The Rise of Rome

supervised the interregnum that followed the death of a king, organizing the election of a successor.

The citizenry was divided into three tribes based on kinship—two of which were composed of Latins and Sabines. Each tribe elected a tribune to represent its interests and commanded tribal levies in times of war. In turn, the three tribes were each subdivided into ten curiae, or courts, individually named after thirty of the kidnapped Sabine women. These formed a popular assembly, the comitia curiata, which voted by curiae on proposals that the king or the Senate placed before it. A curia was further subdivided into ten gentes, or clans. When considering a proposal, these assemblies cast one vote each, and so by a majority determined the curia’s one vote, a majority of which then determined the comitia curiata’s decision.

City-states in the Mediterranean in the early classical period tended to be direct democracies, where citizens met in assembly to make all the important decisions, one man having one vote; or oligarchies, where a minority ruling class managed the state; or monarchies or tyrannies (from turannos, the Greek for “autocrat,” and not necessarily a derogatory term). Quite often, they moved violently from one type of government to another. What was interesting about this early Roman constitution was that it found an ingenious, albeit complicated, formula for combining all three forms of government.

Romulus was as vigorous in the field as he was in the committee room. He set the tone of military aggression that marked Rome’s collective personality throughout its history. For more than twenty years, he fought wars with the new state’s neighbors, extending territory and expanding the population.

NONE OF THIS meant that the king’s fiat was entirely unchallenged. He was generous to his soldiers, assigning them land and giving them a share of the spoils of battle, but as the years passed he became more and more peremptory in manner, especially toward the Senate. On one occasion when they could not come to an agreement, he remarked, “I have chosen you, Senators, not for you to govern me, but for me to have you at my command.” He presented himself in public in some style, wearing a crown and carrying a scepter with an eagle on the top; he wore scarlet shoes and a floor-length white cloak with purple stripes.

In the thirty-seventh year of his reign, the king went to the Campus Martius, an open space north of the Capitol, and held a military review near the Goat’s Marsh (now the site of the Pantheon). Suddenly, a storm came up with loud thunderclaps and darkness fell from a clear sky (perhaps an eclipse). A thick mist formed, and Romulus disappeared from view. When the air cleared, he was no longer sitting on his throne and in fact was nowhere to be found. The senators who had been standing beside him claimed that he had ascended into the skies. One or two said that he had become a god, and soon all present hailed him as divine.

Another version of Romulus’s death gained currency. This was that patrician members of the Senate had become so disgusted with his tyrannical ways that they plotted his assassination. They struck him down in the middle of a Senate meeting. They then cut him up into pieces and each “father” carried a body part under his clothes when leaving the meeting. Hence the vanishing.

The Senate was unpopular with ordinary citizens, but their attention was distracted from rumors of conspiracy when, as the historian Livy put it, “the shrewd device of one man is said to have gained credit for the story [of the apotheosis].” A leading politician, he claimed at a People’s Assembly that Romulus had descended from heaven and appeared to him. The ghost said that he was to be worshipped under his divine name of Quirinus and promised that “my Rome shall be the capital of the world, so let the Romans cherish the art of war.” According to one of Rome’s earliest historians, this was a cynical trick, but it certainly worked.

The official version of a deified Romulus was the one that gained the greatest currency. Even experienced and skeptical commentators like Cicero were inclined to believe it. He observed that in the distant and uncivilized past there was a “great inclination to the invention of fabulous tales and ignorant men were easily induced to believe them … but we know that Romulus lived less than six hundred years ago when writing and education had long been in existence.”

Strangely, the unofficial account of the king’s passing was to receive an uncanny echo during Cicero’s own lifetime, when in 44 B.C. the great tyrant of his age, Gaius Julius Caesar, was struck down by his colleagues during a session of the Senate. Indeed, Cicero was present in the meeting hall at the time, and he must surely have wondered at the coincidence. Then, for seven days, a new comet was seen in the sky, which the common people held to be Caesar’s soul; like Romulus, he had ascended into heaven and joined the company of the gods. In Rome’s end was its beginning.

THE MONARCHY WAS not handed on by birthright but was an elective post in the gift of the People’s Assembly (with some input from the Senate). Most Roman kings were not related to one another and were foreigners or, at least, outsiders; this had the fortunate consequence of removing senators from competition and stabilizing the Senate as an institution.

According to Cicero, the Senate tried for a while to rule without a king, but the People wouldn’t have it. An election was held, and the winner was Numa Pompilius, a Sabine from outside the city. If Romulus had been a warrior king, he was a priest king. He distributed land to every citizen, writes Cicero, to discourage brigandage and to foster the arts of peace. He was especially interested in religion, which he envisaged as a complex system of rules, ceremonies, and superstitions designed to discover the will of the gods and to ensure their favor. He was advised on these matters by a friendly water nymph named Egeria, whom he consulted privately in her sacred grove (near where the Baths of Caracalla were built in the third century A.D.), but many of his innovations were drawn from Etruscan religious observance. Cicero wrote:

He wanted the proper performance of the rituals themselves to be difficult, but that the necessary equipment should be readily available, for he provided that much should be learned by heart and scrupulously observed, but made the expenditure of money unnecessary. In this way, he made the performance of religious duties laborious but not costly.

“Laborious” is the word. Senior Romans holding public office spent much of their time on ceremonial business. If any error was made—misspoken or forgotten phrases or interruption of any kind, even the squeaking of a rat—the whole rigmarole had to be repeated until the performance was perfect. On one occasion, a sacrifice was conducted thirty times before the priest got it right.

Numa was followed by a king, Tullus Hostilius, who was even more warlike than Romulus. His reign was marked by a long struggle with Alba Longa, the city built by Aeneas’s son and from which Romulus and Remus had emerged to found Rome. It was, in effect, Rome’s first civil war. The two sides agreed on a treaty according to which the loser of the conflict would consent to unconditional surrender. The Romans placed a high value on their collective word and, typically, devised an elaborate religious ritual for treaty-making. The king swore that if the Roman People departed in any way from the terms of an agreement with a foreign power he would implore Jupiter, king of the gods, to smite its members, just as he smote a sacrificial pig. With these words, he struck down the pig with a flint.

To avoid a full-scale battle with all the attendant casualties, a duel was agreed on between two sets of triplet brothers—the Curiatii for Alba and the Horatii for Rome. In the fight, all of the Curiatii were wounded, but two of the Horatii were killed. The surviving Horatius, Publius, then reversed the fortunes of battle by killing all his opponents. He was able to tackle them one by one, for they had become separated because of their wounds.

Publius was the hero of the hour, and he marched back to Rome carrying his spoils, the three dead men’s armor. At the city gates, he was greeted by his sister. She happened be betrothed to one of the Curiatii, and when she noticed that Publius was carrying his cloak she let down her hair, burst into tears, and called out her lover’s name.

In a fit of rage, Publius drew his sword and stabbed his sister to the heart. “Take your girl’s love and give it to your lover in hell,” he shouted. “So perish all women who grieve for an enemy!”

He was condemned to death for the murder but reprieved by the People, which refused to countenance the execution of a national hero. However, something had to be done to mitigate the guilt of such a notorious crime. The Horatius family was obliged to conduct expiatory ceremonies. Once these had been performed, a wooden beam was slung across the roadway under which Publius walked, with his head covered as a sign of submission.