Rome: An Empire's Story (8 page)

Rome resembled Etruscan cities like Veii more than it did Athens or Corinth. Similarities of culture and technology—and also of geology and climate—had created a regional style of urbanism in central Italy. Perhaps too it made a difference that in the late Bronze Age there had been palaces and states in southern Greece with strong links to Egypt and the Near East, whereas the Italian Bronze Age had been organized on a much smaller and more local scale, more like that of northern Europe in fact. But central Italy had its own advantages. Then as now, it was a fertile region thanks to the combination of Atlantic rainfall and volcanic soils. The plateau sites favoured by Bronze and Iron Age farmers were also the product of volcanism, spurs of soft tufa formed from lava flows. Hilltop sites were not only preferred for defence: they were also healthier, given the prevalence of malaria in the marshes of the coastal plain. Architecturally too there was a regional style. While archaic Greek cities were building temples and carving sculpture out of the spectacular marbles found around the Aegean Sea, their western counterparts were constructing temples out of tufa and brick, roofing and decorating them with brightly painted terracotta tiles moulded with faces, images, and abstract designs. Even the statues of the gods were ceramic rather than stone. These were the ancient terracotta gods in their simple homes that Propertius contrasted with the marble splendours of his own day.

The most difficult thing to explain is what factors made Rome emerge out of the general poverty of Latial culture to rival the great cities of Etruria. Location probably played an important part. The Tiber is not one of the great rivers of the Mediterranean, but in ancient times it offered both a boundary between peoples, and a communication route from Rome down to the coast and into the interior. To the north of the river there were the Etruscans, to the south the Latins. The Tiber gave access to the Sabine hills to the east as well as to Umbria in the north. By the imperial period, the Tiber Valley provided timber and building stone for Rome, its tributaries supplied much of the aqueduct system, and its claybeds were exploited for brick production.
⁸
Rome was located at the intersection of ecological zones,
always an advantageous position. Rome is about fifteen miles from the sea. An outpost was established at the Tiber mouth at Ostia as early as the fourth century. Long before this there were coastal saltpans there, and the Salt Road (the
via Salaria
) ran through Rome and over the Apennines to the Adriatic. Rome did not sit in an area with great metal resources like the Colline Metallifere that had attracted Greeks to Elba. Nor was the countryside as productive of grain or as suitable for vines as that of Campania. But perhaps when the tendrils of exchange networks extended deeper into Italy, the river port of the city on the Tiber seemed a good entry point.

A second advantage was perhaps Rome’s location on the margins of the Etruscan world. Sixth-century Rome was in some senses a hybrid, and hybrids have their own vigour. Physically the city resembled the great cities of southern Etruria—Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Orvieto, and Vulci as well as Veii. Etruscan influence is everywhere in the form of the hard black Etruscan pottery called
bucchero
. But Romans shared a language and some sanctuaries with the Latins, whom they considered as their kin. Archaeologically the balance seems to have shifted over time. The ninth-century huts and burials of Rome are very similar to those known elsewhere in Latium. Rome did not participate in the growth experienced by Etruria and some other parts of Italy in the eighth century when the Greeks arrived in search of metals. Yet at some point in the seventh and early sixth centuries Rome began to stand out, and to stand comparison with its Etruscan neighbours to the north.

Etruscan cities had emerged as a cluster of what archaeologists sometimes call ‘peer-polities’, a group of states which for a while seem to develop on parallel lines at an accelerated rate as they compete with each other, and learn from each other’s successful experiments and mistakes.
⁹
The same idea has been used in the Greek world to explain the rapid diffusion of innovations as varied as law codes, temple building, and tyranny. Etruscan cities had a common history of this kind from their first nucleations in the ninth century to the shared taste for oriental art in the eighth. Peer-polity systems have other effects, however, including a certain amount of institutional inbreeding and a tendency to limit the success of their strongest members. The Greek world in the fourth century offers a good example, with successive leading city-states brought down to size by alliances made among the others. The unification of Greece came, in the end, only in the form of conquest by a state that had developed on the geographical margins of the system, Alexander’s kingdom of Macedon. Growth at the margins is another common phenomenon. The ancient competition between
Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and various Syrian and Anatolian states was ended in the Iron Age not when one drew ahead of the rest, but when all were conquered from outside by the Persians. Equally the first Chinese Empire was created by one of the marginal polities of the Warring States Period, the Qin. Rome would again enjoy the benefits of growth at the margin during the early second century
BC
, when it took over the Macedonian-led kingdoms to its east, kingdoms that had been engaged for a couple of centuries in expensive and inconclusive competition for influence over the Aegean, southern Turkey, and southern Syria. Perhaps at the start of its history, too, Rome’s rise was due in part to the fact that it was
not
central to developments in Etruria.

