THE ARISTOCRACY IN ANCIENT ROME
The aristocracy, too, had its own political, religious, and military roles in the city. Roman historians later held that the leaders of the city’s aristocratic families met in a council of elders known as the senate, which chose the kings, helped them make policy, and on occasion resisted their initiatives as they saw fit. Aristocratic councils were common in the world of the city-state: They can be found in many Greek cities and are known, at a later date, in many Italian ones, including Rome itself. Some kind of council—at this date certainly aristocratic in character—probably did function in the Rome of the kings.
For long, this senate met in the building known as the Curia Hostilia, supposedly first built by Tullus Hostilius; as noted earlier, excavations have shown that a large stone building was constructed on the site around 600. Like kings, prominent members of the Roman elite also had their own religious roles. Later Romans believed that certain aristocratic families enjoyed especially close relations with the gods; in time, too, prominent families certainly did come to monopolize the most important priest¬ly offices.
Like other cities of central Italy, Rome seems to have witnessed a certain mobil¬ity of elite families during the seventh, sixth, and early fifth centuries. Some aris¬tocrats and their followers moved from city to city, taking up in the new place the position they had abandoned in the old. The Elder Tarquin was thought to have moved to Rome from the Etruscan city of Tarquinii. Around 500, the aristocratic family of the Claudii, which centuries later would provide emperors for Rome, first came to the city with a great body of clients, having left its native Sabine country to the northeast after suffering political setbacks there. A few leaders of private armies gained an especially prominent place in the history of central Italy during the sixth and early fifth centuries. Some of them dominated their own cities, while others sought wealth and power away from home. Romans of a later age liked to believe that their kings had ruled with the consent of the leading families and the people. In practice, however, the entry of powerful individuals and their followers into a new city may have been tantamount to conquest. At the Etruscan city of Vulci, for example, a tradition survived that a prominent war leader from there once seized and ruled Rome. As late as 460, Appius Herdonius, a Sabine, seized the Capitoline hill with armed clients and tried without success to dominate the city.