1. Origins

The origins of Rome are shrouded in mist. We can discount the mythological account that attempts to trace the founders of Rome to the legendary Aeneas, who fled from the burning ruins of Troy. This was originally an invention of Greek historians, which the Romans eagerly took up in an attempt to attribute a noble and illustrious ancestry to what was a far more ignoble affair.

Similarly, the name of the mythical founder of Rome (Romulus) simply means ‘man of Rome’, and therefore tells us nothing at all. According to the traditional belief, the date of the founding of Rome was 753 BC. But this date is contradicted by the archaeological evidence: too late for the first regular settlements and too early for the time of true urbanisation.

The most celebrated historian of early Rome, Livy, mixes genuine historical material with a mass of legend, speculation and mythology, from which it is difficult to extract the truth. However, even these myths are of tremendous importance because they furnish us with significant clues. By comparing the written record – confused as it is – with the evidence of archaeology, comparative linguistics and other sciences, it is possible to reconstruct, at least in outline, the origins of Rome.

The pastoral economy of the founders of Rome is probably true, since it corresponds to what we know about the way of life of many of the Latin tribes, although by the beginning of the first millennium BC, they were already practising agriculture and cultivating the soil with light ploughs.

According to Livy, one such group of shepherds and farmers migrated from the area of Mount Alban (Monte Cavo), some thirteen miles south-east of Rome in the early years of the first millennium BC, and built their huts on the banks of the Tiber. However, this particular group settled in an area that possessed a key economic importance. Rome’s geographical position, controlling the crossing of the Tiber River, which separates the two halves of the Italian peninsula, was of great strategic importance for the nations seeking to control the destiny of Italy. Situated on a ford of the Tiber, Rome was at a crossroads of traffic following the river valley and of traders travelling north and south on the west side of the Italian Peninsula.

To the south of Rome lay the fertile agricultural lands of the Campanian Plain, watered by two rivers and capable of producing as many as three grain crops a year in some districts. Rome also possessed the highly lucrative salt trade, derived from the salt flats at the mouth of the Tiber. The importance of this commodity in the ancient world cannot be overstated.

To this day we say: “a man who is worth his salt”. In ancient Rome, this was literally true. The word ‘salary’ comes from the Latin word, salarium, which linked employment, salt and soldiers, although the exact link is unclear. One theory is that the word soldier itself comes from the Latin sal dare (to give salt). The Roman historian Pliny the Elder states in his Natural History that salt “has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term ‘salary’”.^[1] More likely, the salarium was either an allowance paid to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt or the price of having soldiers conquer salt supplies and guard the Salt Roads (Via Salarium) that led to Rome.

Whatever version one accepts, there is no question about the vital importance of salt. The salt trade must have played a key role in the establishment of a prosperous settled community in Rome, which will also have attracted the unwelcome attention of less favoured tribes. The picture that emerges of the first Roman community is that of a group of clans fighting to defend their territory against the pressure of other peoples (Latins, Etruscans, Sabines etc.).

Early Roman society

According to Livy, Rome was formed by shepherds, under the leadership of chieftains. He refers to the ancient tribes of Rome, the Ramnenses, Titienses and Luceres, about which we know little. As the story goes, the first settlement was established by a number of Latin clans, or gentes, who were soon joined by a “promiscuous crowd of freemen and slaves” from neighbouring states.^[2] Concerned by the lack of women in their new community, the Romans staged a mass abduction of women from the neighbouring Sabines, who, although understandably put out at first, eventually joined the growing city, women, men and all.

Whatever the truth of this tale, which is almost certainly more myth than fact, what appears likely is that from very early on the population of Rome itself seems to have been a mixture of different peoples. This was the natural consequence of Rome’s geographical situation and long years of war. Over a long period, during which the original inhabitants were mixed with many other elements, they gradually succeeded in uniting the scattered inhabitants under a common state.

No one could belong to the Roman people unless he or she was a member of a gens. Ten gentes formed a curia. Every curia had its own religious rites, shrines and priests; the latter, as a body, formed one of the Roman priestly colleges. Ten curiae formed a tribus or tribe, which probably, like the rest of the Latin tribes, originally had an elected president-military leader and high priest. The three tribes together formed the Roman people, the Populus Romanus.

