Roman Kingdom

Romulus and Remus

formationDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

The Roman tradition, as Livy records it four and a half centuries after the fact and admits himself he cannot vouch for, traces the city's founding through a royal house in the nearby city of Alba Longa, dispossessed by a usurping brother who had the rightful heir's newborn twin sons, Romulus and Remus, exposed on the flooding Tiber rather than killed outright. The basket carrying them came to rest at the foot of the Palatine hill, where a she-wolf is said to have suckled them until a shepherd found and raised them as his own.

Musei Capitolini, Rome · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Merulana · CC BY-SA 4.0

Livy himself offers the sceptic's reading alongside the miraculous one in the same passage: perhaps the shepherd's own wife had simply been a woman of easy reputation, whom Latin slang called lupa, a she-wolf, and the story of an actual wolf grew from the word rather than the other way around. He does not resolve which is true. He records both and moves on, which is itself a fair description of how seriously the story should be taken as documented history.

A city, and then a killing

Grown to adulthood and told the truth of their birth, the twins restored their grandfather to the throne of Alba Longa and then set out to found a city of their own on the hills where they had been raised. They disagreed about which hill, and about which of them the gods favoured to rule it, and settled the question by augury - watching the sky for birds, the standard Roman method of reading divine approval for centuries afterward. Remus, on the Aventine, saw six vultures first. Romulus, on the Palatine, saw twelve, later.

The dispute over whose omen counted more - the first sighting, or the greater number - was never settled by argument. Romulus began marking out a wall around the Palatine; Remus, mocking its modest height, jumped over it; and Romulus, or one of his own men, killed him for it. Rome's own foundational story about itself begins with a fratricide over the size of a boundary wall, a detail later Roman writers found uncomfortable enough that some ancient versions soften or omit it rather than let the city's first act be its founder killing his own brother.

The asylum and the Sabine women

Needing a population for a city built on a hill nobody else particularly wanted, Romulus is said to have declared the ground between the Capitoline and Palatine an asylum: any man, free or not, fleeing debt or crime or simply looking for a fresh start, was welcome and protected. It grew Rome's numbers quickly and gave it, in the tradition's own account, a citizen body disproportionately made up of exactly the kind of men a respectable neighbouring city would not want its own daughters marrying.

Musée du Louvre, Paris · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Jacques-Louis David, 1799 · Public domain

The solution the story gives is the rape of the Sabine women: Romulus invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and had his own men seize the unmarried women present by force. War followed, and the story's own resolution is deliberately not a Roman military triumph: the Sabine women themselves, by then married to the men who had taken them and unwilling to see their Sabine fathers and Roman husbands kill each other, stepped between the two armies and stopped the battle. Rome and the Sabine community merged into one people under a joint kingship for a time, before Romulus alone.

What the story is doing

Read as history, almost none of this survives contact with the question of how anyone could know it. Read as the account a much later Roman aristocracy told about its own city's beginnings, the pattern is consistent and worth noticing: violence answered not by more violence but by a forced, uneasy integration of outsiders into the citizen body - exiles and debtors first, a conquered neighbouring people second - is exactly the mechanism the later republic used, again and again, to grow its own population and its alliance network. Whether the story shaped the practice or the practice shaped how later Romans told the story, the two match closely enough that the founding legend reads less like a fantasy unrelated to how Rome actually operated than like Rome's own explanation, to itself, of why it operated that way.

The three kings after Romulus

formationDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

The tradition gives Rome three kings between Romulus and the Etruscan dynasty that follows them, and credits each with a different half of what a city needs beyond a founder: religion, war, and reach.

Numa Pompilius

Romulus, by the tradition's own account, did not die naturally but vanished during a storm, and was afterward worshipped as a god under the name Quirinus - the first and most dramatic instance of a pattern later Roman emperors would revive for themselves. His successor, chosen by the Roman and Sabine communities together after a year without a king, was Numa, a Sabine known for piety rather than military skill, and the tradition makes the contrast deliberate: where Romulus had built the city with the sword, Numa built its religious calendar, its priesthoods and the observances that governed Roman public life for the rest of its history.

