Between 550 and 501 BC, Celts and Carthaginians enter the scene, while Rome throws out its kings
THE NEWLY VICTORIOUS CYRUS had left Harpagus in Asia Minor to finish up the conquest of Lydia by capturing the Ionian cities, along the coast, that had been Lydian allies.
According to Herodotus, Harpagus’s campaigning caused a domino effect. He began his operations with Phocaea, in the middle of the coast: a city whose people were “the earliest Greeks to make long voyages by sea.” Besieged by Harpagus, who was busily building earthworks up against their stone walls, they told Harpagus that they might consider negotiations for surrender if he would pull back for a day and let them debate the matter in peace. He did so, and the Phocaeans “launched their penteconters” (ships with fifty oars and a square mainsail which were peculiarly theirs), “put their womenfolk, children, and all their personal effects on board…embarked themselves,” and sailed away: “So the Persians gained control of a Phocaea which was emptied of men.”
The Phocaeans had already built themselves a trading post called Alalia on the island of Cyrnus—the Greek name for Corsica. Half of the Phocaeans, overwhelmed by homesick longing, decided to go back to their deserted city and chance the Persian wrath. The other half set sail for Alalia.1
Once settled on Corsica, they set out to form a trading empire of their own. Penteconters were perfect for trade; they carried a large crew (fifty oarsmen plus the deck crew and captain, at a minimum), all of whom could fight, if necessary, which made the penteconter much more daunting to pirates than a merchant ship (which often had only five or six men aboard).2 The Phocaeans planned to dominate the western Mediterranean trade routes, to which the other Greek cities had not yet paid much mind. To act as a trading post to the west, they built a colony on the coast of what is now southern France.
This new colony, Massalia, connected the Greek merchant net to a web-work of tribes that were, as yet, barely known. They were wild fighting barbarian tribes who came out of the depths of the rough lands farther away from the coast, bringing with them gold and salt, amber and fur, and (most valuable of all) tin.
The Phocaeans had come face-to-face with the Celts.
“CELT” IS AN ANACHRONISTIC NAME for the tribes who roamed around in western central Europe between 600 and 500 BC. Both the Greeks and the Romans referred to these peoples as “Gauls” or “Celts,” a little later, but between 600 and 500 BC they had no kind of “ethnic identity.”3 They were merely a scattering of tribes with a common origin.
This origin was Indo-European, which meant that they had come, long ago, from that same homeland between the Caspian and the Black Seas once occupied by the peoples later known as Hittites, Mycenaeans, and Aryans.4 Similarities between the languages of these four Indo-European peoples suggest that they wandered from a common point to settle in four different areas: the Hittites went west, into Asia Minor; the Mycenaeans west and then south into the northern Greek peninsula; the “Celts” to the north of the Alps; the Aryans first east and then south into India.
The particular Indo-Europeans later known as Celts did not write, so we can only try to read the graves and goods that they left behind. By the time that Massalia was built, around 630 BC, one particular style of burial had spread from modern Austria across to the southern Loire river. We call it the Hallstatt civilization, after its best-known site: a cemetery and salt mine south of the Danube.160
The Hallstatt tribes filled their graves with gold jewelry, swords and spears, food and drink and dishes for the use of the dead. Their dead chiefs were surrounded by the graves of warriors who were interred with their long iron swords, their most precious possession.5 Merchants from Hallstatt tribes drove their wagons to Massalia, loaded with amber, salt, and tin from as far away as the mines in modern Cornwall. These were all valuable and scarce items, and the trade made Massalia into a boom town.
The profitable Phocaean trade carried on from Massalia grew increasingly intolerable to the Etruscans. Cities from Etruria proper had been busy establishing cities farther and farther north. Now the aggressive Greeks were pushing into territory that the Etruscans considered their own to exploit. Greek colonies sprang up all along the southern coast of modern France; Monaco, Nice, and St. Tropez all had their origins as Greek trading posts.6
The pressure pushed the cities of Etruria—as spikily independent as those of Greece—into an association. Five Etruscan cities of Italy had joined together in an alliance against Rome a century before. Now, twelve Etruscan cities were ready to link their fates together into an association formed in imitation of the Greek amphictyonys, cities joined together for a common purpose while preserving their political independence. The Etruscan League, which formed around 550 BC, included Veii, Tarquinii, and Volsinii.7
Even united, though, the Etruscan League could not hope to fight successfully against the Phocaean invaders. The Phocaeans could call hundreds of allied Greek ships into any erupting war. And so, Herodotus continues, the Etruscans entered into league with the Carthaginians.
