Roman oral tradition held that before it was a Republic, Rome was a kingdom, like many contemporaneous polities. However, my understanding is that there are no surviving sources from this time period, and very little is known for certain about the Kingdom in question.
Are we sure it even existed at all? Or could the entire idea of a Roman monarchy be mythological?
The Romans carefully airbrushed history to conform to their official version, and seem to have obliterated the culture of other nations in the Italian peninsular such as the Etruscans, as well as adopting the Greek myths with their own layer of Disneyfication imposed on them. Given that we only possess a fraction of 1% of all the literature that existed in imperial Rome, it’s hard to say what sources still existed in Republican times. But Livy didn’t make it all up out of whole cloth.
We’re talking about a village of a few hundred people, which existed for a few hundred years. Almost certainly, there will have been periods where a single clan had disproportionate power in the village. Call that a ‘kingdom’ if you please. Much more remarkable, is that once the village got a little larger, it established a stable polity which shared power between all the clans, and managed to successfully extend the system as the population grew a thousand fold.
Course, even in the earliest days as a very small village, the population was relatively spread out, around the port and over the three hills. So maybe it was very difficult for a single family to maintain meaningful supremacy. And to what end, in a small community of subsistence farmers with a few impoverished artisans and traders? No doubt, much struggling and squabbling for status in the village. Which is not inconsistent with the stories collected by Livy?
The republican ideal, i.e. opposition to a monarchy, was entrenched in the constitution and political culture of the Roman Republic - even the emperors, at least in the early Empire, took great care to maintain the illusion that the republican constitution remained intact. It’s hard to believe that such a vilification of a monarchical government would have developed if Rome had never had one, and overthrown it with a republic.
It could have arisen as vilification of their neighbours and their form of government.
Which is probably part of the story, because Rome’s neighbours were mostly Etruscan, and all had monarchical governments. But that makes it all the more likely that Rome itself also had a monarchy. The Romans themselves were well aware that they adopted a lot of Etruscan traditions and customs (as wel ans words) and integrated them into Roman civilisation.
The institutions of the Roman republic were complex, and there are many instances where they mimic or replace the former monarchy. The Senate began, according to tradition, as a meeting of the heads of the patrician families acting as advisers to the king (a clear parallel to how the British parliament evolved). The highest-ranking priest in the official state religion was the Rex sacrorum, who performed the ritual acts that the king would have performed under the monarchy, but who held absolutely no political power otherwise. I think the most plausible explanation for all of this is that there was, in fact, a monarchy that was then replaced by a republican government.
Not so much a villification, as by observation. In the middle republic, the Romans felt themselves a unique community, with their very own res pubblica, which would have seemed manifestly superior to the surrounding communities led by a single more or less powerful autocrat. Even among the Greek villages in the south, none were organised quite like the Romans. But looking back, they would have had little knowledge or understanding of the foundation of the res pubblica.
The main structures, the council formed of the heads of the important famillies, magistrates selected exclusively from those same famillies, in particular two joint chief magistrates, with a limited but continuing and meaningful role for the popular assembly, were established very early, literally in prehistory, in a community of peasants numbering in the order of a thousand souls or so. Certainly less than ten thousand?
I agree with Schnitte, something must have happened in the village which turned the Romans against traditional strictly hierarchical forms of rule, which amazingly stayed with them for the next thousand years, as the village grew to rule the whole civilised world. Livy’s tales of the Tarquins are probably more or less accurate, even if the real rulers had different names, the forms of ‘royal’ powers were different from reported, and the key events were different from reported. The tales have the ring of truthiness, you know.
The res pubblica didn’t have a written constitution, it was a loose and informal thing. Indeed, it would be centuries later, during the Social Wars, that the plebs successfully demanded that a handful of the main laws should be wriiten down
And let’s not let this much later clear social distinction between patricians and plebs confuse us. Even in the later period, it was patricians and rich plebs against the masses of poor plebs. At the establishment of the res pubblica, everyone involved was a poor subsistence farmer. The patricians could easily have been in a majority (being by definition the largest famillies), and the initial plebs would have had broadly the same social status as the patricians, as the knights would continue to have later.
Let’s try to avoid anachronisms of the ‘redcoats storming the airports’ type.
Sandwich
Ninjaed by Schnitte. The Latin tribes to the south east were each also ruled by a rex, which supports their theory.
Picturing the early senate as a royal council like in medieval England feels like an anachronism.
Another argument in favour of the historicity of the Roman monarchy is classical Roman political theory, as laid out in Cicero’s De re publica. For Cicero, there are three basic types of government: Monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Monarchy is the oldest and original one. The Roman republic, to Cicero, is a combination of elements from all three types: The consuls are a monarchical element (even though there are two of them), the senate represents the oligarchy, and the popular assemblies represented democracy. To the Romans of classical times (first century BC and AD), it was evident that the republican constitution arose from an overthrow of an earlier monarchy. One could, theoretically, postulate that this was all made up and Rome started as a republic from the very beginning, but it doesn’t sound plausible to me, and I don’t see a reason why Roman historians - as unreliable as they often are - should have falsified this particular aspect of the history of their city.