Friedrich Engels, in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, lists the following characteristics of the Roman gens:

1. Mutual right of inheritance among gentile members; the property remained within the gens;
2. Possession of a common burial place;
3. Common religious rites (the sacra gentilitia);
4. Obligation not to marry within the gens;
5. Common ownership of land;
6. Obligation of mutual protection and help among members of the gens;
7. Right to bear the gentile name;
8. Right to adopt strangers into the gens; and
9. The right to elect the chief and to depose him.^[3]

Initially, it seems that public affairs were managed by the Senate (the council of elders, from the Latin senex, an old man). This was composed of the chiefs of the 300 gentes. It was for this reason that they were called ‘fathers’, patres, from which we later get the denomination patricians. Here we see how the original patriarchal relations of the old, egalitarian gentile system gradually produced a privileged tribal aristocracy, which crystallised into the Patrician Order – the ruling class in early Roman society. As Engels explains:

[…] the custom of electing always from the same family in the gens brought into being the first hereditary nobility. These families called themselves ‘patricians’, and claimed for themselves exclusive right of entry into the senate and tenure of all other offices. The acquiescence of the people in this claim, in course of time, and its transformation into an actual right, appear in legend as the story that Romulus conferred the patriciate and its privileges on the first senators and their descendants. The senate, like the Athenian boulè, made final decisions in many matters and held preparatory discussions on those of greater importance, particularly new laws. With regard to these, the decision rested with the assembly of the people called the comitia curiata (assembly of the curiae). The people assembled together grouped in curiae, each curia probably grouped in gentes; each of the thirty curiae had one vote in the final decision. The assembly of the curiae accepted or rejected all laws, elected all higher officials, including the rex (so-called king), declared war (the senate, however, concluded peace), and, as supreme court, decided, on the appeal of the parties concerned, all cases involving death sentence on a Roman citizen. Lastly, besides the senate and the assembly of the people, there was the rex, who corresponded exactly to the Greek basileus and was not at all the almost absolute king which Mommsen made him out to be. He also was military leader, high priest, and president of certain courts. He had no civil authority whatever, nor any power over the life, liberty, or property of citizens, except such as derived from his disciplinary powers as military leader or his executive powers as president of a court.^[4]

As chiefs of the gentes, the patricians had an important degree of authority over the use and distribution of the gentes’ communal lands. Heritable property was limited to livestock, slaves and a small plot of land called a heredium. However, the majority of the arable and pastoral land inhabited by each gens was the property of the gens itself, which was granted to individuals on a revocable basis. Through their domination of the institutions of the gens, the patrician chiefs were able to grant lands to their own followers and dependents, known as clientes, and began to accrue a degree of wealth over and above the rest of the population. This economic power of the patricians was also expressed militarily, in that only members of this emerging aristocracy could afford to maintain their own horses.

The exact process by which the old gentile society was destroyed is unclear. The increased wealth derived from the salt trade must have played a role, creating a growing gulf between the rich and the poor members of the gens. What is clear, however, is that eventually the granting of revocable plots out of the communal lands became fixed into private, heritable property.

The rise of private property created sharp divisions in society from a very early date. The harshness of the property laws in early Roman society coincided with the form of the family, which in Rome was the most extreme expression of patriarchy. The (male) head of the family enjoyed absolute power over all other members of the family, who were also regarded as private property, a fact that was already noted by Hegel:

We thus find family relations among the Romans not as a beautiful, free relation of love and feeling; the place of confidence is usurped by the principle of severity, dependence, and subordination. Marriage, in its strict and formal shape, bore quite the aspect of a mere contract; the wife was part of the husband’s property (in manum conventio), and the marriage ceremony was based on a coemtio, in a form such as might have been adopted on the occasion of any other purchase. The husband acquired a power over his wife, such as he had over his daughter; nor less over her property; so that everything which she gained, she gained for her husband. […]

The relation of sons was perfectly similar: they were, on the one hand, about as dependent on the paternal power as the wife on the matrimonial; they could not possess property – it made no difference whether they filled a high office in the State or not (though the peculia castrensia, and adventitia were differently regarded); but on the other hand, when they were emancipated, they had no connection with their father and their family. An evidence of the degree in which the position of children was regarded as analogous to that of slaves, is presented in the imaginaria servitus (mancipium), through which emancipated children had to pass. In reference to inheritance, morality would seem to demand that children should share equally. Among the Romans, on the contrary, testamentary caprice manifests itself in its harshest form.

