Regal period
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The regal period of Rome extended from the foundation of the city in 753 BC to the expulsion of Tarquin Superbus, the last king, in 509 BC.
The legends of this period were well known to Romans of the late Republic and Empire, but historical records are few and unreliable. Roman history up to this point seems to have written as a tableau for securing Roman virtues and vices in history for the purposes of political imitation and avoidance on a skeleton history of its people in response to both the world and the local events of the time. For example, Hugh Last wrote:
- The legends which grew up round the origin of Rome have so slight a value as evidence for the history of the city that they can claim little space: all that is needed is to make their irrelevance plain. The arrival of the Greeks in the western Mediterranean gradually brought Italy within the ambit of Greek myth, and it is on Greek foundations that the whole saga of early Rome is based[1].
Accomplishments attributed to the regal period include the "Calendar of Numa," a precursor to the Julian Calendar, and the Cloaca Maxima, the world's first sewage system.
Contents
The Founding of Rome
Greek connection to Rome
The Cambridge Ancient History goes on to say about the origin of Rome:
- Though it would be wrong to say that the advent of Aeneas to the western Mediterranean was due to his connection in Greek minds with any locality which could boast a cult capable of identification with that of Aphrodite, in Greek mythology the hero's connection with his divine mother was undoubtedly close.[2]
The author speculates that the Aphrodite shrine near Rome may have been a "stepping-stone"[2] for Greek willingness to identify the twelfth century BC Aeneas, the sole survivor of the siege of Troy, and thus a chief representative of Phrygian Greece, with the also nearby shrine, prestigious in the Italy of Rome's founding era (and/or later), Juppiter Latiaris, and regard it and Rome as being founded by a descendant of Aeneas.
The legend of Aeneas
The number in Aeneas' household which transported to the land of the Latins was given variously in the legendary accounts of Aeneas, one being a hundred men.[3] Another account gives that Aeneas' received an oracle that a "four-footed beast"[3] would deliver an omen, the worship of which type of animal, the Apostle Paul gave as an example of pagan folly in religion in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans.[4]
Thomas Arnold narrated the account he compiled:
- The Trojans, when they had brought their gods on shore, began to sacrifice. But the victim, a milk-white sow just ready to farrow, broke from the priest and his ministers, and fled away. Aeneas followed her, for an oracle had told him that a four-footed beast should guide him to the spot where he was to build his city. So the sow went forwards till she came to a certain hill, about two miles and a half from the shore where they had purposed to sacrifice, and there she laid down and farrowed, and her litter was of thirty young ones. But when Aeneas saw that the place was sandy and barren he doubted what he should do. Just at this time he heard a voice which said, "The thirty young of the sow are thirty years; when thirty years are passed, thy children shall remove to a better land; meantime do thou obey the gods, and build thy city in the place where they bid thee to build." So the Trojans built their city on the spot where the sow had farrowed.[5]
The king of the Latins, named Latinus, received them kindly, offering them farming land for every man. But they soon fell to quarreling.
Aeneas makes war on the natives
The two peoples who assisted King Latinus in the war that ensued were the Rutuli and then the Etruri.
Arnold continues:
- Aeneas took his daughter Lavinia and married her, and became king over the children of the soil; and they and the strangers became one people, and they were called by one name, Latins.
- But Turnus [the Rutulian king] called to his aid Mezentius, king of the Etruscans of Caere. There was then another battle on the banks of the river Numicius, and Turnus was killed, and Aeneas plunged into the river and was seen no more. However, his son Ascanius declared that he was not dead, but that the gods had taken him to be one of themselves, and his people built an altar to him on the banks of the Numicius and worshipped him by the name of Jupiter Indiges, which means, "the God who was of that very land".[6]
This struggle explains in the Greek minds why Rome was founded by a Greek descendant, but the important nearby shrine still retained its native name.[2]
Timeline
Rome had seven legendary kings, as follows, presented with the dates of some destructions of previous world powers, some Biblical.
- Romulus (753 to 717 BC)
- 722 BC: Fall of Samaria (lost tribes of Israel) by Assyria
- Numa Pompilius (717 to 673 BC)
- Tullus Hostilius (673 to 642 BC)
- Ancus Marcius (642 to 616 BC)
- 621 BC: End of ancient Athens as Draco's laws are put into place
- Lucius Tarquinius Priscus (616 to 579 BC)
- 612 BC: Destruction of Assyria
- 594 BC: End of Draconian Athens as Solon's reforms are put into place
- 587 BC: Destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon
- Servius Tullius (579 to 535 BC)
- 561 BC: Pisistratus becomes despot of Athens
- 556 BC: Athens liberated from Pisistratus
- 546 BC: Pisistratus restored as tyrant of Athens
- 539 BC: Liberation of Judea and many other nations from destruction of Babylon
- Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (535 to 509 BC)
- 528 BC: Death of Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens
Romulus and Remus
According to legend recounted by Cassius Dio through a derivative work by Johannes Tzetzes, Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of Mars, the god of war, by the daughter of a prior Latin king named Numitor, who was cast out of the land by another king named Amulius, the other king having received an oracle that he would be slain by descendants of Numitor.
Romulus and Remus were rescued from the mighty Tiber River by a daughter of Amulius who sent the two boys to be raised by a shepherd couple, with other derivations of the story relating it was a mother wolf who nursed them back to health and raised them. In 753 BC, Romulus and Remus founded the city of Rome.[7] Romulus killed Remus in a heated community debate on where the base of the city should be built. Romulus is considered the city's first king.
Bibliography
- Livy, From the Founding of the City, book 1.
- Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, books 1-4.
- Plutarch, Romulus and Numa Pompilius.
- Cassius Dio, Roman History, v. 1-2.
- Barthold Georg Niebuhr, History of Rome, v. 1.
- Thomas Arnold, The History of Rome, v. 1, ch. 1-8.
- Theodore Mommsen, History of Rome, book 1-2.
- Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, ch. 1, "The Romans".
- Cook, S.A., ed. et al., Cambridge Ancient History, v. 7, "The Hellenistic Monarchies and the Rise of Rome".
- ch. 10. Jones, H. Stuart. "The Sources for the Tradition of Early Roman History".
- ch. 11. Last, Hugh. "The Founding of Rome".
- ch. 12. Last, Hugh. "The Kings of Rome".
- ch. 13. Jones, H. Stuart. "The Primitive Institutions of Rome".
