The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars

444 Pages·2018·6.4 MB·English

by  Kathryn Lomas

T h e R i s e o f r o m e

T h e R i s e o f
R o m e

• From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars •
K AT H R Y N L O M A S
the belknap press of
harvard university press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2018
Copyright © Kathryn Lomas, 2017
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in the United Kingdom as The Rise of Rome:
From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars (1000 BC–264 BC) in 2017 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Bevin Way
London
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www.profilebooks.com
First Harvard University Press edition, 2018
First printing
Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-674-65965-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements vii
List of figures and plates xvi
Abbreviations xxi
Part I: Early Italy and the foundation of Rome
1 Introducing early Rome 3
2 Setting the scene: Iron-Age Italy 10
3 Trojans, Latins, Sabines and rogues: Romulus, Aeneas and the
‘foundation’ of Rome 35
4 The rise of the international aristocracy: Italy and the orientalising
revolution 54
5 Orientalising Rome and the early kings 83
Part II: War, politics and society: Rome and Italy, 600–400
6 The urban revolution: city and state in sixth-century Italy 99
7 Tyrants and wicked women: Rome, the Tarquin dynasty and the
fall of the monarchy 127
8 The ‘fifth-century crisis’ and the changing face of Italy 154
9 A difficult transition: the early Roman Republic 171
10 Rome on the march: war in Latium and beyond, 500–350 199
Part III: The Roman conquest of Italy
11 The road to power: Italy and Rome, 390–342 217
12 ‘Whether Samnite or Roman shall rule Italy’: the Samnite wars
and the conquest of Italy 238
13 Co-operation or conquest? Alliances, citizenship and colonisation 262
Part IV: From city-state to Italian dominance
14 The impact of conquest: Rome, 340–264 291
15 Epilogue: Rome, Italy and the beginnings of empire in 264 322

Appendix: Roman dates and chronology 329
Timeline 331
A note on sources 335
Notes 347
Further reading 367
Guide to sites, museums and online resources 375
Bibliography 381
Index 393
Preface and
Acknowledgements
The most common image of Rome is one of imperial power – a sprawl-
ing city of gleaming marble buildings ruling a world empire. This
image is a long way from Rome’s origins as a village on the banks of the
Tiber, but by the end of the period covered by this book it was the most
important state in Italy, dominating the entire peninsula and on the brink
of becoming a world power. This rise from small village to world power
is the theme of this book.
The question of why Rome became so dominant is an intriguing one.
In its early stages of development it was a significant local settlement, but
could not compare with its more powerful neighbours. It was only one of
a number of emerging powers in central Italy during the ninth to the sixth
century bc, and in many respects it was overshadowed by the Etruscan
cities north of the Tiber, which achieved greater cultural and political
development at an earlier date than Rome, and by the Campanian and
Greek communities of southern Italy. A political pundit of the seventh
century would probably not have picked out Rome as a candidate for dom-
ination of Italy, and still less could have imagined the empire it acquired
during the second century. By examining its history in the context of these
other Italian cultures, this book aims to explain Roman development in
the light of similar trends elsewhere in Italy and will examine the excep-
tional aspects of Rome that allowed it to establish this dominance.
Perhaps the most obvious question that comes to mind about the very
earliest history of Rome and its neighbours is, how do we know? Our
information about this period is a dense thicket of archaeological infor-
mation, augmented with an equally complex set of myths and narratives
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THE RISE OF ROME
transmitted by ancient writers and additional information from inscrip-
tions and coins. Sifting through this and creating a coherent picture of early
Rome is a complex business, and there are no definite answers to many of
the questions we might wish to ask – only a mass of intriguing possibilities.
If some aspects of early Rome seem frustratingly vague, it is largely because
of these difficulties posed by our evidence, which frequently throws up a
mass of contradictions and requires us to read between the lines. Specific
problems of interpretation are discussed in the text, but readers unfamiliar
with this period of history may find it useful to consult A Note on Sources
for a more general discussion of the issues posed by the evidence.
A new overview of the early history of Rome is timely for a number
of reasons. There are a number of excellent scholarly studies in English,
notably Tim Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome (London, 1995), Gary For-
sythe’s A Critical History of Early Rome (Berkeley, 2005) and Francesca
Fulminante’s archaeological study The Urbanisation of Rome and Latium
Vetus (Cambridge, 2014), but there are few introductions available that
are accessible to a more general readership. With the exception of Ful-
minante’s book, much of the most recent archaeological research, and in
particular the important and controversial work of Andrea Carandini, is
published mainly in Italian. Many previous works also focus principally
on Rome itself. The aim of this present volume, in contrast, is to examine
the rise of Rome within its broader Italian context, and to explore the
similarities and differences between Rome and the rest of Italy, in a way
that is accessible to the non-specialist.
I would like to thank John Davey and the editorial team at Profile
for inviting me to contribute to this series, and for their invaluable
comments and support during the writing process. I would also like
to thank my colleagues at Durham, Edinburgh, UCL and elsewhere
for their comments and encouragement. In particular, I would like to
thank Tim Cornell, Guy Bradley, Jeffrey Becker, Hilary Becker and
Jamie Sewell, and my partner, Martin Hatfield, for their willingness to
listen to discussion of early Rome well beyond the call of duty. Thanks
are also due to Ruth Whitehouse and Martin Hatfield for permission to
use their photographs, and to the staff of the Soprintendenza per i Beni
Archeologici di Napoli, the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Colosseo, the
Museo Nazionale Romano e l’Area Archeologica di Roma, the Soprint-
endenza Archeologia del Lazio e dell’Etruria meridionale, the Deutsches
Archäologisches Institut, Rome, the Great North Museum, Newcastle
viii
Preface and Acknowledgements
upon Tyne, and the British Museum for assistance in obtaining images.
I would particularly like to thank Andrew Parkin, Keeper of Antiquities
at the Great North Museum, for permission to reprint images from the
Shefton Collection of Greek and Etruscan Antiquities, a collection with
which I have a long professional association.
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