Thus perverted and demoralised, do we here see the fundamental relations of ethics.^[5]

The new form of the patriarchal family, based upon the tyrannical rule of the pater familias, was at the same time a reflection of the changed social and property relations and a firm base upon which the latter rested. And gradually, the state as an organ of class domination raised itself above society. The history of the Roman Republic is merely the continuation, extension and deepening of these tendencies, which in the end destroyed the Republic itself.

The Etruscans

In his masterpiece, History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky explains one of the most important laws of history, the law of combined and uneven development:

Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class.^[6]

The historical development of Russia was shaped by its more advanced neighbours. It was not helped by its early contacts with the more backward Tartars and other nomadic steppe dwellers from the East who contributed nothing to its culture and barely left an imprint on its language. It was held back for centuries by its subjugation by the Mongols, although the latter left its imprint on Russian society and particularly the state, which had certain semi-Asiatic characteristics. But it received a strong impulse from its wars with the more developed Poles and Swedes.

The case of Rome is analogous. What determined its course of cultural and economic development was not the long wars with the barbarian Latin tribes, but rather their contact with other peoples that had reached a higher level of socio-economic development: the Etruscans, the Greeks of southern Italy, and the Carthaginians.

As a general rule, backward nations tend to assimilate the material and intellectual conquests of more advanced countries, although this process can often take the most complicated and contradictory forms, combining elements of extreme backwardness with the most modern innovations imported from external sources. This was true of ancient Rome. Like the Japanese in more modern times, the Romans showed a tremendous ability to learn from and assimilate the experiences of other nations, although these borrowings from other peoples were always coloured by a peculiar Roman outlook.

Roman art began by copying Greek originals and never freed itself from Greek influences. But the flexibility and the free and cheerful spirit of Greek art was alien to the psychology of the Romans, who, originating as a race of hill-dwelling shepherds and small farmers never completely freed themselves from a certain narrowness of mind – an unsmiling provincial ‘practicality’ that expressed itself in art and religion by a stern and implacable austerity.

In the early days their gods were the simple deities of an agricultural people, though infused with a strong warrior spirit. Their most important god was originally Mars. But they were pragmatic about religion as about everything else, and regularly imported any foreign deity that seemed useful to them.

When they conquered an enemy, they not only took his wealth and his women, but also his main gods, who were immediately installed in a new temple in Rome. This was a way of emphasising the completeness of their domination and also provided them with allies in Heaven, which they hoped would provide them with some assistance for the next war in this world. In this way, over a period, Rome acquired, alongside a wealth of loot, a superabundance of gods, which must have been quite bewildering at times.

The Romans succeeded in fighting off the neighbouring Latin tribes, whose level of socio-economic development was not so very different from their own. But to the North they were faced with pressure from a more advanced people: the Etruscans. The exact origin of the Etruscans is still a matter of controversy, since very little Etruscan literature remains and the language of inscriptions on their monuments has been only partially deciphered. We have gained most of our knowledge of the Etruscans from studying the remains of their city walls, houses, monuments and tombs.

Some scholars, both ancient and modern, considered them a seafaring people from Asia Minor. But the fact that their language did not belong to the Indo-European family, like Latin and Greek, has led others to suggest that they may have been an original Italian population, a theory which has been supported by recent genetic studies.

At any rate, as early as 1000 BC they were living in Italy in an area that was roughly equivalent to modern Tuscany, from the Tiber River north almost to the Arno River. After 650 BC, the Etruscans became dominant in north-central Italy. According to tradition, Rome had been under the control of seven kings, beginning with the mythical Romulus who along with his brother Remus were said to have founded the city of Rome.

