The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (9 page)

For Cicero and moderate conservatives hundreds of years later, Servius Tullius was a second founder (
conditor
) of Rome, for he had discovered a way of taming the revolutionary forces of democracy. “
[The king] put into effect the principle which ought always to be adhered to in the commonwealth, that the greatest number should
not
have the greatest power,” he noted approvingly. “While no one was deprived of the suffrage, the majority of votes was in the hands of those to whom the highest welfare of the State was the most important.”

ACCORDING TO LIVY
, Servius’s census revealed
about 80,000 citizens—that is, adult men capable of bearing arms. This was a substantial number, and the king extended Rome’s boundary and the
pomerium
, the sacred space behind the city walls, or ramparts, to accommodate a growing population and the seven hills now contained in Rome with a continuous wall. These great Servian fortifications survive in part to this day. (The dating is a mistake; in fact, the walls were constructed in the late fourth century, and before then Rome had little in the way of adequate defenses. Servius Tullius probably merely erected some form of rough-and-ready rampart).

The census number is problematic, too, and modern scholars propose
a population of about 35,000 at the end of the sixth century
B.C
. Nevertheless, this would allow a force to take the field of more than 9,000 men of military age—in other words, one legion of 6,000 plus 2,400 light-armed troops and 600 cavalry. By the standards of the time, this was no mean army. So Rome had become a substantial power to deal with, and Servius is even reported as having conducted a war against the powerful Etruscans, including Veii, the richest city of the Etruscan federation.

ONCE AGAIN, THE
offspring of a previous king stirred up trouble for the current ruler. As we have seen, Servius tried to ensure the loyalty of the sons of Tarquinius Priscus by marrying them to his two daughters. Both unions were unhappy. The eldest boy, Lucius, was a hothead, eager for the throne; his wife loved her father and did her best to calm her husband. By contrast, the second daughter despised her consort, Aruns, who was a peace-loving youth, and bitterly regretted that she had not been allotted Lucius.

A prototype of Lady Macbeth, this second daughter arranged secret meetings with Lucius at which she upbraided him for his lack of ambition and encouraged him to plot against her father. Their first step was to arrange their own affairs; the two did away
with their respective spouses and, without any pretense of mourning and with the aged Servius’s reluctant consent, they married.

The couple then proceeded to the main action. Lucius was in and out of the houses of the patrician families, reminding them of favors his father had done them and insinuating that now was the time to show their gratitude. Young men he swung to his side with money.

When he felt that the moment had come, he forced his way into the Forum with an armed guard, marched into the Senate House, sat himself down on the throne (this was the curule chair, or
sella curulis
, a sort of grand stool, ivory-veneered and with curved legs forming a wide X, with low arms and no back), and ordered a crier to summon the Senate to meet
King
Tarquin. He then delivered a tirade against Servius Tullius. The main charge, according to Livy, was that

base-born himself, and basely crowned, he had made friends with the riff-raff of the gutter, where he belonged; hating the nobility to which he could not aspire, he had robbed the rich of their property and given it to vagabonds.

In other words, like Priscus, Servius was a Greek-style
turannos
and an enemy of the patricians. Just as he himself had every intention of becoming, he might have admitted to himself.

Tarquin was still in mid-flow when a report reached the king of what was afoot. Angry and alarmed, Servius hurried to the Forum and, standing in the antechamber of the Senate House, interrupted the speaker.

“What is the meaning of this, Tarquin? How dare you, while I am alive, to summon the Senate and sit in my chair?”

“It is my father’s chair. A king’s son is a better heir to the throne than a slave.”

Confusion. Opposing cheers. A riotous mob rushed the Senate
House. Tarquin had gone too far to pull back now. A strongly built man, he lifted up the old king by his middle and flung him down the entrance steps into the Forum before turning back to the meeting. Meanwhile, Servius’s retinue had fled, leaving him alone and unattended. Stunned, he was making his way back to the palace when some of Tarquin’s men caught and killed him.

It was said that the murder was committed on his daughter Tullia’s suggestion. She drove into the Forum in a carriage, called her husband out from the Senate House, and was the first to hail him as king. Tarquin advised her to go home, as the crowd might be dangerous. So she started off and, Livy writes:

At the top of Cypress Street [
vicus Cuprius
], where the shrine of Diana stood until recently, her driver was turning to the right to climb Orbius Rise [
clivus Orbius
] on the way to the Esquiline, when he pulled up short in sudden terror and pointed to Servius’s body lying mutilated on the road. There followed an act of bestial inhumanity—history preserves the memory of it in the name of the street, the Street of Crime [
vicus Sceleratus
]. The story goes that the crazed woman … drove the carriage over her father’s body. Blood from the corpse stained her clothes and spattered the carriage.

MANY YEARS IN
the mythical past, Apollo, beautiful god of the sun, music, and archery, was trying to persuade a young woman to have sex with him. He promised to grant her a wish. She grasped a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as the grains in her hand. The wish was granted, but, like so many other mortals who attracted the lecherous attention of classical divinities, she forgot to include undying youthfulness in her request. As time passed, she gradually withered away. A prophetess, or Sibyl, she lived in a cave at Cumae. She predicted the future by writing on oak leaves,
which she arranged at the entrance. According to the novelist Gaius Petronius Arbiter in the first century
A.D
.,
the Sibyl used to sit in a bottle suspended from the roof, and when someone asked what she wanted she replied, “I want to die.” (The actual cave was
discovered by a modern archaeologist, and in Cicero and Varro’s day was used as a shrine tended by a priestess.)

