Rome was not supposed to happen.

The site itself was unpromising. Seven low hills (the tallest barely 150 feet or 46 meters above sea level) rose above a marshy flood plain along the Tiber (TY-ber) River, about 16 miles (26 km) inland from the western coast of central Italy. The marshes bred mosquitoes. The Tiber flooded regularly. The hills were separated by swampy valleys that turned into stagnant pools every spring. If you were looking for an ideal place to build a city in ancient Italy, you would pick almost anywhere else. The Greeks had already planted prosperous colonies on the southern coasts of Italy and Sicily (the region they called Magna Graecia, "Greater Greece"), where the harbors were better, the soil was richer, and the climate was friendlier. The Etruscans (ih-TRUHS-kuhnz), the sophisticated civilization that dominated northern and central Italy, had built elegant cities on well-drained hilltops with proper planning. Rome squatted in a swamp.

But the swamp had advantages that were not obvious at first glance. The Tiber was navigable from the sea, making the site accessible to trade. The hills, however modest, were defensible. The location sat at the intersection of two important routes: the north-south corridor connecting the Etruscan cities of the north with the Greek colonies of the south, and the east-west salt route (the future Via Salaria, "Salt Road") connecting the salt flats at the mouth of the Tiber with the pastoral communities of the interior Apennine mountains. Salt was one of the most valuable commodities in the ancient world (the word "salary" comes from the Latin salarium, possibly related to salt payments), and anyone who controlled the point where the salt road crossed the Tiber controlled a choke point in the economy of central Italy.

By the eighth century BCE, small farming villages had clustered on the Palatine and neighboring hills, burying their dead in the marshy valley below (the area that would later become the Roman Forum, the civic heart of the city). These were modest settlements. Oval huts with thatched roofs, wattle-and-daub walls, and packed-earth floors. Pottery fragments and bronze fibulae (brooches). Nothing that would suggest a future world capital. At the same time, the great civilizations of the Mediterranean were already ancient. Egypt was over two thousand years old. Mesopotamia's cities had been thriving for three millennia (Mesopotamia Ch 3). The Mycenaean palace civilization had risen and fallen centuries earlier (Mycenaean Ch 7), and the Greek world was emerging from its Dark Ages into the Archaic period that would produce the city-states, the alphabet, and the philosophers. The Phoenicians were sailing the Mediterranean, planting colonies, and spreading their alphabet to the Greeks (Phoenicia Ch 3-5). Rome, in 753 BCE, was a village.

A quick note on "firsts" before we go further. When this narrative says Rome did something "first," it means first in the Roman context. Rome was a latecomer to civilization by almost any measure. The Sumerians had cities three thousand years before Rome existed. The Egyptians had writing, monumental architecture, and centralized government when the hills of Rome were covered with nothing but grass and goats. The Greeks had already developed philosophy, drama, and democratic institutions before Rome was anything more than a provincial town. What made Rome exceptional was not originality but scale: the ability to take what others had invented, improve it, systematize it, and spread it across an empire larger than anything the Western world had seen. Rome did not invent the arch, the road, the aqueduct, the legal code, or representative government. It perfected all of them and made them standard equipment for half the known world.

Also: almost everything we "know" about Rome's first two and a half centuries comes from writers who lived five hundred or more years after the events they describe, working from oral traditions, family legends, and political propaganda. The Roman historian Livy (LIV-ee, Titus Livius, who wrote a monumental 142-book history of Rome beginning around 27 BCE) is our main source for the early period, and he was writing seven centuries after the supposed founding. Treat the stories of early Rome the way you would treat Homer's account of the Trojan War (Mycenaean Ch 5): probably based on something real, heavily embellished, and impossible to verify in detail.

The founding legend is one of the most famous stories in Western civilization. Twin brothers, Romulus (ROM-yoo-lus) and Remus (REE-mus), were born to a princess of the city of Alba Longa (AL-buh LONG-guh, a Latin settlement in the Alban Hills about 12 miles or 19 km southeast of Rome) and the god Mars. Their great-uncle, who had usurped the throne, ordered the infants drowned in the Tiber. But the river deposited them safely on the bank, where a she-wolf suckled them until a shepherd found and raised them. As young men, they overthrew the usurper, restored their grandfather, and decided to found a new city. They quarreled over which hill to build on. Romulus chose the Palatine (PAL-uh-tyne), Remus chose the Aventine (AV-en-tyne). When birds and omens favored Romulus, he began plowing a furrow to mark the city's boundary. Remus mocked him by jumping over the furrow. Romulus killed his brother, named the city after himself, and became its first king.

