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 democratic 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.

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.