Romans told two founding stories and saw no need to choose between them. In one, the Trojan prince Aeneas escaped burning Troy and led his people to Italy, making the Romans heirs of an old and tragic nobility. In the other, twin brothers Romulus and Remus, abandoned as babies and nursed by a she-wolf, grew up to found a city; after a quarrel Romulus killed his brother and gave the city his name. Roman tradition dated the founding of Rome to 753 BC. Archaeology tells a plainer story: villages of farmers and herders on hills beside the Tiber River slowly grew together during the eighth and seventh centuries BC, at a river crossing where trade routes met.
Why myths mattered
The stories did real work. The Romulus tale, with its killing of a brother, gave Romans a way to think about civil strife as an old curse on the city. The Aeneas story let them claim kinship with the Greek world while standing apart from it. The poet Virgil, writing under Augustus, turned Aeneas into a model of pietas, dutiful devotion to gods, family and country. Whenever you meet a nation's founding myth, it is worth asking what it does for the people who tell it.
Kings and their fall
Tradition says seven kings ruled early Rome. The last, Tarquin the Proud, was remembered as a tyrant, and the story of his son's rape of a noblewoman named Lucretia, who then took her own life, was told as the spark of revolt. According to Roman tradition, the kings were expelled in 509 BC and the Republic was founded. The word republic comes from the Latin res publica, the public thing or common affair. Romans afterward treated the title of king, rex, as almost a curse, and an ambitious politician could be ruined by a rumour that he wanted a crown.
The machinery of the Republic
Roman offices were designed to stop any one man from gathering a king's power. At the top stood two consuls, elected each year, and each could block the other. Sharing the office and limiting it to one year were the two great safeguards. Below the consuls ran a ladder of offices, the cursus honorum, from quaestor (finance) to praetor (justice) and upward. The Senate, made up mostly of former officials who sat for life, could not pass laws but advised the magistrates, and in practice its advice on war, money and foreign affairs was rarely ignored. Laws were passed and officials elected by assemblies of citizens, though voting was organized in blocs that gave extra weight to the wealthy.
For emergencies the Republic had a safety valve. A dictator could be appointed in a crisis, but only for a maximum of six months. The word did not yet carry its modern meaning; it named a temporary office with a hard limit.
Patricians, plebeians and the Conflict of the Orders
Early Roman society was split between a small hereditary elite, the patricians, and everyone else, the plebeians. At first the patricians monopolized high office and the priesthoods. Over roughly two centuries, from the early fifth to the early third century BC, plebeians fought for a share of power in what historians call the Conflict of the Orders. Their sharpest weapon was secession: plebeians left the city as a body and refused to serve in the army until their demands were met. Tradition places the first secession in 494 BC.
The result was a new office. The tribunes of the plebs were sacred officials who could veto the acts of magistrates to protect ordinary citizens. Rome's earliest written laws, the Twelve Tables of about 450 BC, also came out of this struggle. By 367 BC a plebeian could be consul, and from 287 BC decisions of the plebeian assembly bound all Romans.
A fair view
Admirers ancient and modern praised the Republic for dividing power and binding its leaders to law; the Greek historian Polybius thought its balance explained Rome's success. Critics point out that the reforms mostly opened the top to rich plebeians, producing a mixed nobility that kept power within a few dozen families. Women could not vote or hold office, and slaves had no political standing at all. Most early Roman dates and stories come from writers like Livy who lived centuries later, so historians treat the period before about 300 BC with caution.
Worked example: Cincinnatus at the plough
Livy tells how in 458 BC a Roman army was trapped by an enemy people called the Aequi. The Senate sent messengers to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a former consul working his small farm across the Tiber. He wiped off the dust, put on his toga, accepted the dictatorship, raised a relief army, won the battle and, the story says, laid down his power after sixteen days, long before the six month limit, and went back to his fields. Whether every detail is true matters less than what Romans did with the tale. It made the voluntary surrender of power the highest civic virtue. Notice how it fits the system above: the dictatorship existed because a crisis sometimes needed one commander, and the time limit plus the expectation of return made that safe. When later Romans held power without giving it back, they were measured against Cincinnatus, and, as the last level shows, so were the American founders.