two – who are supposed to have seized power by force or acquired it by some other illegal means, although even these men, some maintain, will still have got their position approved in some way.20 Several ←51 | 52→accounts of the process by which the kings were supposedly appointed can be found in the ancient evidence, and they are variously handled. Some scholars follow the sources closely, others only generally, sometimes drawing on them selectively, picking out and emphasising (and sometimes modifying too) specific details and basing their reconstructions on those details alone.21 There is considerable variation, but there is nonetheless an underlying consensus: Rome’s kings did not inherit their position; they were elected, selected or approved in some way, or otherwise held power illegally.
All this is, however, vastly more uncertain than is usually acknowledged. This is not just because there is good reason to suspect – as is in fact widely accepted – that ancient accounts of the way in which Rome’s kings were appointed are based on the anachronistic retrojection of later ideas and practices. It is also because – and this is something that does not receive the attention it deserves – the literary evidence is filled with stories that presuppose that the sons of kings could inherit the throne, or at least make a credible claim to it on hereditary grounds. The several extant accounts of the regal period regularly juxtapose stories based on ideas of hereditary succession with stories of the Senate and people choosing the next king. Modern scholarship has accepted the latter to varying degrees, but has failed to offer an adequate explanation for the existence of the former (which it has in fact generally ignored), even though both sets of stories can usually be found side by side in the very same accounts.
←52 | 53→
In the following section (II), the question of hereditary succession will be discussed and the numerous stories that presuppose it will be considered. In the section after that (III), the process by which Rome’s kings were said to have been appointed will be assessed. In the final section (IV), an entirely new explanation for the nature and shape of the account of the regal period in the extant sources will be offered.
II
Rome was a colony of Alba Longa, or so the Romans believed, and the kings of Alba Longa (from whom Romulus, Rome’s founder and first king was descended) were said to have inherited their throne.22 No one today supposes that there is anything historical in any of this and it is accepted that the Alban kings were simply used as a chronological device to bridge the gap between the fall of Troy and the foundation of Rome.23 That does not mean, however, that the evidence for them is of no value. On the contrary, it is very important. Whoever invented the Alban dynasty clearly found it natural to think in terms of hereditary succession, even for Rome’s mother-city.24
The Roman king-list, on the other hand, has usually been taken as evidence that things were different at Rome and that Rome’s monarchy was not hereditary in nature. Apart from Tarquinius Superbus, none of the kings is a direct, patrilineal descendant of any other. While it is often ←53 | 54→argued that their names (Romulus’ aside) may well be genuine, that does not really amount to anything much, especially when the chronology of the entire regal period is so extremely problematic.
There are simply too few kings – supposedly only seven in some two and a half centuries – and the inevitable result is that their reigns are all improbably long. There were, in contrast, nearly four times as many emperors during the first two and half centuries of the principate.25 And there are other problems. Numa was supposed to have been a student of Pythagoras, but that is a chronological impossibility.26 Equally impossible is the chronology of the last three kings. The ancient solution in this case was to insert an extra generation of Tarquins, so that Superbus was made into the grandson of Priscus,27 but that is too easy. Although the idea has, somewhat surprisingly, found a few modern adherents,28 it is only a means to fix a chronological problem; it is not based on any evidence and is historically worthless, beyond its value as evidence for the way ancient historians sought to address the problems they encountered in the material they inherited.
The idea that there were just seven kings has been called a ‘patent fiction’ and with good reason.29 With good reason, too, the king-list itself has been labelled ‘a pseudo-historical construct’.30 Scholars even of a conservative nature have regularly been prepared to shoehorn other figures into the list. The best example is undoubtedly the Vibenna brothers, one or both of whom are often supposed to have ruled Rome.31 So, while some ←54 | 55→of the names of the seven kings may be genuine, it is most unlikely that the sequence of them is complete and reliable. The king-list does not, on its own, provide compelling evidence against hereditary succession, not when there are so many problems with it, when it is itself almost certainly a later construct, and above all when hereditary succession is taken for granted in so very many of the stories the Romans told about their kings.
It will be useful to look at these various stories more closely, not only because they are usually just ignored in this context, but also because there are different versions of some of them. In one or two instances, it is possible to make inferences about the relative chronology of the different accounts. For all that there is evidence of disagreement among the sources, and variation in some of the details, the basic point nonetheless remains unaffected: the Romans told numerous stories about their kings that anticipated hereditary succession. These stories are most unlikely to reflect anything at all of the historical realities of regal Rome, about which Rome’s historians knew probably nothing, but they certainly do reflect what later Romans said about their kings. And what they said is often entirely incompatible with modern views of the Roman monarchy.
When Romulus’ reign came to an end (however that was supposed to have happened), he departed leaving no designed heir. In almost every account, Romulus did not have children,32 which means that no argument either way can be made about hereditary succession. The only author, it seems, who claimed Romulus had children is the little known and poorly attested Zenodotus of Troezen, who wrote probably in the mid- to late second century bc, or possibly the early first.33 According to him, Romulus married the Sabine Hersilia, with whom he had two offspring, but Plutarch, who relates Zenodotus’ story, notes that others said Hersilia had married Hostus Hostilius.34 As for the children, one was a daughter named Prima, the other a son called Aollius, but later Avillius, says Plutarch. Neither appears anywhere else, and T. P. Wiseman has plausibly suggested that ←55 | 56→Avillius was invented to create a suitably prestigious ancestor for the Avillii.35 Whatever the motive for the invention of the story, Prima’s and Aollius’ credentials are such that they are of no significance when it comes to the question of hereditary succession.
Several sources evidently claimed that Numa Pompilius, Romulus’ successor, had children, but the nature of much of the evidence is clear from the children’s names. Some said that Numa had four sons, Pompon, Pinus, Calpus and Mamercus, from whom were descended the Pomponii, the Pinarii, the Calpurnii and the Mamercii.36 It is reasonable to assume that the story of these children is a secondary development; it is usually discussed in the context of legendary genealogies and also, in the case of Calpus, with reference to the work of the late second-century historian L. Calpurnius Piso.37 Like the story of Avillius, the story of these children clearly exists only for the sake of creating eponymous ancestors and it does not go beyond that immediate concern. Moreover, not everyone agreed, and some, according to Plutarch, said that Numa had only one child, a daughter called Pompilia.38 This was evidently the earlier version of the story. It is hardly significant that there is no suggestion that Numa’s daughter was ever a candidate to succeed her father.
Pompilia was said to have been married to Marcius,39 the son of the man who had persuaded Numa to accept the Romans’ invitation to become ←56 | 57→their king. After Numa’s death, Plutarch says, the elder Marcius, Pompilia’s father-in-law, had competed with Tullus Hostilius for the throne. He was unsuccessful and subsequently
