Cautious scholars in the nineteenth century had been extremely doubtful about the historical value of these stories of the Roman kings. They argued that there was hardly any more firm evidence for these rulers than for the legendary Romulus: the whole tradition was based on garbled hearsay and misunderstood myth – not to mention the propagandist fantasies of many of the later leading families at Rome, who regularly manipulated or invented the ‘history’ of the early city to give their ancestors a glorious role in it. It was only a short step from this, and a step that many notable historians then took, to claim that the Roman ‘regal period’, as it is now often called, never existed; that those famous kings were figments of the Roman imagination; that the true history of early Rome was entirely lost to us.
RECEI in Boni’s inscription successfully challenged that radical scepticism. No amount of special pleading (that, for example, rex here refers to a later religious official of the same name but not a king in the technical sense) could get round what now seemed undeniable: that Rome had once been some kind of monarchy. The discovery changed the nature of the debate on early Roman history, though, of course, it prompted other questions.
Even now, this inscription puts the idea of the Roman kings centre stage and raises the question of what kingship might mean in the context of a small, archaic community of a few thousand inhabitants living in wattle-and-daub huts on a group of hilltops near the river Tiber. The word ‘king’ almost certainly implies something much more formal, and grander, than we should be envisaging. But there were many different ways in which later Romans saw, or imagined, their early rulers. On the one hand, after the dramatic fall of Tarquinius Superbus, kings were an object of hatred for the rest of Roman history. To be accused of wanting to be rex was a political death sentence for any Roman; and no Roman emperor would ever countenance being called a king, even though some cynical observers wondered what the difference was. On the other hand, Roman writers traced many of their most significant political and religious institutions back to the regal period: if, in the legendary narrative, the city was conceived under Romulus, its gestation came under the kings, from Numa to the second Tarquin. Abominated as they were, kings were credited with creating Rome.
This regal period is caught in that intriguing territory that straddles the boundary dividing myth from history. These successor kings certainly appear more real than the founder. If nothing else, they have apparently real names, such as ‘Numa Pompilius’, unlike the fictional ‘Romulus’, or ‘Mr Rome’. Yet throughout their stories we meet all kinds of flagrantly mythical elements. Some said that Servius Tullius, just like Romulus, was conceived from a phallus that emerged from a fire. It is almost always hard to identify what facts might be lurking in the fictional narrative that has come down to us. Merely to strip away the obviously fantastical elements and to assume that what is left represents an historical core is exactly the kind of simplistic approach that the nineteenth-century sceptics rightly resisted. Myth and history prove much more inextricably bound together than that. A full spectrum of possibilities and unknowables exists between the two extremes. Did someone called Ancus Marcius once exist but not do any of the things attributed to him? Were those things the work of some person or persons other than Ancus but of unknown name? And so on.
It is clear, however, that towards the end of the regal period – let’s say the sixth century BCE, though precision dating remains as hard as ever – we begin to reach slightly firmer ground. As Boni’s dramatic discoveries hint, it then becomes plausible, for the first time, to make some links between the stories the Romans told about their past, the archaeological traces in the ground and a historical narrative, in our sense of the term. What is more, we even get a glimpse of some of this history from the point of view of Rome’s neighbours and enemies. Exploits of Servius Tullius almost certainly feature in a series of paintings discovered in a tomb in the Etruscan city of Vulci, 70 miles to the north of Rome. Dating from around the mid fourth century BCE, they are by several hundred years the earliest direct evidence for him that we have anywhere. Understanding the history of Rome at this period partly depends on exploiting for all they are worth the few such precious pieces of evidence we have; and we shall shortly be taking a closer look at this one.
Kings or chiefs?
The nineteenth-century sceptics had good reason to doubt the surviving Roman accounts of the regal period. There are all kinds of things about the kings that do not quite add up, most obviously their chronology. Even if we imagine unusually healthy lifespans, it is impossible to make seven kings, Romulus included, spread over the 250 years – from the mid eighth century to the late sixth century BCE – that Roman writers assigned to them. That would mean each of them reigned, on average, for more than three decades. No modern monarchy has ever equalled that consistent level of longevity.
The most economical solution to this problem is either to assume that the regal period was really much shorter than the Romans calculated or to propose that there were more kings than have come down in the record (there are, as we shall discover, a couple of potential candidates for these ‘lost monarchs’). But it is also possible that the written tradition we have for this period is more fundamentally misleading than these simple solutions suggest and that, whatever the chronology, the character of Roman kingship was in reality radically different from what Livy and other Roman writers imply.
The biggest problem is that Rome’s ancient historians tended systematically to modernise the regal period and to aggrandise its achievements, as if seeing them through some patriotic magnifying glass. According to their accounts, the early Romans already relied on such institutions as the senate and assemblies of the people, which were part of the political institutional furniture of the city half a millennium later; and in arranging the kingly succession (which was not hereditary) they followed complex legal procedures that involved the appointment of an interrex (a ‘between king’), a popular vote for the new monarch and senatorial ratification. What is more, the power struggles and rivalries they imagine at those moments of transition would not have looked out of place in the court of the Roman emperor in the first century CE. In fact, Livy’s account of the wheeling and dealing after the murder of Tarquinius Priscus – in which his scheming wife Tanaquil carefully concealed the death until she had firmly secured the throne for her favourite, Servius Tullius – is similar to the wheeling and dealing by Livia after the death of the emperor Augustus in 14 CE (p. 381). It is so similar that some critics have suspected that Livy, who was writing from the 20s BCE, could not possibly have completed this section of his History until after 14 CE and must have based his description on the events of that year.