The Republic, in other words, was not just a political system. It was a complex set of interrelationships between politics, time, geography and the Roman cityscape. Dates were directly correlated with the elected consuls; years were marked by the nails hammered into the temple whose dedication was traced back to the first year of the new regime; even the island in the Tiber was a product, quite literally, of the expulsion of the kings. Underpinning the whole thing was one single, overriding principle: namely, freedom, or libertas.
Fifth-century BCE Athens bequeathed the idea of democracy to the modern world, after the Athenian ‘tyrants’ were deposed and democratic institutions established at the end of the sixth century BCE – a chronological match with the expulsion of the Roman kings that was not lost on ancient observers, who were keen to present the history of the two places as if they ran in parallel. Republican Rome bequeathed the equally important idea of liberty. The first word of the second book of Livy’s History, which begins the story of Rome after the monarchy, is ‘free’; and the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ are together repeated eight times in the first few lines alone. The idea that the Republic was founded on libertas rings loudly throughout Roman literature, and it has echoed through radical movements in later centuries, in Europe and America. It is no coincidence that the slogan of the French Revolution – Liberté, égalité, fraternité – puts ‘liberty’ in pride of place; nor that George Washington spoke of restoring ‘the sacred fire of liberty’ to the West; nor that the drafters of the United States Constitution defended it under the pseudonym of ‘Publius’, taken from the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, another of the earliest consuls of the Republic. But how was Roman liberty to be defined?
That was a controversial question in Roman political culture for the next 800 years, through the Republic and into the one-man rule of the Roman Empire, when political debate often turned on how far libertas could ever be compatible with autocracy. Whose liberty was at stake? How was it most effectively defended? How could conflicting versions of the freedom of the Roman citizen be resolved? All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold ‘democracy’. But there were repeated and intense conflicts over what that meant. We have already seen that, when Cicero was sent into exile, his house was demolished and a shrine of Libertas erected on its site. Not everyone would have approved. Cicero himself tells how during the performance of a play on the theme of Brutus, the first consul of the Republic, the crowd burst into applause at a line spoken by one of the characters: ‘Tullius, who underpinned the citizens’ liberty’. The play was actually referring to Servius Tullius and suggesting that liberty might have had a prehistory at Rome before the Republic, under a ‘good king’, but Marcus Tullius Cicero, to give him his full name, was convinced – maybe rightly – that the applause was for him.
Conflicts of this kind form one important theme in the chapters that follow. But before we explore the history of Rome in the first centuries of the Republic – the warfare at home, the victories for ‘liberty’ and the military victories over Rome’s neighbours in Italy – we must look a little harder at the story of the birth of the Republic and the invention of the consulship. Predictably perhaps, it was not quite as smooth a process as the standard story, which I have given so far, makes it appear.
CHAPTER FOUR
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ROME’S GREAT LEAP FORWARD
Two centuries of change: from the Tarquins to Scipio Long-Beard
HOW DID THE Republic really begin? Ancient Roman historians were experts at turning historical chaos into a tidy narrative and always keen to imagine that their familiar institutions went back much further than they really did. For them the transition from monarchy to Republic was as smooth as any revolution could be: the Tarquins fled; the new form of government emerged fully formed; the consulship was instantly established, providing the new order with its chronology from year one. In reality, the whole process must have been more gradual than that story suggests, and messier. The ‘Republic’ was born slowly, over a period of decades, if not centuries. It was reinvented many times over.
Even the consuls did not go back to the beginning of the new regime. Livy hints that the highest official in the state, and the one whose job it was to bang the nail into the Temple of Jupiter each year, was originally called the chief praetor, although the word ‘praetor’ was later used for a junior official below the consuls. There are other early titles recorded for those at the top of the political hierarchy, which only complicate the picture. These include ‘dictator’, usually described as a temporary position to cope with a military emergency, and without the decidedly negative modern connotations of the word; and ‘military tribunes with consular power’, a mouthful aptly translated by one modern historian as ‘colonels’.
There is still a big question mark over when exactly the defining office of the Republic was invented, or when and why some other office was renamed ‘consul’, or even when the fundamental Republican principle that power should always be shared was first defined. ‘Chief praetor’ smacks of hierarchy, not equality. But whatever the key date or dates, the list of consuls on which the chronology of the Republic was based – going back in an unbroken series to Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus in 509 BCE – was in its earliest parts the product of a good deal of adjustment, imaginative inference, clever guesswork and most likely outright invention. Livy conceded, looking back from the end of the first century BCE, that it was next to impossible to sort out with confidence the chronology of officeholders in this early period. It was, he wrote, simply too long ago.
There is also a question mark over how violent the fall of the monarchy was. The Romans envisaged a fairly bloodless regime change. Lucretia was the most prominent, tragic casualty, but, though warfare was to follow, Tarquin was allowed to escape unscathed. The archaeological evidence suggests that the process of change within the city was not quite so peaceful. At least, layers of burnt debris have been excavated in the Forum and elsewhere that are plausibly dated to around 500 BCE. They could be no more than the traces of an unfortunate series of accidental fires. They are enough to hint, however, that the overthrow of Tarquin might have been a bloody, rather than bloodless, coup, and that most of the internal violence was patriotically written out of the standard narrative.
The earliest known use of the word ‘consul’, in fact, dates from two hundred years later. It turns up in the first surviving example of those thousands upon thousands of loquacious Roman epitaphs carefully carved on tombs all over the empire, both extravagant and humble, which tell us so much about the lives of the deceased: the offices they held, the jobs they did, their aims, aspirations and anxieties. This one commemorates a man called Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (the last name means ‘bearded’, ‘long-beard’ or perhaps ‘beardy’) and was displayed on the front of his oversized sarcophagus, which once lay in the family tomb of the Scipios just outside Rome, as burials were not usually allowed within the city itself. Barbatus was consul in 298 BCE, died around 280 BCE and almost certainly founded this ostentatious mausoleum, an unashamed promotion of the power and prestige of his family, one of the most prominent in the Republic. His seems to have been the first of more than thirty burials in it, and his coffin-cum-memorial was placed in the most prominent position, opposite the door.