Serious attempts have been made to identify the missing curiae. Palmer and Carandini are the key figures in this area, and in both cases their arguments are flawed. The important premise from which both work is that there is a connection between the curiae and the Argeorum Sacraria, but this proves to rest on flimsy foundations. Although I would reject their conclusions, close attention to the argument actually reveals more about the curiae, and broadens the picture we have of the religious context in which they operated.

Palmer starts from Festus' distinction between Old and New Curiae. The text is problematic; the manuscript tradition has seven curiae which refuse to move, but only four are named. The easy emendation from VII to IIII is accepted by Lindsay. Nonetheless, there appears to be evidence here for a process of development, just as the tribes grew in number. The final number of curiae therefore is not a creation from nothing, and on either reckoning, neither four nor seven curiae can relate to the original three tribes. Festus implies that Romulus created thirty divisions, but these became too large for the Curiae Veteres; one might as easily assume that the curiae grew in number.

In recent years, the relevance of Athenian democracy to modern political thought has become a popular topic of study. The 2,500th anniversary of Cleisthenes' reforms encouraged a number of important and influential accounts which have examined the nature of radical participatory democracy and its contemporary reflections. Modern accounts of political theory tend to begin with Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. We are accustomed to hearing references to democracy in contrast to and comparison with ancient Greek exemplars, but the Roman model is far less commonly discussed. This is a modern phenomenon, and a tendency which has perhaps gone too far. In this last chapter, I wish to address an important critique of Roman politics, which goes some way to explaining why Rome is so often overlooked, and then I wish to make a claim for reinstating the study of Roman politics as a paradigm and model which merits our consideration as an important intellectual construct both in its own context, and for our own times.

It is inevitable that one should turn from the kinds of considerations raised here to the issue of the origins of the ancient city state. Before Bourriot and Roussel, our models were predicated on the evolution out of a tribal past with primitive kinship organisations. Models of state formation have generally worked with ideas of increased stratification, hierarchy, and settlement complexity. Nowadays, for the classical world, it is more clear that kinship is not a significant and necessary prelude to social complexity.

The first part of this book focuses on the range of evidence which can be and has been brought to bear on the problem of the gens. We begin with the ancient evidence itself. What we know about the gens is actually confined to a few areas: inheritance, and various markers of identity such as burial grounds, legendary genealogies and religious rituals. One problem is that it is very difficult to find specific aspects of the gens which are not shared with many other social groups, so that what makes the gens different is elusive. The absence of a political dimension is also striking. The sources do not describe the gens as a political unit, though it is clear that members of gentes participate in political life in various ways; this will be the focus of the second part of this book. What is important here is to note that one source, Livy, indicates that an argument could be made that the gens was an institution which was possessed only by patricians. At the same time, our analysis of the evidence indicates the difficulty of making that argument with any cogent force, and indicates equally the existence of clear counter-indications, including evidence for non-patrician gentes, and definitions which are at variance with a patrician monopoly. The evidence does not give a single, straightforward picture, and my argument will be that this reflects ancient realities.

The origins of this book lie in my dissatisfaction with my own account of the gens in a previous account of early Rome. For almost a decade, I have been trying to improve upon a few sentences in an earlier book, and I am slightly horrified that the result is as long as it is. Perhaps that is a testament to my obsession, but I hope it also reflects the importance of the subject.

Over such a long period, more people have contributed in direct and indirect ways than any preface can acknowledge. Nonetheless it is a pleasure to bring to mind at least some of my debts. Early versions of parts of the argument were offered as papers to stimulating audiences at Leicester, Cambridge and St Andrews. The real impetus to put my thoughts down as a whole came from the very kind invitation from Trinity College Dublin to present this as the Stanford Lectures in spring 2001. I am immensely indebted to my friends and colleagues there for their hospitality, and the stimulating environment in which I was able to present an early version of these ideas – I hope now to have answered some of the questions so pertinently posed on those occasions. I was then fortunate enough to gain research leave from the AHRB, which gave an invaluable period of time to think, reflect and write.

