Before Rome: Etruscans, Romulus and the Seven Kings

The date everyone knows was worked out by a scholar sitting seven hundred years after the event. Varro fixed the founding at 753 BC in the first century BC, using king-lists that had been tidied long before he saw them, and seven kings across 244 years gives an average reign of thirty-five, which no royal line in recorded history has managed.

The archaeology is less cinematic and more useful. Huts on the Palatine from the eighth century, and a settlement where the salt road crossed the Tiber at the last easy ford before the sea. The kings survive as functions: Numa gets the religious calendar, Servius Tullius gets the census and the tribes, and the Tarquins are visibly Etruscan, which tells you who the neighbours were and who held the priesthoods.

Those neighbours are the real subject. The Etruscans had cities, an alphabet, painted tombs at Tarquinia and Cerveteri and a fleet on the Tyrrhenian Sea while Rome was huts on a hill. The fasces, the augurs reading birds, the triumph: most of what Rome later called ancestral custom came up the road from Etruria. The episodes below lean on archaeology, because the written sources are late, Roman, and writing propaganda about their own origins.

With a written verdict

1hItaly Before Rome: Interview with Dr. Kathryn Lomas Tides of HistoryPodcast

Part of Tides of History

With Kathryn Lomas

Kathryn Lomas on her own book, sixty minutes on the Italy that Rome grew up inside: Oscan and Umbrian speakers, Greek colonies on the coast, and one Latin town among many.

59mRomulus & Remus The AncientsPodcast

Part of The Ancients

With Jeremy Armstrong

The founding myth taken seriously as a piece of storytelling, which is the more useful approach: the Romans believed it and acted on it.

57mThe Kings of Rome The AncientsPodcast

Part of The Ancients

The seven kings, and the far more interesting question of why there are exactly seven of them covering 244 years, which is an average reign no royal line has ever managed.

56mRise of the Etruscans The AncientsPodcast

Part of The Ancients

With Lucy Shipley

Start here for the people Rome learned it from. Cities, writing, painted tombs and a naval reach across the Tyrrhenian Sea while Rome was still huts on a hill.

55mFall of the Etruscans The AncientsPodcast

Part of The Ancients

Fifty-five minutes on how the dominant culture in Italy became a Roman province, city by city, over roughly two centuries. Veii went first, in 396 BC, after a siege the Romans told stories about for ever after.

55mCities, the Etruscans, and Global Urbanism: Interview with Professor Simon Stoddart Tides of HistoryPodcast

Part of Tides of History

With Simon Stoddart

Simon Stoddart on how the city spread across the Iron Age Mediterranean, worked out from Etruria where the evidence is thickest. Fifty-five minutes on the urban habit Rome inherited from its neighbours.

52mThe Etruscans: Rise and Fall of a Mysterious Civilization The EtruscansDocumentary

The people Rome learned its gods, its letters and its drainage from, followed through a 2019 burial ground dug up in Aleria on Corsica. Fifty-two minutes on the civilisation that was there first and left the writing nobody can fully read.

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49mOrigins of the Celts The AncientsPodcast

Part of The Ancients

With Rachel Pope

Rachel Pope on where the Celts actually began, in the Alpine and upper Danube country, long before the word attached itself to Iron Age Britain. Forty-nine minutes giving a loosely used term a map.

44mThe Origins of Rome The AncientsPodcast

Part of The Ancients

With Guy Bradley

Forty-four minutes on what the archaeology actually shows about the site: a river crossing, a salt road, and why anyone settled there.

44mThe Last Kings of Rome and the Foundation of the Roman Republic Tides of HistoryPodcast

Part of Tides of History

Wyman on the transition from kings to Republic, which is the moment the sources are least trustworthy and most interesting.

43mThe Emergence of the Etruscans Tides of HistoryPodcast

Part of Tides of History

Forty-three minutes on where the Etruscans came from, which the genetics now answers less exotically than Herodotus did. Their language is still only half readable and their goldsmiths worked granulation nobody has since matched.

42mBefore Rome Ruled Italy Ancient Warfare PodcastPodcast

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-two minutes on the peninsula before Rome held it: Etruscans in the north, Samnites in the mountains, Greek cities in the south. Murray Dahm, Lindsay Powell and Michael Taylor on the neighbours Rome had to beat before anyone else.

29mEpisode 35 – On The Verge The Ancient WorldPodcast

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-nine minutes on the expulsion of the kings in 509 BC, read from the sources, and on a city that decided it would rather open its gates to an enemy than to a king again.

Everything else, in order

49mKings of Rome. Numa Pompilius. Ancient History HoundPodcast