This is a seductive temptation that has influenced a lot of modern work on early Rome by both historians and archaeologists. We have already spotted the attempt to make the story of the Septimontium reflect the dual nature of the city – Roman and Sabine – which the myth of Romulus emphasises. Recently the discovery of some early earthwork defences at the foot of the Palatine Hill has prompted all kinds of wild speculation that these were the very defences over which Remus jumped, to meet his death, on the city’s foundation day. This is archaeological fantasy. There is no doubt that some early earthworks have been discovered, and that in itself is important – though how they relate to the early hut settlement on the top of the Palatine is puzzling. They are nothing whatsoever to do with the non-existent characters Romulus and Remus. And the attempts to ‘massage’ the dating of the structure, and its associated finds, to end up on 21 April 753 BCE (I am exaggerating only slightly) are special pleading.
There is just one location in the whole of the city Rome where it is possible to link the early material remains directly with the literary tradition. In so doing, we find not agreement and harmony between the two but a wide and intriguing gap. That location is at one end of the Forum, close to the slopes of the Capitoline Hill, a few minutes’ walk from where Cicero attacked Catiline in the Temple of Jupiter Stator, and just next to the main platform (or rostra) from which speakers addressed the people. There, before the end of the first century BCE, in the pavement of the Forum was set a series of slabs in distinctively black stone forming a rectangle of roughly 4 by 3.5 metres, marked out with a low stone border.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archaeologist Giacomo Boni – a celebrity at the time to rival Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, and with none of the dubious reputation for fraud – excavated below the black stone, where he found the remains of some much earlier structures. These included an altar, part of a large free-standing column and a short stone pillar that is covered in mostly unintelligible early Latin, probably one of the earliest texts in the language that we have. The place had been intentionally buried, and the fill included all kinds of extraordinary as well as everyday finds, from miniature cups, beads and knuckle-bones to some fine pieces of sixth-century BCE Athenian decorated pottery. The most obvious explanation, to judge from the finds, which seem to include religious dedications, is that this was an early shrine, possibly of the god Vulcan. It was covered over when the Forum was repaved sometime in the first century BCE – but to preserve the memory of the sacred site underneath, the distinctive black stone was laid above.
Later Roman writers were well aware of the black stone and had various ideas about what it signified. ‘The black stone,’ one wrote, ‘marks an unlucky spot.’ And they knew that there was something underneath it, going back centuries: not a religious shrine, as archaeologists are now fairly confident it was, but a monument connected with Romulus or his family. Several assumed it was the tomb of Romulus; others, perhaps worried that, if Romulus had become a god, he should not really have a tomb, thought it was the tomb of Faustulus, the foster father of Romulus and Remus; still others made it the tomb of one of Romulus’ comrades, Hostilius, the grandfather of one of the later kings of Rome.
They also knew, whether because they had seen it before it was covered or from hearsay, that there was an inscription down there. Dionysius records two versions of what it was: the epitaph of Hostilius, ‘documenting his bravery’, or an inscription ‘recording his deeds’ put up after one of Romulus’ victories. But it was certainly neither of those things. Nor was it, as Dionysius claims, ‘written in Greek letters’: it is bona fide early Latin. But it makes a marvellous example of both how much and how little Roman historians knew about the buried past – and how they so liked to imagine the traces of Romulus still present on, or just below, the surface of their city.
13. A diagram of the remains of the early shrine excavated by Giacomo Boni underneath the black stone in the Forum. On the left is an altar (a squared U-shape structure found elsewhere in Italy at this period). On the right stands what is left of the column, and just visible behind it is the inscribed pillar.
What this text actually says – so far as we can make any sense of it – takes us into the next phase of Roman history and the series of almost equally mythical kings who were supposed to have followed Romulus.
CHAPTER THREE
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THE KINGS OF ROME
Written on the stone
THE INSCRIPTION DISCOVERED in 1899 under the black stone in the Forum includes the word ‘king’, or in Latin rex: RECEI, as it appears in the early form of the language used there. That single word accounts for the inscription’s fame and has changed the way the history of early Rome has been understood ever since.
The text is in many respects extremely frustrating. It is incomplete, the top third of the pillar not surviving. It is close to incomprehensible. The Latin is difficult enough anyway, but the missing section makes it almost impossible to grasp the meaning fully. Even though we can be certain that it does not mark the tomb of Romulus – or of anyone else – most interpretations amount to little more than brave attempts to string together into some vague sense the few individual words that are recognisable on the stone. One notable modern theory is that it was a warning not to let yoked animals drop excrement near the shrine – which would, apparently, have been a bad omen. It is also very hard to know how old it is. The only way to date the text is by comparing its language and script to the handful of other surviving examples of early Latin, for the most part equally uncertainly dated. Suggestions have ranged over 300 years, from around 700 to around 400 BCE. The current, fragile consensus is that it was inscribed in the second half of the sixth century BCE.
14. The early inscription on the pillar excavated under the black stone could easily be mistaken for Greek, and indeed was by some later ancient observers themselves. It is in fact written in archaic Latin, in letters very similar to Greek, and is arranged in so-called boustrophedon (‘ox-ploughing’) style: that is, the lines are read alternately left to right, and right to left.
15. In this painting, ‘The Oath of the Horatii’ (1784), Jacques-Louis David depicts a legend from the reign of Tullus Hostilius, when Rome was at war with neighbouring Alba Longa. Two pairs of triplets, one on each side, agreed to fight it out themselves on behalf of their communities. Here David imagines the Roman Horatii taking their swords from their father. One of them returned home victorious, only to kill his sister (seen here weeping) who had been engaged to one of the enemy. It was a story, for the Romans no less than the eighteenth-century French, that both celebrated patriotism and questioned its cost.
Despite all those unknowns, archaeologists instantly realised that the recognisable RECEI – in the dative case, meaning ‘to or for the king’ – supports what Roman writers themselves had claimed: that for two and a half centuries, up to the end of the sixth century BCE, the city of Rome had been under the control of ‘kings’. Livy, among others, tells of a standard sequence of six monarchs following Romulus, each with a distinctive package of achievements attached to his name.
Their colourful stories – with a supporting cast of heroic Roman warriors, murderous rivals and scheming queens – take up the second half of the first book of Livy’s History. After Romulus came Numa Pompilius, a peaceable character who invented most of the religious institutions of Rome; then Tullus Hostilius, a renowned warmonger; after him, Ancus Marcius, the founder of Rome’s seaport at Ostia, ‘Rivermouth’; then Tarquinius Priscus, or ‘Tarquin the Elder’, who developed the Roman Forum and the Circus Games; then Servius Tullius, a political reformer and the inventor of the Roman census; and finally, Tarquinius Superbus, ‘Tarquin the Proud’ or, perhaps better, ‘the Arrogant’. It was the tyrannical behaviour of this second Tarquin, and of his family, that led to revolution, to the end of monarchy and to the establishing of ‘liberty’ and the ‘free Republic of Rome’. He was a paranoid autocrat who ruthlessly eliminated his rivals, and a cruel exploiter of the Roman people, forcing them to labour on his fanatical building projects. But the awful breaking point came, as such breaking points did more than once in Roman history, with a rape – this time the rape of the virtuous Lucretia by one of king’s sons.