History and Myth

Tradition had a different take on the Latin–Etruscan hybridity of early Rome. The last kings of Rome were remembered as Etruscans, the Tarquins from—inevitably if suspiciously—the city of Tarquinii. It was they, so legend ran, who had drained the forum with forced labour. The traditional chronology is close enough to the archaeological traces of urban growth in the late sixth century to persuade some that the story preserves elements of fact.
¹⁰
The Tarquins, the story goes, had also begun building the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, commissioning the master potter Vulca to come from Veii to create a spectacular terracotta cult statue. But they did not survive to see the work finished: the foundation of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter coincided with the birth of the Republic. The founding myth told how native Roman aristocrats had expelled the Etruscan tyrants, and set up a constitution in which popular assemblies were sovereign. Those assemblies would elect magistrates—first praetors and then consuls—who would govern in pairs, and for no more than one year at a time, advised by a council of former magistrates, the Senate. The most important decisions—declarations of war and the passing of new laws—remained the prerogative of the entire community. A conventional narrative of liberation from tyranny was thus given an ethnic dimension, and linked to the creation of a unique political system. Rome became more Roman by shedding its Etruscan rulers.

The foundation of the temple of Jupiter was a critical reference point for later reflections on the Roman past, just as the temple itself provided
a central focus in the ritual year, and for the collective life of the city. At least one late fourth-century scribe dated events from the foundation of the temple. Augustus’
Fasti
began in the same year with the first ever pair of consuls. So the expulsion of the Tarquins marked (for some) the beginning of Roman history.
¹¹
But it is not easy now to construct a narrative of events from that point until the end of the third century
BC
. Nor was it easy then. Pictor, Cato, Polybius, and their contemporaries looked back from the turn of the third and second centuries, but their vision was limited. There were hardly any written documents. To be sure there was a mass of traditions: some glorified particular families and individuals, some perhaps presented more or less popular views, some were perhaps in the form of dramas or songs, some linked to particular places, cults, or temples. Sifting contradictory and competing, versions and arranging them in time was a formidable task, for which the only tools were guesswork, analogy from Greek history, and imaginative reconstruction. When historians of the late Republic and early Principate set about completing the task, they faced even more formidable difficulties. Polybius had set out to write an account of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean between 220 and 168: that story began around twenty years before his birth and he had witnessed the latter phases, from the vantage point of an honoured hostage, travelling in the train of Scipio Aemilianus. Polybius preceded his account with a shorter summary of events from 264
BC
, the start of the first Punic war and the end of Timaeus’
Histories
of the west. When, under Augustus, Dionysius set out to write
Roman Antiquities
that ended more or less where Polybius began, and when Livy around the same time began his total history of Rome
From the Foundation of the City
, they had to engage in a completely different enterprise, the rationalization of a set of memories organized around powerful social myths.

One set of stories chronicles the rise of Rome as military superpower. The Etruscans made repeated attempts to recapture Rome, but all of them were foiled. For over a century, Rome and Veii glared at each other across the Tiber—three separate wars and two great truces were remembered— before the Romans sacked the city. Traditionally this was dated to 396
BC
. Meanwhile, Rome fought wars against and in alliance with the Latins, the Hernici, and more distant opponents, the Volsci and the Aequi. The world within which these conflicts took place was tiny—barely 50 kilometres across—yet they were remembered on an epic scale. Even more mythologized was the Gallic sack of Rome, conventionally dated to 390
BC
.
¹²
Traditions about this event varied wildly. Did the Gauls sack all or part of the city? Did they keep their ransom or was it recovered? Which Roman heroes were most responsible for survival and recovery? Or was it in fact an Etruscan army from Cerveteri which saw them off? That last version, unsurprisingly, occurs in Greek but not Roman accounts! Yet another set of traditions concerned the series of wars Rome fought against the peoples of the central Apennines.
¹³
The Samnites were represented as barbarian highlanders. Roman tradition recorded three wars fought between the middle of the fourth century and the start of the third. No doubt these campaigns were in reality less coherent than they seemed in hindsight, and the Samnites were definitely not exactly the savages they were portrayed. In fact, monumental sanctuaries in the Abruzzi like that at Pietrabbondante made greater use of Greek architecture than did those of Rome in the same period.

