Roman kings: myth, memory and the making of power

Before Rome's Republic

0:00Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy, or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options.

0:32No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit Progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping, and find coverage that fits your life. On your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen,

1:02and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching, and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Visible puts unlimited 5G data and hotspot in the palm of your hand. Powered by Verizon's 5G network, with no contract holding you back.

1:32And for a limited time, you can get Visible for just $19 a month for 12 months when you use promo code SAVE6. All the features of big wireless service for half the cost. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply. Standard rate applies at month 13. See Visible.com for planned features and network management details.

1:52Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teenaccounts. Before Rome's Republic and the Age of Emperors, there were kings. Or so the story goes.

2:23These rulers loomed large in the Roman imagination, but is their narrative fact or fiction? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Emily Griffith is joined by ancient historian Christopher Smith to sift myth from memory and uncover how seven legendary figures shaped Rome's ideas of power and identity. You're joining me today to talk about Roman kingship and power before the Roman Republic. But before we really dive in, what sort of time frame are we talking about when we're

2:54talking about Roman kings?

The Timeframe and Territory

2:55What sort of region are we talking about too? So very roughly speaking, if one takes the Roman account, and we'll have some challenges around that as we go through, if you take the Roman account, the first king is in the middle of the 8th century BC, that's Romulus, and the last king is expelled from Rome in 509 BC. So we've got that period from the middle of the 8th century to the end of the 6th century. Now, over the period of that 250 years, Rome starts, both archaeologically and in the record,

3:33as really a very tiny place, and it becomes a bigger city. The walls that surround it enclose a larger area, and its territory grows. So what we look at by 500 BC is something which is the city of Rome and a territory that extends a few miles out and critically is heading towards the coast down at what we know of as Ostia and

4:05is looking nervously across the river, but hasn't yet really got there. And is there anything that we should point out about sort of how society was structured in this archaic period? A lot of what we know about early Rome, we have to guess at a bit. But one of the things that seems to be clear, and is something that one would expect, is that Rome has some quite strong familial groups.

4:37The Roman language, they're called Gentes, or Gens, which we usually translate as clan. So that gives you a sense of something that is not just a nuclear family, but is an extended kinship group. How real that kinship group, how fictitious it is, that's a conversation. But it looks like there are quite a few of those family groups. And crucially, some of them have an appellation and an identification as particularly aristocratic.

5:12Those are called patricians in the ancient term, as distinct from plebeians. And that distinction between patricians and plebeians looks like it's an old distinction. Very interestingly, none of our kings are patricians. That is very, very interesting. Now, before we, I suppose, get into that sort of side of it, I think this might be an important point of context to clarify. Am I right in thinking that the history of Roman kingship is almost a legendary one?

Separating Fact from Fiction

5:44Yes, you are. The problem about early Rome is easily described, but very hard to resolve. And it's this. If you look at Greek history from around about 500 BC, without any question, there are people who are writing down histories which come close to describing events of their own time. And by the time you get to famous historians like Herodotus or Thucydides, they're describing events that they participated in themselves. So you've got immediacy.

6:17And with all the problems of eyewitness accounts and so on and so forth, there's no gap. For Rome, the first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, does not write until 200 BC. And I've just been talking about the period from 750 to 500 BC. So there's a gap. And our challenge is, how do we fill that gap of time? And there are various things we do. So one of them is we say, oh, well, look, the Romans kept lists of magistrates. We know they kept lists of magistrates.

6:48And if you go to the Capitoline Museum, you'll see a version of this list from the time of the Emperor Augustus. So end of the first century BC, beginning of the first century AD, on the wall of the Capitoline Museum. So we've got this great list. It's fantastic. It begins at the beginning of the Republic, when the last king goes, 509. So we've still got a problem. You might say, OK, we know about these magistrates, but what about the kings? OK, so then you say, maybe the Romans didn't write it down, but maybe the Greeks did. Because, you know, Herodotus and Thucydides have been writing this stuff.

