At the same time, this was seen as a fundamentally political moment, for in the story it leads directly to the expulsion of the kings and the start of the free Republic. As soon as Lucretia stabbed herself, Lucius Junius Brutus – who had accompanied her husband to the scene – took the dagger from her body and, while her family was too distressed to speak, vowed to rid Rome of kings for ever. This was, of course, partly a retrospective prophecy, for the Brutus who in 44 BCE led the coup against Julius Caesar for his kingly ambitions claimed descent from this Brutus. After ensuring the support of the army and the people, who were appalled by the rape and fed up with labouring on the drain, Lucius Junius Brutus forced Tarquin and his sons into exile.
The Tarquins did not give up without a fight. According to Livy’s implausibly action-packed account, Tarquinius Superbus made an abortive attempt to stage a counter-revolution in the city and, when that failed, joined forces with King Lars Porsenna of the Etruscan town of Clusium, who mounted a siege of Rome with the aim of restoring the monarchy – only to be defeated by the heroism of its newly liberated inhabitants. We read, for example, of the valiant Horatius Cocles, who single-handedly defended the bridge across the Tiber to block the advance of the Etruscan army (some said he lost his life in the process, others that he returned home to a hero’s welcome); and of the bravery of Cloelia, one of a group of young hostages taken by Porsenna, who daringly made her way back home by swimming across the river. Livy suggests that the Etruscans were eventually so impressed by the character of the Romans that they simply abandoned Tarquin. There were, however, less patriotic versions. Pliny the Elder was not the only ancient scholar to believe that Lars Porsenna became the king of Rome for a while; if so, he might have been another of those lost kings, and there might have been a very different end to the monarchy.
24. The three surviving columns, from a later rebuilding of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, still make their mark in the Roman Forum. The rest of the temple is largely destroyed but the sloping base of its steps, often used as a place for speakers to address the people, is still visible (bottom left). The little door is a reminder that the basements of temples were used for all sorts of different purposes. Excavations have shown that there was once a barber’s shop/dentist in the basement of this one.
Deserted by Porsenna, as the standard story runs, Tarquin looked elsewhere for support. He was finally defeated in the 490s BCE (exact dates differ) together with some allies he had made in the nearby Latin towns, at the Battle of Lake Regillus, not far from Rome. It was a triumphant, and certainly partly mythic, moment in Roman history, for the gods Castor and Pollux were supposed to have been seen fighting on the Roman side and later watering their horses in the Roman Forum; a temple to them was erected there in gratitude for their help. Though many times rebuilt, this temple is still one of the landmarks of the Forum, a lasting Roman monument to getting rid of kings.
The birth of liberty
The end of the monarchy was also the birth of liberty and of the free Roman Republic. For the rest of Roman history, ‘king’, or rex, was a term of loathing in Roman politics, despite the fact that so many of Rome’s defining institutions were supposed to have their origins in the regal period. There were any number of cases in the centuries that followed when the accusation that he was aiming at kingship brought a swift end to a man’s political career. His royal name even proved disastrous for Lucretia’s unfortunate widower, who, because he was a relation of the Tarquins, was shortly sent into exile. In foreign conflicts too, kings were the most desirable of enemies. Over the next few hundred years, there was always a particular frisson when a triumphal procession through the streets of the city paraded some enemy king in all his regal finery for the Roman populace to jeer and pelt. Needless to say, plenty of satire was also directed at those later Romans who happened to be landed with the surname (cognomen) ‘King’.
The fall of the Tarquins – sometime, as the Romans had it, at the end of the sixth century BCE – amounted to a new start for Rome: the city began again, now as ‘the Republic’ (or in Latin res publica, meaning literally ‘public thing’ or ‘public affairs’) and with a whole series of new foundation myths. One powerful tradition, for example, insisted that the great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, a building that came to be a major symbol of Roman power and was later replicated in many Roman cities abroad, was dedicated in the very first year of the new regime. True, it had been vowed and, so it was often said, largely built under the kings, by Etruscan craftsmen; but the name of the formal dedicator blazoned across its façade was that of one of the leaders of the new Republic. And whatever the exact chronology of its construction, which is, to be honest, irrecoverable, it came to be seen as a building that shared its birth with the Republic and was a symbol of Republican history itself. Indeed, for centuries there was a Roman custom of each year hammering a nail into the temple’s doorpost, not only marking the passing of Republican time but also physically linking that time to the temple’s structure.
Even apparently natural features of Rome’s cityscape were thought to have their origin in the Republic’s first year. Many Romans knew, as well as modern geologists do, that the island in the middle of the river Tiber where it flows through Rome was in geological terms a relatively recent formation. But how, and when, did it emerge? Even now there is no definitive answer to that; but one Roman idea dated its origin to the very beginning of Republican rule, when the grain that had been growing on the private land of the Tarquins was thrown into the river. Because the water level was low, this piled up on the riverbed and gradually, as it collected silt and other refuse, formed an island. It is as if the shape of the city was born only with the removal of the monarchy.
Also born was a new form of government. As Tarquinius Superbus fled, the story goes, Brutus and, before his imminent exile, Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, straight away became the first consuls of Rome. These were to be the most important, defining officials of the new Republic. Taking over many of the duties of the kings, they presided over the city’s politics at home and they led its soldiers in war; there was never any formal separation in Rome between such military and civilian roles. In that sense, despite being paraded as the antithesis of the kings, they represented the continuation of their power: one Greek theorist of Roman politics in the second century BCE saw the consuls as a ‘monarchical’ element in the Roman political system, and Livy insists that their insignia and badges of office were much the same as those of their kingly predecessors. But they embodied several key, and decidedly unmonarchical, principles of the new political regime. First, they were elected entirely by popular vote, not the half-and-half system of popular involvement that supposedly characterised the choice of king. Second, they held office for only a single year at a time, and one of their duties was to preside (as we saw Cicero doing in 63 BCE) over the election of their successors. Third, they held office together, as a pair. Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared. As we shall see, through the centuries that followed these tenets were increasingly reiterated, and became increasingly difficult to uphold.
The consuls also gave their names to the year in which they held office. It goes without saying that the Romans could not have used the modern Western system of dating that I have been adopting in this book – and for the sake of clarity, readers will be relieved, will continue to use. ‘The sixth century BCE’ would have meant nothing to them. Occasionally they calculated dates ‘from the foundation of the city’, when they had reached some kind of agreement about when that was. But usually they referred to years by the names of the consuls in office. What we call, for example, 63 BCE was for them ‘the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida’; and wine made ‘when Opimius was consul’ (121 BCE) was a particularly famous vintage. By Cicero’s day, Romans had worked out a more or less complete list of consuls going back to the beginning of the Republic, and it was soon put on public display in the Forum along with the list of triumphing generals. It was largely this roster that enabled them to pinpoint the precise date of the end of the monarchy, as by definition it had to correlate with the date of the first consul.