In the first part of this volume we have looked at the gens from four different perspectives. We have considered the ancient evidence and found it to be complex and not straightforward. Although it was an institution which, as we have seen in chapter 2, has bulked large in modern accounts, the picture presented in the ancient sources is problematic, and the definitions we have are dated much later than the period for which the gens is usually invoked as a key institution. I have revived Radin's important observation on Livian usage, and tried to indicate that the reservations over the use of the word gens for non-patricians are not confined to Livy, without claiming that it was impossible for a plebeian family to be recognised as a gens, and indeed there were legal arguments that regarded the gens as an institution found beyond the patriciate. My central contention is that this uncertainty and doubt is a genuine product of the fact that the gens was a topic of debate in antiquity.

We have also looked at the way that the concept of the gens has been treated by modern scholars from the Renaissance, and we have identified some of the unfounded assumptions which have entered the discourse, and shown how these assumptions have affected discourse outside ancient history.

INTRODUCTION

In the next section of this book, consideration of the political context in which the gens is supposed to have played a role is my theme. In this introduction, I give a brief account of the historical framework, preceded by a discussion of two key issues, the nature of clientela or the patron–client relationship in early Rome, and the issue of the identification of the plebs. It should be made very clear that every point in this reconstruction has been the subject of much debate, and my reconstruction is not the same as that of others. Many parts of this reconstruction are discussed in much greater detail later, but a broad statement of the sequence of events, and some of the positions I take, will, I hope, be helpful at this stage. For a statement of the problems with the sources, I refer readers back to the General introduction.

CLIENTES AND PLEBEIANS

The ancient tradition makes the first constitution of Rome the work of Romulus. It is noteworthy that the foundation of the city was accompanied by an act of constitutional creation, and it is, of course, literally incredible that we have reliable details here. First, many such constitutional moments are described in the sources for ancient city states, and all betray signs of later invention. Second, Romulus himself is almost certain to be an invented founder.

In this Appendix we shall consider in detail Dionysius of Halicarnassus' evidence for the religious roles of the curiae. This relates both to his own vision of the curiae, and to wider issues of the development of the curiae which are further discussed in Appendix 2, and taken together present a much more dynamic vision of the curiae than is sometimes appreciated. We begin with his major statement of the religious roles of the curiae as laid down by Romulus.

(2.21.2) χωρὶς γὰρ τῶν ἐχόντων τὰς συγγενικὰς ἱερωσÚúνας οἱ τὰ κοινὰ περὶ τῆς πόλεως ἱερὰ συντελοῦντες κατὰ Φυλάς τε καὶ Φράτρας ἑξήκοντα κατεστάθησαν ἐπὶ τῆς ἐκείνου ἀρχῆς. λέγω δὲ ἃ Τερέντιος Οἅάρρων ἐν ἀρχαιολογίαις γέγραΦεν, ἀνὴρ τῶν κατὰ τὴν αὐτὴν ἡλικίαν ἀκμαάντων πολυπειρότατος. (21.3) ἔπειτα, ὅτι τῶν ἄλλων Φαúλως πως καὶ ἀπερισκέπτως ὡς ἐπὶ <τὸ> πολὺ ποιουμένων τὰς αἱρέσεις τῶν ἐπιστησομένων τοῖς ἱεροῖς καὶ τῶν μὲν ἀργυρίου τὸ τίμιον ἀξιοúντων ἀποκηρúττειν, τῶν δὲ κλήρῳ διαιροúντων, ἐκεῖνος οὔτε ὠνητὰς χρημάτων ἐποίησε τὰς ἱερωσúνας οὔτε κλήρῳ μεριστάς, ἀλλ' ἐξ ρκάστης Φράτρας ἐνομοθέτησεν ἀποδείκνυσθαι δúο τοὺς ὑπὲρ πεντήκοντα ἔτη γεγονότας τοὺς γένει τε προὔχοντας τῶν ἄλλων καὶ ἀρετῃ̃ διαΦόρους καὶ χρημάτων περιουσίαν ἔχοντας ἀρκοῦσαν καὶ μηδὲν ἠλαττωμένους τῶν περὶ τὸ σῶμαι τοúτους δὲ οὐκ εἰς ὡρισμένον τινὰ χρόνον τὰς τιμὰς ἔταξεν ἔχειν, ἀλλὰ διὰ παντὸς τοῦ βίου στρατειῶν μὲν ἀπολελυμένους διὰ τὴν ἡλικίαν, τῶν δὲ κατὰ τὴν πόλιν ὀχληρῶν διὰ τÒν νόμον.

