Kings or chiefs?

The nineteenth-century sceptics had good reason to doubt the surviving Roman accounts of the regal period. There are all kinds of things about the kings that do not quite add up, most obviously their chronology. Even if we imagine unusually healthy lifespans, it is impossible to make seven kings, Romulus included, spread over the 250 years – from the mid eighth century to the late sixth century BCE – that Roman writers assigned to them. That would mean each of them reigned, on average, for more than three decades. No modern monarchy has ever equalled that consistent level of longevity.

The most economical solution to this problem is either to assume that the regal period was really much shorter than the Romans calculated or to propose that there were more kings than have come down in the record (there are, as we shall discover, a couple of potential candidates for these ‘lost monarchs’). But it is also possible that the written tradition we have for this period is more fundamentally misleading than these simple solutions suggest and that, whatever the chronology, the character of Roman kingship was in reality radically different from what Livy and other Roman writers imply.

The biggest problem is that Rome’s ancient historians tended systematically to modernise the regal period and to aggrandise its achievements, as if seeing them through some patriotic magnifying glass. According to their accounts, the early Romans already relied on such institutions as the senate and assemblies of the people, which were part of the political institutional furniture of the city half a millennium later; and in arranging the kingly succession (which was not hereditary) they followed complex legal procedures that involved the appointment of an interrex (a ‘between king’), a popular vote for the new monarch and senatorial ratification. What is more, the power struggles and rivalries they imagine at those moments of transition would not have looked out of place in the court of the Roman emperor in the first century CE. In fact, Livy’s account of the wheeling and dealing after the murder of Tarquinius Priscus – in which his scheming wife Tanaquil carefully concealed the death until she had firmly secured the throne for her favourite, Servius Tullius – is similar to the wheeling and dealing by Livia after the death of the emperor Augustus in 14 CE (p. 381). It is so similar that some critics have suspected that Livy, who was writing from the 20s BCE, could not possibly have completed this section of his History until after 14 CE and must have based his description on the events of that year.

Roman relations with neighbouring peoples are described on a similarly grand scale, complete with treaties, ambassadors and formal declarations of war. Their fighting too is presented as if it involved large-scale clashes between mighty Roman legions and equally mighty enemies: we read of the cavalry charging the opposing flanks, of the infantry being forced to yield, of the opposition driven to confusion … and various other clichés (or truths) of ancient battle. Indeed, this kind of language seeps into modern accounts of the period, many of which also confidently refer to such things as the ‘foreign policy’ of Rome in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.

At this point a reality check is required. However else we may choose to describe the urban community of the early Romans, it remains somewhere on the spectrum between tiny and small. Population size in what is effectively prehistory is notoriously difficult to estimate, but the best guess is that the ‘original’ population of Rome – at whatever moment it was when the aggregate of little settlements started thinking of itself as ‘Rome’ – amounted to at most a few thousand. By the time the last king was thrown out, towards the end of the sixth century BCE, according tostandard modern calculations, we are probably dealing with something in the region of 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants. This is only a best guess based on the size of the place, the amount of territory that Rome probably controlled at that point and what population we could reasonably expect it to support. But it is much more likely than the exaggerated totals that ancient authors give. Livy, for example, quotes the very first Roman historian, Quintus Fabius Pictor, who wrote around 200 BCE and claimed that towards the end of the regal period the number of adult male citizens was 80,000, making a total population of well over 200,000. This is a ludicrous figure for a new community in archaic Italy (it is not far short of the total population of the territories of Athens or Sparta at their height, in the mid fifth century BCE), and there is no archaeological evidence for a city of any such size at this time, although the number does at least have the virtue of matching the aggrandising views of early Rome found in all ancient writers.

It is, needless to say, impossible to know anything much about the institutions of this small, proto-urban settlement. But unless Rome was different from every other archaic township in the ancient Mediterranean (or early townships anywhere), it would have been much less formally structured than the stories suggest. Complex procedures involving an interrex, popular voting and senatorial ratification are entirely implausible in this context; at best, they are a radical rewriting of early history in a much later idiom. Military activity is another good case in point. Here geography alone should give us pause. We need simply look at the location of these heroic battles: they were all fought within a radius of about 12 miles of the city of Rome. Despite the style in which they are recounted, as if they were mini-versions of Rome against Hannibal, they were probably something closer, in our terms, to cattle raids. They may not even have been ‘Roman’ engagements in the strict sense of the word at all. In most early communities, it took a long time before the various forms of private violence, from rough justice and vendetta to guerrilla warfare, came fully under public control. Conflict of all sorts was regularly in the hands of individuals with their own following, the ancient equivalents of what we might call private warlords; and there was a blurry distinction between what was conducted on behalf of the ‘state’ and what on behalf of some powerful leader. Almost certainly that was the case in early Rome.

16. This late sixth- or early fifth-century inscription discovered in 1977 about 40 miles south of Rome is one of the best pieces of evidence for private militia in the early city. It is a dedication to the god Mars (here, in the Latin of the time, the last word, ‘MAMARTEI’) by the ‘SUODALES’ of Publius Valerius (here, ‘POPLIOSIO VALESIOSIO’, on the first line) perhaps the same man as one of the semi-legendary consuls in the first year of the Republic (p. 129), Publius Valerius Publicola. His SUODALES (sodales in classical Latin) may be, politely, his ‘companions’; more realistically, they may be his ‘gang’.

So where does that leave the kings and the word rex on the inscription from the Forum? Rex can certainly mean ‘king’ in the modern sense – a sense we broadly share with the Romans of the first century BCE. They, like us, would have had in mind not just an image of autocratic power and its symbols but also a theoretical concept of monarchy as a form of government, to be contrasted with, for example, democracy or oligarchy. It is extremely unlikely that anything of this sort was in the minds of the men who centuries earlier carved the stone in the Forum. For them, rex would have signalled individual power and prominence, but in a much less structured, ‘constitutional’ way. When we are discussing the realities, rather than the myths, of this early period of Rome’s history, it might be better to think in terms of chiefs or big men instead of kings, and to think of the ‘chiefly’ rather than the ‘regal’ period.