The last three ‘kings’ of Rome were said to have been Etruscan: Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus. Although the list of kings is of dubious historical value, it is believed that the last-named kings may have been historical figures. This suggests that Rome was under the influence of the Etruscans for about a century. The early histories state that Rome was at one time under the rule of Etruscan ‘kings’, and the archaeological record shows that Rome was indeed at one stage an Etruscan city.

Actually, the use of the word ‘king’ is incorrect. Engels points out that the Latin word for king (rex) is the same as the Celtic-Irish righ (tribal chief) and the Gothic reiks, which signified the head of the gens or tribe:

The office of rex was not hereditary; on the contrary, he was first elected by the assembly of the curiae probably on the nomination of his predecessor, and then at a second meeting solemnly installed in office. That he could also be deposed is shown by the fate of Tarquinius Superbus.

Like the Greeks of the heroic age, the Romans in the age of the so-called kings lived in a military democracy founded on gentes, phratries, and tribes and developed out of them. Even if the curiae and tribes were to a certain extent artificial groups, they were formed after the genuine, primitive models of the society out of which they had arisen and by which they were still surrounded on all sides. Even if the primitive patrician nobility had already gained ground, even if the reges were endeavouring gradually to extend their power, it does not change the original, fundamental character of the constitution, and that alone matters.^[7]

The Etruscans were interested in Rome for both economic and strategic reasons. South of Rome, Italy was dominated by powerful and prosperous Greek colonies. Indeed, the ancients referred to southern Italy and Sicily as Magna Graecia (Greater Greece). Etruscan expansion brought them into contact with the Latins, and eventually they reached the very frontier of Magna Graecia, where they began to establish colonies.

This opened up a new period of conflict between the Etruscans and Greeks for the domination of Latium, the homeland of the Latin tribes. It was impossible for the Etruscans to hold Latium unless they took Rome, which lay between Latium and themselves. In addition to its strategic importance, the salt from the mouth of the Tiber was essential to Etruscan cities, which had no other source of this important commodity.

Rome was surrounded by prosperous Etruscan city states like Tarquinii, Cere and Veii, and it was under their influence that Rome was transformed. They were on a higher plane of economic and cultural development than the Romans, with whom they traded, and whom they eventually dominated. The fact that the Etruscans were on a higher level explains why they succeeded in establishing this superiority. They were organised, like the Greeks, in city-states, and their art and culture showed strong Greek influences. Weapons and other implements, exquisite jewellery, coins, statues of stone, bronze, and terracotta, and black pottery (called bucchero) have been found.

Roman historians never actually state that the Etruscans conquered Rome, but that may be for reasons of national pride. But it is clear that, in one way or another, they took control of the city. Before the arrival of the Etruscans, Rome was a small conglomeration of villages approaching what Engels would have called the higher stage of barbarism.

From an economic, cultural and technical point of view, the Etruscans must have had a profound effect on the economic life of Rome, its development, culture and social structure. Only the later influence of the Greeks of southern Italy was greater. Contact with a more advanced civilisation would have finally put an end to whatever was left of the old gentile constitution, strengthening the position of the old tribal aristocracy, undermining the old clan solidarity and preparing the ground for a transition to new legal and class relations.

The Etruscans are said to have been great engineers and were probably responsible for the transformation of Rome from a relatively primitive tribal centre to a thriving city in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC. It was under these new masters that, according to tradition, the first public works such as the walls of the Capitoline Hill were constructed.

Until then the Tiber was crossed by ford and Rome itself was not more than a collection of poor huts. It was during this period that a bridge called the Pons Sublicius was built. It was also at this time that we can date the construction of the impressive sewerage and drainage system, the Cloaca Maxima.

Political and military reform

Rome’s military organisation also underwent an important change in this period. Hitherto, the Romans had essentially fought on the basis of clan warfare, with the patrician horsemen leading a number of warrior bands made up of their clients. At some point however, likely during the period of Etruscan rule, Rome adopted the Greek phalanx: densely packed infantry fighting with shields and spears.

