The Beginnings of the Republic

Tradition records the dedication of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol among the most conspicuous and important signs of the birth of the Republic. The colossal building - the largest Etrusco-Italic type temple of all time - was consecrated by the first consul in republican history, although the temple was started by the royal dynasty of the Tarquins in the first half of the sixth century, a date confirmed by the most recent excavations on the temple plateau.1 Much archaeological evidence of building and town development concurs to delineate the beginnings of a republican political structure, at Rome as in the rest of Latium and in Etruria. The most important of this evidence is the disappearance of the customary seventh - and sixth-century habit of decorating large aristocratic residences with architectural terracottas that glorified the military achievements of the leading men of the state and their rituals - both familial, such as weddings and symposia, and political, such as triumphal departures and returns (these last being the true origin of future republican and imperial ceremonies and related representations). Instead, from the end of the sixth century, decorated terracotta roof-revetments were reserved exclusively for the residences of the gods.2 Of primary importance for our comprehension of the political climate at the time is the abandonment of the Temple of Fortuna (known later as Fortuna Redux, i. e., ‘‘Returning’’), a foundation of King Servius connected with the assumption of power and with the notion of triumph.3

In the first two decades of the fifth century, the urban expansion of Rome continued briskly, as did the construction of imposing buildings that had carried on through the entire last century of the monarchy: at the end of the seventh century the first Tarquin is credited with the completion of the Circus Maximus (the chariotracing stadium) and the Cloaca Maxima or ‘‘Great Drain’’ (which emptied the swamp

On the site of the later Forum), in addition to the foundation of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. This evidence allows us to reconstruct an initial phase in the life of the young Republic, in which not only Rome but also the cities of Latium and southern Etruria continued to enjoy the extraordinary development that had begun in the preceding century.4 In turn, the consular lists of the first 20 years of the Republic and the beginnings of the conflict between patricians and plebeians only confirm the other types of evidence. Tradition records that among the consuls of the time there were men either of plebeian gentes (clans) or of the nomina Tusca, respectively, people who did not belong to patrician families or were of Etruscan origin. Immediately after the disappearance of these gentes from the consular lists, a discernible ‘‘closure’’ of the patrician class occurred, evident in the exclusive presence of only patrician gentes in those same registers after 486 (following Varro’s chronology): the beginning of the social unrest of the plebeians is documented by the first mass secessions to the Aventine, one dated to 494, and the other to 471, which is perhaps the more authentic date of the two.

In Rome, and in all the other major Latin cities, from Praeneste to Lavinium, as in the great cities of central and southern Etruria, the first decades of the fifth century are characterized by intensive public building, mainly sacred as far as we know, and no doubt associated with the lively competition between the aristocratic gentes that took place at the end of the monarchy in order to ensure preeminence on the new political stage. Even the figural decoration of the roofs of the temples changed: the myth of Hercules, often used by tyrants to represent ideological expectations connected to their social and political role, was abandoned in favor of other Greek mythological subjects that instead illustrated the punishment for the typical vice of the king-tyrant, hubris, as well as myths that celebrated virtues more appropriate to the new constitutional situation. This sustained building activity was focused not only on the large state temples, but also concerned minor, or in any event unofficial cult places, where we would expect to see the involvement of those outside the dominant aristocracy. An illuminating example of the life and fortunes of these minor, unofficial cult places is provided by the sanctuary at the Greek emporium in the port of Tarquinia, Gravisca, whose worshipers, Greek and Etruscan merchants and commercial intermediaries, show a number of affinities with the plebeian class in Rome which was forming at that time.5 In Gravisca during the first two or three decades of the Etruscan and Latin republics we observe a substantial continuity in frequentation and cult: despite the evident drop between 550 and 520, Attic pottery continued to arrive until the beginning of the fifth century, and indeed in the years around 480 the sanctuary was ambitiously reconstructed. The reconstruction, however, lacked the architectural characteristics of contemporary official sacred buildings, which should not be surprising in view of the social and cultural marginality of the visitors to the sanctuary.

Even artisanal production appears to be sustained by the new building activity, and, in general, by the elevated lifestyle of the dominant classes. Plastic and pictorial decoration for the temples represented an important source of commissions for a high-quality artisan who, as in the past, was guided or at least influenced by specialized craftsmen from the Greek areas, now more clearly identifiable as Magna Graecia (the Greek coastal regions of southern Italy) and Sicily. The traditionally favored Ionian models were abandoned when, by the end of the sixth century, systems of terracotta roofing over a wooden superstructure were adopted that were undeniably of Sicilian origin. Pliny (HN 35.154) tells us that the cella of the temple of Ceres, Liber, and Libera in Rome, dedicated in 493, was painted by two Greek artists, Damophilus and Gorgasus, the former perhaps grandfather of the homonymous teacher of the painter Zeuxis, born at Heraclea Minoa in the territory of Agrigentum.6 On the other hand, the presence ofpainters ofGreek origin is well documented in the painted tombs at Tarquinia in the first quarter of the fifth century, with the beginning of a new style and decorative scheme characterized by the placement of a symposium scene at the end and depictions of games along the side walls of the tomb.7 On the whole, the artisans in Rome who undertook the most demanding projects remained in the shadow of Etruria. This is true not just for architectural terracotta decoration: the only important sculptural work in Rome during these years, the Capitoline she-wolf, is attributable to late-archaic Etruscan foundries (see also Chapter 6). Pottery production, the best attested craft of the time, seems to be located in the principal Latin cities: although local pottery painters, firmly established in Etruria, were absent from Latin cities, production continued of bucchero, the principal fine tableware for all of the archaic period, maintaining a reasonably high quality for the entire time.8

