Gcse ancient History
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Theme: The constitutional, religious and economic development of the Roman state under the kings 4.1 The establishment of Rome under Romulus What did Romulus do for Rome? Romulus started Rome and it was named after him. He set up defences on the Palatine hill, where he grew up. He started ceremonies for the gods in the same way as the Albans did them, but for Hercules he made everyone worship in the Greek way which had been started by Evander. Romulus gave the people laws. He made himself seem grander in his general appearance and so that the country folk would follow his laws he got himself twelve lictors. (Body guards who had the power to beat people with their sticks or kill them with their axes.) Some people said it was twelve because twelve vultures appeared to Romulus but Livy thinks it was because the idea of lictors came from the Etruscans who had twelve – one for each of their tribes. Romulus made his city bigger with big walls round it but not many people lived there so he invited lots of people to come and start new lives there. Once he had lots of men, Romulus started to organise the place. He created one hundred senators (wise old men to help rule the place), either because this number was enough, or because there were only one hundred who were fit for the job. They were called ‘Fathers’ as a result of their good reputation, and their descendents were called ‘Patricians’ (pater means father in Latin). Romulus increased Roman territories and power by defeating the Caeinenses, the Crustimini, and the Antemnates, (according to Livy these peoples had all attacked Rome after the Romans tricked them and abduted their daughters). Romulus made a treaty with Tatus Tatius, the king of the Sabines, (whose daughters the Romans had also abducted). They agreed to share power with Rome as capital of their joint populations. Romulus then divided the population into thirty groups and recruited three groups each of one hundred Knights were recruited: the Ramnenses, the Titienses, and the Luceres. Romulus became the only king again a few years later, when Tatius was killed in a riot in Lavinium, caused by his taking the side of his relatives after they attacked some Laurentine ambassadors. Romulus renewed the treaty between Rome and Lavinium at this point, in order to make up for the ambassadors being attacked and the king being killed. The Fidenates thought the Romans were getting too powerful so they attacked them but Romulus defeated them easily by tricking them into an ambush. The last thing we are told he did was defeated the Veii in battle then destroyed their farms but gave them a peace treaty when they asked for it in exchange for some of their land. Livy concludes that, ‘this was what Romulus achieved while he was king at home and at war and all of it shows that he was descended from a god and deserved to be a god after he died. He had the courage to get his grandfather’s kingdom back for him, he planned and built a city and he took care of it in peace and war. He made Rome so strong that it was safe and peaceful for the next forty years. But the ordinary people were more grateful than the senators, and the soldiers liked him more than everyone else. He had 300 of them as bodyguards, both in peace and in war, who he called ‘The Swift Ones’.’ – Livy 1.15 In typical Romulus fashion, he was looking at his army when he was whisked off in a cloud to become a god. Julius Proculus claimed that Romulus appeared to him to give his final message to the people of Rome: He said, “Citizens, at dawn today Romulus, the father of this city, suddenly came down from the sky and stood in front of me as clear as day. I stood still because of respect and fear, and prayed to him to ask if I could look up at him. He said to me, ‘Go and tell the Romans that the gods in the sky want my city, Rome to be the capital of the world: so they should become good soldiers, and tell them, and they should tell their children, that no one can stand up to the Roman army’. When he had said this, he went up into the sky”. Amazingly everyone believed him and they were all much happier then. And that was the end of Romulus but he had set Rome on a course to be ‘the capital of the world’ and laid the foundations for a no-nonsense city with a very warlike attitude.
