Overthrow of the Roman monarchy

• 1. Introduction

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  The overthrow of the Roman monarchy is the founding act of the Roman Republic, a story of rape, suicide, and revolution that the Romans themselves could barely remember by the time they wrote it down. The traditional date is c. 509 BC. The last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was driven from the city his family had ruled, and in his place the Romans installed two annually elected consuls. That, at least, is the legend. What actually happened is a question that has occupied scholars for centuries, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. The details were largely forgotten within a few generations. What survived was a narrative so saturated with literary borrowing, political motive, and later invention that separating history from myth is nearly impossible. How much of this story is real? How did a narrative this contested become the founding myth of an empire? And what does it say about Rome that even the Romans treated their own past as raw material for reinvention?

• 2. The Traditional Story

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  Sextus Tarquinius, the king's second son, rapes a noblewoman named Lucretia. She reveals the assault to a group of Roman noblemen, then kills herself. The resulting fury drives a revolution. Leading the uprising is Lucius Junius Brutus, the king's own nephew, alongside Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, the king's cousin and Lucretia's husband, Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, her father, and an influential ally, Publius Valerius Poplicola.

  At the moment of the coup, Tarquin is off fighting a war against the city of Ardea. He rushes back to Rome but finds the gates shut against him. The coup leaders have already persuaded his own army to abandon him. His sons are expelled, and Brutus and Collatinus become the first consuls, though in this earliest period the title used was praetor, derived from the Latin word for leader.

  Brutus himself administers an oath before the people never again to tolerate a king. He also proposes banishing every member of the Tarquin clan, a motion that sweeps up his own colleague Collatinus, who is removed from office and replaced by Poplicola. Brutus then discovers his own two sons are part of a conspiracy to restore the monarchy and orders their execution.

  Tarquin, in exile, does not give up. He persuades Etruscan cities to attack Rome on his behalf, but they are defeated at the Battle of Silva Arsia, where Brutus himself is killed in combat. Poplicola celebrates a triumph for the victory. Tarquin then enlists Lars Porsenna, king of Clusium, who marches on Rome but is stopped at the bridge by Horatius Cocles fighting alone until the structure can be demolished. Porsenna eventually withdraws. A further attempt through Tarquin's son-in-law Octavius Mamilius, who mobilises the Latin League, fails at the Battle of Lake Regillus, where Roman tradition credits divine assistance from Castor and Pollux. Tarquin then retires to Cumae, where he dies in 495 BC.

• 3. The Unreliable Sources

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  Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch's Life of Poplicola are the main literary sources for the monarchy and the earliest republic, and scholars describe them as notoriously unreliable. The first literary history of Rome was written by Quintus Fabius Pictor around 200 BC, centuries after the fall of the monarchy. By that point, the Romans had already lost any reliable record of what happened.

  Those ancient historians worked from fragmentary evidence and reconstructed the past in light of their own present. The historian T. P. Wiseman argues that many of the kings and figures from the traditional story were ahistorical inventions of the fourth and third centuries BC, created by senatorial families to advertise their lineages rather than to preserve accurate history. Wiseman and others go so far as to dismiss even Fabius Pictor as having had little knowledge of Roman history beyond the fourth century BC. James Richardson argues that Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the central figures of the entire narrative, never existed at all.

  The stories that were written down by the second century BC served a specific purpose: to celebrate the republic as Roman senators of that era understood it. Senatorial historiography was about family prestige, not political accuracy. As one summary of the scholarly consensus puts it, the details of Livy's political and military narrative amount to reconstruction or plausible invention, either by Livy himself or by the sources he relied on.

  Barthold Georg Niebuhr, writing in the early nineteenth century, proposed that the underlying oral tradition may have been transmitted through poems sung by bards at banquets. Wiseman has more recently argued for public performances of historical plays, which would have circulated these stories widely in a society where most people could not read. Lucius Accius' tragedy Brutus is identified as one such source feeding into what Livy eventually recorded.

