Lars Porsenna Marches on Rome
Around 508 BC the Etruscan king of Clusium marched on Rome, and the Roman account of what happened is unusually transparent about being a cover story. Rome had just expelled Tarquin the Proud and become a republic. Lars Porsenna came south, according to the tradition, to restore him. What Rome remembered afterwards was a sequence of individual heroism: Horatius holding the bridge over the Tiber alone while it was cut down behind him, Mucius Scaevola thrusting his right hand into a fire to show that pain would not make him talk, and Cloelia escaping across the river with a group of hostages. Each of those stories ends with Porsenna impressed and withdrawing. Neither Tacitus nor Pliny believed it. Both record instead that Rome surrendered to Porsenna, that the city was handed over, and that the Romans were forbidden the use of iron except for agriculture - a disarmament clause of the kind imposed on a defeated enemy. The two versions cannot both be true, and the one the Romans told is the one that survived because it was told more often. What is not disputed is that Porsenna did not restore the Tarquins, and that he lost interest in Rome shortly afterwards; his army was beaten at Aricia by a coalition of Latin cities and Cumae, and Clusium withdrew from Latium for good. Pliny also describes Porsenna's tomb as a labyrinth beneath a pyramid hung with bronze bells, a monument nobody has located and which may never have existed. The city itself is known mainly from its cemeteries, and from canopic funerary urns with modelled human heads that are peculiar to it.
- Year: 508 BCE
- Category: Military
