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Ancient Rome

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Introduction; Early History; Life in Early Rome; The Roman Republic ; The Legacy of the Roman Republic

Etruscan Influence

The Etruscans had enormous cultural, social, and political influence on early Rome. The origins of this seafaring people remain obscure, but most scholars now believe that the Etruscans brought their language, their religion, and their love of music and dance from the Near East to northern Italy. Their distinctive culture was further shaped in the Italian region of Tuscany, which bears their name.

Tomb paintings provide a record of Etruscan civilization and illustrate their cultural sophistication, intense religious beliefs, and artistic accomplishments. Their skill at urban planning, engineering, and waterworks had a deep influence on the development of Rome. In Rome itself, projects attributed to the Etruscan kings included the building of city walls, the engineering of the Forum, and the construction of the great drain to channel both rainfall and sewage into the Tiber. For centuries the Romans also built and decorated their temples in the Etruscan style. They were in awe of the extraordinary metalwork of Etruscan craftworkers shown in products ranging from iron plows to bronze mirrors, silver bowls, and fine gold jewelry. Elaborate aristocratic tombs in central Italian towns such as Praeneste (now Palestrina) as well as rural drainage trenches cut into rock to preserve topsoil show that Etruscan influences even spread to the countryside around Rome.

Other aspects of Etruscan culture also had a lasting impact on the Romans. The Etruscan cities were controlled by the nobility and ruled by kings. Rods and axes, symbols of civil and military authority, represented royal power to the Etruscans. Later, bundles of rods surrounding an ax, called fasces in Latin, were carried before Roman magistrates in ceremonial processions. Etruscan women possessed a social freedom which scandalized Greek writers, since they were allowed to recline on couches with their husbands at public banquets. Women received greater respect and visibility than in other cultures, and this treatment became an important legacy to the Romans.

The Etruscans had extensive commercial exchanges with the Greeks; for example, Greek pottery reached Etruria, while Etruscan ironwork has been found in Greek sites. The Etruscans also took the alphabet from the Greeks and incorporated the Olympian gods into their own array of deities. Etruscan power reached its peak in the 6th century bc when three successive Etruscan kings ruled at Rome and their control extended from the Po Valley in northern Italy to the Bay of Naples in the south.

Life in Early Rome

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From earliest times the family lay at the center of all personal and social relations in Rome and even influenced public and political activities. Religion was the other principal element that shaped early Roman life, and religion and family remained closely intertwined as the twin pillars of Roman society for the five centuries of the Roman Republic.

The Romans held moral values that were typical of a conservative agrarian society with strong family networks. They were hardworking and frugal, self-reliant and cautious, serious about their responsibilities and steadfast in the face of adversity. They particularly valued virtus, the physical and moral courage suitable to a man (vir). The stress on family responsibility was evident in the idea of pietas, the belief that every Roman owed loyalty to family authority and to the gods of Rome. Likewise fides (good faith) made a Roman’s word his or her bond—in both public and private life. The early books of Livy’s History provide many examples of the virtues and values that Romans believed made them different from, and superior to, other peoples.

Family Relationships

Beginning with the era of the kings, the Roman family mirrored the patriarchal nature of the Roman state in the absolute and lifelong power (patria potestas) that the father (paterfamilias) exercised over his wife, children, and slaves. Each father was the priest of the cult of his ancestors and of the hearth gods of the family. Ancestor worship focused on the genius of the family (gens) which was the inner spirit passed on from one generation to another. Their genius bound Romans to their ancestors and their descendents in a single continuous community. The primary purpose of Roman marriage was to produce children, and all legitimate offspring belonged only to the father’s family. In event of divorce, children remained with the father. For centuries a father had the right to abandon an infant at birth. Usually this unwanted child was a deformed boy—or a girl whose family wished to avoid paying a dowry. The law even allowed a father to execute a grown son for treasonous behavior.

Despite the father’s extreme authority, Roman writings provide evidence of warm family feeling. Parents were closely involved with the education of their children; Roman boys would accompany their fathers to the forum to observe public meetings as preparation for citizenship. When members of the Roman nobility died, their sons delivered speeches in praise of the deceased and also their ancestors, while masks of these loved ones were displayed. This custom helped to sustain family pride and cultivate family myths, but as the statesman Cicero later commented, “the history of Rome has been falsified by these speeches for there is much in them that never happened.”

Within the Roman family, there was also much greater intimacy between a husband and wife than in Greece, where men and women saw relatively little of each other. After marriage, a Roman girl left her father’s authority to enter the household of her husband (or father-in-law, if he was still alive). A girl was usually between 14 and 17 years of age at her wedding, while her husband was often in his mid-20s. Young Roman children would not be forced to enter marriage unwillingly, but few could refuse parental arrangements. In early Rome divorce was rare and only happened if the husband desired it; later, divorce became more frequent among the upper classes. A shortage of women resulted from the abandonment of infant girls and deaths during childbirth. Roman women could almost always find husbands, even for second or third marriages. No unmarried women were recorded among the aristocratic class in Republican Rome.