• 4. The Problem of Chronology

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  The date 509 BC comes from the Varronian chronology, assembled during the late republic by Marcus Terentius Varro and later used by the fasti Capitolini. Modern scholars believe this system runs approximately four years behind actual dates in its earlier period, so that a Varronian year of 344 corresponds to the real year 340 BC. The simplest method the Romans used to date the republic was counting consular pairs: two consuls were elected every year, so counting backward gave an apparent age for the republic.

  But different ancient historians arrived at different dates. Dionysius of Halicarnassus placed the republic's foundation in the first year of the 68th Olympiad, implying 508-7 BC. Polybius calculated it as 28 years before Xerxes crossed into Greece, implying 508 BC. A census conducted in 389 or 388 BC suggested 119 years earlier, putting the foundation at 508 or 507 BC. Gnaeus Flavius placed the dedication of the Capitoline temple in 507 BC by counting backward from the known dedication of his own temple to Concordia in 303 BC.

  The consular records themselves are internally inconsistent. Five names appear as first consuls: Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Publius Valerius Poplicola, Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, and Marcus Horatius Pulvillus. But Livy notes that in older writing, Lucretius' consulship appears nowhere. Polybius says a treaty from the first year of the republic was dated to the consulship of Brutus and Horatius, even though Livy and Dionysius say those two never held office simultaneously. Cicero and Pliny record only Brutus and Valerius Poplicola as the initial pair, omitting Collatinus entirely. Cassius Dio, quoted by Zonaras, says Brutus initially ruled alone and was given a colleague only to prevent him from making himself king.

  The historian Gary Forsythe argues that the names in the consular list follow a pattern of importing characters from later years of the fasti backward into earlier periods. He suggests Valerius was moved from the second year into the first specifically so that the character could pass a lex Valeria that is itself fictitious, modelled on a real law from 300 BC. The historian Fred Drogula states the difficulty plainly: without reliable sources, there is no way to prove most of the information contained in the fasti.

• 5. Greek Parallels and Borrowed Tropes

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  The rape of Lucretia bears a striking resemblance to an incident that, according to Greek tradition, triggered the expulsion of the Peisistratid tyrants from Athens, also around 510 BC. Sexual violence against innocent women was a well-established literary device for characterising tyrants in ancient writing, and its appearance in two founding republican narratives from the same era is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

  The parallel runs further. Collatinus is banished from office in the Roman story in a way that mirrors the ostracism of Hipparchos, son of Peisistratos, from Athens. Tarquinius' campaign to retake Rome with foreign help echoes Darius' attempt to restore the last Peisistratid tyrant to power. Scholars debate vigorously whether these Roman tales are copies of Greek originals, genuine Roman stories that were later dressed in Greek details, or some combination of both.

  Alexander Koptev argued in 2010 that the dates in early Roman history trace back to a single source: Timaeus of Tauromenium. Timaeus performed what Koptev calls artificial numerological exercises, synchronising Roman events with better-documented Greek ones to produce a chronological skeleton. On this reading, the date traditionally assigned to the republic's founding was not calculated from Roman evidence at all. It was chosen because it matched the year in which Cleisthenes established democracy in Athens, 510-9 BC, making the two revolutions neat contemporaries.

  Some historians have also identified a cyclic structure in Livy's account of the early republic, in which moral virtue rises and then falls over a period of 360-365 years. Starting from Romulus, the cycle peaks under king Servius Tullius, then restarts under Camillus, then peaks again in the era of Scipio Africanus, before Augustus enters as the figure who re-founds Rome and initiates the cycle once more. Romulus, Camillus, and Augustus emerge from this framework as coequal heroic figures, which reflects the political concerns of Livy's own era far more than it illuminates the sixth century BC.

