Rome: An Empire's Story (7 page)

Further Reading

Roman myth-makings about their past and their gradual awakening to an imperial destiny are the subject of Erich Gruen’s
Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome
(London, 1992) and Emma Dench’s
Romulus’ Asylum
(Oxford, 2005). Andrew Erskine’s
Troy between Greece and Rome
(Oxford, 2001) is a wonderful study of Rome’s discovery of its Trojan origins. A vivid account of Roman myth-making is Peter Wiseman’s
Myths of Rome
(Exeter, 2004).

The study of later receptions of Greece and Rome is one of the fastest growing areas of classical scholarship. For the afterlife of Rome and for Rome as a model of empire, see Catharine Edwards’s
Roman Presences
(Cambridge, 1999) and Margaret Malamud’s
Ancient Rome and Modern America
(Oxford, 2009). A valuable set of essays
is Richard Hingley’s
Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age
(Portsmouth, RI, 2001).

The best introduction to the comparative history of the pre-modern world is Patricia Crone’s
Preindustrial Societies
(Oxford, 1989). One of the most influential studies of early empires was Jon Kautsky’s
The Politics of Aristocratic Empires
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1982). Susan Alcock, Terence D’Altroy, Kathy Morrison, and Carla Sinopoli’s
Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History
(Cambridge, 2001) faithfully reproduces the exciting conference that gave rise to it. For a recent essay in systematic comparative history, see Walter Scheidel,
Rome and China
(Oxford, 2009).

Map 1.
The peoples of Italy around 300
BC

KEY DATES IN CHAPTER III

NB Most dates before Pyrrhus’ invasion derive from conjectures made by antiquarians in the last century
BC
. The first serious histories of the west were those written by Timaeus of Sicilian Tauromenium and by Fabius Pictor (of Rome) in the early and later third century
BC
respectively. Both works are lost, but later writers made some use of them in works written in the second century
BC
and after.

III
RULERS OF ITALY

What you see before you, stranger, now mighty Rome, were grassy hills before the days of Trojan Aeneas. Evander’s wandering cattle rested where now the Palatine temple to Naval Apollo stands high. These golden temples grew for terracotta gods, content to live in simple houses built without art.

(Propertius,
Elegies
4.1.1–6)

Almost no Greek writer mentions Rome before 300
BC
, and no native historian before 200
BC
. By the time these histories were written, Rome was already the dominant power within Italy. During the third century
BC
, the Romans fended off Pyrrhus of Epirus’ invasion of southern Italy; fought and won a twenty-three-year-long naval war against Carthage; consolidated their power over the Greek cities of Campania and southern Italy and the peoples of the peninsula’s mountainous spine; and began the conquest of the Gallic inhabitants of the regions north of the Apennines and south of the Alps. The final two decades of the century saw Rome survive Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and carry war back to Carthage. Victory at Zama in 202 ended Carthaginian regional ambitions forever, even if the city survived another half-century before it was obliterated. Rome at the start of the second century
BC
enjoyed a dominant position at the geopolitical centre of the Inland Sea. It was equipped with institutions, ideologies, and experience
geared to conquest. From that point on, control of the whole Mediterranean world was only a matter of time.

How the Romans reached that position is more puzzling. Ancient narratives are transparently written in the knowledge of (and often to explain) Rome’s imperial destiny. Myths of divine favour and mortal virtue, and tales of the heroic exploits of the ancestors of this or that aristocratic clan, can hardly be the basis for our history. Even those Roman historians who were reasonably sceptical of those stories tended to use the better-known histories of Greek cities as a pattern for their own reconstructions. Their accounts present a Rome at times impossibly primitive, like the pastoral idyll Propertius summons up beneath the golden temples of Augustan Rome, or else fantastic tales of palace intrigues worthy of Homeric courts. For all these reasons, a reliable account of early Rome must begin from archaeology.

The City on the Tiber

Perhaps no archaeological site has been the object of such intense scrutiny as the city of Rome.
¹
The site has been continually occupied since the Bronze Age. Layered remains of medieval, Renaissance, and later cities make it difficult to reconstruct even the imperial capital of Augustus in detail. That megalopolis, with its great monuments and a population of around a million, was itself the product of centuries of rebuilding. Construction reached a particularly frantic phase during the late Republic. It was already widely reported in Pliny the Elder’s day, (the early Flavian period) that in 78
BC

no house in Rome was more beautiful that that of Marcus Lepidus [the consul], but by Hercules within thirty-five years the same house did not rank in the top one hundred mansions.
²

By the end of the Republic many aristocratic houses and temples were being reconstructed every generation on ever more lavish scales, funded by the proceeds of overseas conquest. Recovering material from the origins of Rome beneath all of this is very difficult, and its interpretation remains highly controversial.
³

At the beginning of the last millennium
BC
communities of Iron Age farmers had already established villages on the tops of the low tufa plateaux that approached the River Tiber where it made a slow curve around the little plain that would become the Field of Mars. Each village had one or
more cemeteries. The best known is at Osteria dell’Osa, in use from the ninth to the seventh centuries.
⁴
The organization of the burials and the distribution of the grave goods suggest it was shared by a number of clans, and also that it was used both by families of high status and by their humbler dependants. It is likely that the separate identities of these villages, and of their ruling families, also explain the later location of a number of key temples on each of the hills of Rome. How, and how early, these communities began to work together as a single polity is obscure: there are far too many gaps in the record.