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapters have had three objectives: first, to reinstate the curiae properly in the discourse on early Rome, by examining their nature, functions and privileges; second, to examine the nature and privileges of the patriciate, in the context of the Struggle of the Orders; and third, to pose a problem over the apparently fractured and fracturing nature of Roman society, and its surprising cohesion and success. I have laid heavy emphasis on the proclaimed privileges of the patriciate, but have been dubious about the grounds for those privileges. In other words, I have suggested that the patriciate is a fiction of its own making, and claims and counterclaims about it should be seen in terms of an argument, and not as statements of fact. Moreover, it is not clear that the patriciate emerged into the Republican period with these arguments already developed, or that it was successful in maintaining the privileges it claimed in the fifth and fourth centuries. The long history of the military tribunes with consular imperium for instance may reflect a long period of uncertainty over the justification of patriciate control of office.

In terms of the cohesiveness or otherwise of Roman society, the army provides an obvious case-study.

INTRODUCTION

My intention in this chapter is to explore the archaeological evidence for gens-like structures in Latium, focussing on the two sites of Osteria dell'Osa and Satricum, and considering in brief the contribution which the Auditorio villa site has made to our understanding of early agriculture and land use in Latium. Having established that there is a division to be drawn between the social anthropological concept of gentilicial society, and the ancient historical reality, I wish to investigate two sites where the two have been brought together. In fact the concept of gentilicial society is widespread, particularly in Italian scholarship, and my approach has wider consequences. Nevertheless, there is perhaps a difference between a generalised reference to gentilicial society and a specific definition of an archaeologically identified group as a gens, and it is this which most concerns us here. It is important to be clear from the outset that in the two case-studies considered here, the possibility for the degree of specificity in the argument is entirely due on the one hand to the outstanding quality of the excavation, and on the other to the superb reconstruction of a much less well-excavated site. My disagreements with the conclusions take nothing from my admiration of the work that has been conducted.

INTRODUCTION

Although we take it for granted that the patriciate is a central feature of the Roman social structure, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down. We know that various important priesthoods were confined to patricians and we know that several political offices were at one time confined to patricians, but that over time the plebeians successfully gained access to these offices; the consulship is the obvious example. Various claims of exclusivity could be made about the patriciate, and as we have seen, one relates to the gens, though other definitions were less flattering, for instance the claim that a patrician was simply someone who could name his father. They clearly had a strong sense of identity – they even had a special shoe (the calceus patricius). In fact, the patriciate is not nearly as straightforward an institution as it might at first sight appear, and, rather like the aristocracies of Greece, the Bacchiadai or the Eupatridai, it is easier to understand in the broad than in the detail. The purpose of this section is to examine the patriciate more closely, to see what other characteristics it had which might be relevant to our larger enquiry; and that will also take us into a consideration of the nature of the early senate and of the emergence of the plebeians. We shall see that definitions of the patriciate by patricians, and by others, were often tendentious.

