Here the tradition becomes literature, and the prose of politics is fused into the poetry of love. One evening (says Livy), in the King’s camp at Ardea, his son, Sextus Tarquin, was debating with a relative, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, the comparative virtue of their wives. Collatinus proposed that they should take horse to Rome and surprise their ladies in the late hours of the night. They found the wife of Sextus feasting with intimates, but Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, was spinning wool for her husband’s clothing. Sextus was inflamed with desire to try Lucretia’s fidelity and enjoy her love. A few days later he returned secretly to the home of Lucretia and overcame her by wile and force. Lucretia sent for her father and her husband, told them what had happened, and then stabbed herself to death. Thereupon Lucius Junius Brutus, a friend of Collatinus, called upon all good men to drive the Tarquins from Rome. He himself was a nephew of the King; but his father and his brother had been put to death by Tarquin, and he had gained his cognomen Brutus—i.e., idiot—by pretending lunacy so that he might be spared for his revenge. Now he rode with Collatinus to the capital, told Lucretia’s story to the Senate, and persuaded it to banish all the royal family. The King had meanwhile left the army and hurried to Rome; Brutus, apprised of this, rode out to the army, told Lucretia’s story again, and won the soldiers’ support. Tarquin fled north, and appealed to Etruria to restore him to his throne.45 IX
An assembly of the citizen-soldiers was now convened; and instead of a king chosen for life it elected two consuls,X with equal and rival powers, to rule for a year. These first consuls, says the tradition, were Brutus and Collatinus; but Collatinus resigned, and was replaced by Publius Valerius, who won the name Publicola—“friend of the people”—by putting through the Assembly several laws that remained basic in Rome: that any man who should try to make himself king might be killed without trial; that any attempt to take a public office without the people’s consent should be punishable with death; and that any citizen condemned by a magistrate to death or flogging should have the right of appeal to the Assembly. It was Valerius who inaugurated the custom whereby a consul, upon entering the Assembly, must part the axes from the rods and lower them as a sign of the people’s sovereignty and sole right, in peace, to impose a sentence of death.
The revolution had two main results: it freed Rome from Etruscan ascendancy and replaced the monarchy with an aristocracy that ruled Rome until Caesar. The political position of the poorer citizens was not improved; on the contrary, they were required to surrender the lands that Servius had given them, and they lost the modest measure of protection with which the monarchy had shielded them from aristocratic domination.47 The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
The expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, added to the defeat of the Etruscans by Greek colonists at Cumae in 524, threatened to end Etruscan leadership in central Italy. Responding for these reasons to Tarquin’s appeal, Lars Porsena, chief magistrate of Clusium, collected an army from the federated cities of Etruria and advanced upon Rome. At the same time an attempt was made in Rome itself to restore Tarquin. The two sons of Brutus were among the arrested conspirators, and the fiery first consul provided an exemplar—perhaps a myth—for all later Romans when he witnessed in stoic silence the flogging and beheading of his children. The Romans destroyed the Tiber bridges before Porsena could reach them; it was in this defense of the bridgeheads that Horatius Codes immortalized himself in Latin and English lays. Despite this and other legends with which defeat tried to cover itself with glory, Rome surrendered to Porsena,48 and yielded portions of her territory to Veii and to the Latin towns that had been despoiled by Rome’s kings.49 Porsena showed his good taste by not demanding the restoration of Tarquin; in Etruria, too, by this time, aristocracy had driven out monarchy. Rome was weakened for a generation, but her revolution remained.
The Etruscan power had been expelled, but the marks and relics of Etruscan influence were to survive in Roman civilization to its end. That influence was apparently least on the Latin language; nevertheless, the Roman numerals are probably Etruscan,50 and the name Roma may have come from the Etruscan rumon, river.51 The Romans believed that they had taken from Etruria the ceremonies of a returning conqueror’s triumph, the purple-hemmed robes and ivory curule (chariotlike) seat of the magistrates, and the rods and axes carried before each consul by twelve lictors in token of his authority to strike and kill.52 XI The coins of Rome, centuries before she had a fleet, were adorned with the prow of a ship—long used in the coinage of Etruria to symbolize her commercial activity and naval power. From the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. it was a custom among Roman aristocrats to send their sons to Etruscan cities for higher education; there, among other things, they learned geometry, surveying, and architecture.55 Roman dress derived from the Etruscan, or both from a common source.