The traditional date was April 21, 753 BCE.

Everything about this legend is carefully constructed. The divine father (Mars, god of war) brands Rome as a warrior civilization from birth. The she-wolf signals wild toughness. The fratricide establishes that Rome would tolerate no disrespect to its boundaries. The plowed furrow (the pomerium, poh-MEER-ee-um, the sacred boundary of the city, within which no weapons could be carried and no army could march) became a real legal concept that Romans enforced for centuries. Even the name "Palatine" gave us the word "palace" (the emperors would later build their residences on this same hill). Myth and reality were braided together from the very beginning.

The Romans also told a second origin story, one that connected them to the wider Mediterranean world. Aeneas (eh-NEE-us), a Trojan prince who fled the burning city of Troy (Mycenaean Ch 5), sailed west across the Mediterranean, landed in Italy, and founded the dynasty that would eventually produce Romulus and Remus. The poet Virgil (VER-jil) gave this legend its definitive form in the Aeneid, Rome's national epic, written under Augustus around 19 BCE. The Aeneas legend served a political purpose: it gave Rome a pedigree older than Greece's, connecting Roman origins to the heroic age of the Trojan War while claiming the losing side as ancestors (a characteristically Roman move, turning defeat into the foundation of something greater).

The Roman tradition named seven kings who ruled Rome between its founding and the establishment of the Republic in 509 BCE. Whether all seven existed as historical individuals is uncertain. The first four (Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and Ancus Marcius) are essentially legendary. The last three are more plausible because they have Etruscan names and connections, and the Etruscan presence in Rome during this period is confirmed by archaeology.

Numa Pompilius (NOOM-uh pom-PIL-ee-us), the second king, is credited with establishing most of Rome's religious institutions. He created the college of Vestal Virgins (six priestesses who tended the sacred fire of the goddess Vesta in the Forum, maintaining a flame that symbolized the life of the city, sworn to thirty years of celibacy on pain of death). He reformed the calendar, adding the months of January and February to a previously ten-month year. He established the office of Pontifex Maximus (PON-tih-fex MAX-ih-mus, the chief priest of Rome, a title that would later pass to the emperors and eventually to the Pope). Whether Numa really did all this or whether later Romans attributed their religious institutions to a single wise founder is impossible to determine, but the institutions themselves were real and ancient.

The last three kings are the ones who matter most historically, because they are associated with the Etruscan influence that transformed Rome from a village into a city.

The Etruscans were the dominant civilization of central Italy from roughly the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE. They lived in a loose confederation of city-states (the "Dodecapolis," twelve major cities) in the region called Etruria (ih-TROOR-ee-uh, roughly modern Tuscany, which takes its name from them). The Etruscans were wealthy, urbanized, and culturally sophisticated. They built planned cities with grid-pattern streets, stone temples, and elaborate underground tombs painted with vivid frescoes of banquets, dancing, and athletic games. They were skilled metalworkers, accomplished traders, and enthusiastic adopters of Greek culture (Etruscan tombs are one of the richest sources of imported Greek pottery anywhere in the Mediterranean). Their language (Etruscan is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language, as different from Latin as Basque is from Spanish) remains only partially understood despite thousands of surviving inscriptions, mostly short funerary texts.

Where the Etruscans came from was a question the ancient Greeks debated. The Greek historian Herodotus (heh-ROD-uh-tus, the fifth-century BCE "father of history" who traveled the Mediterranean world and wrote a sprawling account of its peoples) claimed they migrated from Lydia in western Anatolia. Modern DNA studies have produced mixed results, but the current consensus leans toward the Etruscans being indigenous to Italy, developing their distinctive culture from local roots with heavy Greek influence absorbed through trade and cultural contact.

