Etruscans

History’s Great Mysteries: Tracing our Political Evolution further into the Depths of History

People often ask why I find ancient history so much more fascinating than medieval or modern history. There are many reasons, but one noteworthy one lies in the fact that the farther back one goes in history, as a general trend, the more nebulous things become. Historians of more modern periods generally agree on the facts and argue over marginal, or even inconsequential, issues. In the realm of ancient history, however, the sources become less reliable, and the task of the historian becomes to piece together basic facts from a disputed body of evidence. This leads to far more interesting discussions and analysis.

My last article credited the Roman Republic with laying the foundations for our Constitution. This one will attempt to go farther down the rabbit hole of early human history and explore where the system of the Roman Republic came from. If I were to ask you to guess, you would probably argue the Greeks. While there’s some indirect influence there, that is not the best answer. The Romans did not have meaningful contact with the Greeks until long after the foundations of their Republican system were already firmly laid down. The more direct influence on the Roman political system came, not from the south, but directly to the north, from the Etruscans.

This takes us into some of the foggiest regions of history and into the realm of what is at best educated guesswork, and, at worst, speculation. The Etruscans, based in northern Italy, were one of the three great powers of the western Mediterranean in the Archaic Age (approximately 800 B.C. to 500 B.C.), together with the Greek colonies in southern Italy and the Carthaginians, based in North Africa. The Etruscans operated as a loose confederation of city states like the Articles of Confederation that predated the establishment of our constitution.

Out of the three great Archaic Western Mediterranean powers, we know the least about the Etruscans, largely because no one has been able to decipher their language. We can read their words phonetically because they adopted a variation of the Greek alphabet, however, their language is so ancient that it predates the Indo-European migration into Europe around 2000 BC that gave rise to almost all other European languages. Thus, it has no apparent relationship to any other known language and is nearly impossible to figure out. The only other European language that bears no relationship to any other known language in this regard is the Basque language, which is still spoken today.

As a result, while we have many Etruscan inscriptions, we must rely primarily on archeological evidence and much later Roman sources of very questionable reliability to learn about the Etruscans. Luckily, one of the few aspects of the Etruscan Language that we can decipher are names and titles, which can be inferred from context. This, together with what we can gather from the Roman Sources, gives us a fair amount of insight into the Etruscan political system. As a result, we can trace our Roman roots even farther back to their original source. It would be a major omission not to note that the Etruscans did have a sizable amount of Greek influence, however, the system they developed was fundamentally different from that of the Greeks. This Etruscan system was the direct source from which the Romans adapted their system.

The Roman sources, writing many centuries later, tell us that the legendary founding of Rome was in 753 B.C., using our calendar, and that the city was originally ruled by kings. This regal period allegedly lasted until 509 B.C. when the Romans believed they expelled the last king and established the republic. This timeline is often treated as historical fact, but it is probably not accurate. Rome was likely around before 753 B.C., and this 509 B.C. date was almost certainly moved back by later Roman propagandists to pre-date the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens in 508 B.C. The Roman sources would have us believe that this Roman system was established suddenly as a new Republic. However, the evidence overwhelmingly tells us that many of the aspects of the mixed Constitution of the Roman Republic, namely the Senate and the popular assemblies, were already in place during the regal period.

There is major controversy among historians over whether the cities of Etruria exerted direct control over Rome during this period. The Romans were not Etruscans, they were the northernmost (and closest to Etruria) of the Latin ethnic and language group. Some argue that during the later regal period, the Etruscans installed puppet kings in Rome. Others refute this, but the purpose of this article is not to get lost in the weeds of that dispute. What is clear is that the Etruscans exerted heavy influence during this period one way or the other. The Roman Republic did not develop overnight in 509 B.C. but was the product of a long evolution stretching far back into the regal period.

The Romans did not practice hereditary monarchy during the regal period, nor was the power of the monarchy absolute. Kings were nominated by the Senate and approved by the popular assemblies, and both the Senate and the popular assemblies wielded significant power, even during the regal period. Both the Senate and the popular assemblies appear to be direct importations from Etruscan systems.

It is important to understand that, during this period, most of the Mediterranean was dominated by city states. While the growing Persian Empire gobbled up most of the city states of the near east, the city state model would continue to dominate modern Greece and Italy for several more centuries. This was the world in which Rome grew up, until they ultimately consumed the city-states one by one.

The Etruscan City States appear to have retained their primitive tribal structures within their mixed constitution. This tribal system was adopted by the Roman Republic and formed the basis for the popular assemblies, explaining much of the Roman Republic’s grouping of people into tribes for voting, an anachronistic system that endured through the entire life of the Roman Republic. This also explains the seemingly disjointed nature of the multiple assemblies in Rome.

With respect to the officials, the Etruscan magistrates served one-year terms, which almost certainly formed the basis for the one-year terms of the magistrates in the Roman Republic, including the two consuls at the head of state. While the adoption of two consuls after the expulsion of the kings from Rome appears to have been a Roman innovation, designed to prevent the same coalescing of power around one individual, the terms and the manner of election of most magistracies was taken directly from Etruscan practice. Moreover, many of the cultural political symbols of power in Rome, including the toga and the fasces, were also Etruscan creations.

Finally, most of the Etruscan city states appear to have had their own senatorial bodies, who in most cases served not only to select the king, but also to serve as a heavily influential advisory body to him. These senatorial bodies appear to have been experienced politicians who remained on the council for life, which is precisely the Roman Senatorial model that persisted all the way through the Republic and into the imperial period. Thus, each of the three distinct branches of government of the Roman Republic that the founders modeled our system after were originally Etruscan creations.

The Founders, when they adopted our Constitution, did not know a lot of this because they predated the era of modern scholarship and archaeology on these matters. In their eyes, the Romans were the brilliant minds who created the system on which they based our Constitution, and the Etruscans were largely lost to history. In fact, they did not even have a sophisticated knowledge of the Greek political system, beyond what was chronicled by Aristotle, as Greece was still controlled by the Ottoman Empire and closed off to the outside world. Much of the information shared herein has only come to light in the last 200 years.

My next article will complete the story by chronicling the indirect influence the Greeks had on this lineage. While the founders did not import Greek systems directly, they used Greek political philosophy, particularly the works of Aristotle and his followers, to adapt the Roman system into the better political structure we see today.