The Rise of Rome

make way for it. This was Numa’s Regia, and its name suggests that this was the king’s official residence.

The foundations of a vast, archaic temple can still be seen on the Capitol. This was the Tarquins’ Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. It testifies to the magnificence of the Rome they governed.

The eagle that stole Priscus’s hat at the Janiculum saw across the river a patchwork of huts on the tops of wooded slopes. If the bird were to survive a normal span of thirty years and once again fly over the cluster of hills by the Tiber, it would be startled by the spectacle below—a busy market square, bright colored shrines and temples, shops and public buildings. A shiny, brand-new city.

6 Free at Last

HAVING DISPOSED OF THE TARQUINS, BRUTUS AND his fellow conspirators had to decide what to do next. In principle, each of them could very well have presented himself to the People as a successor king. That they did not do so, but instead established a republic, is a sign that this was not a revolt from “below” but a plot by resentful aristocrats, who wanted government by the elite.

We have already noticed that the last three kings were not patricians but outsiders, even foreigners; their power flowed from the People. According to the literary record, Superbus bullied the nobles mercilessly, and it looks very much as if they now took their revenge. That members of his family, Brutus and Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband, headed the coup, shows that even his core support broke with him—quite possibly because of a sex scandal rather than because of political disagreement. The Lucretia story reads rather like the plot of a stage play, but, as we have surmised, there may have been more than a germ of truth in it.

Traditionally minded as they were, Romans disliked abolishing constitutional institutions, and although the monarchy had to go, they replaced it with something similar but cut up into different pieces. The object was not to remove royal power but to tame it. The king’s religious duties were passed to a priest, the rex sacrorum, or king of sacred things. His executive power, his imperium, which gave him command of the army and authority to interpret and execute the law, went to two officials called consuls. Rather like the president of the United States, the consuls were not accountable to a representative assembly. These “magistrates,” as they were called, were elected, as the kings had been; they wore similar state robes, sat on the sella curulis, and were also attended by lictors. The first consuls took office in 509.

The nobility wanted to eliminate the risk that one ambitious man could restore the monarchy—hence the division of power between two officeholders. This has the appearance of being an eccentric decision, and one likely to foster inertia. But power-sharing of this kind was not unknown in the ancient world. Sparta, for example, the celebrated Greek city-state whose citizens had a well-justified name for self-discipline, boasted two kings, each from a different royal family.

Two other restraints were placed on the consuls. Their term of office lasted for only twelve months, and each could place a veto (intercessio) on the other’s decisions. In Rome “No” always trumped “Yes.” In alternating months, one consul took the lead. The lictors walked in front of him in single file, with their rods (and, when outside Rome, axes), while his colleague stepped back into second place. The designers of these new arrangements recognized that domestic or external crises might arise from time to time which demanded forceful emergency action. So they invented the post of dictator. He was to be appointed by the consuls and entrusted with supreme authority on his own. His term of office was limited to six months.

Under the monarchy, the Senate was probably only an ad hoc collection of patricians and other leading personalities. Members were selected by the king and, under the early Republic, by the consuls. This state of affairs may have lasted until the fourth century, after which the Senate became a permanent, standing committee. Senators were expected to behave with probity; they were not allowed to engage in banking or foreign trade and were excluded from public contracts. They were unpaid. Not surprisingly, ways and means were found of bending the rules.

Although its function was to advise the consuls, the Senate possessed that weighty thing, auctoritas. A difficult word to translate, it referred to the influence that came with experience and high position. Theodor Mommsen writes that the force of auctoritas “was more than advice and less than a command, an advice which one may not safely ignore.” The Senate came to represent continuity, and its collective experience and expertise meant that its influence would only grow with the passage of time. There were no political parties and programs, but shifting networks of personal and collective alliances, often acting in the interest of aristocratic clans.

As we have seen, there existed a People’s Assembly, supposedly shaped by King Servius Tullius, the comitia centuriata. During the early Republic, the Assembly held supreme authority in the sense that it was the only body entitled to elect officials and pass laws. In practice, though, its democratic impact was limited, because its structure was skewed in a way that gave the “centuries” of the well-to-do more voting power than was allocated to the poor.

A system of patrons and dependents, the clientela, also cut across the democratic process. Freemen became the “clients” (through circumstance or choice) of wealthier people who were higher up on the social, economic, and political scale. They did everything they could to advance their patrons’ interests, and in return they received protection. When things went wrong, they could apply for assistance, usually financial or legal, in the sure knowledge that they would receive it. A patron’s son could expect to inherit his father’s list of clients. Like a feudal pyramid, the clientela brought signal benefits to the poor and financially insecure.

This web of interlocking obligations was tightly woven and made change difficult. It was one of the reasons that Rome became a conservative society and, in its constitutional arrangements, fought shy of revolutionary upheavals.

BRUTUS, WHO WAS one of the first-ever pair of consuls, persuaded an Assembly to swear an oath never again to allow any man to be king in Rome. An early law of the Republic made it a capital offense for anyone to become a leading official without being elected. Forever after, until the days of Cicero and beyond, Rome’s ruling elite were obsessed with a fear that one of their number would aim for royal power, regnum, and ruthlessly eliminate anyone suspected of meditating a coup. They liked to compete among themselves for a turn at the top, and although great families came and went through the centuries, a nobleman of any ability felt that public office was his birthright.

Brutus and his friends could not count on the People to support them, even if the Tarquins had lost popularity through high-handedness. If the fledgling Republic was to have a chance of surviving, they knew that something had to be done to reconcile them to the new order of things. When addressing the People, an early consul took the nervous precaution of ordering his lictors to lower their rods, as a gesture of submission, and had a law passed allowing the comitia centuriata to be the final court of appeal against a sentence of execution or whipping (if ordered inside the city’s pomerium). It was uncertain that this concession would be enough, for in the long run ordinary citizens would notice that, as Cicero remarked, “though the People were free, few political acts were performed by them.”

The crucial point to be made about this new constitution is that it would work only if there was give-and- take. To avert despotism, the forces in the state were almost too evenly balanced one against the other. A spirit of compromise and a refusal to resort to violence were essential to its success.

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TARQUIN WAS NOT nicknamed Superbus for nothing. Pride had played a part in his and his sons’ fall, but pride also goaded him to resist and regain his power. Three stories are told about this desperate period during which the fate of the new Republic was in doubt; they are (surely) fictions, but they express, in their sensational way, what Romans viewed as good and bad behavior.

Superbus sent an embassy to the city, which announced his abdication and promised not to use military force to stage a comeback. In a tone of sweet reasonableness, he merely asked for the return of his and his family’s