The story of urbanism in central Italy is interwoven with that of Phoenician and Greek penetration of the western Mediterranean. Phoenicians and Greeks first appeared in the ninth and eighth centuries respectively, powered by economic growth at home and exploiting slight but significant technological advantages in navigation and warfare.
⁵
Indigenous Iron Age societies were everywhere drawn into relationships of one kind or the other with the new arrivals. Exploration and trade typically came first; colonial foundations followed in some areas. Eventually, Phoenicians would settle in North Africa, western Sicily, and southern Spain; Greeks in eastern Sicily and southern Italy and eventually Mediterranean France. Bases like Marseilles near the mouth of the Rhône, and Spina at the northern end of the Adriatic, opened up trade routes into central Europe. Phoenicians and Greeks went on to explore the Atlantic coast too, seeking tin from the British Isles and exotic goods such as ivory from West Africa. But at first things were probably much more confused. There is early evidence for both Phoenician and Greek presence in coastal Etruria. It was metals that first drew visitors to central Italy.
⁶
During the eighth century the Etruscans to the north of Rome and Campanians to the south began to be enriched by trade with the newcomers. Etruscans had already begun to develop complex urban societies and states before easterners arrived; they were well positioned to repel would-be colonists, and enthusiastically traded metal grain for eastern luxuries.
⁷
Their enthusiasm was so marked that this period of Etruscan culture is often called the Orientalizing period, and for a while many scholars believed that in their case the myths of eastern origins were actually true. Further south, Campanians and others were less able to resist Greek settlement: a string of new Greek cities were founded in southern Italy, the most northerly being Cumae.

Rome was located between the two, in the region known to ancients as Old Latium. During the ninth and eighth centuries the material culture of this region diverged from that of neighbouring regions and developed a
style of its own, but one noted for its relative poverty. There are fewer rich burials than in Etruria, its warrior graves contained many fewer eastern imports, its population probably did increase, but it was scattered in smallish settlements that could not compare either with southern Etruscan centres like Veii, Tarquinii, and Caere, or with the Greek cities at Cumae and Naples. At the northern edge of Latium was the cluster of villages at the Tiber crossing.

When did this cluster of villages first come to form the community of the Romans? Recent excavations have uncovered a number of huts and burials and some kind of defensive wall dating to the eighth century, but it is very difficult to be certain what these tantalizing fragments represent. Was Rome already on the road to urbanism? Or still just a scatter of villages? During the late seventh century the swampy valley north of the Palatine was drained, creating what would become the forum. At some point in the sixth century massive walls were constructed in some places. Both projects must have taken some labour and some organization. The earliest of Rome’s great temples, on and around the Capitol, are also sixth century in date. All these enterprises would have taken a great deal of manpower, and testify to some kind of collective organization. From the sixth century, too, survive the first traces of massive aristocratic houses, located on the southern edge of the forum. From this point on it seems reasonable to think of Rome as a city with defined districts and some centralized institutions. But the division of space was fairly rudimentary. The early forum perhaps served a whole range of commercial, political, and religious functions, and the Capitoline Hill would for centuries be both a religious sanctuary and a refuge/citadel. But for some purposes at least the inhabitants of Rome seem have come together as a single people.

This emergence of cities through the coming together of clusters of villages was a common process across the archaic Mediterranean world. Athens followed a similar sequence, growing out of hamlets each with their own cemetery in the area around the acropolis. The first public space of Athens, the
agora
, also served all sorts of functions as late as the sixth century; a more differentiated use of space followed only later. The history of early Corinth is not very different. Southern Etruria also followed this route to urbanism. Veii, just ten miles north of Rome, grew up on a plateau of the soft volcanic rock known as tufa. A cluster of villages, cemeteries, and hilltop sanctuaries gradually coalesced to form what by ancient standards was a massive city. Piecemeal fortifications closed the
gaps in natural defences until, in the early fourth century, a six-kilometre-long circuit wall was built. Rome’s ‘Servian’ wall circuit, built almost contemporaneously, was eleven kilometres (about seven miles) long and enclosed over 400 hectares. By the standards of the age this was a huge occupied area, telling us that Rome already stood out among her Italian neighbours, and especially among the Latins who mostly lived in much smaller settlements.