06c: Podunk on the Tiber

Early on the morning of April 21, 753 BC, two young brothers named Romulus and Remus climbed to the top of a hill in Latium, a region in what is now west central Italy. They had already had a very interesting life. Twin sons of a local princess and the great god Mars, they had been exposed at birth by their evil uncle and left to die. Luckily, a roaming she-wolf found the bawling babies and suckled them, which saved them until a friendly local shepherd and his wife discovered them. After a troubled adolescence, they had decided on a new start. That's how the twins found themselves atop a hill in Latium, founding a new city on the site of what would eventually be Rome. But only one of them could be king. One of them had to have been the older twin, but they were mere babies when they were born, and couldn't be expected to noticed who had come first. Instead they resorted to augury (Romans loved their omens) to decide who would be king. Remus was the first to spot a flock of vultures, but Romulus spotted a bigger flock. Another version had Remus jumping over a wall Romulus had just finished building. Both versions end with Remus dead and Romulus sole ruler of the city they had just founded. Romulus recruited new settlers for his new city by opening an "asylum" in the forest, where fugitives, freedmen and slaves could join his new people. Since Rome was still experiencing a shortage of marriage-aged females, so he invited the neighboring Sabine tribe over for a picnic. While the Sabine men were busy enjoying the food and drink, the Romans ran off with their womenfolk. The Sabine army attacked Rome to bring the women back home, but the women - as the story goes - were just as happy to be Romans.

At any rate, that's just how the ancient Romans liked to think their city was founded. The name Romulus means "young Roman" in Latin, and his character was almost certainly a legendary invention. The murder of Remus was a tough one to explain positively, and the Latin word for "she-wolf" is the same as the word for "prostitute:" lupa. No doubt a struggling young city-state was always looking to pad its population by welcoming fugitives and stealing wives. This account of Rome's foundation grew even less satisfactory as Rome grew stronger and came into contact with Greek colonies on the southern Italian coast. Almost every one of the Greek colonies could brag about being founded by a hero, or the son of a god, or at least a big time hero from the Trojan War. Suddenly, the murdering foster-son of a prostitute wasn't much to brag about. By the 300s BC, the Romans latched on to a legend about the hero Aeneas - illegitimate son of the looove goddess Venus and one of the Trojan army's greatest fighters. After Troy was sacked, Aeneas had wandered the Mediterranean, finally winding up in Italy, where he founded a few cities and was worshiped as a god after he died. The Romans "discovered" that Aeneas had been a distant ancestor of Romulus, which not only made the Romulus myth sound better but made Rome's founder a direct descendant of an Ancient Greek goddess.

Rome started out as one of roughly fifty villages in Latium. It had an advantageous location; the original settlements which eventually merged into Rome existed on seven little hills - Capitoline, Caelian, Aventine, Palatine, Quirinal, Viminal, Oppian - surrounding a swamp. The same cluster of hills also overlooked a crossing of the Tiber river, offering the little settlements both water and land transportation. The first century BC historian Livy recognized Rome's advantageous location. He places these words into a speech by the great general Camillus, bane of the Etruscans and savior of Rome from the Gauls:

"Not without reason did gods and men choose this spot for the site of our city - the healthful hills, the river to bring us produce from the inland regions and oversea commerce from abroad, the sea itself, near enough to be convenient but yet not so near to bring danger from foreign fleets, our location right in the heart of Italy - all these advantages make this the best of all places in the world for a city destined to grow great."  

Livy's account comes at the tail of some very intereting developments in Rome. Rome had already established herself as first among equals in the region of Latium, and was now dueling it out with various Etruscan cities to the North. As we will see, it took a great deal of time and effort for the Romans to make themselves masters of Italy and their biggest immediate threat was posed by a funky people known as the Etruscans. Where the Etruscans came from, not even the Etruscans themselves knew for sure. They were already established on the Italian peninsula by 800 BC, and lived in fortified city states protected by a strong military. The Etruscans were far ahead of the village-dwelling Latins (including the Romans) culturally and scientifically. They dominated huge parts of Italy - again including the Romans - until the end of the 500s BC. The Etruscans were influenced at least to some extent by the Ancient Greeks, many of whom had colonized the southern part of Italy. They proved to be the single most extensive influence upon the Romans. Thanks to the Etruscans, the Romans worshipped a group of anthropomorphic deities (that is, gods and goddesses who looked and behaved like men and women). Like the Etruscans, the Romans believed in all sorts of fortunetellers, developed their own striking artistic traditions, and wrote with an alphabet derived from the Greeks.

But the early relationship between Romans and Etruscans was very seldom friendly. Since the Etruscans were by far the more advanced culture, they dominated the Romans and probably ruled Rome for quite some time. It is even thought that Etruscan kings had drained the swamp between the hills of Rome and building the Roman Forum - because left to their own devices, the Romans themselves never could have accomplished such a feat of engineering. Of course, the Romans weren't exactly grateful: Camillus, who delivered that cute speech about Rome's location, was just one of a number of Roman generals who won eternal glory by kicking Etruscan tail. Likewise, the fall of theRoman monarcy in 509 BC may have resulted more from hatred of the Etruscans than from hatred of monarchy. So let's take a look at that good old Roman monarchy...