4.2 The development of religion under Numa How did Numa develop religion? Numa Pompilius was famous because he was fair and religious and he knew a lot about humans’ and gods’ laws. When Numa was nominated to be king, nobody could think of anyone better so the Senators offered him the job. He said they had to ask the gods like Romulus did, which shows he was very religious from the start. The priest saw the good omens and Numa became king. Numa’s first act was to found the temple of Janus which showed that the Romans were at war when the doors were open and at peace when they were shut. He made peace with the neighbours and shut it. This was so that he could tame the warlike city and give it new laws and religious rituals. Then Numa decided to use fear of the gods to control the people so he pretended to meet the goddess Egeria and said that she told him how to set up the rituals and the priesthoods. Here Numa is developing religion but perhaps mainly to keep people under control, although even though Livy says that Numa invented the meetings with the goddess, he is portrayed as very religious. Numa is supposed to have created the twelve lunar months and a method to remedy the fact that they do not quite fit. He also decided which days were right for doing public business and which were not. Livy tells us: He sorted out putting priests in charge of things, but he did the most holy ceremonies himself, especially the ones the priest of Jupiter does now. But he thought that in a warlike community there would be more kings like Romulus than like himself, and that they would want to go to war themselves. So that the holy ceremonies of the kingdom didn’t get neglected, he made the priest of Jupiter a permanent job and then made it more important with a special toga and the royal curule chair. He added two other priesthoods to this: one for Mars and one for Quirinus. He also chose the Vestal Virgins, a priesthood that came from Alba which the founder of Rome would have recognised. He gave them money from the public funds so that they would be really careful priestesses of the temple, he showed that they should be respected and were holy by making them stay virgins and other ceremonies. He also chose twelve ‘Dancers’, the Salian priests of Mars Gradivus, and gave them embroidered tunics, and on top of them they wore bronze breastplates. He ordered them to carry the heavenly shields, which are called the ancilia, and to go through the city singing songs and performing their special dance with three steps. Then he chose Numa Marcius, son of Marcus, from the senators as the priest of state religion, and he put him in charge of all the holy documents which said what animals should be used, which days, and which temples the sacrifices should be at, and where to get the money to pay. He also put that priest in charge of all other private and public ceremonies, so that the people would come to him in case they upset any of the gods’ laws by forgetting traditional ceremonies and joining foreign cults. That same priest was not only in charge of the ceremonies for the heavenly gods but also funerals and pleasing the spirits of the dead. He also said what omens should be recognised from lightning flashes and other events and what people should do about them. To find out about these things from the gods, he set up an altar for Jove the Revealer on the Aventine hill, and he looked for signs from the god, for which omens should be accepted. Livy 1.20 Numa was very peaceful and religious and he got the Romans to copy him. According to Livy, the neighbours were so impressed by how religious the Romans all were that they did not want to attack and no longer saw Rome as just a great big army camp. Numa gives Rome a new side to its character. Numa was supposed to go to meet Egeria his spiritual ‘wife’ in a forest and he made this a holy place. He also created many other ceremonies including one to celebrate keeping promises. His main achievement was that he kept his power while keeping peace the whole time. When Augustus became Emperor of Rome, he started a religious revival which may be linked to Numa’s creation of all the religious aspects of the Roman culture.
4.3 The nature of the Tarquins and their effect on the development of Rome There are three Tarquins who are most important for the purposes of this section: Tarquinius Priscus, his son Tarquinius Superbus and his son Sextus Tarquinius. The first two were kings of Rome but the behaviour of the last one was the final straw for the monarchy in Rome. Tarquinius Priscus Lucius Tarquinius Priscus was originally called Lucumo and was Etruscan. He went to Rome with his wife Tanaquil intending to do something to make himself powerful. On the way an eagle took off Priscus’ hat and then put it back on again which was seen as an omen that he would be king. Tarquinius Priscus managed to get the king Ancus Marcius to trust him to be in charge of his sons but he betrayed this trust after Ancus died by sending his sons out hunting and then getting the people to vote him in as king. Livy says that he was quite a good man but a bit of a trickster as can be seen from how he made himself king. Tarquinius Priscus did some good things for Rome: he increased the size of the senate, made war successfully on the Latins, planned out the Circus Maximus, established games and improved the forum. We start to see the Tarquin arrogance when in a war with the Sabines and Priscus he tried to rearrange the cavalry units set up by Romulus and name some after himself. The omen interpreter Attius Navius pointed out that before Romulus did this he checked the omens so Tarquinius should do the same. Tarquinius replied very rudely that the priest should say, with his gift of prophecy, whether what Tarquinius was thinking just then could be done. When the priest said it could be done, Tarquinius replied that he was wondering whether you could cut a knife-sharpening stone in half with a razor. Amazingly the priest did it. This shows the haughty attitude of Tarquinius, the importance of the omens and also that the gods did not let him get away with this. On the whole, however, Tarquinius Priscus was not that bad. Tarquinius Superbus Lucius Tarquinius who was given the name Superbus because he was so arrogant was trouble from the start. First he had his wife killed so he could marry his sister-in-law Tullia who had got her husband killed. Then he seized the throne by force and threw out the old king who was run over in a chariot by Tullia and Tarquinius Superbus did not even let him be buried. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus surrounded himself with armed men and did exactly what he wanted to in Rome without consulting anyone. He made particular friends with the Latins and then manipulated them into handing their power over to him by faking a plot by a man called Turnus who he had thrown in a river in a basket of stones even though he was innocent. He told the Latins they could either give him their power according to some treaty that he had probably just made up, or he would destroy their fields and cities. Sextus Tarquinius Next is Sextus Tarquinius. When Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was unable to conquer the Gabii in the normal way, he sent his son Sextus to trick them. Sextus told tha Gabii that he was sick of his father and was now his enemy. Slowly Sextus built up the trust of the Gabii until they put him in charge. His father sent him a silent message by knocking the heads off the tallest poppies in front of the messenger who did not understand. Sextus knew just what to do and so he killed all the important Gabii, shared their wealth out among the others and handed the whole city over to his father. Sextus Tarquinius also raped Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius Collatinus. She killed herself and her father, her husband and his friend Lucius Junius Brutus vowed to avenge her. 4.4 Reasons for the removal of the kings Although the Tarquins did some good things for Rome such as building things and had military victories, eventually the Roman people got sick of their behaviour.
Down with the monarchy! Brutus swore on the bloody knife that Lucretia had stabbed herself with that he would punish the Tarquins and get rid of the kings of Rome forever. He made a great speech to the Romans and persuaded them to stand up to the king’s power and send all his family away then he got the army on his side and established the Roman republic in which two consuls were in charge and the people voted for them. The story of the horrible rape of Lucretia and the men swearing on the bloody knife to remove the kings is very dramatic and makes a good story. It is thought that there is an influence from the overthrowing of the kings of Athens and the conspiracy of Cataline so a lot of this story is just that, an exciting story. However some people are quite certain that the people began to hate the Tarquinius Superbus because he was being tyrannical and that the noble men made a conspiracy and got rid of him.
Sources: Livy and Virgil as sources 5.1 Livy’s own statements on his work in his preface Livy’s preface: I do not know for sure (and if I did, I wouldn’t dare to say) whether the job I have taken on – writing the story of Rome and the Roman people from the very beginning – will be worth the effort. Since I see that it is an old and common practice that the new writers always think they will either write more truthfully or write more skillfully than the older writers. Anyway, I shall be pleased to set out, as best I can, the record of the things the greatest people on earth have done and if I am not noticed in the crowd of writers, I shall comfort myself because they are such great and talented writers who put me in the shade. Besides, this is a really big job. It goes back more than seven hundred years and having started from humble beginnings it has grown so much that the job may be too big.I have no doubt that most readers will find the earliest times, and those just after, less enjoyable and they will hurry on to the modern times when for a long time by being so powerful the state has worn itself down. But I shall enjoy this work since as long as I am looking back at the old days in my mind, it will take away from my sight the bad things which our generation has seen for so many years. I shall be free from the concern which can cause anxiety in the mind of a writer, even if it does not push him away from the truth. What happened before the foundation of the city or while it was being built has been passed down in a way more suitable for the stories of poets than an authentic historical record of what happened and I don’t intend to prove it right or wrong.The stories of old days can be allowed to mix human events with supernatural ones since it makes the origins of the city more impressive and if any people should be allowed to say they are descended from supernatural beings and trace their founders to the gods, Rome’s glory in war is so great that when they say that Mars is their first ancestor and the father of their founder, the countries of the world accept it in the same spirit as they accept their power. But no matter how these things and ones like them are considered and judged, I don’t think they are very important. Instead I would like people to think carefully about what sort of lives and morals the people had, and the men and their skills which they used at home and in