7:21So, you know, why not? Well, we haven't got a surviving source, which does that. So you have to guess, is it somebody else who we don't have surviving who knew? Well, this becomes tricky because you would expect somebody to quote, somebody to say, as so-and-so said. And the only place we have this is for the very first king, Romulus. And we've got Greek sources that talk about the first king of Rome. Only very late sources have a story that looks like what the Romans report to us.

7:52The names actually aren't the same. Often, the Greek sources say that it's a Romaios, not Romulus. So there's something that's a bit squiff between our Greek sources and our later Roman tradition. And then you can say, well, maybe the Romans just remembered it. And then, of course, there are all these challenges about the extent to which you remember correctly. So, methodologically, if we put it that way, we have a problem. Now, what you can do then is say, okay, well, let's have a look at what the sources are, what the traditions are,

8:25how realistic are they? Could they be true? So, Romulus and Remus are a couple of twins who are abandoned by their mother by force. She's threatened with their death. So, she hides them and she puts them in a little boat and he gets swept down a river whose course is slightly difficult to discover. And they arrive at the foot of the Palatine and then they are found by a wolf who suckles them until they are discovered by a shepherd and then they grow up.

8:55That doesn't sound like the most plausible thing to happen. You know, it's not the kind of thing that you meet every day. There are a whole bunch of oddities within the stories. The second king, Numa, learns Roman religion from a nymph he happens to meet in a wood. The sixth king, Servus Tullius, at least in one of the stories, is born to somebody who sees a phallus dancing in a hearth. Again, not something that happens in our ordinary life.

9:26So, you've got a bunch of stuff there that doesn't quite work. And the chronology, to get from 750 odd to 509 BC with seven kings means each of them reigns for 35 to 40 years. Ancient life expectancy can sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, be higher than we sometimes think. But to have seven that lasts that long. So, internally, it doesn't look quite right. That then leads us to say, well, what is this narrative that we've got? And we get into the difficulty of whether it's a myth, whether it's a legend, or whether it's some sort of reflection of reality, which isn't correct, but is telling us some quite important truths.

10:08And so, that's the space in which we tend to have to work. It's really important clarity there from the of. For the sake of our listeners, how should we be thinking about it right now? How can we align these both in our head? Can we say it's a story that reflects Roman ideas of power? So, I would say, and I guess my job is to sell my view, is that, yes, it is a really important way in which the Romans told a story, their origin, their expansion, and how power works.

10:49And I would say, at any rate, that what's exciting about the Roman king narrative is that it distills an awful lot that's going on in an archaic society into a narrative form. And what we can play around with is trying to work out what the constituent elements are that ended up forming this amalgam of bits and pieces. So, I guess I would say what's really critical to hold on to is, one, the established Roman tradition varies very little.

11:25The seven kings come in the same order. They're the same kings. And number two, that in the way that the established picture comes to us, it contains with it things about power, politics, things about law, things about religion, things about society. And it tells a story of how Rome comes to be, which makes it a very important foundational narrative for the whole of Roman history. And bear in mind, the Romans tell the story about themselves right through to the end of the Byzantine Empire.

12:00I mean, there are Byzantine sources that go, and, you know, Rome started with Romulus and Remus. So, it goes right the way through. When talking about Roman kings, it seems we need a lot of contextualising in this. What exactly do we mean when we call them kings? How does that understanding of kingship at the time differ to perhaps today? Great question. And, Emily, you're so right. One of the challenges of Roman history is that you have to dig away so many things before you can get going, particularly here.

Defining the Roman Rex

12:32So, we use this word king as a translation of a Roman Latin word rex. And rex, its Indo-European background, it is an Indo-European word, seems to have a lot of connotations of being a judge or an adjudicator. And the term rex also becomes used for a certain priestly office. And I think this is meaningful because I think what we have here is somebody who has a set of competencies that are military, political, quasi-judicial, and religious.

