Roman Kingship

Abstract

The Romans developed an account of their early history which was organized by the reigns of seven kings. By the 1st century bce, they had settled on a standard chronology for these kings, and in the following sequence: Romulus 753–717, Numa Pompilius 716–674, Tullus Hostilius 673–642, Ancus Marcius 641–617, Tarquinius Priscus 616–578, Servius Tullius 578–534, Tarquinius Superbus 534–509. It is clear from archaeological evidence that Rome from the 8th to the 6th century bce was in a period of significant growth and transformation. There are a number of exciting finds which have been related to the historical account. This account however was the product of a long period of development, and the narrative as it developed came to reflect the contemporary concerns of Roman politics. So research on Roman kingship has to take account of both the possibility of genuine history underlying the account, and the literary and artistic motivations which led to the transformations of the story over time. The relationship between these two is the subject of significant methodological discussion, on a spectrum from attempts to directly relate the historical account to archaeological finds, to significantly more skeptical claims that connections are coincidental and that the historical record is wholly unreliable. The third strand of investigation is institutional history and includes the controversy over the so-called leges regiae, the alleged legal precursors to the codification of law in the Twelve Tables from the mid-5th century bce, and the transformation of the Roman constitution into one characterized by shared time-limited office-holding. A quite different approach sees the kings as encoding deep mythological structures, and argues for a reconceptualization of the early history of Rome as a mythical rather than a historical sequence. Although this has been less popular recently, aspects of this scholarly approach have been influential in other fields of study. This is particularly true of social anthropology and the history of religion, where Dumézil’s classification of the Roman kings has been influential but controversial (see section Roman Kings and Indo-European Mythology).