wars to win power and extend it. Then I would like people to notice the discipline slipping gradually, first the sinking morals then them slipping more and more, then beginning to fall steeply, until we arrive at these days when we can’t put up with either our faults or the ways to fix them. There is something especially beneficial and useful in studying what happened long ago, because you can look at examples of everything that can happen clearly set out in a record. From this you can take for yourself and your country, things to copy, and things which are rotten from start to finish which you can avoid. On the other hand, unless my love for this job which I have started has tricked me, there has never been a country either more powerful or with better morals or with so many good examples to follow. There has never been a place where people have moved so slowly towards greed and extravagance or where there has been respect for such a long time for living without luxury and being for economical. Really, the fewer possessions people had the fewer they wanted. Recently, riches have brought greed and the huge quantity of pleasure has brought a desire for ruining and destroying everything because of self-indulgence and lust. But unwanted complaints, even when perhaps they are necessary, really must not appear at the start of such a grand piece of work. I would much rather begin by using the poets’ way of doing things, with good omens and wishes and prayers to the gods and goddesses to ask them to give a favourable and successful outcome to the great task before me. At the start Livy makes the point that what he is doing has been done before. He calls the Romans the greatest people on earth so we can see that he is openly biased. He does not care if the stories are not very believable as long as they show the Romans in a good way. He also says that he does not intend to prove the old stories true or false. When we ask ourselves how reliable Livy is and come to the conclusion that he is not always very factually reliable we have to remember that in this section of his history he was not that bothered. Livy was more interested in putting his message across. He wanted to show the Romans in a certain way and he wanted to stop the moral decline by showing examples of good (and bad) behaviour from the past. At the end of the preface Livy makes a sort of prayer to the gods and goddesses which is very much like Virgil’s invocation at the start of the Aeneid (which in turn is modeled on Homer’s beginnings). Perhaps Livy is praying not only that he will write a good book, but that his message about the moral decline of his beloved city will be listened to.
5.2 Foundation myths as presented by Livy and Virgil Livy is a historian but this part of his history is largely legendary but he does not try to pretend it is true or say that it is false. It is part of the Roman culture. Virgil is a poet. What he writes doesn’t have to be true. The importance is in what these legends say about the Romans and their culture. It might not be their real heritage but it is the one that a patriotic Roman wishes to claim for the Romans.
5.3 Livy’s sources and how he used them The first Roman to write about Rome’s history was Fabius Pictor who was alive in 200 BC, which was 300 years after the end of the monarchy. Not exactly an eye witness account. Other historians came after Pictor and covered the same information but added their own ideas. For example Calpurnius Piso (Livy refers to him), who was a consul in 133 BC and C. Licinius Macer, who was Tribune of the Plebs in 73 BC. Valerias Antias and Q. Aelius Tubero (who was possibly the son of a friend of Cicero) are two more examples. All these historians had certain things in common. They were all men with jobs in the government who were writing history as a hobby. They had no interest in historical research. They used history as a way to draw attention to the issues and debates of their time. For example ‘it is no wonder the Romans are so brave and warlike because they are descended from brave warlike ancestors.’ These historians did not try to find out whether the standard version of Roman history was true, they just accepted it and added their own spin. Livy does tell the traditional version of events and it is pretty obvious that it is not a true story. A lot of the stories from early Roman history come from old Greek myths. The Romulus and Remus story and some of the events in the lives of the kings come from Greek myths. The kings of Athens were overthrown and replaced with a democracy in 510 BC; a tale which miraculously appeared in the history of Rome. The Romans do not seem to have had a developed mythology of their own so they borrowed it from the Greeks. This is not that surprising when we remember that there were Greek city- states in Italy. Roman historians also used events in their recent history and put them into the distant past on the assumption that human nature stays the same. For example the conspiracy of Cataline is very similar to the plot against Rome by Tarquinius Superbus. Just because Livy’s account is embroidered with Greek myth and later Roman history, it does not mean that the basic facts are made up. Greek colonies were neighbours to Rome in the early days. Even though the Romans did not write things down in those days, the Greeks did and they included stories of early Rome in their local history. Rome was even mentioned in history books from mainland Greece. Etruscans may also have written about Rome in their history books although they did not survive. The other source of information for early Roman history is archaeology, which can sometimes be used to check if Livy was right although this is a very tricky business. |