Founding of the Roman Republic
The Romans expelled their last king around 509 BC and replaced the monarchy with a republic, and everything they wrote about it afterwards was written five centuries later. The traditional account has Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh king, ruling by violence and without consulting the senate, and his son Sextus raping Lucretia, a noblewoman, who told her family and killed herself. Lucius Junius Brutus — who had survived by pretending to be a fool, which is what his name means — swore on the knife to end the monarchy, and the people voted the family into exile. Livy and Dionysius are the sources, and they are writing under Augustus about events six centuries earlier from a tradition that was oral for much of that time. What the archaeology supports is a change in the sixth or early fifth century, in a period when Etruscan influence over Rome was receding and tyrannies were being overthrown across the Greek world too. What replaced the king mattered more than how he went. Two consuls held the royal power, elected annually, each able to veto the other; the senate advised and controlled finance; and the assemblies elected and legislated. The design's principle was that no one should hold power alone or for long, and the Romans added the dictatorship — six months, for emergencies — as the deliberate exception. The word king remained the worst thing a Roman could be called, which is part of why Caesar was killed and why Augustus never used it. The republic lasted 482 years. The constitution that replaced the king was never written down and worked until the armies stopped belonging to the state.
- Category: Political
