If we go along with the Etruscan version, he had once been the faithful follower of Caelius Vivenna and a comrade in his adventures; and later, when he had been driven out by a change of fortune, he left Etruria with all that remained of Caelius’ militia and seized the Caelian Hill [in Rome], which then became called after his leader Caelius. When he had changed his own name (for his Etruscan name was Mastarna), he was given the name I have already mentioned [Servius Tullius] and took over the kingdom, to the very great advantage of the state.
The details that Claudius gives raise all kinds of puzzles. One is the name Mastarna. Is that a proper name or the Etruscan equivalent of the Latin magister, which in this context would mean something like ‘boss’? And who is the Caelius Vivenna who is supposed to have given his name to the Caelian Hill in Rome? He and his brother Aulus Vivenna – usually said to have come from the Etruscan town of Vulci – crop up several times in ancient accounts of early Roman history, though in frustratingly incompatible, and typically mythic, ways: sometimes Caelius is a friend of Romulus’; sometimes this pair of Vivennas are dated to the time of the Tarquins; one late Roman writer imagined Aulus becoming the king of Rome himself (so was he then one of the city’s lost rulers?); in Claudius’ version it looks as if Caelius never made it to Rome at all. But what is clear here is the overall character of what Claudius is describing: rival militias, more or less itinerant warlords, personal loyalty, shifting identities – as different as you could imagine from the formal constitutional arrangements that most Roman writers attributed to Servius Tullius.
We get a similar impression from the set of paintings which once decorated a large tomb outside Vulci. Now known as the François Tomb (from the name of its nineteenth-century excavator – see plate 7), it must have been the crypt of a rich local family, to judge from its size, with ten subsidiary burial chambers opening off an entrance passage and central hall, and from the substantial quantity of gold found there. But for those interested in early Rome, it is the cycle of paintings in the central hallway – which probably date to the mid fourth century BCE – that make it so special. Prominently featured are scenes drawn from the wars of Greek mythology, largely the Trojan War. Balancing these are scenes of much more local fighting. Each character is carefully named, half of them also identified with the name of their home town, half of them not, presumably indicating that they are men from Vulci, so not needing further identification. They include the brothers Vivenna, Mastarna (the only other certain reference to him that survives) and a Gnaeus Tarquinius ‘from Rome’.
No one has managed to work out exactly what is going on in these scenes, but it is not difficult to get the gist. There are five pairs of fighters involved. In four of these pairs, a local, Aulus Vivenna among them, is running his sword through an ‘outsider’; the victims include Lares Papathnas from Volsinii and that Tarquinius from Rome. This man must surely be something to do with the kingly Tarquins, even though in the Roman literary tradition the first name of both those kings is Lucius, not Gnaeus. In the final pair, Mastarna is using his sword to cut through the ropes binding the wrists of Caelius Vivenna. One odd feature (and presumably a clue to the story) is that all but one of the victorious local men are naked, their enemies clothed. The most popular explanation is that the paintings depict some famous local escapade in which the Vivenna brothers and their friends were taken prisoner, stripped and bound by their enemies but managed to escape and turned their swords on their captors.
This is by far the earliest direct evidence to survive for any of the characters in the story of early Rome and their exploits. It also comes from outside, or at least the margins of, the mainstream Roman literary tradition. That does not, of course, necessarily make it true; the mythic tradition of Vulci may have been just as mythic as that of Rome. Nevertheless, what we see here gives a much more plausible vision of the warrior world of these early urban communities than do the aggrandising versions offered by Roman writers, and by some of their modern followers. It was a world of chiefdoms and warrior bands, not of organised armies and foreign policy.
Archaeology, tyranny – and rape
By the sixth century BCE, Rome was certainly a small urban community. It is often tricky to decide when a mere agglomeration of huts and houses becomes a town with a sense of itself as a community, with a shared identity and aspirations. But the idea of a structured Roman calendar, and with it a shared religious culture and rhythm of life, most likely goes back into the regal period. Archaeological traces too leave little doubt that by the sixth century BCE Rome had public buildings, temples and a ‘town centre’, which are clear indications of urban living, even if, in our terms, on a small scale. The chronology of these traces remains controversiaclass="underline" there is not a single piece of evidence on whose dating all archaeologists agree; and new discoveries are always altering the picture (though often not quite so significantly as their discoverers hope!). Nonetheless, it would now take a very determined, and blinkered, sceptic to deny the urban character of Rome at this period.
The remains in question are found in several places under the later city, but the clearest impression of this early town is found in the area of the Forum. By the sixth century BCE, its level had been artificially raised and some drainage work had been carried out, in both cases to protect the area from flooding; and at least one or two successive gravel surfaces had been laid, so that it could function as a shared central space for the community. The inscription with which we started this chapter was found at one end of the Forum, just beneath the slopes of the Capitoline Hill, in what had been an early shrine, with an outdoor altar. Whatever exactly the text means, it was certainly a public notice of some sort, which itself implies the framework of a structured community and recognised authority. At the other end of the Forum, excavations of the earliest levels under a cluster of later religious buildings, including those associated with the Vestal Virgins, have suggested that they go back to the sixth century BCE or even earlier. Not far from there, a few scant remains have been discovered of a series of substantial private houses of roughly the same date. The remains are very scant, but they do give a faint glimpse of some well-heeled big men living in style next to the civic centre.
It is hard to know how closely to match these archaeological remains to the literary tradition about the last kings of Rome. It is almost certainly going too far to suggest, as the excavators would like us to believe, that one of those sixth-century BCE houses near the Forum was actually the ‘House of the Tarquins’, supposing such a thing ever existed. But nor is it likely to be a complete coincidence that the Roman narratives of the last part of the regal period stress the building activities that the kings sponsored. Both of the Tarquins were supposed to have inaugurated the great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (later Roman writers found these two kings easy to confuse); and both were said to have built the Circus Maximus and to have commissioned shops and porticoes round the Forum. Servius Tullius, as well as having several temple foundations to his name, was often credited with surrounding the city with a defensive wall. This would be another key sign of a sense of shared community, although the surviving fortification now known as the Servian Wall is for the most part no earlier than the fourth century BCE.