for the political and, it could almost be said, ‘constitutional’ side of things, and the supposed establishment of the state, the details are quite clearly anachronistic. The very idea of a state – that is, of an organised political community under a single government – also had to develop, and there is similarly evidence that suggests that this too was something that took time and, moreover, that this was something that was variously asserted and contested in a number of different ways (see below).
←27 | 28→
What all this means is that, unfortunately, what the Romans have to say about the origins and early development of their city-state is largely unusable, simply because it takes for granted the existence of the city-state from the moment of Rome’s supposed foundation and, even more improbably, presupposes the existence of the very idea of the city-state even before the creation of the city or state itself (although these are not the only reasons why the use of the literary evidence is extremely difficult). Once Rome had been founded, as far as later Romans were concerned – at least, the ones who wrote and whose works have survived – Rome existed as a city-state, with a citizen body, various political structures and so on. There are further consequences of this approach too.
II
At the time when the first city-states of central Italy were starting to come into existence, other social groups and structures already existed in the region, and indeed continued to exist. The first city-states did not, after all, appear from nowhere and out of nothing, as the archaeological evidence shows. It is not unreasonable to suppose that some of these other groups and structures may have been directly threatened by the emergence of the city-state, and that some may have also even threatened the first, fledgling city-states.
In the Roman literary tradition, however, the city-state is not just taken for granted, it generally predominates (and this is something that has, in turn, cast a long shadow over modern scholarship, and continues to do so in some quarters even to this day). Not only does Rome simply come into existence when Romulus founds it but, as noted earlier, Romulus himself is connected with another, much older city-state, Alba Longa. Alba Longa was said to have been founded by Ascanius who, like his father Aeneas, had come from the city of Troy.23 Furthermore, when it came to his education, ←28 | 29→the young Romulus supposedly went to school in the nearby city of Gabii (note, as well, that this presupposes that there was no school where he was raised, presumably because the site of Rome was, according to the story, essentially all pasture).24 It is no wonder, then, that Romulus can so easily conceive of founding a city, and subsequently do so; he supposedly lived in a world where city-states had long existed and were the norm. This is obviously because later Romans just took the idea of the city-state for granted.
The almost inevitable result of all this is that, should the literary evidence happen to contain any material that may potentially shed some light on those various social groups and structures that predated and possibly even rivalled the earliest city-states (and it is an extremely difficult proposition: no one wrote history at Rome until the late third century bc), that material will undoubtedly have been reshaped in various ways on account of later assumptions and to conform with later expectations.25 There is a further difficulty: any attempt to identify such material and to take that reshaping into account will usually and almost unavoidably result in a circular argument. Fortunately, however, there is some helpful archaeological evidence, and this evidence has the distinct advantage that it is contemporary.
In the late 1970s archaeologists working at the site of the temple of Mater Matuta in Satricum, a city that lay to the south of Rome, found a slab of stone on which an inscription had been written. The stone had been reused in the construction of the temple and that reuse provides a terminus ante quem for the inscription of about 500 bc.26
The inscription records a dedication to the god Mamars by a group of individuals who identified themselves simply as the suodales of Poplios Valesios. The word sodales, ‘companions’, could be used in a number of contexts including, perhaps most significantly, a military. Whatever the ←29 | 30→precise context of the word’s use in the inscription (which does, note, record a dedication to Mars), the inscription provides evidence for a group of individuals who defined themselves with reference simply, and indeed entirely, to another person.27
There is a small body of further evidence that seems to fit with this idea of an individual and his companions. The bulk of it is literary, and so from much later times, which means that its value and use are extremely difficult. Much of it consists of stories of prominent individuals who move from one city to another (usually their destination is Rome, but that is doubtless only because the literary evidence focuses on Rome), and who take with them large numbers of followers. If these followers thought of themselves in any way as belonging to, or even as citizens of, the city-state they were leaving behind, then presumably their ties to their leader were greater.
It is on account of this and other evidence for mobility that archaic Rome has been called an ‘open city’,28 although it may be anachronistic to make anything much of this. When city-states were still comparatively new, and indeed still developing, and when urban lifestyles were new along with them, and when the concept of citizenship, of belonging to a city-state, was equally new, or only starting to emerge,29 the idea that a city could be ‘closed’, in the sense of having a definite and fixed body of citizens or of simply refusing to admit immigrants, may conceivably have been more novel than the idea that one could be ‘open’.
One such story of mobility which, it has been very persuasively argued by F. Zevi, appears to have been recorded in an early source involves a man called Lucumo. Lucumo was said to have been the son of a Corinthian merchant called Demaratus who had settled in the Etruscan ←30 | 31→city of Tarquinii. After his father died, Lucumo left Tarquinii and moved to Rome, taking with him all his family’s wealth and all his followers.30 Another equally famous but much more difficult story involves a man called Attus Clausus. He was also said to have migrated to Rome, in his case from Inregillus, a Sabine town, and he similarly took with him very large numbers of followers.31
The story of Lucumo has further significance because, after he moved to Rome and after the incumbent king of Rome, Ancus Marcius, had died, Lucumo managed to succeed him. He became Rome’s fifth king, Lucius Tarquinius. (‘Lucumo’ was Romanised as ‘Lucius’, and Lucumo took the name ‘Tarquinius’ from the city of his birth.)32 As far as the Romans certainly of later times were concerned, this was nothing extraordinary. Their monarchy, they believed, had never been hereditary, and most of their kings had supposedly come from elsewhere.33 It may be that the model of powerful men (men like Poplios Valesios, Attus Clausus, as well as Demaratus and obviously Lucumo) and their followers provides an explanation for any number of Rome’s kings.34
It is in this same context that the word sodalis reappears too, although it does so in a text from the first century ad, so extreme caution is needed.35 The Emperor Claudius gave a speech, the text of which has been partially preserved in an inscription that was found in Lyon