The majority of our evidence pertains to architecture. Through the first years of the Republic tradition records a series of temple foundations that documents the coexistence of two different trends in urban development. The first of these trends, following the will ofthe dominant class, was concentrated in the part ofRome that the monarchy had designated in the formative phase of the city as the area for political activity and an important collective sacred space, i. e., the area of the Forum and the Capitoline Hill behind it, dominated by the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus which both emulated and rivaled the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the collective focus of the Latin People (see Maps 7 and 8). On the one hand, the Regia (or ‘‘King’s House’’), and on the other, the Senate building (Curia) and the Comitium or ‘‘Meeting Place,’’ with their numerous associated sanctuaries - all of small dimensions but with considerable significance for the collective social values of the archaic city starting with the heroic tomb of Romulus, the mythic founder of Rome - constituted the natural location for the development of the new Republican religious and political institutions, thus creating an ideal space similar to the agora in Greek cities, indubitably the model for the Roman Forum. The space now took on a definite form: the north side of the open space coincided with monuments ofthe monarchy, to the west, the Curia and the Comitium, and to the east, the Regia. (Figure 24.2.) The extension of the square was fixed permanently on the southern side by two large temples: one, the temple of Saturn built in 499, was on the same axis as the Curia and the Comitium, placed to the west of the open space that would become the Forum, while the other, the temple of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux), was built to the southeast of it in 484. Although the temple of Saturn, which was constructed in relation to an adjacent ancient altar and to the mundus (‘‘pit,’’ considered to be the umbilicus, ‘‘navel,’’ or center of the city), is known only in its Augustan phase, recent excavations at the temple ofthe Dioscuri have brought to light the original podium and recovered some of the beautiful architectural terracotta decoration, probably originating from Caere and datable to the years between 490 and 470.9 The two temples exhibit all-too-obvious propagandistic messages, directed at reaffirming the preeminence of Rome in the Latin world and celebrating the new Republican order. Just as the Capitoline temple represented the rival to the ethnic sanctuary of the Latin peoples, so too the temple of Saturn established at Rome the primitive god who was the founder of Latin civilization with a new and formidable synoecistic symbol based on the relationship on one side with the Altar of Saturn and the mundus, the ‘‘center of the city,’’ and on the other, with the political buildings of the Curia and the Comitium. The other temple, dedicated to the Dioscuri, was intended to celebrate the victory over the Latin peoples and the conclusion of the foedus Cassianum (Treaty of Cassius), embracing other political and institutional aspects of the new Republican order with a clear reference (for the Dioscuri too were youthful horsemen) that was destined to last for centuries to the military role of the patrician youth, the equites, or ‘‘knights.’’

The other important trend also followed in its own way a path already delineated in the period of kingship under Servius Tullius with his establishment of the temple of Diana, a duplication of the pan-Latin cult at Aricia. This building activity concentrated on the Aventine Hill and well expressed the culture as well as the political and social aspirations of the rising plebeian class, which in this phase was not yet an openly subject and marginalized group. Like the contemporary Forum temples, the new Aventine foundations constituted an opposition, placed at the two extremities of the hill’s northeastern slope facing the valley of the Circus Maximus where there existed already an extremely ancient sanctuary to Murcia, one of the archaic manifestations of Venus, with a very strong popular character that is evident in the festivals celebrated there. Of the two new sanctuaries, the first, dedicated in 495 at the southeastern edge of the hill, paid homage to the god of commerce, Mercury, and expressed clearly the economic and ideological formation of a merchant class with a strong Greek element active in the nearby Tiber port. Two years later, in 493, at the opposite, northern extremity of the Aventine slopes - and thus in even closer contact with the river port to the north - the other sanctuary was dedicated to Ceres, Liber, and Libera - the Roman version of a group of Greek divinities, Demeter, Kore, and Dionysus-Iacchus, whose cult was enormously popular, especially in the Greek colonies of Sicily and Magna Graecia. to its priests and administrators, the sanctuary soon became the political and religious center for plebeians, maintaining a distinctly and palpably Greek character that derived from the mercantile nature of many of its visitors and survived until the imperial period, when the cult was, by law, still administered by a Greek priestess from Velia or from Naples. As we have seen, the cella of the temple was painted by Greek artists, perhaps from Sicily, whose presence is to be connected to either the cult origins or to the commercial traffic of the nearby port.