The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire by Anthony Everitt Read Free Book Online

he remarked, “I have chosen you, Senators, not for you to govern me, but for me to have you at my command.”He presented himself in public in some style, wearing a crown and carrying a scepter with an eagle on the top; he wore scarlet shoes and a floor-length white cloak with purple stripes.
    In the thirty-seventh year of his reign, the king went to the Campus Martius, an open space north of the Capitol, and held a military review near the Goat’s Marsh (now the site of the Pantheon). Suddenly, a storm came up with loud thunderclaps and darkness fell from a clear sky (perhaps an eclipse). A thick mist formed, and Romulus disappeared from view. When the air cleared, he was no longer sitting on his throne and in fact was nowhere to be found. The senators who had been standing beside him claimed that he had ascended into the skies. One or two said that he had become a god, and soon all present hailed him as divine.
    Another version of Romulus’s death gained currency. This was that patrician members of the Senate had become so disgusted with his tyrannical ways that they plotted his assassination. They struck him down in the middle of a Senate meeting. They then cut him up into pieces and each “father” carried a body part under his clothes when leaving the meeting. Hence the vanishing.
    The Senate was unpopular with ordinary citizens, but their attention was distracted from rumors of conspiracy when, as the historian Livy put it, “the shrewd device of one man is said to havegained credit for the story [of the apotheosis].” A leading politician, he claimed at a People’s Assembly that Romulus had descended from heaven and appeared to him. The ghost said that he was to be worshipped under his divine name of Quirinus and promised that “my Rome shall be the capital of the world, so let the Romans cherish the art of war.” According toone of Rome’s earliest historians, this was a cynical trick, but it certainly worked.
    The official version of a deified Romulus was the one that gained the greatest currency. Even experienced and skeptical commentators like Cicero were inclined to believe it. He observed that in the distant and uncivilized past there was a “great inclination to the invention of fabulous tales and ignorant men were easily induced to believe them … but we know that Romulus lived less than six hundred years ago when writing and education had long been in existence.”
    Strangely, the unofficial account of the king’s passing was to receive an uncanny echo during Cicero’s own lifetime, when in 44 B.C . the great tyrant of his age, Gaius Julius Caesar, was struck down by his colleagues during a session of the Senate. Indeed, Cicero was present in the meeting hall at the time, and he must surely have wondered at the coincidence. Then, for seven days,a new comet was seen in the sky, which the common people held to be Caesar’s soul; like Romulus, he had ascended into heaven and joined the company of the gods. In Rome’s end was its beginning.
    THE MONARCHY WAS not handed on by birthright but was an elective post in the gift of the People’s Assembly (with some input from the Senate). Most Roman kings were not related to one another and were foreigners or, at least, outsiders; this had the fortunate consequence of removing senators from competition and stabilizing the Senate as an institution.
    According to Cicero, the Senate tried for a while to rule without a king, but the People wouldn’t have it. An election was held, andthe winner was Numa Pompilius, a Sabine from outside the city. If Romulus had been a warrior king, he was a priest king. He distributed land to every citizen, writes Cicero, to discourage brigandage and to foster the arts of peace. He was especially interested in religion, which he envisaged as a complex system of rules, ceremonies, and superstitions designed to discover the will of the gods and to ensure their favor. He was advised on these matters by a friendly water nymph