The first actors, and their name histriones, came to Rome from Etruria. It was Tarquinius Priscus, if we may believe Livy, who built the first Circus Maximus, and imported race horses and pugilists from Etruria for Roman games. The Etruscans gave Rome brutal gladiatorial contests, but they also transmitted to Rome a higher status of woman than could be found in Greece. Etruscan engineers built the walls and sewers of Rome, and turned it from a swamp into a protected and civilized capital. From Etruria Rome took most of her religious ritual, her augurs, haruspices, and soothsayers; as late as Julian (A.D. 363), Etruscan soothsayers were an official part of every Roman army. With Etruscan rites Romulus was believed to have laid out the limits of Rome. From the same source came the Roman wedding ceremony, with its symbolism of capture, and the Roman ceremonial funeral. Rome took her musical modes and instruments from Etruria.56 Most of her artists were Etruscans, and the Roman street where the artists worked was called Vicus Tuscus; the arts themselves, however, may have filtered in through Latium from the Campanian Greeks. Sculptural portraiture in Rome was deeply influenced by the death masks made for the family gallery—a custom taken from Etruria. Etruscan sculptors adorned the temples and palaces of Rome with bronze statuary and terra-cotta figures and reliefs; Etruscan architects bequeathed to Rome a “Tuscan style” that still survives in the colonnade of St. Peter’s Church; Etruscan kings at Rome seem to have built her first large edifices, and to have transformed Rome from an assemblage of earthen or wooden huts into a city of wood, brick, and stone. Not till Caesar would Rome see again so much building as under Etruscan rule.
We must not exaggerate. However much Rome learned from her neighbors, she remained, in all the basic features of life, distinctively herself. Nothing in Etruscan history quite suggests the Roman character, the grave self-discipline, the cruelty and courage, the patriotism and stoic devotion that patiently conquered, and then patiently ruled, the Mediterranean states. Now Rome was free, and the stage was cleared for the incomparable drama of the grandeur and decline of paganism in the ancient world.
I The names given are Roman; the Etruscan names are unknown.
II The Greeks called the Etruscans Tyrrheni or Tyrseni; the Romans called them Etrusci or Tusci. Possibly, like tyrant, the Greek name came from Tyrrha, a fortress in Lydia. Tower is probably a kindred word.
III They were used in Egyptian tombs and temples, and in the palaces of Nineveh. Some Roman arches are as old as any that remain in Etruria.26
IV There were more than seven of these modest elevations in Rome, and the “seven” varied from time to time. In Cicero’s day they were the Palatine, Capitoline, Caelian, Esquiline, Aventine, Viminal, and Quirinal.
V Perhaps also he cleansed it with sewers. Roman historians ascribed to him the Cloaca Maxima, or Supreme Sewer; but some scholars reserve this honor for the second century B.C.40
VI As originally applied to cavalrymen, the term could bear the traditional English mistranslation into knights; but equites soon lost this early sense, and came to mean the upper middle, or business, class.
VII Few students are inclined to follow the extreme skepticism of Ettore Pais, who rejects as legendary all Roman history before 443 B.C., and believes that the two Tarquins were one person, who never existed.43 A tentative and modified acceptance of the traditional story after Romulus appears to “account for the phenomena” better than any other hypothesis.
VIII The traditional account of the Tarquins is probably darkened by aristocratic and anti-Etruscan propaganda. The history of early Rome was written chiefly by representatives or admirers of the patrician class, just as the history of the emperors was later written by senatorial partisans like Tacitus.
IX Most students since Niebuhr consign Lucretia to legend and Shakespeare. We do not know where history retires and poetry enters. Some have thought even Brutus to be legend;46 but here, again, skepticism has probably gone too far.
X Or, says another tradition, two praetors or generals.
XI In an Etruscan tomb at Vetulonia, dated back to the eighth century B.C., a double-headed iron ax was found, with its shaft enclosed by eight iron rods.53 The double ax as a symbol of government is at least as old as Minoan Crete. The Romans gave to the bound rods and axes the name of fasces, bundles. The twelve lictors (ligare, to bind) owed their number to the twelve cities of the Etruscan Federation, each of which provided a lictor for the chief officer of the Federation.54