Prologue

Ab Urbe Condita 245, or 509 years from the traditional founding of Rome, stands in Roman memory as a turning point upon which the city’s political identity came to rest. In later centuries, when Romans dated time by the names of annually elected consuls, this year was associated with Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus—figures placed by tradition at the moment when the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was expelled and the Republic was said to have begun. This narrative, preserved above all in the writings of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, entered Rome’s civic consciousness with such authority that it shaped how Romans understood power, legitimacy, and their own origins. Yet the further one moves back into Rome’s earliest history, the more uncertain the ground becomes, and the more difficult it is to separate recollection from construction.

According to the account that later generations accepted, Tarquinius Superbus ruled not by consent but through fear and suspicion. His grandfather, also named Lucius Tarquinius, was remembered as having seized power through intrigue and aristocratic support; the grandson, by contrast, was said to have abandoned even the outward forms of kingship. He surrounded himself with guards, silenced opposition, and treated both senators and commoners as instruments of his will. How much of this reflects historical memory, exaggeration, or political invention cannot be known. Archaeological evidence for the regal period remains fragmentary, and the literary sources preserve not contemporary testimony but stories shaped by later republican values. Even so, the legend of expulsion served a clear purpose. It offered a lesson that Romans believed timeless: that unchecked power leads to ruin, and that political freedom survives only through vigilance.

The episode said to have brought monarchy to an end focused on an act of violence committed by Sextus Tarquinius, the king’s son, against Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus. In the traditional telling, her suicide transformed private outrage into public revolt, and Brutus swore an oath upon her blood to drive the Tarquins from Rome. Whether understood as literal event or symbolic narrative, the story functioned as a demonstration of aristocratic honour and collective resolve. It also embedded within Roman political memory a lasting suspicion of concentrated authority. Modern historians, however, approach the episode with caution. The structure of the tale follows familiar patterns from Greek literature, where sexual violation often serves as the catalyst for political transformation. It reads less like recovered history than like a foundational myth, crafted to give the Republic a moral origin.

What can be stated with greater confidence is that around this period Rome’s political order changed in a fundamental way. Executive authority was no longer vested in a single ruler, but divided between two annually elected consuls, each constrained by term limits and post-office accountability. The Senate, drawn from leading patrician families, emerged as the principal deliberative body. Popular assemblies, organised by wealth and tribal affiliation, conferred legitimacy on elections and legislation. This system was far removed from democracy in any modern sense, yet it claimed to distribute authority more broadly than monarchy had done, and to guard against its return.

Romans believed the lessons of 509 were permanent. Kingship, in their understanding, meant the concentration of power in one hand, and such concentration was equated with danger. Even the suspicion of regal ambition could provoke hostility or violence. That inherited fear shaped the fate of figures such as Spurius Cassius, Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, and later Tiberius Gracchus, each accused of aspiring to rule alone. The charge itself could destroy a career, or a life. Romans acted as though monarchy had been killed at the beginning of their political existence—and that it must never be allowed to reappear.

Yet if the expulsion of the kings marked the Republic’s beginning, it did not end the political forces that Plato, writing generations later in Greece, would identify as destructive to constitutional orders. In his analysis, republics and democracies contain impulses that undermine them from within. Freedom, when unrestrained, dissolves discipline; civic virtue erodes into licence; disorder invites men who promise salvation through exceptional authority. Plato’s critique was not composed with Rome in mind, but later Romans would find its logic disturbingly familiar.

Early Rome was not a democracy in Plato’s sense. The Senate retained decisive authority, and the assemblies were structured to favour wealth and status. Nevertheless, Romans valued the principle that no individual should rule alone. Their institutions combined elite leadership with a measure of popular consent, producing a system capable of both rigidity and adaptation. The tensions within that arrangement, however, were present from the beginning.

Over the centuries that followed, Rome expanded from a city among Latin neighbours into a power that dominated Italy and then the wider Mediterranean. Its institutions evolved under pressure from conquest, rebellion, and reform. New magistracies—the praetorship, censorship, aedileship, and tribunate—emerged to meet administrative needs or to channel social conflict. During the Struggle of the Orders, plebeian demands forced constitutional compromise. In moments of military emergency, the Republic created the dictatorship, a temporary office endowed with supreme authority. Each innovation demonstrated Rome’s capacity to adapt, but each also revealed how often necessity approached the edge of tyranny.

For generations, Romans believed their constitutional order prevented lasting domination. That belief rested not only on law, but on custom, rotation of office, and the moral authority of the mos maiorum, the ancestral way. The memory of 509—of a king expelled and liberty restored—was repeatedly invoked as a warning. Yet when the nature of crisis changes, old warnings can lose their clarity.

By the second century BCE, Rome’s internal balance began to strain. Conquest concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a few families. Political competition intensified as magistrates sought provincial commands for profit and prestige. The spread of slave labour displaced small farmers, while dispossessed citizens crowded into the capital. Tribunes promised reform; elites resisted it. At the same time, generals returning from prolonged campaigns found soldiers loyal less to the state than to their commander. Rome’s political language remained intact, but the institutions it described no longer operated as they once had. The Republic possessed no effective means of restraining ambition sharpened by inequality and opportunity.

