THE EARLY REPUBLIC
In the sixth century, Rome was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in Italy. At the end of the century, however, Rome and many of its neighbors entered into a period of great turbulence. In Rome itself, this coincides with an important shift in rule with the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the Roman Republic. The first century of the Republic is nearly as obscure as the history of regal Rome. Once again, our evidence for the city’s history in this period rests on archeology, on a few inscriptions, and on the same literary sources examined earlier in this chapter. The Roman writers who attempted a history of this period again filled their ac-counts with marvels and fabrications, and their belief that the Republic functioned in the beginning much like it did later almost certainly has led to much distortion. But while many of the major developments are reasonably clear, it is difficult for us to place events in specific political and social contexts, and it is impossible to write an accurate and detailed continuous narrative of the century.
Rome’s monarchy ended with the sixth century in the midst of decades of strife that seems to have shaken many of the cities of Italy. Rome’s historians later described the expulsion of the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, in terms that justified his fall, presenting him in the conventional garb of a tyrant, and providing the details appropriate to such a figure and to his family. The central episode in his fall was an assault by his son, Sextus Tarquinius, on Lucretia, the wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, and her subsequent suicide. Because of this and other crimes, we are told, prominent members of the Roman elite, especially Lucius Junius Brutus, Collatinus, and Publius Valerius Publicola (or Poplicola), exploited the king’s absence to take over the city and begin the Republic. Whatever the facts of the matter, it is certain that kings once ruled Rome and just as certain that, in the fifth century, they no longer did. Rome was not alone in this transition, for some Etruscan cities made a similar shift in the sixth and fifth centuries.
Romans of a later date believed that the end of the monarchy marked the beginnings of the major political institutions of the Republic, but the transition was definitely not this sharp and clear. Powerful leaders still possessed armed fol-lowings, and it may have seemed an open question to contemporaries whether or not a new king appeared. A fragmentary inscription in archaic Latin recently found at the Latin city of Satricum, the so-called Lapis Satricanus, records a dedi-cation made to the god Mars by a group identifying itself as the soudales of Poplios Valesios. Soudales are either the members of a cult association of equals, or the elite companions of a prominent individual; just conceivably, their leader could have been the Publius Valerius Publicola known from later Roman authors. In any case, the text shows that some kind of leader with a personal following was active in Latium around 500. In the fifth century, it should be noted, the nearby Etruscan city of Veii first expelled its king and then, after a substantial interval, installed another.