Roman women could attend public and private banquets and enjoyed far more social freedom than their counterparts in Greece. Mothers were in charge of domestic servants and played an important role in child rearing, providing strong moral guidance to sons as well as daughters. According to earliest Roman law, daughters shared equally with sons in the estate of a father who died without a will, and they were usually included in their father’s bequests. The moral strength and loyalty of Roman women became an important theme in literature as wives stood by husbands through civil wars and exile.

Slavery

The Roman household included slaves who labored beside the family in the fields. The earliest slaves were poor peasants who were reduced to slavery by debt. Slavery had no ethnic or racial basis: birth, conquest, or debt condemned men and women to that condition. Early slaves were thought to be part of the family and were treated reasonably well. Slaves were permitted to keep some private savings (peculium), with which they might eventually purchase their freedom. After emancipation a freed slave became a Roman citizen. Freedmen often remained with families as paid laborers on farms or in households.

It was only much later, in the 2nd century bc, that huge numbers of foreign captives were brought to Rome to work on immense plantations. Romans then began to treat slaves with a cruelty that eventually provoked several terrible slave revolts. One of the most famous leaders of slave uprisings was Spartacus, an army deserter who was sold into slavery as a gladiator. He and his followers defeated Roman forces several times, including a series of battles known as the Third Servile War, or Gladiators’ War, before Spartacus was killed. Despite insurrections, slavery survived as an institution throughout Roman history.

Religious Practices

The earliest Romans were primarily an agricultural people and focused their religion on spirits who, according to their beliefs, presided over nearly every aspect of the natural world, including springs, forests, and rivers. Some of these deities survived over time to become the gods honored with small shrines at crossroads throughout Italy. Early superstitions, such as the magical power of the evil eye, also continued long after the Romans introduced new religious practices. Some taboos, such as those that prohibited the high priest of the god Jupiter from touching a horse or dog, were mysterious even to the Romans themselves and were attributed to the remote past. To these primitive beliefs the Romans added such Etruscan practices as interpreting the will of the gods by the flight of birds (auspices) or by the study of an animal’s liver.

The Etruscans had also adopted gods from the Greek pantheon, or family of gods, and many of these divinities were passed on to the Romans. Zeus, the Greek god of the skies, for example, had a counterpart in the Roman god Jupiter, while Hera, the wife of Zeus and queen of the gods, became the Roman goddess Juno. Other Greek gods with Roman equivalents included Aphrodite, the goddess of love, known to the Romans as Venus, and the Greek god of war, Ares, who was called Mars by the Romans.

The ancients believed that religion held the Roman state together. Kings, and later civil magistrates, were obligated to ensure that the community remained at peace with the gods. Public pageantry emphasized the importance of devotion to the gods and included prayers, festivals, and sacrifices. A certain element of reciprocity existed in religion, as the Romans expected their gods to respond to offerings. The Latin phrase quid pro quo (one thing for another) which described such an exchange is still used today. Gradually, groups of priests and priestesses took responsibility for the worship of specific gods and goddesses. The most notable of these groups were the vestal virgins who served Vesta, the goddess of the hearth.

The Roman calendar was fundamentally a religious document. Some months were named after gods, including January for Janus, who presided over beginnings, and March for Mars, the war god. Other months were merely numbered. The Roman calendar originally began with March, so the seventh month, September, took its name from the Latin word septem for seven. The name of the eighth month, or October, derived from octo for eight, and others followed suit.

The Romans also named the days of the week for gods. The Romance languages continue to use Roman gods for these days, while in English the names of their ancient Germanic counterparts are used. Hence Friday, the day of the goddess of love, Venus, is vendredi in French, but takes its English name from Freia, the German goddess of love. In 45 bc when Julius Caesar acted as the dictator of Rome, he revised the calendar to reflect the solar year, making it 365 days long and adding an extra day every fourth or leap year. See also Calendar: The Roman Calendar

Like the calendar, Roman religion did not remain static. The Romans adopted new gods whose specific powers were needed by the people. At the siege of the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 bc, the Romans tried to entice Juno, the patron goddess of the Veians, to their side. When Veii fell, the Romans claimed that the goddess had deserted the people of that city and so they erected their own temple to Juno in Rome. Further Roman conquests brought other gods into its pantheon. This flexibility in Roman religion mirrored a similarly flexible attitude toward political institutions during the era of the Roman Republic.

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