The Classical World (41 page)

Alternatively, Rome was credited with a visit from the wandering
Trojan hero Aeneas, who arrived in Italy and founded nearby Lavinium after the sack of Troy. Aeneas was well known in Greek poetry, including Homer, but his connection with Rome is not attested for us before
c.
400
BC
. By then it was part of a wider Western trend. Non-Greek cities in south Italy and Sicily also claimed similar links with travelling Trojans. These Trojan claims were a useful way for non-Greek outsiders to connect with the respected myths of the Greek world. For the Romans, the ‘Trojan connection’ was developed through Aeneas’ son and was to prove very useful when they began to have dealings with Greeks in Greece and Asia.
¹

Wolf’s milk, exile and fratricide were an unusual ancestry. But they went with something very important: an exceptionally generous asylum policy. Romulus was supposed to have declared his new Rome to be an asylum centre for all comers. In Athens, myths and dramas presented the Athenian hero Theseus as kind to strangers too, but at Rome the kindness went with a most un-Athenian readiness to grant citizenship to outsiders. The citizenship was even granted to Romans’ slaves when they were formally freed by their citizen-masters. Freeing became frequent in Roman households (less so on Roman farms), but there was a hard-headed reason for much of it. Many slaves paid for their freedom and continued to pay or help their masters when freed. For masters, therefore, it was more sensible to free slaves after a while than to maintain them as an ageing asset. The community also benefited: children born to slaves when freed were available for recruitment as Roman legionary soldiers. From this abundant source, Rome’s military manpower thus grew far beyond the armies of Athens’ or Sparta’s tightly limited citizenry.

Nonetheless, it was slow to bear fruit. From the 450s (when the laws of Rome’s Twelve Tables were published) until the 350s Romans evidently had had to confront a whole series of difficulties. There were recurrent political tensions in their citizenry; years of bad harvests beset them; many of their Latin neighbours renewed hostilities. The late fifth century was a time of widespread migrations by other peoples in Italy, especially those who descended from the inland Apennine mountains. They entered the plains and the fertile western coast of Italy and blocked Rome’s expansion in that direction. The best-known of these migrants are the Samnites in south Italy: their warriors on
horseback were honoured by stylized tomb paintings, well preserved in the area of Paestum in southern Italy.
²

For a century or so, from 460 to 360
BC
, there were fewer than ten years in all when the Romans were not at war. Their darkest hour was
c.
390
BC
, when Gauls (ultimately from southern France) came south into Italy and raided Rome itself. Legends later multiplied around this event, but it had been big enough to be noticed by Greeks, including Aristotle.
³
The most famous story is that the raiding Gauls were dislodged from Rome’s revered Capitol hill when they caused the sacred geese of the goddess Juno to cackle in the night. The brave Manlius was alerted and drove the enemy off. Actually, the Gauls’ looting may have continued without interruption. Holy objects from Rome’s religious cults were escorted for safety to the nearby Etruscan town of Caere (modern Cerveteri) in the company of the six Vestal Virgins, the distinctive young servants of Rome’s virgin goddess Vesta (Hearth). It was this retreat, not the geese, which became known to Aristotle in Greece. The day of Rome’s worst defeat by the Gauls, 18 July, remained a day of ill omen and no business in the Roman calendar.

After this crisis, a Greek visitor in the 370s, the age of Plato, would have found Rome a rambling muddle. Later the Romans explained the absence of any town plan as due to their hasty rebuilding after Rome’s sack by the Gauls. In fact, it was endemic. Unlike Alexandria, Rome was never planned by a king or lawgiver. Instead, it evolved untidily, both in politics and architecture. The expulsion of the kings in the late sixth century had led to the immediate founding of the Republic and the dividing of the king’s powers among magistrates. They were to hold office for a year and, in most historians’ opinion, the most important of them were to be two consuls, serving as colleagues. Arguably, the consulship was not formally confined to patrician nobles, but initially patricians almost always held it. Much depends on how much trust we can put in the later lists of consuls, or
fasti
, but even so it seems clear that there were periods of irregularity, especially in the eighty years or so after the Twelve Tables. Quite often, two consulships were not filled.

Beyond the small group of ex-consuls, there were many other Roman citizens to consider, both in the town area and in its dependent

countryside. Politically, the position of half of them is easily summed up. As in the Greek world, half of the city of Rome, the women, could not vote or hold political office. Unlike Athenian women, they were not even able to be priestesses of the gods, unless they were one of the six Vestal Virgins. While their father or grandfather lived women were legally (like sons) in his ‘power’, and when he died they were put promptly (unlike sons) under the guardianship of their male next of kin. As perhaps more than half of Roman women aged twenty did not have fathers or grandfathers still alive (on a likely average), most adult women would be under guardianship. When they married, the predominant form of marriage conveyed them like children into the ‘hand’ of their husband. But even when ‘guarded’ they could own or inherit property (although they could not dispose of it without their guardian’s consent). When married, they could inherit from their husband on his death, like one of his children. Moreover, husbands were often away fighting and women were authoritative both within their own households and with their children. The legal formalities seem to exclude almost any independent action on their part, and yet the legends of the early Republic (perhaps reflecting domestic reality, especially in the upper class) are rich in stories of courageous or chaste heroines. Politically, however, women were irrelevant on the public stage.

