Anthony Everitt - The Rise of Rome

Before building began, the augurs investigated the opinions of deities who already had holy places on the site. They all agreed to be resettled elsewhere—except for Terminus, the god of boundaries, so a special shrine in his honor was incorporated into the temple. His lack of cooperation was regarded as a good omen, for it signified the permanence of Rome’s borders.

The temple quickly became the center of Rome’s religious life. It was the repository of treasures donated by victorious generals, dedications, and military trophies. The rooms got so cluttered that in 179 B.C. numerous statues and commemorative shields fastened to the columns were cleared out.

A development of more practical value was the transformation of the brook that crossed the Forum into the city’s main drain, the Cloaca Maxima. Various smaller streams debouched into it. In Tarquin’s day, it was an open sewer, crossed by a bridge that doubled as a shrine to Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings and endings. As a result, the Forum finally lost its marshiness, and large-scale building became possible.

A TERRIBLE PORTENT appeared. A snake was observed to glide out of a crack in a wooden pillar in the palace. Everyone ran away in a panic. Even Tarquin was alarmed, although in his case the emotion was not so much fright as foreboding. He decided to consult the oracle at Delphi, and ask for an authoritative explanation.

Delphi was a town in central Greece, occupying a series of terraces along the slopes of Mount Parnassus. In this precipitous location stood a shrine to Apollo. It was the home of an oracle, one of the sacred places scattered throughout the Mediterranean where a god would respond to inquiries about the future. The oracle at Delphi was world-famous and was consulted by states as well as individuals.

The king did not dare to entrust the oracle’s reply to anyone but his closest relatives, so he commissioned two of his sons, Titus and Aruns, to journey to Greece, in Livy’s words, “through country which Roman feet had seldom trod and over seas which Roman ships had never sailed.” They were accompanied by the king’s nephew, Lucius Junius Brutus, a descendant of one of Aeneas’s companions. He was a strange young man, who deliberately assumed a “mask” to conceal his real personality. His family’s great wealth had attracted the unwelcome interest of the king, who had had his elder brother killed. Brutus was well aware that Tarquin had no hesitation in putting aristocrats to death, and feared that his turn would be next. So he pretended to be a simpleton and allowed the king to seize his estate without protest. He even accepted the additional cognomen of Brutus, the Latin for “stupid.”

Delphi was a spectacular destination. As the party neared the end of its journey, the road dwindled to a steep path and, according to Pausanias, the author of a celebrated guidebook to ancient Greece, became “difficult even for an active man.” Once arrived in the town, the visitors walked up a processional avenue, the Sacred Way, to the Precinct of Apollo, a walled enclosure at the top of the city filled with monuments and dedications, gifts in return for favors received. There were twenty Treasuries, small buildings that resembled miniature Greek temples and contained splendid offerings to Apollo, often works of art, including the Bronze Charioteer, one of the greatest masterpieces of Greek sculpture to have survived to the present day, and a bronze version of the wooden horse of Troy. Everywhere were nude statues of victorious athletes.

The Tarquin boys made their way to the Temple of Apollo, which stood at the center of the Precinct. Carved on the temple’s exterior were three famous maxims, epitomizing the Greek idea of the good life: “Know yourself” ( ); “Nothing in excess” ( ); and, somewhat mean-spiritedly, “Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens” ( ). Here they paid a consultation fee and made a sacrificial offering. All having gone well, and the animal having behaved as it should when sprinkled with water, they went inside the temple and sacrificed again, placing the victim, or parts of it, on an offertory table. Hieratic spokesmen (the Greek word is , from which we have our prophet ) then ushered the Romans into a space where they could hear but not see the Pythia, a priestess who delivered her prophecies in an inner sanctum.

The Pythia was a local woman of a certain age, who served for life and was sworn to chastity. Before a séance, she purified herself by washing in the nearby Castalian Spring, and burned some laurel leaves (the laurel was Apollo’s plant) and barley meal at a symbolic hearth inside the temple. She then sat on a tripod and, crowned with laurel and holding a dish of sacred spring water, became possessed by the god. In this probably self-induced trance, she “raved”—that is, spoke in some form of fragmentary and ecstatic speech.

The spokesmen translated the ravings into elegant hexameters. These oracular messages were often fork-tongued, and those who consulted the god needed to consider their meaning with great care before taking any consequential action. It does not follow that the Pythia was hedging her bets. If she wished, she could speak clearly and authoritatively; she and the temple personnel were well-informed on international politics and, when it came to personal consultations, they doubtless built up experience of human psychology. However, the Greeks believed that divine messages were in the nature of things ambiguous. There was a limit to human beings’ access to sure knowledge of the future.

Brutus knew how to get on the right side of the Pythia. He produced a wooden stick as an offering; Titus and Aruns had a good laugh at his expense for having made such a paltry gift. They did not realize that the stick had been hollowed out and that inside it Brutus had hidden a rod of gold. After the Tarquins had received an answer from the oracle (we are not told what it was), they decided to ask another question: Which of them would be the next king of Rome? The oracle’s typically equivocal answer was “He who shall be first to kiss his mother shall have supreme authority in Rome.”

Titus and Aruns made the obvious, literal interpretation. They decided that the prophecy should be kept a secret, so that at least their brother Sextus would be out of the running; they themselves would decide by lot which one would kiss his mother when they got back to Rome. But Brutus guessed that Apollo was being tricky. He pretended to stumble, and fell flat on his face, his lips touching the earth, the mother of all things.

This would by no means be the last time that senior Romans made their way up the steep path to the shrine of the god, in urgent need of his guidance.

IT WAS A sex scandal, not a political or military crisis, that brought the dynasty down. A long siege of the town of Ardea, the capital of a Latin tribe, the Rutuli, was loosening discipline in the Roman camp. Applications for leave from the front were rather easily granted, especially to officers. The young princes staged lavish entertainments in their tents. On one occasion, everyone was drinking heavily in the quarters of Sextus Tarquinius. Someone happened to raise the subject of wives, and each man praised his own in extravagant terms. A member of the royal family, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, broke in: “Stop! Why do we need words, when in a few hours we can prove beyond any doubt the superiority of my own Lucretia?”