Early Rome
The city of Rome was formed by the linking of a number of villages; the consequence was that the Forum ceased to be used for
burials and became the public open space of the new city. It is interesting that the great Etruscan city of Veii, which was for many
years the principal rival of Rome, consisted of a plateau also originally occupied by separate villages. The comparison with Veii is
interesting in another respect also; for Rome and Veii were not simply bigger, but orders of magnitude bigger, than any other
community in the lower Tiber valley.
Certainly, Rome "was a prize worth having, and Roman tradition was unanimous in holding that Rome was originally ruled by
kings, and that two of the last three successors of Romulus, eponymous founder of the city and first king, were Etruscan
adventurers, Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus. Their arrival in and seizure of power at Rome illustrates an important
aspect of archaic society in central Italy as a whole, namely its openness to horizontal penetration. Just as in archaic Greece, tyrants
and aristocrats of one polis intermarried with those of another, so in archaic Italy there was no rigid conception of citizenship to tic
a man to the community of his birth. What is more, openness to horizontal penetration seems to have been true of all social levels;
for in the years immediately after the fall of the monarchy at Rome, the Sabine aristocrat Appius Claudius and his retainers were
admitted to membership of the community, he at the social level appropriate to his existing standing, they at the level appropriate to
theirs. And when from the fourth century we can make reliable inferences about the nature of the relationship between Rome and
other Latin communities, we can observe that an essential element of the relationship is freedom of movement between one
community and another. It does not much matter whether this element of the relationship is a survival of a period when the Latins
were a tribal community or -whether it is the product of the diplomatic history of the sixth and fifth centuries. What matters is that
it seemed acceptable in the context of archaic central Italian society.
In talking of the social level appropriate to the retainers of Appius Claudius, I have so far left on one side one of the crucial
problems of early Roman history. Roman tradition is unanimous in holding that there existed already under the monarchy a group
of families known as patricians which succeeded in the early years of the Republic in acquiring both a monopoly of secular and
sacred office and almost complete control of the economic resources of the community. Those who were not patricians are
presented by our sources as plebeians; this is the system they knew in their own day, but it is likely that the early community of the
Romans included social groups which were neither patrician nor plebeian. What is clear is that there emerged with great rapidity a
plebeian movement, which created an organization parallel to, and alternative to, that of the patrician state, in the course of what is
known to scholars as the struggle of the orders. The plebeian organization set out to break the patrician monopoly of secular and
sacred office in the Roman state and to reduce the extent of economic exploitation of the poor by the rich. In the pursuit of its first
objective, the plebeian movement was wholly successful; and in the second century Cato could assume that there were no formal
barriers in the way of any Roman citizen achieving the highest office of the state. We shall see shortly how plebeian economic
aspirations were fulfilled.
I have used the term 'Roman citizen'; and the unitary concept of Roman citizenship is the result of the process I have been
describing, at the end of which, if one was domiciled at Rome, one was either free and a Roman citizen or a slave. It cannot be too
strongly emphasized that the openness of Roman society to plebeian mobility which is the corollary of this fact is as far as we know
a feature unique to Rome; though it may have applied to other Latin communities, it probably did not apply to Etruscan
communities, which continued to display, like some Greek communities, a range of statuses between slave and free.
But there is more. To the astonishment of Greek observers, a slave freed by a Roman citizen became a Roman citizen. And, as we
shall see, Roman citizenship came to be available in due course not simply to members of Latin communities, but also to entire
Italian peoples. Given the fact that by the time this occurred Rome was the dominant power in central Italy, this too is to be seen as
involving the openness of Roman society to penetration from below.
I have talked in general terms of secular and sacred office in early Rome and of the creation of a plebeian organization parallel to
that of the Roman state. Under the monarchy, presumably, the kings were in the habit of consulting a body of advisers, the
institution which became in due course the Senate of the Republic. At the end of the sixth century the king holding office for life
was replaced by two consuls holding office for one year at a time. There appear in addition in our sources for the early years of the
Republic specialist financial officials (quaestors) and a variety of military offices. Probably the sources had no accurate
information; but the supposition that there existed already under the monarchy a differentiated administrative structure is entirely
reasonable; the method of appointment presumably changed from nomination to election with the arrival of the Republic. There