Much of what was remembered is probably true, especially for the latter stages of the Samnite Wars that ended just before Pyrrhus’ invasion. Dates were only put to them much later, of course, and many depended on ‘synchronism’ with events in Greek history. Rome apparently ejected its tyrants around the same date Athens expelled hers; the century-long grudge match with Veii in the fifth century looks suspiciously like the long and contemporaneous rivalry between Athens and Sparta; even the Gallic invasion sets Romans alongside Greeks as victims of temple-pillaging northerners, or else might be paralleled to the Persian sack of Athens. How much massaging was necessary to give Rome a
proper
past? How far were events telescoped or compressed to bring out the correspondences? What was omitted because it was useless to the narrative being created, or even contradicted it?

A second problem is that many stories seem to have clear moral ends. Time and again, individual Romans put the survival of the city ahead of their own interests. Horatius fought off Lars Porsenna’s invading army in a series of single combats while the bridge over the Tiber was cut down behind him. Camillus, exiled by Rome, refused to lead an enemy army against his ungrateful homeland. The epic poet Ennius summed up the ideology in the line

The Roman state depends on its ancient customs and heroes.
¹⁴

Or consider how repeated power struggles between aristocratic patricians and the excluded masses (the
plebs
)—social conflicts of a kind quite common in the archaic Mediterranean—are again and again resolved by
compromise and constitutional innovations. Stories of self-sacrifice and affirmations of social solidarity were comforting ideals for an age in which civil conflict was tearing the state apart. But they are hardly reliable history, any more than the stereotypes such as Livy’s portrayal of Roman women either as victims of tyranny or inspirations to their men folk or both. All wars, naturally, were just wars, and the gods were always on Rome’s side.

Ways and Means

There are hints that even at the very beginning of the Republic, Rome was already a powerful state. Polybius described three treaties, each made between Rome and Carthage in the period before the Pyrrhic War.
¹⁵
The earliest, written in archaic Latin, was dated to the first year of the free Republic. Its terms seem sufficiently anachronistic by Polybius’ day to be genuinely ancient, and he went to some lengths to try to explain them. In the treaty the Romans promise to respect Carthaginian territories in Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa and not to deliberately sail beyond ‘the Fair Promontory’ (probably Cap Farina just north of Carthage). The Carthaginians on their side promised not to intervene in Latium, either in the cities Rome controlled or in those she did not. Intervention of that kind was a realistic prospect. Three gold tablets from the Etruscan port city of Pyrgi, dating to about the same time, record dedications in both Etruscan and Punic to the goddess the Carthaginians called Astarte and the Etruscan ruler of Caere, Uni. Other provisions of this treaty provided for trade. Perhaps most significant of all, Rome treated on behalf of her allies as well as herself. The treaty, in other words, evokes a half-forgotten world of hegemonic politics and spheres of influence, a world in which larger communities dominated their smaller neighbours without absorbing them into formal empires, all at the end of the sixth century
BC
. We could compare the kind of leadership exercised by Carthage over other Punic cities, some of them named in the second of the three treaties, or Spartan leadership of the Peloponnese in the fifth century, and Athenian control of the islands and coasts of the Aegean only a little later. Marseilles in southern Gaul, Syracuse in Sicily, and Tarentum in southern Italy all acquired regional influence of this kind. The history of the fifth and fourth centuries may be maddeningly obscure, but by the time Pyrrhus crossed the Adriatic in 280 at the invitation of the Tarentines, Rome had
joined this small group of leading cities. The big question is how Rome managed to get to this point, given the small scale of her fifth-century wars within Latium and its adjacent districts.