What Claudius has to say about Caeles Vibenna and his most faithful companion, by chance, gets some support from a fourth-century bc Etruscan tomb painting from Vulci, which depicts a naked and bound ‘Caile Vipinas’ being freed by ‘Macstrna’ (the figures are identified by inscriptions).39 This certainly fits perfectly well with the Etruscan context that Claudius mentions and seems to confirm the friendship between the two men, although it does not necessarily verify anything else, or even those details. The painting is still more than 200 years later than the purported events.40
As the city of Rome developed, another type of group appears to have emerged, if it did not already exist. These were the gentes. A gens was essentially a group of people who shared a common nomen; there was a notional idea that each gens ultimately originated from one individual, but these individuals are usually mythical and the extent to which individuals from different branches of the same gens were actually biologically related to one another is unclear. It is, however, unlikely that they were.41
It used to be believed that the gentes existed before the city-state, but the more prevalent view today is that they probably developed at about ←33 | 34→the same time.42 That does not mean, however, that they were necessarily all developing in the same direction.43 It may also be the case that clear distinctions should not be imposed, at least early on, between individuals and their sodales and the gentes.44 Gentes too, or some of them at any rate, may perhaps have once also had individual leaders. Attus Clausus, the man who took all his followers to Rome, changed his name once he got there to Appius Claudius. The story explains the origins of the gens Claudia at Rome. Having said all that, the evidence does generally suggest that the gentes were acephalous, certainly in historical times.
The gentes were powerful groups who appear to have long been able to pursue their own ambitions, and even behave in ways that may have been contrary to the idea of the state. The best example is found in the story of the private war that was said to have been waged by the gens Fabia with the Etruscan city of Veii (or, it may be, just with a rival group based in that city). The evidence for this war is, however, deeply problematic, and it has long been recognised that the story of the Fabii’s expedition has been modelled on the famous, and essentially contemporary, exploits of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae; like the Spartans, the Fabii were 300 or so in number and, like the Spartans, they were all killed, and the parallels do not stop there.
Whether or not it is possible to strip away all the parallels between these two episodes, and whether or not anything of value would be left, if they were removed, is anyone’s guess.45 Yet it may be that the story is not wholly fabricated, simply because it fits so poorly with all those assumptions about the Roman state and its army (namely that both had been created by Romulus, and so existed from his day onwards). It is telling that it is also possible to detect various attempts to harmonise the story of the Fabii’s campaign with those assumptions. In Diodorus’ account, for instance, the Romans fought a great battle with the people of Veii in which they were ←34 | 35→defeated; among the dead were the 300 Fabii.46 The private war of the Fabii is thus effectively made, in Diodorus’ version, into an affair of the state.
The power and influence of the gentes can be seen as well in the Roman tribal system. Rome’s territory came to be divided up into regions called tribus [tribes]. The earliest of these were named after gentes. One was called the tribus Fabia, the Fabian tribe, and it has been suggested that this tribe should be located in the direction of Veii, on the principle that the 300 Fabii were fighting to defend their own land. It is reasonable to infer that these early tribes were named after those who dominated the land in question, and that was clearly not the state.47 Later on, however, when Roman territory expanded and new tribes were created, they were instead named after geographical features.
The first of these new tribes seems to have been the tribus Clustumina, following the defeat of Crustumeria; it was perhaps created in 495 bc, if the literary evidence can be trusted.48 Whether or not it can, it is significant that no further tribes were said to have been added for over a century, which is a considerable period of time. Four were created in 387 bc, then two each in 358, 332, 318, 299 and 241, and these tribes were almost all given geographical names.49 Clearly, by this time, the state had become more powerful and so tribes ceased to be named after gentes.
←35 | 36→
III
From this necessarily brief and patchy overview, it is possible to see that, alongside the developing city-state of Rome, there appears to have existed various other social groups, and it seems that these groups could, for some time, act entirely independently of the state, if they so chose, even when they were based at Rome. The most obvious conclusions to draw from this are that the Roman state was at first under-developed and comparatively weak, and also that not everyone subscribed to the idea of it.
The difficulty then is working out why, how and when the state and the idea of being a part of it and belonging to it – so, essentially, citizenship – became firmly established and more influential than, say, adherence to a man like Poplios Valesios or Attus Clausus, and also why, how and when those men themselves came to commit to the idea of the state, and to the idea that they too were citizens of it.
These questions are, not surprisingly, unanswerable in any precise way, not just because the city and state of Rome were not founded at some particular moment in time, but also because the evidence is simply insufficient to answer questions of this kind in anything other than the most general of terms. The only contemporary evidence is the archaeological evidence, and archaeological evidence can only very rarely be used to answer questions about political ideas and practices. This is part of the reason why Carandini has ended up having to draw increasingly on the literary evidence for Romulus’ foundation of Rome, although he thinks that that evidence is reliable, or at least that some of it is. Not only do Carandini’s selective handling of the literary evidence and his need to reconcile it with the archaeological evidence (which points in a different direction) undermine his approach, but the basic assumption that the literary evidence for Romulus and the foundation of Rome sheds light on the origins of Rome is simply untenable.
Contemporary textual evidence is what is really needed, but barely a handful of inscriptions from archaic Rome have been discovered and only two of those are relevant to questions pertaining to the state, and even then only vaguely so. What makes those two inscriptions relevant is ←36 | 37→simply that some form of the word rex appears on them. Moreover, one of the inscriptions was carved on a stone stele that was set up in the Forum, and the very act of setting up such a monument is in itself highly significant, while the other inscription