The Sibyl was somewhat more mobile when Rome was young. One day she presented herself at court, looking like an old woman. She brought with her nine books filled with prophecies, and offered to sell them to King Tarquin for a certain sum. He refused, and the Sibyl went away and burned three of the books. Shortly afterward, she returned and offered Tarquin the six remaining books for the same price. Laughter greeted the offer. So off she went again, burned three more books, and came back, offering the final three—for the same price.

By now, the Sibyl had won the king’s full attention. He asked the augurs to advise him. They warned him that his failure to purchase the complete set of books spelled disaster for Rome, and that he should at least secure those that were left. He paid up and stored the books in a cellar under the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, the construction of which he was superintending at the time. There they stayed, consulted during state emergencies, until the first century
B.C.
, when the temple burned down and the books with it.

The story reveals contrasting dimensions of Tarquin’s character—hastiness and arrogance, but also a realistic response to a check. Not surprisingly, he won the nickname of Superbus, the Proud. Cicero once remarked that the foundation of political wisdom is to
understand “the regular curving path through which governments travel.” In Superbus’s case, the curve led inexorably from assassination to despotism. Cicero went on: “[He] did not begin his reign with a clear conscience and, as he feared suffering the death penalty for his crime, he wished to make himself feared by others.”

Tarquin was no delegator, and he kept public business either in his hands or in those of his three sons, Titus, Aruns, and Sextus.
Access to his presence was strictly controlled, and he behaved with great haughtiness and brutality to all and sundry. He once, arbitrarily and against convention, had a number of Roman citizens stripped and bound to stakes in the Forum, where they were then beaten to death with rods.

In spite of his violent personality, Tarquin’s reign was in many ways a successful one. Like previous kings, he conducted an expansionist foreign policy, deploying a combination of military force and guile. His main object was to establish Rome as the leader of the confederacy of the tribes of Latium, and he also moved farther down the peninsula to attack the Volsci, a tribe to the south of Latium. The city’s territory now stretched to the sea, where the port of Ostia enhanced trade and, thanks to Superbus, was encroaching southward into the lands of its Latin neighbors. Here we see the beginnings of Rome’s imperial career.

On one occasion Tarquin was besieging the town of Gabii, which refused to join the confederacy. Making little progress, he devised an ingenious stratagem. His son Sextus, pretending that he had been badly treated by his father, fled to Gabii, bearing on his back the marks of a heavy beating. He soon won the confidence of the inhabitants and was appointed the town’s commander. He then sent for his father asking what he should do next. Tarquin, suspicious of the messenger’s loyalty, said nothing but, seeing some poppies, simply walked up and down striking off the tallest heads.

The bemused messenger returned to Gabii and reported the king’s curious behavior. Sextus immediately got the point. He was to rid himself of the town’s leading citizens. Some were openly executed; others, who could not plausibly be charged with any offense, were put to death in secret. Still others were allowed to go into exile, forfeiting their property. Sextus distributed the profits of this exercise in liquidation. Livy neatly observes: “
In the sweetness of private gain public calamity was forgotten.” Without complaint or resistance, Gabii let itself be handed over to the Romans.

The king was a busy builder. He installed tiers of seating for the
Circus Maximus and completed the vast Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the lower crest of the Capitol. (Priscus had, at most, laid only the foundations.) Standing on a massive platform fifty-three meters wide and sixty-two long, it was a proud assertion of the magnificence of the Rome of the Tarquins. Probably made from mud brick faced with stucco, it contained three
cellae
(inner chambers) dedicated, respectively, to Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and Minerva. (Here the goddesses were on their best behavior, the scandalous judgment of Paris a distant memory.) The cult image of Jupiter was made of terra-cotta and showed him brandishing a thunderbolt. He wore a tunic and a purple toga (as we have seen, the costume worn by generals celebrating a triumph, when they processed through the city to the Capitol). The roof was wooden, with bright, multicolored terra-cotta decorations, and on the peak of the triangular façade stood another terra-cotta statue of Jupiter riding a four-horsed chariot.

Before building began, the augurs investigated the opinions of deities who already had holy places on the site. They all agreed to be resettled elsewhere—except for Terminus, the god of boundaries, so a special shrine in his honor was incorporated into the temple. His lack of cooperation was regarded as a good omen, for it signified the permanence of Rome’s borders.

The temple quickly became the center of Rome’s religious life. It was the repository of treasures donated by victorious generals, dedications, and military trophies. The rooms got so cluttered that in 179
B.C
. numerous statues and commemorative shields fastened to the columns were cleared out.

A development of more practical value was the transformation of the brook that crossed the Forum into the city’s main drain, the Cloaca Maxima. Various smaller streams debouched into it. In Tarquin’s day, it was an open sewer, crossed by a bridge that doubled as a shrine to Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings and endings. As a result, the Forum finally lost its marshiness, and large-scale building became possible.