• 6. What Scholars Believe Now

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  Tim Cornell's 1995 book Beginnings of Rome set out the semi-traditionalist position in its most complete form. Cornell accepts that a domestic crisis of some kind sparked a revolution in Rome around 500 BC that overthrew the existing monarchy, and that Rome was caught up in a broader upheaval affecting most of Tyrrhenian Italy at that same period. Lars Porsenna, on this reading, intervenes as part of that wider conflict, though his precise relationship to the fall of the Tarquins is unclear. His forces probably take Rome and then move south, suffering a decisive defeat against Latin forces at Aricia, a battle Cornell supports with a Greek historical tradition in Dionysius of Halicarnassus concerning Aristodemus of Cumae, which also dates the battle to 504 BC.

  Archaeological evidence supports some disruption around 500 BC. Evidence of destruction has been found near the comitium, and the royal sanctuary near Sant'Omobono at the foot of the Capitoline Hill was destroyed and left abandoned for around a century. Cornell reads this as consistent with an oligarchic coup against a populist tyranny, with power eventually conceding to the army as represented in the comitia centuriata. If the king had nominated two army officers for the assembly's approval, an attractive hypothesis, as Cornell puts it, is that those two officers overthrew their master and took over the state.

  Gary Forsythe and Andreas Alföldi offer a different model: that the republic emerged not from an internal Roman revolution but directly from Porsenna's invasion. Porsenna either abolishes the monarchy himself or puts Tarquin to flight. When Porsenna is forced to withdraw after Aricia in 504 BC, the officials he left in charge become the first consuls by default. This theory also neatly explains why Brutus and Collatinus, both members of the royal family, were appointed: Porsenna would have wanted governors whose royal blood lent legitimacy to his occupation.

  Einar Gjerstad proposed moving the expulsion of the kings to around 450 BC, matching archaeological evidence of economic impoverishment and the disappearance of Etruscan names from the consular fasti at that date. Robert Werner, in a 1963 monograph, argued that the republic was established as late as 472 BC, which coincides with the documented collapse of Etruscan power in central Italy. Cornell rejects both as overly revisionist, but Forsythe considers Cornell himself too trusting of the source material. The field has not reached consensus, and the historian's task, as one scholar has put it, runs the risk of simply producing a modern narrative with no basis in the evidence at all.

• 7. The Legacy

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  The Romans themselves kept the memory of Lucius Junius Brutus alive with a statue on the Capitoline Hill, showing him with an unsheathed sword, placed before the statues of the seven kings he had replaced. When Julius Caesar's power grew, the public invoked the story of that earlier Brutus to pressure his descendant, Marcus Junius Brutus, into organising the assassination.

  During the French Revolution, the name Brutus became a touchstone for republican virtue. Boys were named Brutus. Whole towns took the name. Mona Ozouf observed that the leaders of the revolution drew on legendary antiquity to rise to the level of the events they were living through. Voltaire's play Brutus, written around 1730 and initially unsuccessful, became enormously popular in the 1790s after the abolition of the French monarchy. At almost exactly the same time, the authors of The Federalist Papers were signing their essays with the pseudonym Publius, taken from Publius Valerius Poplicola of Livy's narrative, to argue for ratification of what would become the Constitution of the United States.

  Shakespeare's 1594 poem Lucrece told the story of Lucretia in what contemporaries called melodramatic rather than narrative fashion and enjoyed immense acclaim when first published. Attilio Mastrocinque argues that Macbeth borrowed elements from the ancient Tarquin stories, with Macduff, Malcolm, and Siward of Northumbria modelled on Brutus, Lucretius, Collatinus, and Poplicola. The English playwright Nathaniel Lee dramatised the story in a late seventeenth century play, Lucius Junius Brutus. Thomas Babington Macaulay's verse retelling in Lays of Ancient Rome was, at one point, extremely well known. The deaths of Lucretia and of Brutus' sons became recurring subjects of neoclassical painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long after scholars had begun to doubt whether any of it actually happened.