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(the regal connotations are clear from the building’s name).⁵⁰ Nonetheless, while this evidence confirms that Rome had in fact once been ruled by kings,⁵¹ and while it also helps to reveal something of the wider context, its value is somewhat more limited than it may seem at first sight.

The ideas associated with the word rex evidently changed over time,⁵² and this makes it very difficult to use any of the evidence for the king’s position in the state (viz. the writings of Rome’s historians, antiquarians and so on), simply because that evidence dates to the second and first centuries bc and, in many cases, even later still. That evidence was also written in the belief that the Roman state, of which the king was said to have been a central part, had existed from the time of the city’s foundation and that Rome’s first king was Romulus. The inscriptional evidence certainly proves that Rome had once been ruled or in some way led by individuals whose title was rex, but it does not prove that these kings had the powers, status or position in the state that later writers claimed they had, nor that the state itself existed to the extent or in the way that those writers assumed it did.

A further piece of evidence, which can to a certain extent be treated as contemporary, lends some support to this conclusion. Sometime supposedly in the late sixth century bc the Romans made a treaty with the city of Carthage. The treaty itself does not survive but, fortunately enough, ←37 | 38→Polybius saw the text of it on a bronze tablet and – with the help of some learned Romans who were able, for the most part, to decipher the archaic Latin in which it was written – included a translation of it in his work.⁵³ The treaty shows that, by this time, Roman influence spread over parts of Latium, the region to the south of Rome. More significantly, the oath that was sworn when this treaty was made was sworn by only one individual and the divine punishment envisaged in that oath, should the treaty be broken, was to be meted out only to that same individual. Polybius’ account of the oath has been rejected by modern scholars, precisely because it does not involve the state, but that is to beg the question. The account Polybius provides fits perfectly with the evidence discussed so far which suggests that individuals could dominate Rome and that the state was weak by comparison.⁵⁴

The difficulties involved in attempting to trace the emergence of the Roman city-state have also been made worse by problems of methodology. One common approach for identifying the moment when Rome qualifies as a city-state has been to begin with questions of definition and with establishing a set of criteria that will allow for that moment to be identified.⁵⁵ As these criteria are themselves a matter of debate, the date inevitably changes with the criteria. Under these circumstances, the value of any attempt to identify some point in time when Rome can be called a city-state is naturally limited. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to trying to identify the moment when some sense of allegiance to the state came to the fore, and when the idea of citizenship developed.

Despite all these difficulties (and equally, because of them), a good number of hypotheses about the formation of the Roman city and state have been entertained.⁵⁶ Outside influences, such as trade, warfare and ←38 | 39→the influence of the cities of the Greek world (which of course included southern Italy) on the development of the Italic city-states in general have been frequently discussed. The role of internal factors has also been included in the debate although the evidence for them is often especially difficult. Trade with outside peoples usually leaves traces in the archaeological record, the context of which often also reveals something of the distribution of wealth and of social stratification, while something like the construction of defensive works or the destruction of a settlement is also often visible archaeologically. Evidence for developments driven by internal social, political or economic factors, on the other hand, can be much more difficult to detect,⁵⁷ where such evidence even happens to exist, and more often than not, it is unlikely to do so. Again, contemporary textual evidence is what is needed, but there is none from those early times, while the much later literary evidence takes the existence of the city and state from the very outset for granted. Arguments about internal developments and processes are usually therefore of a considerably more theoretical and conjectural nature.

      N. Terrenato, for instance, has recently argued that it was actually the gentes who were responsible for the creation of the Roman state, a proposition that inevitably requires him to address the very big question of why they, of all groups, should have been concerned to do such a thing. To answer this, Terrenato considers the various roles that a city-state could have played in diplomacy, politics, trade and religion, as well as in warfare and domestic conflict. In his view, the state was simply ‘one of many political tools that clans [gentes] had at their disposal’, although, for this argument to work, Terrenato inevitably has to depict Rome as long an extremely weak state. Indeed, he views it as ‘a weak and fragile entity’ that suffered from ‘congenital frailty’ and ‘inherent instability’; it was in fact nothing more than a puppet of the gentes. But this is a picture that may start to seem at odds with Rome’s growth and military success.

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Terrenato’s model is, moreover, entirely top-down, so much so in fact that the state can be described as the gentes’ ‘toy’ which ‘they felt fully entitled to tear … apart whenever they grew tired of it.’⁵⁸ It may reasonably be asked, however, why the Roman people should have gone along with this, and why they should have tolerated the idea that the nascent city-state where they lived and with which they may have identified, and of which they were or were becoming citizens, was little or nothing more than a plaything of the powerful, and potentially a transitory plaything at that, one that could be cast aside at any moment.

      The views of the Roman people are, of course, unknown, since there is hardly any evidence for them and certainly none that is anywhere near contemporary. Even apart from the question of what they may have been prepared to put up with, it would nonetheless be rash simply to deny them any role in the formation of the Roman state, and to suppose that the state’s formation was due entirely, or even largely, to the activities of the powerful few, and even more so when the powerful few were the ones who stood to lose the most (even if there were also some potential gains to be made).

As it happens, it may just about be possible to detect something of the role that the people may have played in the formation of the Roman state. The argument does require that all ideas of a foundation moment are dismissed entirely,⁵⁹ and that much greater prominence is given to the evidence that suggests that the formation of the Roman state was the result of a very lengthy process, one that saw advances as well as steps backwards (or even sideways) and one that was affected in various ways by conflicting needs and ideas. If the case that has been made so far has been at all persuasive, such an approach should not seem problematic in the least.

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      IV

The main theme, according to the Romans’ own accounts, of Rome’s social and political history during the fifth and fourth centuries bc is the so-called ‘conflict (or struggle) of the orders’. The Roman citizen body was, or so the Romans believed, neatly divided into two orders, the patricians and the plebeians; the division is, however, over-schematic and quite probably unhistorical, at least for early times.⁶⁰ From the beginning of the republican period (that is, after the kings had been expelled and replaced with elected annual magistrates), the patrician families allegedly dominated the state, as only patricians could hold the magistracies and

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