CARTHAGE, which lay on the northern coast of Africa at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, was already three hundred years old by 550. The two oldest cities of the loose Phoenician federation, Tyre and Sidon, now lay in Cyrus’s dominion. But Carthage, farther away, was the center of its own little kingdom. In 550, its king was Mago, the first Carthaginian monarch of whom we have any historical record.8
By Mago’s day, Carthage had planted trading colonies of its own in the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians were no happier than the Etruscans to see the Greeks busily colonizing around them, and they were very amenable to joining in an attack on the Phocaeans at Alalia.161 A historical record of the alliance survives in Aristotle’s Politics, which mentions that the “Etruscans and Carthaginians” once formed a community “for the sake of trade and of business relations.”9
60.1 Romans, Carthaginians, and Gauls
The Greeks on Alalia (or Corsica), getting wind of the plot, prepared for war: “The Phocaeans got sixty of their own ships ready,” Herodotus writes, “and went out to meet the enemy in the Sardinian Sea.” In the fighting that followed, forty Phocaean ships were destroyed, and the remaining twenty damaged so badly that they could no longer fight. But they could still float, so the Phocaeans sailed back to Corsica, loaded up their womenfolk and children once more, and retreated to Rhegium, a Greek city on the toe of the Italian boot.
The sea battle at Alalia was the second great naval battle ever fought (Rameses III against the Sea Peoples being the first). The immediate effect was that the Etruscans were temporarily top dog in the area. They took over Corsica and, untroubled by roving Phocaeans in penteconters, built trading colonies themselves, as far west as the coast of Spain (or so writes Stephanus of Byzantium.) They were at the height of their power, masters of the peninsula north of the Tiber.10
Massalia itself had its ties with Alalia cut, but the Etruscans did not destroy it. Having wiped out the mother city, they were not too worried about far-flung children. Massalia likely struggled for some time, but instead of collapsing, the city survived into the twenty-first century; it is now called Marseilles.
The battle had also given Carthage room to spread itself. By treaty with the Etruscans, they claimed rulership of Sardinia; and, untroubled by Greeks in the western Mediterranean, they too extended their reach to the Spanish coast.
WHILE THE GREEKS retreated and the Carthaginians and Etruscans sailed the Mediterranean, Rome was growing in both size and power. The more outlying areas that it claimed, the greater its internal troubles. How could a king of one race rule over a set of peoples so hostile to each other that they still refused even to intermarry? And how could that king deal with an aristocracy so opinionated and independent that it could be accused of assassinating its first, semidivine ruler?
In the days of Etruscan rule, Rome’s king and Rome’s people seem to have tried to work out some sort of compromise between monarchic absolutism, Cyrus style, and rule by the people, as in Athens. The history of the compromise is obscured by the early historians of Rome, who all seem to be reading later structures back into much earlier times. But it seems that, even in the days of the kings, Romans were already given a voice in the city’s affairs.
The Roman historian Varro mentions an early division of Rome’s people into three “tribes” of some kind, which may represent the three national groups of Sabines, Latials, and Etruscans (although the earliest accounts of Rome say nothing about this).11 Livy, on the other hand, credits Servius Tullius with dividing the people of Rome into six “classes,” based not on ancestry but on wealth; a useful way of starting from scratch, for a city in which the self-made man first made his appearance. The richest Romans were expected to defend the city with bronze helmet, shield, greaves, breastplate, sword, and spear; the poorest were required to bring only slings and stones.12 Even under the kings of Rome, the citizens of Rome were expected to defend their own city—and, presumably, to decide when and where attack was needed. Given this much power over their city, the Roman citizens would not put up with the rule of a king for much longer.
At the end of Servius Tullius’s forty-four-year rule, the monarchy imploded.
The culprit was Servius Tullius’s nephew, Tarquin the Younger. He was not only ambitious but evil; his wickedness soon found an outlet when he started an affair with his younger brother’s wife Tullia, who was also evil: “There is a magnetic power in evil,” Livy observes, “like draws towards like.” Tarquin the Younger was himself married, but rather than allowing this to get in their way, the lovers plotted the deaths of both of their spouses, and then married.