13:12Now, that's not unusual for people who are sitting in kingship figures. What we've got to sort of try to think away a little bit is the solid, stable figure of a medieval king and all the paraphernalia or even more modern king. This is a figure who kind of sits within an archaic society, which means that we look, or at least some of us look hard at the notion of kings in anthropological societies and those individual chieftain-like figures.

13:49But yes, what happened was that at some point in time, rex becomes a word that moves into the medieval period and beyond as something that is associated with very particularly powerful monarchs, often with hereditary ambitions. And therefore, it just naturally followed that we call it a king and all the associations. I was going to ask you, was this more an absolute or more constitutional monarchy in terms of ideas?

14:20I'm guessing that might not be the right question now. It's a good question, but we probably are going to end on either side of that. And one of the really challenging issues is that for the Romans, it was very important to give a sense of continuity and indeed continuity of power. So in a way, from the first king, Romulus, in a legal account of the way that Rome works, power comes down, is handed, transmitted across through kind of constitutional mechanisms, one king to another.

14:59And where it starts to go wrong is when that power is usurped towards the end with Servius Tullius, king VI being deposed by Tarquinius Superbus, deposed and murdered. And then you can have a break from a constitutional approach. So if you believe the Romans, then there is something that's akin to a kind of constitutional element. The challenge, of course, is what if that's wrong? Is there an alternative narrative? An alternative narrative could be there are lots of holes between these individuals, that there are gaps between them, that we've got individuals who are remembered.

15:37Some individuals are probably invented. And there's a reality behind this, which the Romans turn into a constitutional picture. Now, why would they want to? And this is where you get to why the Roman kings are so interested. Why would the Romans want to have that story? Well, partly because other societies, Greek societies, have it too. They have king, king, king, king, king, democracy, or king, king, king, tyrant, democracy, that kind of pattern. But it's also because that notion of power, what the Romans called imperium, this really important word, which means my capacity to make you do something.

16:16My imperium is in my ability to tell you to go and do something and you do it. And there are consequences if you don't, descends through the kings to the consuls, which are the first two magistrates of the Roman Republic. And they fundamentally use that imperium to command armies and pass laws. And so it's important for the Romans, it seems, to be able to see power coming down unbroken. That's probably not how it happened, but it's the way they told the story.

16:48OK, in terms of how they told the story, then, could you give us a little bit more detail about who may be sat under the Roman kings? I feel we're going to come into some sort of more of what you've just mentioned there as we talk through this.

Archaeology and Early Society

17:01OK, so Romulus, having disposed of his unfortunate brother Remus, works out that he can't run this place on his own, so he needs a senate. So he creates a senate, and within that, those senators are the patricians, partrays. Now, this is interesting because there's another foundation myth that's already come up. So you've got a king who's created a senate, and the senate there is sitting, OK, so we go right back to the beginning.

17:31So for the senate that Rome has right through into the imperial period, there's their foundation story. Did he? Well, it's very tricky to see how anything as formal as what is described in the sources is realistic for an early society. And indeed, there are quite a lot of worries about whether even in the republic, the senate met as a formal body all the time in the way that by about the 4th century, it does become that. Then you kind of think, OK, well, you've got a senate, then you need an army, and Romulus does indeed create the army, and here anachronism is rife.

18:14So the ancient sources always describe the army of the regal period in a way that is clearly appropriate for a later period, and they retroject it. But did they have some sort of fighting force? For sure, they must have done. So we can be reasonably comfortable that there's likely to be some sort of advisory body, and I'll come back to why that might be the case, and it's probably a fighting force. The critical thing that's going on here in the Roman narrative is that a king is gathering these families together and turning them into something more cohesive.

18:58The families of Rome may have been really quite powerful. We see them associated with territories. So you have something called a tribe or a tribus, which has got nothing to do with anthropological tribes. It means a division of land. So you have something like the tribus Romilia, and that's the tribe of the Romilian family, and it's a portion of land. So that family can be quite powerful in its own space.

