In 616 BC, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus began his reign as the fifth king of Rome. He was the first king of the Etruscan dynasty and regarded as a good ruler, expanding Rome and laying the foundations for the Temple of Jupiter. He was followed by Servius Tullius, another good Etruscan king who advanced Rome’s defences, developed rules for the military mustering of citizens and built the defensive Servian Wall. He also enumerated a census of his kingdom, sowing the seeds of a representational government – not a full democracy but an early political organisation.
The seventh and final king of Rome was also Etruscan, but Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) was a tyrannical ruler. Legend states that his final undoing was the rape (by his son) at sword point of the pure, beautiful and faithful Lucretia – an act that caused her to take her own life in shame.
The king was eventually expelled by the republican Lucius Junius Brutus, an ancestor of Marcus Junius Brutus, the controversial assassin of Caesar hundreds of years later.
The final throes of the monarchy were played out at the bridge known as the Pons Sublicius. The writer Plutarch describes how Romans defeated an Etruscan force, sent in response to an appeal by the defeated and exiled Tarquin the Proud to fellow Etruscan King Lars Posena. The hero of the day was Publius Horatius Cocles (Keeper of the Gate of Rome) who held off the Etruscans while the bridge, giving access to Rome, was destroyed – before swimming across the Tiber to safety on the Roman side. Lars Porsena and his Etruscan allies laid siege to Rome, but the standoff ended in a peace treaty.
The Etruscans were significant rulers in the north but David Gwynn notes that Rome retained a separate identity despite its Etruscan heritage. Moreover, the eventual expulsion of these kings showed Rome’s independence from their larger neighbour.
The monarchy was dissolved in 509 BC and replaced with two consuls: Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus (Lucretia’s husband). Lucretia’s legacy to Rome was its freedom from the Etruscans. And so started the Roman Republic.
Key sites
Tiber Island is prominent in the middle of the River Tiber in the centre of Rome and home to an early Renaissance church today.
The story goes that the island was created when grain belonging to Tarquin the Proud was cursed and thrown into the river, the island silting up and creating a permanent feature.
The River Tiber used to frequently flood, causing widespread destruction. Successive leaders (including Caesar) planned to embank it, but never did. It was finally embanked with today’s steep walls in the 1880s.
The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Capitoline Hill) was established by the later kings of Rome and finally dedicated in 509 BC. Throughout Republican and Imperial Rome it was the most important centre of Roman society and spirituality and was where senators held their first meeting under a ceiling decorated with gold, looted from Carthage. The temple was enhanced with a marble facing during the second century BC, destroyed by fire in 83 BC, rebuilt in the Greek style and destroyed again in AD 69, during the civil war of ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’. The victor, Emperor Vespasian, rebuilt the temple but, owing to another fire, it was replaced by his son Emperor Domitian in the late AD 80s. Domitian’s temple remained intact until it was finally destroyed in AD 455. The remaining materials were comprehensively pillaged by 571 AD and today only foundation blocks and fragments remain above ground.
NB: Tarquin the Proud is believed to have purchased the three remaining Sibylline Books (prophecies written by a series of Greek prophetesses), dating around 525 BC. But these books were lost in 83 BC in a devastating fire during the civil war in General Sulla’s time. Later, during the rule of Augustus (31 BC–AD 14) a replacement set was sourced and stored in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill. But these too were later destroyed as paganism declined in favour of Christianity.
Excerpt from ‘The History Lover’s Guide to Ancient Rome‘ by Callum Moy.
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