Texts in Context:
The Seven Kings of Rome
By Gabriel Blanchard
All roads lead to Rome, they say, and the student of its history is apt to retort that they all have to be walked to get there.
Ab Urbe Condita
Having brought Greece almost up to the point at which it fused with Roman civilization,1 we now return to the origins of the latter. It may feel strange, living in what the Romans would have called the year MMDCCLXXVII ab urbe condita—that is, “2777 from the founding of the city,” or 753 BC—to look back at a Rome that is small, unimportant, and ruled by kings, but there is the beginning of our story.
Around twenty years before that, a pair of twins were fathered by the god Mars2 upon a Vestal Virgin—a woman from the royal family of the city of Alba Longa,3 Rhea Silvia by name. (Alba Longa itself, according to legend, had been founded by a son of Æneas, one of the heroes of the Trojan War; we shall have cause to return to him later.4) Because no one in myths has read myths, the city’s paranoid king had the twins exposed, upon which the inevitable happened: they were suckled by a she-wolf, a shepherd adopted them, and they eventually learned of their ancestry and slew the wicked king—the usual. Then, they set out to found their own city.
Remus died in the course of a dispute over where exactly they should place their new city; the death is famously attributed to Romulus, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus (whom one is reluctant to doubt, if only because that has to be the best name a historian has ever had) actually relates several contradictory accounts of Remus’ death, some of which don’t make Romulus responsible at all.
We’re All in This Together
In any event, Romulus is supposed to have reigned over the city for thirty-seven years, during which he was responsible for three particularly important decisions. One was the selection of the original Senate, an advisory council of one hundred elders. Another was making Rome a haven for the outcasts of other cities. Ethnicity was no object: Rome would absorb the Sabines, Latins, and Etruscans before the end of the monarchy; and while there was no pretense of class equality, rich and poor, and even slave and free, were at any rate equally welcome in Rome. What mattered were Roman virtues: qualities of character like commitment to duty (pietas), sobriety (gravitas), reverence for the gods (religio)—traits anyone could cultivate, if they chose. One who cultivated a character of this kind could hope to achieve dignitas, a term that is difficult to translate well into English; it indicated prestige and honors, yes, but it went beyond that; it indicated honor, understood more as a moral quality than a social one.
This resulted, among other things, in a significant surplus of Roman males, and males whom neighboring peoples (like the Sabines, to take an example at random) refused to intermarry with, fearing to swell the numbers of the new realm. And that brings us to Romulus’s third historic decision: the kidnapping of the Sabine women.5 According to Livy, this was effected by Rome inviting their neighbors to a cycle of games, not unlike the Olympics. During the proceedings, Romulus gave a signal, at which the Romans seized all the attending maidens they could get their literal hands on and ran away—as well as seizing one woman who was married already, apparently by mistake, but since Romulus made her “his wife too” regardless, …? (Tertullian’s notorious maxim credo quia absurdum6 springs to mind.)
The Sabine men, while unamused, nonetheless seem to have been strangely slow in their response. By the time their king, Titus Tatius, was leading an army against Rome, the Sabine women in question were allegedly able to intervene for peace by coming in between the two armies with their newborns in their arms. Ultimately, the Sabines were fused with the Romans as a people, and, Spartan style, Titus Tatius reigned alongside Romulus for five years (until Tatius’ death).
“Sad Stories of the Death of Kings”
In 716 (or XXXVII ab urbe condita), Romulus disappeared. There were legends he was swept up to heaven by a whirlwind. There were also rumors the king had been murdered; if so, the body was never found.
We tend to assume that kingship is always hereditary, but the Roman monarchy was elective (which isn’t uncommon, historically). As it happened, a Sabine, the husband of Titus Tatius’s daughter, was eventually chosen to succeed Romulus. This second king, Numa Pompilius, was responsible for Rome’s multitude of priesthoods and religious festivals; it was he who built the temple of Janus (god of transitions and doorways, and namesake of January) whose doors had to be kept open whenever Rome was at war. From the time Numa built the temple of Janus until his death, forty-three years later, the doors were shut.
His successor, Tullus Hostilius (r. 672-640 BC), was the grandson of one of Romulus’s warriors—the doors of Janus were opened most of his reign. The fourth king, Ancus Marcius, was a grandson of Numa Pompilius and another lover of peace. With the death of Marcius came a new development.
A good shepherd shears the flock; he does not flay them.
The Etruscan Dynasty
The Romans, Latins, and Sabines were all Italic peoples, i.e. speakers of languages from the Italic branch of Indo-European. (The modern descendants of the Italic languages are the Romance languages,7 which all come from Latin; no other Italic tongue has had native speakers since antiquity.) Other Indo-Europeans speakers also inhabited the region—Greeks in the south, Celts to the northwest—as did a few Semitic-speaking Carthaginians, mostly in Africa. The Etruscans were different. Their language had no other relatives in the peninsula, and at most one or two anywhere else; they may have been the descendants of the first modern humans ever to settle in northern Italy. Their culture was renowned for its expertise in religious and magical ritual—the classical Roman guide to divination was called the Etrusca Disciplina, “the Etruscan science.”