Roman Forum, Rome · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Gary Todd · Public domain

He is credited with fixing the ritual calendar, establishing the priestly colleges - the pontiffs who oversaw religious law, the augurs who read omens, the Vestal Virgins who kept Rome's sacred fire perpetually alight - and closing the doors of the temple of Janus, left open in time of war and shut only when Rome was at peace with every neighbour. Later Roman writers record that the doors were closed exactly twice more in the whole of the kingdom and republic's combined history after Numa's own reign, which is itself a fair measure of how rarely the state that inherited his institutions found itself entirely at peace.

Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

Tullus Hostilius

Numa's successor reversed the emphasis entirely. Tullus Hostilius fought a war against Rome's own mother city, Alba Longa, and the tradition resolves it through single combat between two sets of triplet brothers, the Horatii for Rome and the Curiatii for Alba - a device, real armies substituted with representative champions, that appears in more than one ancient Mediterranean tradition and should be read as a story shape rather than a documented battle plan. Two of the three Horatii died before the third, wounded but faster than his exhausted opponents, killed all three Curiatii in turn and won the war for Rome.

Alba Longa's subsequent betrayal of its alliance obligations led Tullus to destroy the city outright and resettle its population in Rome, doubling the city's citizen body at a stroke - the same absorption pattern the previous chapter's asylum and Sabine material already established, now applied to an entire conquered city rather than to individual migrants.

Ancus Marcius

The fourth king, Numa's own grandson by the tradition's genealogy, combined both emphases: he is credited with renewing Numa's religious observances after Tullus's own neglect of them, while also extending Rome's territory to the Mediterranean coast, founding the port town of Ostia at the Tiber's mouth to give the city its own access to the sea and its salt trade, and building the first bridge across the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius, deliberately constructed of wood so it could be dismantled quickly if an enemy needed to be kept off the city's own bank.

What three kings together were credited with

None of these reigns survives as anything closer to documented history than Romulus's own founding does - no independent record from the eighth or seventh century BC corroborates any of it, and the neat progression from piety to war to a balance of both reads at least as much like a later Roman audience's idea of what a well-rounded sequence of founding kings ought to look like as it does like an actual record of three men's separate reigns. What the tradition establishes, whether or not any individual detail happened as told, is a Rome that already had, in outline, two things neither the kingdom nor the republic that followed it ever stopped resting on: a religious apparatus nobody seriously proposed abolishing, and a habit of absorbing whoever it conquered rather than simply destroying them.

The Etruscan kings

expansionDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

The tradition's last three kings belong to a single Etruscan-connected family, and mark, even in the legendary account, a change of register: these are the kings credited with the physical monuments a visitor to Rome could later actually go and look at, rather than only with wars and religious institutions no building preserved.

Tarquinius Priscus

Lucius Tarquinius, the son of a Greek migrant to the Etruscan city of Tarquinii, is said to have moved to Rome specifically because Etruscan custom barred a man of mixed and partly foreign blood from holding office in his own city, and to have been elected king there instead on the strength of his wealth and ability - a story that reads suspiciously like a later explanation for why Rome's kingship passed to an outsider family, but one the Romans themselves preserved rather than suppressed.

Rome · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0

He is credited with beginning the building programme later kings and the early republic both continued: the Circus Maximus, laid out in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine for chariot racing; the Cloaca Maxima, a great drainage sewer that channelled the marshy ground between Rome's hills into the Tiber and made the valley that became the Forum usable land; and the beginning of construction on a temple to Jupiter on the Capitoline hill that later kings and the early republic finished. Whether any specific structure now identifiable in the ground actually dates to his own traditional reign in the early sixth century BC is a separate question from whether Rome underwent exactly this kind of transformation, from a cluster of hilltop villages to a city with monumental public works, in roughly this period - the archaeological record supports the second claim considerably more confidently than the first.