Here the most important people were the small male clique of senators. Most probably, they had served as advisers to Rome’s kings and after the kings’ expulsion their advisory council had lived on as the Roman Senate, a body of distinguished men, many of whom had been magistrates themselves. They could advise the holders of public offices and resolve disputes between them. The crucial question was whether non-nobles were to be made members of this Senate or not. As in Greek cities of the seventh century
BC
, the question became increasingly acute, until it was agreed,
c.
300
BC
, that the ‘best men’ should be selected by merit, not by birth. At first, the ‘best’ would mostly be the well-born, nonetheless. Senators had presumably been enrolled at first by the consuls, but by
c.
310
BC
enrolment became the job of the two annually appointed censors.

Beyond the Senate, there were the people at large, the citizens on whom Rome’s military activity depended. There were particular
reasons why they could not be overawed and relied on, unlike their contemporaries in Philip and Alexander’s Macedon, the ‘Foot Companions’. Rome’s first popular strike, or secession, in 494
BC
had not been forgotten by the common people and there were ample reasons why it might recur: debt continued to tie poor people harshly to their social superiors, but politically they had scope (though not much) for manoeuvre. For the citizenry did meet in assemblies (including a ‘council of the plebs’ which no patrician could attend). Formally, at least, each adult citizen-male did have a vote in these meetings, and the citizen-majority was sovereign in the assemblies which passed laws. What the majority decided became a law, without any further checks on a law’s legality and its relation to existing statutes; in this respect, the Romans’ assembly was even more capable of instant legislation than the contemporary assembly in democratic Athens. However, the assemblies were organized as if the prime aim was to exclude the ‘tyranny’ of the crowd. The assembly of the ‘tribes’ mainly met so as to pass laws, and by 332
BC
it was divided into twenty-nine ‘tribes’, or districts. The system was one of block-voting, and when a majority of the twenty-nine tribes had voted the same way the others did not even vote at all. Such votes as were given went only to establish the majority within each tribal ‘block’. As these ‘blocks’ were of very different sizes, many more voters might have voted against a law than for it, and yet by a majority of ‘blocks’ the law would go through.

The other main assembly, the ‘centuriate assembly’, was most important for electing most of the magistrates and for judging certain trials. Its organization was even more cleverly weighted against a lower-class majority. Those without property were bunched into only one century (out of a total of 193) and, yet again, would very seldom vote. The richest, including the cavalry, voted first and their centuries’ majority votes usually sufficed for a majority. Such changes as there ever were to this unprecedented system were only changes of detail.

Each type of assembly could only be summoned and presided over by a magistrate. Nobody else could speak, and until the later second century
BC
voters voted visibly and could therefore be intimidated by ‘canvassers’. The ‘tribal’ assembly gave most blocks of votes to people outside the city, with the inevitable result, no doubt intended, that only the reliable and richer citizens who could come into Rome would
vote at all. These assemblies were complicated bodies and certainly assumed that ‘the people’ were sovereign. But that sovereignty was so cleverly contained that only a few modern historians would insist on calling it democratic, quite apart from the hierarchical social context (and clever bribery) within which votes were exercised at all.

There was, however, a glimmer of popular sovereignty and rights here. The ‘people’ did elect magistrates, including the tribunes who could veto unacceptable proposals put to a public meeting. The tribunes were not necessarily populist, but there was scope to be so if they dared to use it. There was also a brute fact of life: the Senate could not legislate. It could pass advisory decisions (
consulta
) and for a while it either did or could vet any decision which was to go to an assembly and be made into a law. But the senators were not ‘the government’ nor was public business consigned for a matter of years to any representative body of delegates or magistrates, chosen from their number. As the Romans had not adopted a constitution from a lawgiver, it is we who look for their ‘constitution’ in what was a bundle of evolving customs, traditions and precedents. At the heart of their practice, there was a two-headed beast, as some of them later characterized it: the venerable senators and the (formally) sovereign plebs.

At first, the tensions were contained within a sharply stratified social order. Nonetheless, they were there, and as a result the years from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth centuries are rightly described by historians as Rome’s ‘struggle of the orders’. It was not carried on as an extreme struggle of the poor against the rich: there were no demands by the poor to redistribute private property, as in some of the contemporary Greek cities in nearby Sicily. There is a constant risk of believing the much later traditions which were projected back into this period from later times of crisis and are overwhelmingly our main type of evidence. However, it does seem that the main struggle over land was simply over the ‘public land’ which was being annexed by conquest from Rome’s neighbours. Rich Romans used this land, but it was not strictly theirs. Should this use be restricted for other Romans’ benefit?

More immediately important were struggles over debt and the related issues of ‘freedom’. The demand was not, as in the Greek world, to abolish existing debts. It was rather to regulate the ways in
which debtors were treated and to check the harassment of poor men by their social superiors. Far more than at democratic Athens, ‘freedom’ was valued at Rome in a negative sense, as ‘freedom from’ interference. Among the senators the most prized freedom was the ‘freedom from’ monarchy or tyranny, the one-man rule against which the Roman Republic had developed. Among the people, the most prized ‘freedom’ was ‘freedom from’ unchecked harassment by superior persons like senators. But there was also a stubborn sense of Roman citizens’ ‘freedom to…’, freedom to legislate, freedom to judge cases of treason and freedom to elect magistrates. These ‘freedoms’ were embedded in the assemblies which had existed before the Republic took over from the rule of kings.