The phalanx was potentially a very effective way of fighting by the standards of the times, but its adoption was not simply a tactical or technical question. The formation of infantry into a phalanx required not only bronze shields and spears but men with the means to maintain them, the strength to carry them, and the training and discipline to fight in close formation.

All of these things required a class of robust peasants, epitomised by the famous Athenian hoplites of the Persian war. Such men could be found in the Roman countryside, but not entirely within the old populus romanus, which was limited to the original patrician gentes.

The rural tribes that had been incorporated into Roman territory, either by conquest or immigration, formed the bulk of what was known as the plebs. These plebeians were free and a section of them could even rival the patricians in wealth, but under the original tribal constitution they remained totally excluded from political power, which was originally monopolised by the clan aristocracy.

The question of Rome’s military organisation therefore became a pressing social and class question. Sooner or later, the economic and social weight of the plebs, and in particular its wealthier layer, would be reflected in the political organisation of the state. This was understood by the ancients themselves, not least Aristotle, who explains:

And indeed the earliest form of constitution among the Greeks after the kingships consisted of those who were actually soldiers, the original form consisting of the cavalry (for war had its strength and its pre-eminence in cavalry, since without orderly formation heavy-armed infantry is useless, and the sciences and systems dealing with tactics did not exist among the men of old times, so that their strength lay in their cavalry); but as the states grew and the wearers of heavy armour had become stronger, more persons came to have a part in the government.^[8]

The old gentile order of society based on personal ties of blood was in open contradiction to the new economic and social relations. It was already irremediably decayed and in its place was set up a new state constitution based on territorial division and difference of property and wealth. This constitution excluded not only the slaves, but also those without property who were barred from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians.

The new Centuriate Assembly (comitia centuriata) popular assembly, while democratic in appearance, was in reality a fraud that served to disguise the real domination of the patrician aristocracy. The whole male population liable to bear arms was divided into six classes on a property basis. The cavalry was drawn from the wealthiest men, who could afford to provide their own horses. And the cavalry and the first class alone had ninety-eight votes, an inbuilt majority; if they were agreed, they did not even need to ask the others; they made their decision, and that was the end of it. On this point Livy writes:

The rest of the population whose property fell below this were formed into one century and were exempt from military service.

After thus regulating the equipment and distribution of the infantry, he [Servius Tullius] re-arranged the cavalry. He enrolled from amongst the principal men of the State twelve centuries. In the same way he made six other centuries (though only three had been formed by Romulus) under the same names under which the first had been inaugurated. For the purchase of the horse, 10,000 lbs were assigned them from the public treasury; whilst for its keep certain widows were assessed to pay 2000 lbs each, annually. The burden of all these expenses was shifted from the poor onto the rich.

Then additional privileges were conferred. The former kings had maintained the constitution as handed down by Romulus, viz., manhood suffrage in which all alike possessed the same weight and enjoyed the same rights. Servius introduced a graduation; so that whilst no one was ostensibly deprived of his vote, all the voting power was in the hands of the principal men of the State. The knights were first summoned to record their vote, then the eighty centuries of the infantry of the First Class; if their votes were divided, which seldom happened, it was arranged for the Second Class to be summoned; very seldom did the voting extend to the lowest Class.^[9]

According to Livy this constitution was instituted under the second of the Etruscan kings, Servius Tullius. Whether or not this is the case, the reforms accredited to Tullius were likely instituted by the time the Roman Republic first came into being, and this uneasy compromise between patricians and plebeians would set the stage for almighty future struggles.

Endnotes

[1] Pliny, Natural History, Vol. 8, Book 31, p. 433.

[2] Livy, History of Rome, Vol. 1, Book 1, p. 11.

[3] See Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 104-5.

[4] Ibid., pp. 110-1.

[5] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 286-7.

[6] Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, pp. 27-8.

[7] Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 111.

[8] Aristotle, Politics, p. 343.

[9] Livy, History of Rome, Vol. 1, Book 1, pp. 50-1.