Roman kings: myth, memory and the making of power
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Before Rome's Republic and the Age of Emperors there were kings, or so the story goes. These rulers loomed large in the Roman imagination, but is their narrative fact or fiction? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Emily Briffitt is joined by ancient historian Christopher Smith to sift myth from memory and uncover how seven legendary figures shaped Rome's ideas of power and identity.
You're joining me today to talk about Roman kingship and power before the Roman Republic. But before we really dive in, what sort of time frame are we talking about when we're talking about Roman kings? What sort of region are we talking about too?
So, very roughly speaking, if one takes the Roman account, and we'll have some challenges around that as we go through, but if you take the Roman account, the first king is in the middle of the 8th century BC, that's Romulus, and the last king is expelled from Rome in 509 BC. So we've got that period from the middle of the 8th century to the end. End of the sixth century. Now, over the period of that 250 years, Rome starts both archaeologically and in the record as really a very tiny place, and it becomes a bigger city. The walls that surround it enclose a larger area and its territory grows. So what we Look at by 500 BC is something which is the city of Rome and a territory that extends a few miles out and critically is heading towards the coast down at what we know of as Ostia and is looking nervously across the river, but hasn't yet really gone.
out there.
And is there anything that we should point out about sort of how society was structured in this archaic period?
A lot of what we know about early Rome, we have to guess at a bit. But one of the things that seems to be clear and is something that one would expect is that Rome has some quite strong familial groups. The Roman language they're called gentes or gens, which we usually translate as clan. So that gives you a sense of something that is not just a nuclear family, but is an extended kinship. Great. How real that kingship group, how fictitious it is, this that's a conversation. But it looks like there are quite a few of those family groups, and crucially, some of them have a appellation and an identification as particularly aristocratic. Those are called patricians in the ancient term, as distinct from and plebeians and that distinction between patricians and plebeians looks like it's an old distinction.
Very interestingly, none of our kings are patricians.
That is very, very interesting. Now before we I suppose get into that sort of side of it, I think this might be an important point of context to clarify. Am I right in thinking that the history of Roman kingship is almost a legendary one?
Yes, you are. The problem about early Rome is easily described but very hard to resolve. And it's this. If you look at Greek history from around about 500 BC, without any question, there are people who are writing down histories which come close to describing events of their own time. And by the time you get to famous historical Historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, they're describing events that they participated in themselves. So you've got immediacy, and with all the problems of eyewitness accounts and so on and so forth, there's no gap. For Rome, the first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, does not write until 200 BC. And I've just been talking about the period from 750 to 500 BC. So there's a gap.
And our channel. Is how do we fill that gap of time? And there are various things we do. So one of them is we say, Oh, well, look, the Romans kept lists of magistrates. We know they kept lists of magistrates. And if you go to the Capitoline Museum, you'll see a version of this list from the time of the Emperor Augustus, so end of the first century BC, beginning of the first century AD, on the wall of the Capitoline Museum. Museums.
What time period do the Roman kings cover and why does it matter?
We've got this great list. It was fantastic. It begins at the beginning of the Republic when the last king goes, 509. So we've still got a problem. You might say, okay, we know about these magistrates, but what about the kings?
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