Rome · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Penelope Davies · CC BY-SA 4.0

Servius Tullius

Tarquinius Priscus's successor, by the tradition's own telling, was not his son but a former household slave - a detail the Romans preserved with some evident discomfort, softened in one version of the story by making him secretly a nobleman's freeborn son taken captive as a child, and left plainly stated as slave birth in another. However he came to the throne, Servius Tullius is credited with the single most consequential institutional reform the kingship produced: a census dividing the male citizen body into property classes, each obligated to supply a specified number of armed men equipped to a standard the class could afford, voting in an assembly - the comitia centuriata - organised by those same classes rather than by simple headcount.

The effect, whether it worked exactly this way from the start or was elaborated by later generations who then read it back into Servius's own reign, tied military obligation directly to political voice: a man's standing in the assembly matched what he was expected to contribute in war. It is the same principle the early republic's own citizen levy ran on for the next three centuries, unmodified in its essentials until the manpower crises of the later republic forced a different approach entirely.

He is also credited with extending Rome's own city wall to enclose all seven of the traditional hills and with expanding the citizen body through further conquest and absorption of neighbouring Latin communities - though the wall that carries his name today, standing in visible sections around modern Rome, is dated by its construction material to more than a century after his own traditional reign, a discrepancy the next chapter takes up directly.

What "peak" means for a legendary sequence

Servius Tullius is named as the kingdom's peak here on institutional grounds the later republic itself never abandoned, not because his own reign can be independently dated or verified in the way a documented ruler's can. The census, the property-based military classes, and the assembly built on them outlasted the monarchy that supposedly created them by centuries - which is either a remarkable case of one king's reform surviving essentially intact through five hundred years of political upheaval, or, just as plausibly, a later republican institution's own origin story, retrojected onto the king the tradition found easiest to credit with it.

What the ground actually shows

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

The Roman tradition gives the kingdom a fixed shape: seven kings, a founding year calculated backward from it by the scholar Varro in the first century BC, and a total span of two hundred and forty-four years averaging a suspiciously tidy thirty-five years per reign. Archaeology does not confirm this shape, and does not straightforwardly contradict it either. What it shows is a different kind of picture, built from the ground rather than from a king list, and the two do not line up neatly.

Huts before a city

Excavation on the Palatine has found the remains of small oval huts - postholes, wall trenches and drainage gullies marking out one-room structures with thatched roofs - dating to the ninth and eighth centuries BC, the period the traditional founding date falls within. This is consistent, in a general way, with the idea of a settlement beginning around then. It is not consistent with a single founding act by one man in one year: the broader archaeological culture these huts belong to, usually called Latial culture, shows scattered hilltop villages across the region for generations before and after the traditional date, gradually growing, merging and competing with each other rather than one village suddenly becoming a city on a fixed day.

What the material record does support is a genuine, gradual process of exactly the kind the founding legend compresses into a single dramatic year: separate hilltop communities on the Palatine, the Quirinal, the Esquiline and Rome's other hills coalescing into one settlement over the eighth and seventh centuries BC, roughly the period the tradition assigns to Romulus and his immediate successors.

The Etruscan question

The archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the sixth century BC - the period the tradition assigns to the Etruscan-connected kings - is considerably richer, and does show a city undergoing real transformation: monumental temple construction on the Capitoline, elite tombs with grave goods matching contemporary Etruscan and Greek imports, and Rome's earliest substantial inscriptions, written in an alphabet derived from Etruscan models. Etruscan cultural and political influence over Rome in this period is not seriously disputed. Whether it took the specific form of three named individual kings ruling in the exact sequence and for the exact reigns Livy gives is a separate question the material evidence cannot answer either way.

Roma Termini, Rome · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Joël Thibault · CC BY-SA 4.0

The wall that is not old enough

One specific case is worth stating plainly because it can be checked against physical evidence rather than argued from silence. The wall enclosing Rome's seven hills, standing today in visible sections and traditionally attributed to Servius Tullius in the sixth century BC, is built from a volcanic stone quarried at Veii - a city Rome did not control until it conquered Veii in 396 BC. The wall cannot have been built from that stone before Rome held the quarry it came from, which places its actual construction in the fourth century BC, most likely after the Gallic sack of Rome around 390 gave the city an urgent, documented reason to build proper fortifications. The wall that carries Servius Tullius's name was built more than a century after his own traditional reign ended.