Violence returned openly to Roman politics in 133 BCE, when Tiberius Gracchus was killed for proposing land reform. No Roman citizen had died in civic conflict for generations. The taboo was broken. A decade later, his brother Gaius met the same fate. These events confirmed the logic Plato had described: republics can damage themselves while claiming to act in their own defence. Romans invoked the memory of 509 even as fear and force were now generated from within the system itself.

In the years that followed, individual commanders rose whose authority exceeded legal restraint. Gaius Marius, elected consul an unprecedented seven times, reformed the army by recruiting the landless poor. The measure addressed an immediate military need, but it bound soldiers’ fortunes to their general. Service became a path to reward, and loyalty followed opportunity. Each solution to crisis weakened norms that could not later be restored.

When Lucius Cornelius Sulla entered public life, the Republic had already been reshaped by decades of strain. The story of 509 still echoed in speeches and rituals, but its meaning had faded. Sulla distinguished himself in war, showing courage, calculation, and a rare ability to secure soldiers’ loyalty. His rivalry with Marius, initially restrained, hardened into a feud that reflected the deeper collapse of cooperation within the elite.

The decisive rupture came when Sulla, appointed to command the war against Mithridates of Pontus, saw that command transferred to Marius by popular vote. Rather than submit, he marched his legions on Rome, violating a boundary no Roman commander had crossed before. The precedent of 509 offered no guidance here. Rome had expelled a king to prevent tyranny, yet now Roman soldiers entered the city at the order of their general. The descent had begun earlier, but Sulla’s act revealed how far the Republic had travelled.

His later dictatorship, conferred through legal forms, exposed a central paradox of the Roman constitution. The dictatorship had once been an emergency office, limited in time and scope. Sulla transformed it into an instrument for reorganising the state. He proscribed enemies, redistributed land, purged juries, and reshaped the Senate. All was done in the name of restoration. Yet the methods employed undermined the legitimacy they claimed to defend. When Sulla retired, Romans declared the Republic restored. What remained, however, was the precedent that one man, through force, could refashion the state.

Here Plato’s warning acquires its sharpest relevance. Republics do not collapse by abandoning their ideals outright, but by defending them through contradictory means. In purging threats in the name of liberty, Rome adopted the habits it most feared. The legend of Tarquinius, once a safeguard, had become too simple. Romans watched for crowns, but failed to recognise subtler forms of domination.

The pattern repeated. After Sulla came Pompey, Caesar, Antonius, and Octavian, each claiming extraordinary authority in order to rescue the state. Each promised restoration. Each presented innovation as tradition. But the logic of power had shifted. Once exceptional authority was accepted as a tool of preservation, the boundary between defence and destruction blurred.

The Romans of 509 believed they had solved tyranny by expelling a king. Kingship, however, had been only one manifestation of a deeper problem. Tyranny emerges whenever fear, ambition, and opportunity converge. The founders of the Republic could not imagine legions turned against citizens, senates paralysed by threat, or elections shaped by patronage. They believed the danger had been removed for good.

The tragedy of the Republic lay not in the ignorance of its founders, but in the reluctance of later generations to recognise changed conditions. Politicians continued to invoke 509 even as they undermined the principles it symbolised. Reforms arrived too late or proved insufficient. Violence became habitual. Rome reassured itself after each crisis, while the cumulative damage deepened.

By the time Sulla resigned, the Republic already bore scars that no law could erase. Elections were corrupted, magistracies politicised, the Senate enlarged without being empowered. Patronage displaced independence; bribery replaced persuasion. And throughout, Romans repeated the old assurance: no king would ever rule in Rome.

Monarchy returned nonetheless, concealed within republican forms. The first princeps claimed to serve the state, to guard tradition, and to restore peace. He wore no crown and honoured ceremony, yet he concentrated power more completely than any king before him. The Republic did not die when a diadem appeared, but when the machinery of the state became dependent on a single will. That dependence emerged through centuries of effort to preserve republican liberty.

Ab Urbe Condita 245 thus belongs not only to the distant past, but to the logic that shaped Rome’s fate. It marks both origin and flaw, promise and contradiction. The Romans believed they had ended tyranny; they had only redirected it.

The prologue of Sulla’s story therefore begins not in his lifetime, but in the memory of a city that defined itself through the expulsion of a king. In that act lay the seed of a lasting contradiction: the belief that liberty can be secured by force, that political purity can be restored through violence, and that exceptional power can preserve a constitutional order. Sulla inherited this contradiction, acted within it, and magnified it. He sought to resolve the Republic’s crisis by wielding its most dangerous instruments.

Whether he succeeded for a time or failed irrevocably is a matter for judgment. But his life cannot be understood without recognising that when Rome expelled Tarquinius Superbus, it planted both the ideal that no man should rule alone and the fear that would one day justify someone attempting precisely that.

Plato had warned of this cycle. Republics, he argued, destroy themselves not through neglect, but through the very measures they adopt in the hope of saving themselves.

Rome proved him right.