“From that day on,” Livy writes, “Servius, now an old man, lived in ever increasing danger.” Tullia, the prototype of Lady Macbeth, was filled with ambition that her new husband be king, and “soon found that one crime must lead to another…. she gave her husband no rest by day or night.” “I didn’t want a man who would be content just to be my husband,” she lectured him, “I wanted a man who was worthy of a crown!”
Pricked into action, Tarquin the Younger broke into the throne room while Servius Tullius was out, seated himself on the throne, and declared himself king. Servius, hearing of the invasion, ran to the throne room to confront the usurper, but Tarquin, who had “gone too far to turn back,” hurled the old king out into the street with his own hands, where his assassins finished the old man off. “With Servius,” writes Livy, “true kingship came to an end; never again was a Roman king to rule in accordance with humanity and justice.”13
Tarquin the Younger, now in control of the throne, quickly earned himself the nickname Tarquinius Superbus: “Tarquin the Proud.” He formed a bodyguard to strong-arm the citizens of Rome into obedience; he executed Servius Tullius’s loyal supporters; he accused innocent people of capital crimes so that he could confiscate their money. “He had usurped by force the throne to which he had no title whatever,” Livy tells us.
The people had not elected him, the Senate had not sanctioned his accession. Without hope of his subjects’ affection, he could rule only by fear…. He punished by death, exile, or confiscation of property men whom he happened to suspect or dislike; he broke the established tradition of consulting the Senate on all matters of public business; he made and unmade treaties and alliances with whom he pleased without any reference whatever either to the commons or the Senate.
All of these were serious offenses. But the last straw came when his son, putative heir to the Roman throne, raped a Roman noblewoman named Lucretia, the wife of one of his own friends. Shamed, Lucretia killed herself. Her body lay in the public square while her husband shouted out to his countrymen to help him avenge his wife’s death. It did not take long for indignation over the rape of Lucretia to morph into indignation over the tyrannical acts of the entire family.
Tarquin the Proud himself was outside Rome at the time, leading a campaign against the neighboring city of Ardea. When news of the uprising reached him, he started back to Rome; but by the time he arrived, the rebellion was in full swing, “Tarquin found the city gates shut against him,” writes Livy, “and his exile decreed.” The army joined “enthusiastically” into the insurrection, and Tarquin was forced to flee north into Etruria with his son.
Lucretia’s bereaved husband and one of his trusted friends were elected leaders of the city, by the popular vote of the army: only members of the divisions which had been formed by Servius Tullius were allowed to vote. The two men were given kinglike powers to declare war and make decrees—but with a difference. Their power would last only for a single year, and each man could veto the other’s decrees. They were now consuls: the highest office in Roman government. Rome had been liberated from its monarchy, and the Roman Republic had begun.162
Livy, our most thorough source for these years, gives this story a heavy pro-Republic gloss. As far as he is concerned, once Tarquin the Proud was thrown out of the city, the entire history of Rome makes a right-hand turn: “My task from now on will be to trace the history of a free nation,” Livy declares, “governed by annually elected officers of state and subject not to the caprice of individual men, but to the overriding authority of law.”
The expulsion of Tarquin the Proud probably does have a historical base, but it is unlikely that the Romans suddenly realized the shortcomings of monarchy. Rather, the driving out of the Etruscan king represents the throwing off of Etruscan dominance.
Rome had been ruled by Etruscans since the accession of Tarquin the Elder a hundred years earlier. But since the sea victory at Alalia in 535, the Etruscans had been hard pressed to keep their power.
The events following Tarquin the Proud’s expulsion show the slippage of Etruscan strength. In Etruria, he went from city to city, attempting to put together an anti-Roman coalition. “I am of the same blood as you,” was his most potent argument. The men of Veii and Tarquinii responded. A double army marched behind Tarquin, back towards Rome, in an attempt to reassert Etruscan power over the most important city south of Etruria.
They were met by the Roman army and defeated in a fierce fight which was almost a draw; Livy remarks that the Romans won because they lost one fewer man than the Etruscans. The Etruscans then began to plan a second attack on Rome, this time under the leadership of Lars Porsena, the king of the Etruscan city of Clusium.