19:28Why do they come together? What brings them together? How are they held together? That's maybe one of the roles of a king. And why should we think that they have come together? And this is where archaeology comes in. We used not to know much about the city of Rome in its earliest phases because it's underneath really exciting stuff like the Roman Forum and Michelangelo's piazza and Baroque palaces and so forth. But increasingly, we've got to know more and more about the archaeology of early Rome.

20:01And early Rome gets big by the 6th century. I mean, seriously big. This is one of the most significant cities in central Italy. It's way up there with big Etruscan cities like Velli over the river, Tarquinia, Givetri, etc. So to get there and to do some of the things that underpin that in terms of infrastructure, massive drainage, significant walls, a remarkable number of temples. There's something going on, but it's a kind of combination of competition and collaboration.

20:33So the picture you would build up is something like this. You've got a king, whether that's a continuous or an occasional officer, who brings these families and this population together so that it can operate as a cohesive whole, which would imply that they might very well need to be some sort of advisory body in which you can kind of, you know, work out the challenges between people. And certainly requires a military force, sufficient cohesion that it can manage its competitors in the area.

21:07So we've got some real strong inferences of what we can get at there. And a lot of this is inference and we're on stronger ground now that we've got the archaeology and the archaeology, not just of Rome, but of other competitor cities. We can see Rome sitting with others and then you can start to play games and say, well, it looks like many of these places have got hints of the sorts of structures that I'm describing, different little bits of evidence you can put together and you get there by inference. This does reveal something about early Roman history, by the way, which is, it is a game of hypotheses.

21:42We don't have very much hard evidence. So we move those pieces around the board and we wrap it around with a lot of inference. But the size of Rome and the walls that you see, some of which still stand, the so-called Servian walls, that gather several of the individual hills of the early city. The control of, or at least the claim to control the Tiber River, the fact that some sites which are close to Rome in the 6th century BC seem to disappear,

22:14which may mean that they're sort of absorbed in, all of this is telling us something. And then we come to that bit that I mentioned about the lists of magistrates. So when the Republic gets going in 509, we start to have a narrative of what Rome is doing that is based on a different documentary basis. And in that, Rome has got elected magistrates. It's got an army. It's doing things. It's beating people or losing sometimes to them and so forth.

22:44So you've got to think, well, that didn't happen on the 1st of January 509, right? There's something before. So we're doing a lot of that kind of work. I think it's fascinating, by the way. I think it's really intriguing because it presses us to imagine what a society could look like. And it presses us to recognise our own, what we bring to that, how we imagine that society from ourselves and whether those imaginations are anachronistic reconstructions from what we'd like to see.

23:22Insurance isn't one size fits all. And shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options.

23:54No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit Progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life. On your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

24:28Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Visible puts unlimited 5G data and hotspot in the palm of your hand. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. With no contract holding you back. And for a limited time, you can get Visible for just $19 a month for 12 months when you use promo code SAVE6.

25:02All the features of big wireless service for half the cost. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply. Standard rate applies at month 13. See Visible.com for planned features and network management details. Something else that you mentioned that we might have to infer is about the fact that famously there are these seven kings. We can presume they might not have all reigned for 30 to 40 years. So that might suggest that there were more people in the mix.

25:35It also presents this history as this one straight narrative that flows consistently from king to king. Can we infer that this was an elective position? Was this a hereditary thing?

The Seven Kings Examined

25:48How did that work? Or is, again, are we guessing a little bit? There are a couple of really interesting bits and pieces around this, which is there is quite an elaborate nomination process that is referred to in the sources. And there is also this very odd office which survives into the Republic of the Interrex, which is the person between the kings. So that implies that the Romans had had to think at some stage about what happens when there wasn't a king.