So it is no surprise that when an Etruscan, Tarquin the Elder, began campaigning to be the next King of Rome, it was partly at the prompting of his wife, a formidable seer named Tanaquil. He was selected; he expanded both the Senate and Roman territory. After a reign of nearly forty years, he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Servius Tullius.
Tullius was (or was said to be) the son of a slave, but Tanaquil had a vision of him with a crown of flames erupting from his head, and persuaded the king to wed their daughter to him. Tullius reigned for many years as Rome’s sixth king, but his extensive political reforms made him increasingly unpopular with the wealthy. In 534 BC (or CCXIX AUC), Servius Tullius was assassinated—and even for a murder, this was remarkably depraved, given the identities of the assassins. One was Tarquin the Younger, who as the son of the previous king was effectively Tullius’s adoptive brother, as well as his brother-in-law; the other was Tarquin’s bride, Tullia—so named because she was Servius Tullius’s own daughter. It is once again likely no surprise that this is the king known to history as “Tarquin the Arrogant.”
“The Seven Heads Are Seven Kings”
The reign of Rome’s last king was not all bad. He sponsored important public works, including the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Circus Maximus (a theater for chariot-racing), and, best of all from a practical point of view, the Cloaca Maxima: an ancient sewer system of such high quality that parts of it are still in use. But of course, we are here not to praise Tarquin, but to bury him.
Accounts vary, and all were written centuries after the events in any case; said events took place, incidentally, in or around the year 508 BC, just when Cleisthenes was drafting Athenian democracy. But all agree that the king’s son, Sextus Tarquin, entered the bedchamber of a married woman named Lucretia, daughter of Spurius Lucretius, chief justice of the city. He tried to persuade Lucretia to acquiesce, telling her she would be his queen; he tried threatening her, to which she reportedly reacted only with contempt. But in the end, he told her he would kill both her and a slave, and lie that he had caught them together, staining her good name beyond any hope of repair; rather than allow this disgrace to herself and her family, she yielded. Yet even at this point, she had a plan in mind.
The next day, dressed in black, Lucretia either went to her father and husband, or sent for them; historians vary. She told them everything. To understand what happened next, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with a culture to which one’s virtue and good name were everything. Cassius Dio relates her words thus:
“I, because I am a woman, will treat my case as becomes me; but if you are men, and care for your wives and children, avenge me, free yourselves, and show the tyrants what manner of men you are, and what manner of woman of yours they have outraged.” When she had spoken to this effect, she did not wait for any reply, but immediately drew a dagger and slew herself.8
Rome Discrowned
The grief and horror Lucretia’s suicide9 provoked translated easily into revolt. Her father and her widower, Lucretius and Collatinus, were among the four principal leaders; alongside them were a statesman named Valerius Poplicola, and a nephew of the king (whom everyone had till now dismissed as a half-wit) by the name of Marcus Junius Brutus. He took the dagger from Lucretia’s wound, brandishing it with a declaration of perpetual enmity not just toward the Tarquins, but toward kings as such. In drafting the new constitution, known simply as rēs pūblica or “public affairs,” an oath is administered: never to restore the monarchy, nor ever again to tolerate kings, and to do them to death who attempted such a thing. The oath of Brutus would prove fateful, indeed.
1For a few centuries, okay? What? Come at me, Gibbon.
2The nicer versions make it Mars. The nastier ones can wait for college.
3Alba Longa was destroyed in the 7th cent. BC; it may have been near Castel Gandolfo.
4It’s possible a faint memory is preserved in this legend. We don’t have grounds to believe in a historical Æneas; but there seems to be a link between the languages of Etruscan, spoken north of Rome in antiquity, and Lemnian, spoken in the Bronze Age on the isle of Lemnos, west of Troy. This may indicate there were trade routes between the Ægean and Italy back then; if so, refugees from a historical Trojan War may have followed those routes, fleeing the aftermath.
5This is often called the rape of the Sabine women. If the event is historical (which may be impossible to know), the ugly word is probably appropriate; however, we’ve rephrased it here because, when the old phrase was coined, that word meant merely “seizure” or “theft.”
6Roughly: “I believe it because it is stupid.”
7Today, the most familiar Romance languages are French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. However, there are many others (Catalan, Provençal, Sardinian, etc.), and they tend to fade into each other in adjacent regions.
8Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book II.
9Lucretia has traditionally been lauded for her keen sense of honor and family pride. More recently, some uncomfortable implications of the story have been highlighted, especially by feminist scholars. Without wading into that debate, suffice it to say, we do not recommend Lucretia’s decision to anybody.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the Journal. If you enjoyed this piece, check out some of our posts on Roman literature and authors: we have introductions to St. Augustine, Cicero, Epictetus, St. Gregory, Josephus, Ovid, and Terence. Or, if you’re feeling like something more modern, how about our posts on the Brothers Grimm, Sojourner Truth, Sigmund Freud, or Elie Wiesel?
Published on 19th August, 2024. Page image of Trajan’s Column, erected in 113 AD.