KINGS IN ANCIENT ROME
And kingship persisted in Rome in the form of a priestly office, the rex sacrorum, that continued the king’s religious functions long after the political and military powers had been lost. Rome was not the only Italian city with a king, but it is far from clear how common monarchy was tyrants, who seized power forcefully and often ruled in the same way, governed many of the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily during the sixth and fifth centuries. Kings led a number of Etruscan cities too, from the seventh century into the opening years of the fourth.
With the excep-tion of Gabii, which supposedly had a king imposed on it by the last king of Rome, no other Latin city is known to have had kings of its own. Apart from the Greek colony of Cumae, which was ruled by tyrants for a time, the internal arrangements of Campanian cities are almost completely unknown. Generally speaking, some cities may never have had kings, or had them only intermittently. Roman historians did believe that their monarchy had not been hereditary, so that each king had to establish his right to rule. In the traditional list of seven kings, it should be noted, there is only one instance where a father and his son both held the throne, although even here the reign of another intervened.
Romans of a later date associated their kings with leadership in war, the con-struction of temples and other public buildings, the performance of religious rites, and the granting of judgments in legal disputes. These early rulers, we are told, defeated many of the surrounding towns and villages, forcing some of their inhabitants to move to Rome, while others were permitted to remain in what would become no more than small rural centers without much civic life. Archeologists have found the remains of towns near Rome, some of which were wealthy and powerful in the seventh century, but no more than fortified villages in the sixth. In later periods, the Romans regularly celebrated rites that marked the boundaries of their territory centuries earlier. Certain rituals preserved the memory of a time when Roman territory encompassed only about seventy-five square miles (190 sq km), and Rome’s frontiers were no more than five miles (8 km) from the city in any direction. By the end of the sixth century, however, Rome had become a much larger place: Its territory probably covered almost 300 square miles (780 sq km), while the population may have been as high as 35,000.
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