Even the identity of the Romans themselves is not always a straightforward question. Rome was founded after tribal conflict between Latins, Sabines and Etruscans, and the single Roman identity which the Empire created has its origins in murkier waters. In 616 BC, Lucius Tarquinius became the first Etrurian or Etruscan ruler of Rome, and, from that date onwards, the Etruscan influence on Rome was considerable. Livy tells the story of how Tarquin, or Tarquinius, whose original Etruscan name was Lucumo, came to know his destiny. It is another of those ‘omen from the sky’ stories of which the Romans were so fond:
The pair [Lucumo and his wife, Tanaquil] had reached Janiculum and were sitting together in their carriage, when an eagle dropped gently down and snatched off the cap which Lucumo was wearing. Up went the bird with a great clangour of wings until, a minute later, it swooped down again and, as if it had been sent by heaven for that very purpose, neatly replaced the cap on Lucumo’s head, and then vanished into the blue. Tanaquil like most Etruscans was well skilled in celestial prodigies, and joyfully accepted the omen. . . .‘Did it not take the crown, as it were, from a human head, only to restore it by heaven’s approval, where it belongs?’ Thus dreaming upon future greatness,
Lucumo and Tanaquil drove on into Rome, where they bought a house, and Lucumo took the name of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.
The Latins, the tribe defeated by the Etruscans under Tarquinius, were considerably less advanced than their conquerors. It was the Etruscans who introduced public sewerage and bridges to Rome, and who drained the marsh at the foot of the Palatine hill to create a public space, which eventually housed the Forum. The custom of marking the city boundaries in priest-led rituals was originally Etruscan. The fasces, the bundle of rods symbolizing authority which later gave its name to the fascist movement, was an Etruscan device. Even the famous gladiatorial contests and triumphal parades were Etruscan in origin. Livy tells us that many of the Roman festivals of his day were founded on much earlier primitive Etruscan agricultural traditions; for example, the Robigalia, a purification festival concerned with preventing blight in crops, continued to be celebrated centuries later, when Rome was a bustling urban sprawl. Similarly, the cumbersome electoral and legislative procedures introduced by Servius Tullius in about 550 BC remained almost unchanged even in Cicero’s time, many centuries later. Even the most famous of Roman legends, that of the twins Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf, then raised by a shepherd and eventually founding the city of Rome, is actually an adaptation of an earlier myth from Asia Minor, found also in Greece in the legend of Neleus and Pelias, sons of the god Poseidon, who were exposed on the banks of the River Enipeus but saved by being suckled by a wild dog and a wild mare.
So, when the Celts first invaded Italy in about 400 BC, it was Etruscans rather than Romans who were expelled from the Po Valley. The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753 BC, but even among classical authors there was considerable debate about the accuracy of that date. Livy places the coming of Tarquinius to Rome at about 625 BC.
This early Rome had a king, as each of the Celtic tribes did. He ruled with a senate of elders (called patres, meaning ‘fathers’), some of whom were blood relatives, in the Celtic style, but some of whom were appointed on merit from other leading families. There was also a consultative assembly, known as the comitia curiata (‘business committee’), which was constituted on a representative basis from smaller ethnic groups or regions, called curiae (often translated as ‘parishes’, although there is no real religious connotation). It can be seen immediately that this early Roman form of kingship was very different to the Celtic form. Inheritance was strictly patrilinear; promotion rewarded merit as well as rank; there was at least a semblance of democratic representation in the consultative assembly, the comitia curiata. When the Etruscans took control of Rome, they introduced more elaborate symbols of monarchy, including distinctive regalia for the king, a central shrine (dedicated to Vesta) near the marketplace, a central palace, and a ceremonial chair or throne, the sella curulis (literally ‘seat of the chariot’), which was later adopted for use by elected magistrates, and on which the modern notion of a special royal seat or throne is based.
In the same way as the Celts, the Etruscans believed that kingly rule was divinely sanctioned. Livy tells a tale about King Servius which reads almost as though it might have come from one of the Irish or Welsh vernacular texts, with its emphasis on augury and the power of quick thinking and correct utterance. King Servius had built a new temple to Diana in the middle of the city, and to the outskirts of the temple had been brought for sacrifice an extraordinary heifer from the Sabine farmlands. There was a prophecy related to the heifer: whoever sacrificed it, that man’s tribe would rule Rome thenceforward. A Sabine saw an opportunity to topple the Etruscan dynasty, but a sharp-witted priest thwarted his plan, as Livy reports:
Now the Sahine I was speaking of, on the first suitable opportunity, drove the heifer to Diana’s temple in Rome and led her to the altar.
The Roman priest in attendance regarded with admiration the great beast of which he had heard so much - and, at the same time, he had not forgotten the prophecy.
‘Stranger,’ he said, ‘what can you be thinking of? Surely you do not mean to sacrifice to Diana without first performing the act of purification? You must hathe yourself, before the ceremony, in a living stream. Down there in the valley the Tiber flows.’
The stranger was a religious man, and the warning went home. Unwilling to omit any part of the proper ritual, lest the event should fail to correspond with the prophecy, he hurried down to the river.
During his absence the Roman priest sacrificed the heifer himself.
All Rome, including the king, was delighted.
Under the influence of several other cultures, most notably that of the Greeks, the Etruscan kings introduced a radically new governmental concept during their period of hegemony: they created three new tribes, the Ramnes, Tities and Luceres (all three names are Etruscan), which, unlike the earlier system of ethnic curiae or parishes, were not founded on district or ethnic identity. This change, which predates Romulus and the first purely Roman kings, had a profound impact on the later Roman identity: in the full flowering of the Republic, a person could be a swarthy maize-eater from Ethiopia, or a square-headed onion-eater from Gaul, yet still be as much a Roman citizen as any patrician in the senate.