Roma Termini, Rome · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Sergey Sosnovskiy · CC BY-SA 4.0

What that means for the rest of the tradition

The wall is a useful case precisely because it is checkable in a way most of the kingdom's own history is not: a specific structure, a specific king credited with it, and a specific piece of physical evidence that settles the question independently of what any literary source claims. It does not prove the other kings or their other achievements are equally fictional. It does establish that the Roman tradition was capable of attaching a later achievement to an earlier, more prestigious name, whether through honest confusion across centuries of oral transmission or through a later builder's own decision to associate new work with an old and respected king's memory. Every other specific claim about the kingdom's own history - what Numa actually instituted, what Tarquinius Priscus actually built, whether the census attributed to Servius Tullius took the exact form later sources describe - should be read with the same possibility in mind, and mostly cannot be checked against anything as solid as a quarry's own geology.

Tarquin the Proud

contractionDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

The kingdom's seventh and last king is, in the tradition's own telling, the one whose reign is meant to explain why the office was abolished rather than reformed. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus - the surname itself means proud, or arrogant, and was almost certainly applied retrospectively by a tradition writing his character backward from his ending - took the throne, by Livy's account, by having his own father-in-law Servius Tullius murdered, and then governing without the senate's ordinary consultation, executing or exiling opponents without trial, and using forced labour on his own building projects.

The omen and the feigned madness

Livy records a story meant to set up the man who would eventually end the monarchy. A snake was said to have appeared from a crack in the palace and thrown the household into a panic serious enough that Tarquin sent two of his own sons, along with his nephew Lucius Junius Brutus, to consult the oracle at Delphi. Brutus, the story says, had deliberately affected stupidity for years to avoid being seen as a threat by an uncle who had already killed other relatives with better claims to the throne - carrying a golden rod hidden inside a hollow wooden staff as a private joke on the oracle's own riddling style.

Asked who would rule Rome next, the oracle answered that it would be whoever first kissed his own mother. Tarquin's sons drew lots to decide which of them would race home to try it; Brutus, understanding the riddle correctly where his cousins had not, deliberately fell and kissed the earth - the mother of all things - on the way out of the temple. The story exists to explain, before the killing that actually ends the kingdom happens, why the man who leads the revolt was in a position to do it at all: patient, apparently harmless, and already quietly certain of his own future role.

Gabii and the poppy heads

A separate episode, concerning the Latin town of Gabii, is preserved mainly for the political lesson later Roman writers found useful to draw from it, and is worth including for what it says about how the tradition understood Tarquin's own method of rule. Unable to take Gabii by force, Tarquin is said to have sent his son Sextus there pretending to have fled his father's cruelty; once trusted and given command of Gabii's own army, Sextus sent a messenger to his father asking what to do next. Tarquin, walking in his garden, made no verbal reply at all - he simply walked among his poppies, striking off the heads of the tallest with his stick, and sent the messenger back with nothing but that image to report. Sextus understood: he had the leading men of Gabii killed or exiled one by one, and the town, deprived of anyone capable of organising resistance, surrendered to Rome without further need for a siege.

Gabii, Lazio, Italy · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Carlo Morino · CC BY-SA 3.0

What the story is building toward

Both episodes exist in the tradition to characterise a specific kind of rule - one that governs by removing anyone capable of independent standing, whether through outright murder or through patient, deniable manoeuvring - immediately before the same son's own act of violence against a Roman noblewoman becomes the spark that ends the whole arrangement. The kingdom's own final king is remembered, in other words, less as a specific historical individual than as the tradition's own fullest available illustration of exactly what the office of king could become and exactly why a Roman audience five centuries later still found the word itself worth fearing.

The expulsion

endDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

The act that actually ended the kingdom is a single episode, one the state that replaced it went on to tell and retell at far greater length than almost anything else in its own early history: Tarquin's son raped a Roman noblewoman named Lucretia, who told her husband and father what had happened, made them swear an oath of vengeance, and killed herself rather than live with the disgrace. Lucius Junius Brutus - the same nephew whose feigned stupidity and kissed earth the previous chapters have already followed - pulled the knife from her wound, swore on it to drive out the whole house of Tarquin, and called on Rome to join him.