Rome's last three kings (traditionally Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus, reigning roughly from 616 to 509 BCE) were either Etruscan or heavily Etruscanized, and under their rule, Rome was physically transformed. The marshy valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills was drained by a great sewer called the Cloaca Maxima (KLOH-ah-kuh MAX-ih-muh, "Greatest Drain"), one of the world's earliest sewage systems, an engineering project on a scale that only the Etruscans had the expertise to execute. Parts of the Cloaca Maxima are still functioning today, over 2,500 years later, which is a sentence that tells you everything about the durability of Roman (originally Etruscan) infrastructure.

The drained valley became the Roman Forum, the open-air civic center where Romans would conduct their business, their politics, their religion, and their arguments for the next thousand years. On the Capitoline Hill (the smallest but most sacred of Rome's seven hills), King Tarquinius Priscus began construction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Jupiter "Best and Greatest"), Rome's most important temple, dedicated to the king of the gods along with the goddesses Juno and Minerva (the so-called Capitoline Triad). The temple was completed and dedicated in 509 BCE, the same year the Republic was founded (a coincidence that the Romans probably manufactured after the fact). It was an Etruscan-style structure: a high podium, deep front porch, three inner chambers (one for each deity), and a terracotta roof with brightly painted sculptural decorations made by Etruscan craftsmen.

King Servius Tullius (SER-vee-us TUL-ee-us), traditionally the sixth king, is credited with two enormous achievements. First, he built the Servian Wall, the first defensive wall enclosing all seven hills of Rome, defining the city's physical boundaries for centuries. Second, he reorganized Roman society into classes based on wealth rather than birth, creating the centuriate assembly (a political body organized around military centuries, in which citizens were grouped by wealth class and voted as units). This was not democracy. The wealthiest classes voted first and had the most votes. But it was the germ of the idea that political power should be organized systematically rather than handed out by kings, and it would become one of the foundations of the Republican constitution.

The end of the monarchy came (according to tradition) in 509 BCE, and it came with a story the Romans loved to tell because it cast the Republic's founding as a moral drama.

Tarquinius Superbus (tar-KWIN-ee-us soo-PER-bus, "Tarquin the Proud"), the last king, was a tyrant. His son, Sextus Tarquinius, raped a Roman noblewoman named Lucretia (loo-KREE-shuh), who told her husband and father what had happened and then killed herself rather than live with the shame. Her kinsman Lucius Junius Brutus (BROO-tus) led a revolt, expelled the Tarquin family from Rome, and the Romans swore they would never have a king again.

The story is almost certainly legendary in its details. But the underlying event (a revolution that replaced monarchy with an elected magistracy) probably reflects something real. Rome in the late sixth century BCE was caught up in a wider wave of political change: across the Greek world, tyrants were being overthrown and replaced with oligarchies or democracies during the same period. In Athens, the tyrant Hippias was expelled in 510 BCE, one year before Rome's traditional date. The idea that concentrating power in a single hereditary ruler was dangerous was in the air across the Mediterranean. Rome's solution was characteristically pragmatic: instead of one king, elect two consuls who serve for one year and can veto each other. Instead of hereditary rule, competitive elections (limited to the aristocracy, but elections nonetheless). Instead of trusting any individual, trust the system.

The word "king" (rex) became the most powerful insult in the Roman political vocabulary. For nearly five centuries, from 509 BCE until Julius Caesar's dictatorship in the 40s BCE, the accusation that someone was seeking to become a king was the surest way to destroy a political career and, in several cases, to justify assassination. The Romans' hatred of monarchy was not philosophical. It was visceral, baked into their founding narrative, repeated in their education, and enforced by a political culture that punished any appearance of excessive personal power. Understanding this hatred is essential to understanding everything that happened in the Late Republic, because the crisis that destroyed the Republic was, at its core, a struggle over whether one man could accumulate enough power to become king in all but name.

The Republic began with two consuls, a Senate (an advisory body of former magistrates and leading citizens, originally dominated by the hereditary aristocracy), and a set of religious, military, and legal institutions inherited from the kings. It was not designed. It grew. And the first two and a half centuries of its existence would be defined by two simultaneous struggles: outward expansion across the Italian peninsula, and an internal fight between the old aristocracy and the common citizens over who would have a share in political power.

Ancient Rome

Seven Hills

The Early Republic

The Punic Wars

The Late Republic

Caesar and the Death of the Republic

Augustus and the Principate

The Flavians and the Five Good Emperors

Crisis and Recovery

Constantine and Christianity

The Fall