tribes’ from the north, nor much interested in analysing their motives. But according to Livy, the effects were so devastating that the city had to be refounded (yet again), under the leadership of Marcus Furius Camillus – war leader, dictator, ‘colonel’, sometime exile and another ‘second Romulus’.

  This narrative is based on firmer foundations than anything before. Admittedly, even in 300 BCE the earliest Roman literature was still decades away, and the later accounts looking back to this period contain plenty of myth, embellishment and fantasy. Camillus is probably not much less fictional than the first Romulus, and we have already seen how the words of Catiline were used to ventriloquise the speeches of an early Republican revolutionary, none of whose words could possibly have survived. Yet the end of this period stands on the brink of history and history writing as we know it, far beyond a simple four-line epitaph. That is to say, when the well-connected senator Fabius Pictor, who was born around 270 BCE, sat down to compose the first extended written account of Rome’s past, he might well have remembered talking in his youth to people who had been eyewitnesses to events at the end of the fourth century BCE or who had talked to men of Barbatus’ generation who were. Pictor’s History does not survive beyond a few quotations in later writers, but it was famed in the ancient world. His name and a brief synopsis of his work have even been found painted on the walls of one of the few ancient libraries ever unearthed, in Taormina in Sicily, a combination of advertisement and library catalogue. Two thousand years later, we can read Livy, who had read Pictor, who had talked to people who remembered the world as it was around 300 BCE – a fragile chain of connection deep into antiquity.

  Increasingly too, fragments of contemporary evidence survive, to set against the later Roman historical account or point to an alternative narrative. The career summary in Barbatus’ epitaph is one of these. When Livy covers those years in his History, he writes of the Romans entering an alliance with, rather than subduing, Lucania, and he describes Barbatus fighting somewhere quite different, in northern Italy, and not very successfully at that. True, Barbatus’ epitaph is likely to have magnified his achievements, and ‘subdued’ may have been how the Roman elite preferred to present an ‘alliance’; but the inscription probably does help to correct Livy’s later, slightly garbled, account. There are a number of other such fragments, including some striking paintings of about the same time, which depict scenes from the wars in which Barbatus fought. Among the most remarkable and revealing of all, however, are the eighty or so short clauses from the first written collection of Roman rules and regulations (or ‘laws’, to use the rather grand term that most ancient writers adopted), put together in the mid fifth century BCE and laboriously reassembled thanks to centuries of modern scholarly detective work. The collection is known as the Twelve Tables, from the twelve bronze tablets on which it was originally inscribed and displayed. It offers a window onto some of the concerns of
those earliest Republican Romans, from worries about magic or assault to such tricky questions as whether it was allowed to bury a corpse with its gold teeth in place – an incidental insight into the skill of ancient dentistry that archaeology confirms.

  So it is to the world of the Twelve Tables that we first turn, before going on to explore the radical changes, both internal and external, that followed. Reconstructing the history of this period is an intriguing and sometimes tantalising process, and part of the fun comes from wondering how some of the pieces of the incomplete jigsaw puzzle fit together and how to tell the difference between the fact and the fantasy. But there are enough pieces in place to be confident that the decisive change in Rome came in the fourth century BCE, in the generation of Barbatus and Appius Claudius Caecus and that of their immediate predecessors, and that what happened then, hard as it is to pin down in detail, established a pattern of Roman politics, at home and abroad, which lasted for centuries.