What happened to the office, not just the man

Tarquin and his family fled the city. What matters more than the flight itself is what the Romans did with the vacancy it left: they did not simply depose one bad king and choose a better one, which every earlier crisis in the tradition - the year without a king after Romulus, the disputed succession to Ancus Marcius - had resolved by finding a new individual to hold the same office. In 509 BC, by the tradition's own dating, the office of king was abolished outright and replaced with two annually elected magistrates holding equal power, each able to block the other - a structural answer to the specific failure mode the previous chapter's stories had spent their own energy illustrating.

Two hundred and forty-four years, on one reckoning

Whatever can or cannot be verified about any individual king's reign, the Roman tradition treated the kingdom as a single, bounded unit of time with a clear beginning and a clear end, more confidently dated by later generations than almost anything that happened within it. That confidence is itself worth noting rather than simply inheriting: a chronology calculated backward centuries later from a fixed list of seven names is a different kind of evidence than a contemporary record, and the previous chapter's archaeology suggests the actual transition from scattered villages to a kingless city-state was considerably messier, and probably longer, than one dramatic year and seven tidy reigns.

What is not in serious doubt is that some transition of this general kind happened around this period, and that whatever Rome had been governed by before it, the state that emerged afterward defined itself, for the whole of its subsequent history, in explicit and permanent opposition to the word rex.

Roman Forum, Rome · Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

What outlasted the kings

afterlifeDrafted from Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

The republic that replaced the kingdom abolished the office of king so thoroughly that the word itself became close to unusable in Roman political life for the next five centuries. It did not abolish the institutions the kingdom was credited with building. Almost the whole of Rome's religious and social apparatus passed from the monarchy to the kingless state that followed it essentially intact, run by different people under a different constitution.

The priesthoods kept their offices

The colleges Numa was credited with founding - the pontiffs, the augurs, the Vestal Virgins tending Rome's sacred fire - continued exactly as before, filled now by election or co-optation among the aristocracy rather than by royal appointment, but performing the same rites on the same calendar. One office was kept in a form that openly admitted what had happened to it: the rex sacrorum, king of sacred rites, a priesthood created specifically to perform the religious ceremonies a king had once performed in person, held for life by a man permanently barred from standing for any political magistracy at all - an office whose entire design was to preserve the word rex inside Rome's religious life while making absolutely certain the man holding it could never again wield the political power that word had once meant.

Roman Forum, Rome · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

The census and the classes

Servius Tullius's property-based classes and the centuriate assembly built on them did not end with the monarchy either. The republic went on taking a census, organising its citizens into the same graduated classes for military and voting purposes, and holding elections in the same assembly, largely unmodified in its basic structure, for centuries - one king's own credited reform outlasting every one of the kings who came after him, functioning as ordinary republican machinery long after nobody alive remembered a monarchy at all.

The senate itself

The kingdom's tradition already includes a senate, advising the king and in the interregnum periods between one king's death and the next king's election reportedly running the state's affairs directly, a body of elders whose standing rested on age, family and experience rather than on holding an office of their own. The republic's own senate is, on the tradition's own account, the same body under the same name, continuing to advise magistrates who had replaced a king rather than starting again from nothing.

What actually changed

What the expulsion abolished was concentration, not government. A single man holding religious, military and judicial authority together, for life, with no formal check on any of it, became instead a scattered set of separate offices - a religious king with no politics, elected annual magistrates with no permanent tenure, a senate with authority but no formal power to legislate - each one recognisable as a fragment of what the kingship, in the tradition's own account, had held whole. The republic did not invent Roman government. It took the monarchy's own institutions apart and rebuilt them deliberately so that no single piece, and no single man, could ever hold them all together again. Whether that design worked for as long as its own builders hoped, and what eventually put every piece back into one man's hands regardless, belongs to the republic's own much longer story rather than to the kingdom that came before it.