26:19So one way of answering your question is to say, what might it look like if there was a thing called a king that you could resort to, but you didn't have it all the time? What are the circumstances in which you might choose to have a singular figure? So I sometimes think that what we've got across, say, the 8th to the 6th century, which is a period which archaeologically you can see Rome is developing, that the actual foundation dates 753, we can forget that.

26:53But look at the period. You've got to flow backwards and forwards between moments where families, clans could probably get on, they might compete with each other quite a lot. There was a degree of kind of individuality. And when people were managing those factions, sort of engaging with each other, still being able to form alliances and so forth, it was fine. But what happens when it goes wrong? What happens when these alliances of families fall apart? Or what happens when external circumstances put you in a position where that kind of let's-see-how-we-go approach doesn't work, whether that be bad harvest, whether it be a particular external threat, whatever.

27:36You might then need somebody who can bring you together and to make the hard choices that are difficult for a community, which is riven and split. And so this is where I think it's quite interesting, the notion of Rex as adjudicator comes to play. And so I have a vision sometimes that what we're looking at are memories of figures who took that role of an adjudicator.

28:10And that gets turned into a continuous narrative because that's a much easier one to go with. And some figures are added who probably aren't actually real, but because you've got a few, then you kind of carry on. An interesting figure here is Ancus Marcius, who's described as bonus Rex. And it's quite interesting, he's one that's picked out as good. That's an adjective which often in Rome has a lot of connotations about being just and fair.

28:44So that model then comes back to your question about, well, how do you get there? So there's some sort of consensus process, which we shouldn't gloss as very happy. You know, they don't all sort of line up and say, hurrah, but it allows for a process where in crisis you can arrive at a situation where somebody presents themselves and that is acclaimed, accepted, given some sort of role and a role to do something. It's interesting, I think, that as the Rex becomes an office that doesn't work in Rome, it gets replaced to an extent by the other individualistic office.

29:25Everywhere else where you look in Rome, from Republic on, power is shared. Two consuls, always two. You can't have one consul at a time. So the individual officer is the dictator and the early dictators are dictators to do something. They're not just a dictator. They are a dictator to hold an election. They're a dictator to solve a problem. And I think the Rex might be exactly that. The Rex is somebody who comes in to fix and then how you get rid of a Rex becomes an interesting issue.

29:59Just so we've covered it as a point of context, we've been talking about the seven kings in the tradition. We've spoken about a few of their names. Could you just give us those seven names in order? And is there anything that we should flag about each of them? So it is a great story as it boils down. And each of the kings has a bit of a kind of special power. So Romulus is number one. Miraculous birth gets rid of his twin, takes over, and he founds a lot of the military and political stuff of Rome.

30:31So that's the story about him. He's the one who gets it going, founds the city, gets it going. What they haven't got under Romulus particularly strongly is religion. So the next king, Numa Pompilius, comes in and he teaches the Romans about religion. So you've got statecraft, if you like. You've got then religion, Numa Pompilius. Then we get somebody called Tullus Hostilius. Tullus Hostilius predominantly is associated with military activity and conquest of territory.

31:05Then we get this very interesting shift to a king, Ancus Marcius. He's a bit of a king who brings everything back together again. There's a little bit of, you know, all of us, all of that. He's quite pious. He looks after military staff and he's quite sort of sane and stable. But the next king is from a real outsider, Tarquinius I. He comes from Etruria, north of the Tiber River. He's a new person to arrive. And he is a builder.

31:37There's an awful lot of building work that happens under his reign. He's then succeeded by an extraordinary figure called Servius Tullius. There's lots to say about Servius Tullius, but he seems another kind of intruder into the story. He's not related to anybody, but he turns out to be one of the most inventive of the kings. So he resets the constitution. Allegedly, he does a whole load of founding things. He reorganizes the city.