News of the coming attack was received in Rome with something close to panic. They had barely managed to fight off Veii and Tarquinii, and Lars Porsena had earned himself a reputation as a fierce fighter. In terror, the farmers on the city’s outskirts abandoned their farms and fled inside the city’s walls.
It was a peculiarity of the Roman defenses that the city was protected on three sides by walls, but on the fourth—the east side—only by the Tiber. The river was generally considered uncrossable, but there was one way that an army could get across the Tiber and directly into the city: a wooden bridge which stretched from the eastern lands outside the city, known as the Janiculum, across the river, right into the heart of Rome.
Lars Porsena made his first approach from this direction, eschewing the walls in favor of the Tiber. The Etruscan army swept in like a storm, and took the Janiculum without difficulty; the Roman soldiers posted there threw away their weapons and ran across the bridge to safety.
Except for one: the soldier Horatius, who took up his position at the western edge of the bridge, ready to hold it alone: “conspicuous amongst the rout of fugitives,” writes Livy, “sword and shield ready for action.”14
According to Roman legend, Horatius held off the Etruscans long enough for Roman demolition forces to arrive to destroy the bridge. Ignoring their shouts for him to retreat back across the bridge before it was taken down, he went on fighting until the supports were cut to pieces. “The Etruscan advance was suddenly checked by the crash of the falling bridge and the simultaneous shout of triumph from the Roman soldiers who had done their work in time,” Livy writes. Horatius, now cut off from the city, plunged into the river in full armor and swam across. “It was a noble piece of work,” Livy concludes, “legendary, maybe, but destined to be celebrated in story through the years to come.”
Like Sennacherib’s withdrawal from the walls of Jerusalem, Horatius’s defense of the bridge was a minor military engagement that stands out in memory because of a poem; in this case, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, in which Horatius becomes the model of patriotic British bravery:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?”15
Gallant though it may have been, the defense of the bridge did not end the Etruscan attack. Porsena spread his forces across the Janiculum, barricaded the river so that Rome could not be supplied with food by ships, and besieged the walls. The siege, supplemented by various indecisive battles, dragged on until Porsena finally agreed to withdraw in return for Roman concessions. The two cities swore out a peace treaty that did little to change the relationship between the two cities, but at least halted hostilities.
The treaty revealed that the Etruscans and Romans were now balanced in power. Given that the Etruscans had been dominant for so many decades, this was a defeat for the cities of Etruria. And Rome made its own treaty with Carthage, sworn out in the same year, which recognized the coast south of the Tiber not as Etruscan, but as Roman territory.
Polybius records this treaty in his Rise of the Roman Empire. As he understands it, Rome and Carthage agreed to friendship on certain conditions, the most important being that Roman ships were not to sail farther west than “Fair Promontory,” the modern Cape Bon.163 A Roman captain who was blown off course and landed in the forbidden territory was to repair his ship and leave within five days, without buying or carrying away “anything more than is required for the repair of his ship or for sacrifice.”16 Any trade that took place east of Fair Promontory had to be carried out in the presence of a town clerk (presumably to keep the Romans from trading arms close to Carthaginian land). In return, the Carthaginians agreed to leave the entire Latin population alone, to build no forts near them, and to refrain from entering Latin territory with weapons. Clearly the Romans were most concerned for their future political expansion, while the Carthaginians had their eye on a trading empire.
The Etruscans, on the other hand, were nowhere in sight. They were also just about to lose their grip on the land around the Po river; groups of Celtic warriors were on their way over the Alps, down into northern Italy.
According to Livy, they were driven by a population explosion; Gaul had become “so rich and populous that the effective control of such large numbers was a matter of serious difficulty.” So the king of the Celts in Gaul sent his two nephews out, with two groups of followers, to find new lands. One nephew went north, into “southern Germany,” while the other went south with a “vast host” towards the Alps. They crossed the mountains and “defeated the Etruscans near the river Ticinus, and…founded the town of Mediolanium”—that is, the city of Milan.