Sometime around 510 BC, the Etruscan kings were expelled and replaced by elected magistrates, who served two at a time, after the earlier Etruscan fashion. There had been military clashes with Lars Porsenna of Clusium, and the times were generally unsettled, which made major constitutional change more likely. In 494 BC, the ordinary people or plebs of Rome also eleaed representatives called tribunes to deal with their grievances, which had been exacerbated by crop failures and widespread disease, notably malaria.
Livy makes a lively story out of the end of the Tarquinian dynasty. The story’s hero is Lucius Junius Brutus, whose name means literally ‘the stupid one’. Sextus Tarquinius, also known as Tarquin the Proud, the last of the Etruscan kings, had been troubled by a snake which had emerged from a crack in a pillar of the royal palace. He sent Brutus, Titus and Arruns to the world-famous oracle at Delphi in Greece, to seek an interpretation of the omen. Livy’s account continues:
The three young men reached Delphi, and carried out the king’s instructions. That done, Titus and Arrans found themselves unable to resist putting a further question to the oracle. Which of them, they asked, would be the next king of Rome? From the depths of the cavern came the mysterious answer: ‘He who shall be the first to kiss his mother shall hold in Rome supreme authority.’ Titus and Arruns were determined to keep the prophecy absolutely secret. . . . They drew lots to determine which of them, on their return, should kiss his mother first. Brutus, howevei; interpreted the words of Apollo’s priestess in a different way. Pretending to trip, he fell flat on his face, and his lips touched the Earth - the mother of all living things.
Shortly after the envoys’ return, Sextus Tarquinius committed his notorious rape of Lucretia, wife of his royal companion and kinsman Collatinus, and Brutus took advantage of the subsequent outrage to throw off his disguise of pretended stupidity, seized control of Rome and thereby brought to an end the dynasty of the Tarquinian kings.
Brutus’s kissing of Mother Earth echoes a deeply held Celtic belief, namely that kingship implied a literal bonding with the land. The physical beauty and potency or fertility of the king or queen were directly linked to the beauty and fecundity of the land itself. In Ireland, the bond was conceptualized as a marriage, and the rituals which accompanied the installation of a new king were essentially marriage rituals. The concept of an Earth Mother is common to many cosmogonies, and the ancient Greek personification of Gaia as the real and living spirit of the planet Earth has become widely known more recently through the influence of ecological movements. For the Celts, the seasons maintained their succession and delivered their fruits in the same way that the people of the tribe went through their seasons and delivered their children: because the tribe or clan was bonded to the land in the person of the royal partner, who was always physically without blemish, strong, proud, beautiful, potent or fertile, and vigorous.
There are one or two notable similarities between the earliest Celts and the earliest Romans. Although, as we saw above in the case of King Boiorix challenging Gaius Marius to personal combat, the Celtic notion of representative combat between kings or champions was not reflected in Roman practice generally, Livy tells us, with details of the oaths and ceremonies, how the Romans and Albans agreed to let their battle be settled by three chosen champions in 670 BC. However, the emphasis of the story is to suggest that the practice was romantic and archaic. Similarly, Livy tells us about cattle raids - a very authentic Celtic practice - taking place between the early Romans and Albans.
The notion of the king’s divinity is also strongly emphasized in Livy’s accounts. He tells us how Romulus, Rome’s first real (i. e. non-Etruscan) king, passed from this world:
Such, then, were the deeds of Romulus, and they will never grow old.
One day while he was reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius near the marsh of Capra, a storm burst, with violent thunder. A cloud enveloped him, so thick that it hid him from the eyes of everyone present; and from that moment he was never seen again upon earth.
Romulus has been assumed into the pantheon of higher beings, the gods who sanctioned his kingship. Similarly, King Numa, Romulus’s successor, who was a Sabine and therefore potentially unpopular, had his succession confirmed by a series of heavenly signs and omens specifically invoked by a tutelary priest.
There were more mundane connections between Celtic and Roman practices, particularly in matters relating to warfare, since it was in battle that Celts and Romans usually first got to meet each other, and therefore to learn from each other. As Rome expanded into Celtic territories in Gaul and further north, the nature of campaigning changed: instead of fighting through the summer, then returning to their farms and homesteads in Italy for the winter, Roman troops now had to set up permanent hiberna, or winter camps. That meant greater and more prolonged contact between each side, with inevitably greater cultural interaction. The Celts observed the effeaive-ness of the Roman gladius or short sword, and the Romans observed the effectiveness of the Celtic chariot, which they adopted and called a currus, from which the modern word ‘car’ is derived. When the Celtic long sword became too effective for comfort, the Romans developed the pilum, a spear used for thrusting, unlike the alia or javelin, which was thrown. The Celts had long battle horns, for which the term comyx is nowadays used, and the Romans had a shorter comu, or signalling horn. The Celts carried totemic banners, with boars, stags or bulls painted on them, and the Romans carried the imperial eagle (and, before the Empire, probably also carried totemic flags - we know of the existence of at least one type, a dragon flag or banner, because the word for its carrier, the draconarius, survived in the Latin vocabulary). Even under the imperial eagle, individual legions carried subsidiary banners with other animal totems, often zodiac creatures associated with special birthdays or famous battle dates in the legion’s history.
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