32:08He does building. And he's ungenerally thought to be a bit of a good egg. But the Tarquins haven't finished. So Tarquinius Superbus, clues in the name, Superbus, proud, gets rid of Servius Tullius and takes over himself and then is expelled. So there's a narrative. You know, Romanus the founder, Numa does religion. Tullius does army stuff. Anchus Marcus pulls it together a bit. Tarquim from the outside, Servius. And the proud, evil, last king. Lots of things to do with this because a French scholar called Georges Dumézil looked at Indo-European stories and saw that often there are three parts.

32:48You have warrior, priest and farmer. And he said, well, that's interesting because you've got a bit of those three things. So actually, this isn't true at all. It's an Indo-European tripartite story. Then you do things like, say, well, the first four kings are from the Romano-Latin part of the world. But Tarquinius is from a truer. So you've got a division between local kings and incoming kings. Or if you like, stranger kings.

33:18So one anthropological concept is the stranger king is the person who comes from outside because you can't fix things yourselves. That's quite an interesting idea, I think. But actually, it's complicated again because Numa is Sabae, not Latin. So he comes from the outside. In fact, Romulus comes from the outside because Rome is sort of there, not there right at the beginning. So you've got Romulus founder, Numa from the outside. Tullius, yes. Anchus, yes. Then you've got another outside, the service is an outsider in a different way.

33:49And then dying kings. So what about another anthropological concept is that kings die. And one of the things that you kind of quite like about dying kings is it makes it very clear that kings don't go on forever. It constrains them in various ways. Well, Romulus is killed at the end of his life somehow. He's either assumed into heaven in a battle or torn to pieces by the Roman Senate. Numa, as you would expect for a good religious sort of person, dies peacefully. Tullius Hostilius tries to be religious, can't make it work, does a thunderbolt spell and manages to summon the thunderbolt onto his own head.

34:29So that kills him. And then you have this tremendous moment where as Anchus Marcus passes, Tarquinus is made king by being sort of presented through a window. And there's all this kind of stuff and then service to this is run over by his daughter-in-law. So there's lots of stranger kings, dying kings, anthropological models, which takes me back to that business about this story not just being you've got a narrative, but you've also got loads of things which have kind of come into the story.

35:03The Romans have thought about this problem and brought everything they've got to it. Bits of religion, bits of very mythical stories, bits of how to describe law, how to describe power, how to control power. And that how to control power for me is what's interesting because one way of reading the narrative is this is an unbroken history of powerful individuals. And another version is this is a history of individuals who in various ways fail and have to be constrained or deposed.

35:39How does that then shape their thinking about kingship and power in the later Roman Republic and Empire?

Power and the Later Republic

35:46So I think this is its core to the way the Romans actually wind up thinking about themselves. So one of the things is I don't much like the notion of a king. It's a tricky concept. And one of the problems about it is that you've got to manage transition, you've got to manage deposition and so on and so forth. So the fundamental principle of the Republic is that power is always shared between individuals, except in emergencies and in a constrained way. So the dictator is always a dictator to do something for a limited amount of time until Julius Caesar.

36:20So actually, we've got a sort of, I think, a double wave in one cell. My kind of emergent picture, the Romans do have very powerful figures in the period before the Republic who probably do very important things for constructing their society. They probably it's not probably the same as the narrative, but they do have that that memory and that notion. And they're worried about it and they replace it with something which distributes power.

36:54And then having worked out that they should distribute power, they then have an awful lot of stories which backflow into the describing kings that justify why you should always distribute power. And this iterates and solidifies, mutually reinforcing both sides of the story, the it can go very badly wrong in a single individual. And also, this is why we distribute power. Now, of course, the question you're dying to ask is, OK, but what happens?

37:26They end up with emperors again. Tacitus, that famously caustic and cynical historian, describes Roman history at the beginning of the Annals almost as the Republic is a brief sentence between kings and the emperors. You know, it's kind of they had a go at it. But really, Rome's always about powerful men. Interestingly, you can see, particularly with Augustus, the sense is maintained for some period of time, that kind of foundation myth of the advisory body.

