Later Roman writers presented a clear and dramatic story of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. On the one hand, they told of a series of violent social conflicts within Rome itself: between a hereditary group of ‘patrician’ families, who monopolised all political and religious power in the city, and the mass of the citizens, or ‘plebeians’, who were completely excluded. Gradually – in a vivid tale that involves strikes, mutinies and yet another (attempted) rape – the plebeians won the right or, as they would have put it, the freedom to share power on more or less equal terms with the patricians. On the other hand, they stressed a series of major victories in battle that brought most of the Italian peninsula under Roman control. These started in 396 BCE, when Rome’s great local rival, the Etruscan town of Veii, fell after decades of warfare, and ended roughly a hundred years later, when victory against the Samnites made Rome by far the biggest power base in Italy, and caught the attention of Duris on Samos. Not that this was a story of unchallenged expansion. Soon after the defeat of Veii, in 390 BCE a posse of marauding ‘Gauls’ sacked Rome. Exactly who these people were is now impossible to know; Roman writers were not good at distinguishing between those whom it was convenient to lump together as ‘barbarian tribes’ from the north, nor much interested in analysing their motives. But according to Livy, the effects were so devastating that the city had to be refounded (yet again), under the leadership of Marcus Furius Camillus – war leader, dictator, ‘colonel’, sometime exile and another ‘second Romulus’.
This narrative is based on firmer foundations than anything before. Admittedly, even in 300 BCE the earliest Roman literature was still decades away, and the later accounts looking back to this period contain plenty of myth, embellishment and fantasy. Camillus is probably not much less fictional than the first Romulus, and we have already seen how the words of Catiline were used to ventriloquise the speeches of an early Republican revolutionary, none of whose words could possibly have survived. Yet the end of this period stands on the brink of history and history writing as we know it, far beyond a simple four-line epitaph. That is to say, when the well-connected senator Fabius Pictor, who was born around 270 BCE, sat down to compose the first extended written account of Rome’s past, he might well have remembered talking in his youth to people who had been eyewitnesses to events at the end of the fourth century BCE or who had talked to men of Barbatus’ generation who were. Pictor’s History does not survive beyond a few quotations in later writers, but it was famed in the ancient world. His name and a brief synopsis of his work have even been found painted on the walls of one of the few ancient libraries ever unearthed, in Taormina in Sicily, a combination of advertisement and library catalogue. Two thousand years later, we can read Livy, who had read Pictor, who had talked to people who remembered the world as it was around 300 BCE – a fragile chain of connection deep into antiquity.
Increasingly too, fragments of contemporary evidence survive, to set against the later Roman historical account or point to an alternative narrative. The career summary in Barbatus’ epitaph is one of these. When Livy covers those years in his History, he writes of the Romans entering an alliance with, rather than subduing, Lucania, and he describes Barbatus fighting somewhere quite different, in northern Italy, and not very successfully at that. True, Barbatus’ epitaph is likely to have magnified his achievements, and ‘subdued’ may have been how the Roman elite preferred to present an ‘alliance’; but the inscription probably does help to correct Livy’s later, slightly garbled, account. There are a number of other such fragments, including some striking paintings of about the same time, which depict scenes from the wars in which Barbatus fought. Among the most remarkable and revealing of all, however, are the eighty or so short clauses from the first written collection of Roman rules and regulations (or ‘laws’, to use the rather grand term that most ancient writers adopted), put together in the mid fifth century BCE and laboriously reassembled thanks to centuries of modern scholarly detective work. The collection is known as the Twelve Tables, from the twelve bronze tablets on which it was originally inscribed and displayed. It offers a window onto some of the concerns of those earliest Republican Romans, from worries about magic or assault to such tricky questions as whether it was allowed to bury a corpse with its gold teeth in place – an incidental insight into the skill of ancient dentistry that archaeology confirms.
So it is to the world of the Twelve Tables that we first turn, before going on to explore the radical changes, both internal and external, that followed. Reconstructing the history of this period is an intriguing and sometimes tantalising process, and part of the fun comes from wondering how some of the pieces of the incomplete jigsaw puzzle fit together and how to tell the difference between the fact and the fantasy. But there are enough pieces in place to be confident that the decisive change in Rome came in the fourth century BCE, in the generation of Barbatus and Appius Claudius Caecus and that of their immediate predecessors, and that what happened then, hard as it is to pin down in detail, established a pattern of Roman politics, at home and abroad, which lasted for centuries.
The world of the Twelve Tables
The Republican regime started with a whimper rather than a bang. There are all kinds of stirring tales told by Roman historians of the new political order, of warfare on a grand scale over the first few decades of the fifth century BCE and of larger than life heroes and villains, who have become the stuff of modern legend too. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, for example, who more than two millennia later gave his name to the American city of Cincinnati, is supposed to have returned from semi-exile in the 450s BCE to become dictator and lead Roman armies to victory against their enemies before nobly retiring straight back to his farm without seeking further political glory. Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, by contrast, who inspired Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, was reputedly a war hero turned traitor around 490 BCE, who joined forces with a different enemy and would have invaded his home town had not his mother and wife intervened to dissuade him. But the reality was quite different, and of much more modest dimensions.
26. The farmer who saved the state. This twentieth-century statue from modern Cincinnati shows Cincinnatus returning the symbols of political office and going back to his plough. Many Roman stories presented him in this way as a no-nonsense patriot but there was another side to Cincinnatus, as a diehard opponent of the rights of the plebeians and of the poor in the city.
Whatever the political organisation of the city when the Tarquins were removed, archaeology makes it clear that for most of the fifth century BCE, Rome was not thriving at all. A sixth-century BCE temple that is sometimes linked to the name of Servius Tullius was one of those buildings burned down in the fires around 500 BCE, and it was not rebuilt for decades. And there was a definite decline in the imports of Greek pottery at the same time, which is a good indicator of levels of prosperity. Put simply, if the end of the regal period could reasonably be dubbed ‘La Grande Roma dei Tarquini’, the early years of the Republic were far less grand. As for all the heroic warfare that bulks so large in Roman accounts, it may have played a significant part in the Roman imagination, but it was all very local, fought out within a few miles’ radius of the city. The likelihood is that this was traditional raiding between neighbouring communities or guerrilla attacks, later written up, anachronistically, as something more like formal military clashes. Much of it, no doubt, was still on a semi-private basis, drummed up by independent warlords. That, at least, is what one fabled incident in the early 470s BCE hints, when 306 Romans are said to have perished in an ambush. They were all said to be from a single family, the Fabii, plus their dependants, hangers-on and clients: more a large gang than an army.