I can’t tell if there are any surviving sources. Interesting. It might be that the answer can only be found inside a book or museum- not everything is on the internet. Or that they just don’t exist and the sources are all much later.
Propaganda. I’m guessing, but If the history of the kingdoms/overthrow is being written right around the time of the Republic being undone, it’s certainly a good story to inspire the overthrow of Caesar/later dictators and bring the republic back.
And what does one mean by “from the very beginning”? The people of Rome were not place there, fully formed, by the gods. They had ancestors, too, and those ancestors had to have had some form of governance, even if only tribal. And if, as often happens in a tribe, the chief of the tribe was the son of the previous chief, for a few generations in a row, well, that’s at least monarchy-adjacent.
Just my personal theory here. I feel the Roman kings were a foreign dynasty that invaded and took over Rome; something like the Normans who would later invade and take over England.
Later Romans didn’t want to admit they had been conquered so they didn’t openly say they had been ruled by foreigners. They just said how much they hated being ruled by kings, which they understood was a codeword.
Except that the more plausibly historical kings in Livy are explicitly Etruscan, not Latin. Anyway, ‘foreign dynasty’ sounds pretty grand for the richest peasant in a village of subsistence farmers.
The legendary first king was also explicitly an immigrant.
It’s not as if the myths actually reflect well on the earliest Romans. The later Romans claimed that much of their populace was descended from a group of unkempt savage hill women, who had been kidnapped en masse to rectify a lack of women for the brutal itinerant workmen who had flooded into the growing town.
Not your usual tales of civic pride…
Sure, Romulus was an immigrant but his ancestry was Trojan and he was the son of a god, so that was okay.
But Tarquin? That’s not a Roman name. According to the official history, Tarquin moved to Rome and then convinced the Senate to elect him King. No real explanation on why the Senate chose a non-Roman instead of one of the sons of the previous king.
So you have to wonder. Maybe when Tarquin moved to Rome, he was accompanied by a few thousand of his friends and they were all pointing spears at the Senators when Tarquin was “chosen”.
King Tarquin then led the Romans in conquering several neighboring communities. So maybe Rome was actually the first community that Tarquin conquered.
Roman tradition has it that the last two kings. Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, were indeed foreigners, Etruscans to be precise. Priscus was supposedly a wealthy immigrant who managed to convince the popular assembly to elect him king, and Superbus (the most hated king of all, and the one whose overthrow ended the monarchy and established the republic) was his son. So Roman historians did not shy away from admitting that their city was, for a while, ruled by foreigners. OTOH, the five kings before Priscus were, according to tradition, indigenous Latins.
Wasn’t Servius also a foreigner? His mother was a foreign slave living in Tarquin’s household. The official story is Servius’ father was a god. But some of us might consider the alternative theory that his father was Tarquin, who was probably happy to accept the divine father theory is it got his wife to stop asking questions about who got her maid pregnant.
You’re right, I mixed up the Tarquins. There’s three of them, Priscus, Servius and Superbus. That makes, if I count right, three Etruscan kings and four Latin ones preceding them.
Of course, the fact that this gives you seven as the total number of Roman kings should make any observer wary - seven is a number so heavily laden with symbolism that it looks made up. So probably the exact list of kings and the legends attributed to them were to a large extent invented by Roman historians. But the basic principle that there was some form of monarchical rule before the institutions of the republic were established is still plausibly historical.
Another oddity with the kings info is their unusually long reigns, 35 years on average. Given the small size of the kingdom, the hostile people surrounding them, the poor health care of the time, etc. that is just off.
I would like to believe that the consul lists would confirm the foundation of the republic (and therefore imply the existence of kings prior to that). But the early part of the lists are a contradictory mish mash.
There are just so many tantalizing bits of the “Maybe this can be argued to be true and therefore some related stuff is likely.” variety.
Take the Brutus clan. Marcus Junius Brutus was one of the most noted of Julius Caesar’s assassins. He was descended from Lucius Junius Brutus who was a key player in the overthrow of the last Roman king. This was well known to the ancient Romans who saw the connection between two members of the same family responsible for the foundation of the republic and, somewhat inadvertently, the end of the republic. It’s too implausible to believe that they invented the older one to tie in to the younger one. But you really can’t go anywhere with this.
With regard to the Brutus lineage it’s the age old problem. Clearly some of them were real, their exploits at least true in part. But how far back does the “a bit truthful” part go before you are dancing on legends?
Apparently some of this is due to deliberate fraud. In Rome, a lot of respect was given to having an old established lineage. So if a new family was rising in power, they would bribe officials to add fictitious ancestors into old records such as consul lists or carve their names onto to old monuments.