Nor was that the end of the invasion. Livy goes on to describe at least four successive waves of Gaulish invasion, each maurading tribe driving away the Etruscan inhabitants who lived in the cities south of the Alps, and building their own towns in the Po river valley. The fourth wave of arriving Celts found “all the country between the Alps and the Po already occupied” and so “crossed the river on rafts,” expelled the Etruscans between the Po and the Apennine ridge, and settled there as well.17
The Celts must have been a fearsome sight, charging down the mountain slopes towards the walls of the Etruscan cities. The word “Celt,” given to these tribes by the Greeks and Romans, comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to strike,” and the weapons found in their graves—seven-foot spears, iron swords with thrusting tips and cutting edges, war chariots, helmets and shields—testify to their skill at war.18 “They slept on straw and leaves,” Polybius remarks, “ate meat, and practised no other pursuits but war and agriculture.”19
This particular invasion, which began around 505 BC, was part of a larger movement in the entire Celtic culture. Right around this time, new customs begin to overlay the old Hallstatt settlements; this was a culture that used knots, curves, and mazelike lines as decorations, and which buried leaders not with wagons, as in Hallstatt graves, but instead with two-wheeled war chariots. This was not a peaceful takeover. The Hallstatt burial ground at Heuneberg, in southern Germany, was thoroughly looted; the fortress on the Danube was burned.20
Archaeologists have given this next phase in Celtic culture the name “La Tène,” after one of its most extensive sites, just west of the southern Rhine. In some places La Tène sites lie south of Hallstatt sites, or overwhelm them (as at Heuneburg and Dürrnberg), but generally they lie a little to the north.21 It is the La Tène style of art which we now identify as “Celtic,” and the characteristics of the La Tène culture which replaced those of the Hallstatt. This was not a foreign invasion, but a homegrown shift in power: one Celtic culture overwhelming another.
This internal struggle for dominance gave rise to the invasions southwards into Italy; its reality is preserved in the later account of the Roman historian Justin:
The reason the Gauls came to Italy and sought new areas to settle in was internal unrest and ceaseless fratricidal strife. When they tired of this and made their way to Italy they drove the Etruscans from their homeland and founded Milan, Di Como, Brescia, Verona, Bergamo, Trento, and Vicenza.22
The unrest may have driven some of the Celts as far over as the western coast of Europe, and perhaps even across the water to the island of Britain. Britain had been inhabited for some centuries by a people we know almost nothing about, except that they dragged together huge rings of standing stones for a purpose which had something to do with the sky. Construction on Stonehenge, the most famous of these huge monuments, probably began around 3100 BC and continued over the next two thousand years.164 But these people were soon infiltrated by the same warlike Celts who were pushing south against the Etruscans. Right around 500 BC, graves in Britain begin to contain war chariots for the first time, just like the La Tène graves in southern Germany.
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC responded to the invasions in the north by altering its new government. “In these circumstances of mounting anxiety and tension,” writes Livy, “…the proposal was made, for the first time, of appointing a dictator.” The year was 501, only eight years after the Republic began.
Livy chalks up the willingness of the voting populace (which is to say, the army) to pass this proposal to a whole constellation of military emergencies: war with various nearby cities, hostility from the Sabines, looming attack from other Latin towns, unrest from “the commons.” But certainly the ripples of displacement from the north, reverberating down south, put the entire peninsula on edge.
The office of dictator was not, as in modern times, license for unlimited power. The Roman dictators had power for only six months at a time, and had to be appointed by the ruling consuls. Often the dictator was one of the consuls. His role was to keep Rome secure in the face of extraordinary outside threats, but he also had unusual powers inside the city. Consuls were allowed to impose the death penalty on Romans outside the walls of Rome, in connection with military expeditions, but inside Rome they had to submit criminals to the will of the voting population for punishment. The dictator, though, was allowed to exercise that power of life and death inside Rome itself, with no obligation to consult the people.23
This first dictator may have been appointed to deal with marauding Gauls, Latins, and Etruscans, but getting Rome’s unruly population back under control was also part of his job, as Livy makes clear. “The appointment of a dictator for the first time in Rome,” he writes, “and the solemn sight of his progress through the streets preceded by the ceremonial axes, had the effect of scaring the commons into a more docile frame of mind…. From a dictator there was no appeal, and no help anywhere but in implicit obedience.”24
Implicit obedience: Rome’s first defense. It was the first time that the rights of the Republic were suspended for the sake of expediency, but not the last.