37:59There are fake elections and so on and so forth. But the word rex is not a comfortable one to use. And instead, you think about imperator, because here what you've got is that notion of imperium. The imperium is the thing you have. And it's consolidated into an individual for purposes, particularly of military activity. And you sort of downplay civil relevance. Romans are sometimes said to have hated kings.

38:30And I think this is given as a narrative which makes the transition to an emperor really hard. I'm not sure it's quite right. In the case of Julius Caesar, we're looking at an individual who constructs the most extraordinary story about himself, whereby he claims to be descended from Romulus, the first king. And before that, right back to, you know, very Trojan ancestry, Aeneas and so forth. And he plays a lot of games with the reconstruction of Roman kingship.

39:04And that clearly irritates people a lot. There are many aspects of the way that Julius Caesar goes about things that Augustus doesn't pick up and is able to find a way through. And I think that it's the way Julius Caesar presents this notion of a revived kingship that is annoying rather than an intrinsic hatred of the notion of kings. As Cicero says, the Romans hate kings. But of course, he would say that because he's trying to get rid of Caesar. And I think that makes it a smoother transition for Augustus to find a sort of parallel institution to carry on soul power.

39:46And over a period of time, you know, that just crystallizes.

Deconstructing the Origin Story

39:49But they never call themselves Brex. So what I hope listeners might take away when people think about Roman kings is something like this. It's very easy to treat this as a subject which really doesn't merit a lot of attention because it's just a myth. There's nothing historical in it. And traditionally, many universities, including the one I studied, don't begin talking about Roman history until the middle of the third century BC because there's nothing really to say. There are some people who read this as a straight story.

40:21I mean, you know, people say, well, it must have been something like that. I've tried to say that there's a middle ground here in which you can find out an awful lot about what Roman society might have been like because it was the place in which the conditions existed to create this kind of story. So the challenge for us, and I think it's endlessly fascinating, is to say, OK, here's the story and we've got to decompose it into the variants that we've got.

40:55What kind of place makes a story like that? And once you ask that question, what kind of place makes a story like that? And you add in the amazing archaeology, suddenly early central Italy, early Roman, early central Italy becomes one of the most fascinating places to actually play in. There aren't many of us playing in this space, and I think it deserves a bit more attention than it gets. And I hope I've encouraged people to think, OK, let's maybe there's a bit to dig into.

41:28That was Christopher Smith speaking to Emily Briffitt. Christopher is a professor of ancient history at the University of St. Andrews and is the executive chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. NFL football season is here, which means when you switch to Verizon, it feels like because you get NFL Sunday ticket from YouTube on us. When you buy an eligible 5G phone on select unlimited plans, which means you can watch every out-of-market game every Sunday afternoon.

42:06And it's all on us. Now that's the Verizon way to kick off the NFL football season right. Switch and get NFL Sunday ticket from YouTube on us, only with Verizon. With summer coming to an end, you're going to be spending more time indoors. Get your home ready and save up to 50% off custom window treatments during the Labor Day mega sale at Blinds.com. From room darkening to light filtering shades, finding the perfect fit is easy. Get free samples, expert design help, and professional measure and install services, or DIY with confidence and support every step of the way.

42:40Shop up to 50% off site-wide plus huge savings on doorbusters right now during the Labor Day mega sale at Blinds.com. Leading insurers know that fragmented operations don't cut it anymore. Policyholders expect more, and modern insurers meet those expectations with Adian. From effortless premium collections to instant claims payouts, Adian's single platform automates the entire policy lifecycle. One platform to manage how money moves, control claims fraud, and automate operations.

43:12Adian, fintech built for your next move. Hi, this is Sam from the Good Food Podcast. If you love all things good food, join us at the festive Good Food Show from the 26th to the 29th of November at Birmingham's NEC. With a line-up of James Martin, John Turow, Lisa Faulkner, Pinkoombs and more, you'll be able to get plenty of cooking ideas for your Christmas entertaining. Find out more at goodfoodshow.com. See you there.