INTRODUCTION

‘It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that we would know how the archaic Roman institutions worked if we knew what the Curiae were’, wrote Momigliano in 1963, before commencing a review of what he himself described as the ‘very unsatisfactory evidence’. Several subsequent attempts have been made to resolve the issues which Momigliano identified, and in each of them the curiae are central to an understanding of archaic Rome. In 1970, R. E. A. Palmer argued for the centrality of the curiate constitution; in 1990, R. E. Mitchell made the curiae a key military institution; and more recently, A. Carandini has set the curiae at the heart of his reconstruction of Rome. Moreover, recent excavations claim to have revealed the site of the Curiae Veteres, a discovery which has prompted further speculation.

It may seem however that this discussion takes us far away from the gens and is an irrelevant intrusion into the argument. It is important therefore to set out from the beginning the way that the curiae allegedly interact with the gentes. This chapter will demonstrate that many of those interactions are modern guesses, and that the relationship has to be rethought, which itself has very important consequences for the reconstruction of the gens. In addition, our consideration of the way in which the Attic genos has been understood within the wider context of Athenian society indicates the need for such analysis in relation to the gens.

THE EARLY ROMAN ARMY

In order to find the proper context within which the gens operated, we have investigated other structures of the Roman community. We have discussed the nature of the patriciate, and the ways in which the political assemblies of Rome developed, and we have seen a picture of extraordinary complexity. Continuing, overlapping and competing spheres of influence have characterised our whole account hitherto, and archaic and early Republican Rome appears a difficult, strange and complex world, far from the easy dichotomies and the straightforward historical evolution which characterise the ancient sources, and some modern accounts. If anything has been thought certain about early Rome, it is its belligerence, and its military organisation, yet we have already seen ways in which the structures and hierarchies governing warfare prove more rather than less intricate. Where does this leave the Roman military might? This chapter pulls together various themes addressed at various stages in what precedes, and it has three purposes. First, it represents an attempt to understand the nature of early Roman warfare, and what that tells us about a range of issues, including the nature of patron–client relationships in this period, and the value of the archaeological record in understanding them. Second, concentration on warfare allows us to address a part of the activities of the gens as represented through the famous exploits of the Fabii for instance.

The gens, of all Roman institutions, is the one most alluded to and least explained. Only the absolute power of a father over his son has had such influence in subsequent philosophical and political thought. Historians have made the gens the key to Roman politics, archaeologists have sought the gens on the ground, and both have described as ‘gentilicial’ a huge array of activities and traces of social behaviour. Early modern thinkers found the justification for their definitions of contemporary nobility in the concept of gentilitas. Social anthropologists have used the gens as a model to help them understand societies as distant as Africa and native America. Engels developed Marx's belief that the Roman gens helped to explain the origin of private property. One of the most profound divisions in twentieth-century Italian jurisprudence has been between those who thought the gens (embodied by family) predated the state, and those who saw it as the product of the state. This debate is not only still ongoing, but also shadows a much wider, and much deeper, concern in modern thought about the nature of identity, as a real ethnic, biological fact, or a fictitious, political fig leaf concealing darker motives and deeper fears.

Yet there has been no substantial treatment of the gens in English for nearly a century, and none that I know of in any language which sets out to establish both the reality of the institution, and the myriad interpretations that have been laid upon it.

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, we set out the wider political context of the early Republic through consideration of the curiae. Our argument was that the curiae were a vital aspect of the Roman constitution, and that one could not identify the patrician gentes neatly with the curiae, but had to develop a more complex and sophisticated analysis. My intention was to clarify the political society in the early Republic, by reference to the assembly structures. In this chapter, we turn to the patriciate itself. Modern scholarship tends to be comfortable with the idea that patricians like the Claudii and the Fabii were organised into gentes; and we have seen Livy report a claim that only patricians were organised by gentes. So who were the patricians?

The following chapters address three key themes. I begin, not with the patriciate itself, but with an investigation of the relationship between individual gentes and ownership of land, starting with the issue of the significance of the fact that some tribes at least bear the names of patrician gentes. The purpose of beginning with the issue of land-ownership is twofold: it addresses directly one of the major areas of confrontation in the sources between patricians and plebeians, and it reveals more about the way in which an economic explanation of the distinctions between social groups at Rome might be made.