Jules Michelet’s History of the Roman Republic is a sweeping narrative history of Rome from its mythic founding through the fall of the Republic, written by one of nineteenth-century France’s most celebrated historians. Michelet treats Rome not as a dry sequence of consuls and battles but as a living organism shaped by geography, race, religion, and class conflict. The book moves from the prehistoric peoples of Italy through the kings, the conquest of the Mediterranean world, and finally the dissolution of the city under the weight of its own contradictions.
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The Core Argument
Michelet’s central claim is that Rome was never a single unified people but a composite, formed from the collision and eventual fusion of distinct races and social orders. The Pelasgi, those mysterious agricultural and industrial peoples who colonized nearly every Italian coast, brought arts, mining, and a religion of subterranean gods. The Sabines and other pastoral brigands brought the lance, the wolf, and the habit of plunder. The Etruscans contributed a sacerdotal aristocracy, divination, and the sacred science of boundaries. Rome emerged from the violent meeting of these worlds.
The driving engine of Roman history, in Michelet’s telling, is the long struggle between patricians and plebeians. The patricians embodied exclusion, national individuality, and the jealous preservation of privilege. The plebeians embodied extension, conquest, and aggregation. Without the plebeians, Rome could never have conquered and absorbed the world; without the patricians, there would have been no personal character, no original life, no Rome at all. This duality appeared legally in the Twelve Tables, which declared war on the aristocratic family for the sake of the individual, and it persisted through every reform and revolution until the military chief finished the popular work by proscribing the aristocracy and establishing equality of civil law.
Michelet also argues that Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean was not merely military but cultural and religious. As Rome prevailed over Greece by policy and arms, she fell increasingly under Greek ideas. The stern, infertile gods of ancient Italy gave way to the brilliant myths of Hellas. Rome chose the most heroic version of her own founding—Aeneas, the wolf, the son of Mars—precisely because it conformed to Greek spirit and moved farthest from the sacerdotal spirit of ancient Italy.
Inside the Book
The Pelasgi and the Peoples of Italy
Nearly every Italian coast was colonized by Pelasgi—first the Arcadian Pelasgi, the Oenotrians and Peucetians, then the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi, the Lydians. They drove the ancient Siculi onto the island that bears their name, absorbed others through similar manners and language, and pushed still more into the mountains. Along the coasts they founded towns: Coere, Tarquinii, Ravenna, and Spina, called the ancient Venice of the Adriatic. On the Latium coast, Argive Ardea with its king Turnus, and Antium, built by a brother of Ardea’s founder, appear Pelasgic, as does Spanish Saguntum, a colony of Ardea. Near Salerno stood a temple of Argive Juno founded by Jason, the Pelasgic god of medicine—perhaps a sign that Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Mardna were Tyrrhenian. Facing them, Pelasgic Teleboans appear at Capri and on the Tiber, while Tibur and Falerii were founded by Argive Siculi, probably Pelasgi.
Tradition holds that they built twelve towns in Etruria, twelve on the Po, and twelve south of the Tiber—mirroring the twelve tribes, townships, and cities of Pelasgic Attica, the twelve gods of its first judges, the Thessalian Amphictyonic council, and the Aeolian and Ionian leagues of twelve towns. Even names repeated themselves: Larissa appears in Asia, Thessaly, and Italy. Alexander the Molossian found in Magna-Grecia the river Acheron and the town Pandosia he had left in Epirus; both Italy and Epirus had a Chaonia, where reigned a son of Thessalian Pyrrhus and Trojan Andromache.
What Michelet finds astonishing is that a race spread over so many countries vanished entirely from history, its tribes perishing, fusing, or losing their names. An inexpiable malediction attaches to them; their enemies’ accounts are ominous and bloody—the women of Lemnos strangling their husbands in a single night, the inhabitants of Agylla stoning Phocian prisoners. This may be explained by the scorn and hatred heroic tribes felt for the agricultural and industrial populations that preceded them. The Pelasgi adored subterranean gods who guarded the earth’s treasures; as farmers and miners they sought gold or corn. Their arts seemed odious to barbarians, who saw all industry they did not understand as magic. Initiations into artisan corporations, aided by mystery, encouraged odious accusations. The magic worship of flames, serpent-gods, and mandragons terrified heroic tribes, who opposed unknown powers with the sword. The Telchines of Sicyon, Boeotia, Crete, Rhodes, and Lycia could pour the mortal waters of the Styx over plants and animals; like medieval witches they charmed, fascinated, predicted, and raised tempests, and pretended to cure maladies—could they not inflict them? The Cabiri of Lemnos, Samothrace, and Macedonia, whose name served for both gods and worshippers, were smiths and miners, like the Cyclops of the Peloponnesus, Thrace, Asia Minor, and Sicily, who penetrated the depths of the earth with lamps fixed on their foreheads.
Some derive “Cabiri” from kaiein, to burn; others from the Cabirim, strong men of Persia who acknowledged a smith as liberator; or from the Hebrew Chabirim, associates—the consentes or complices of Etruria. Certainly they adored formidable powers residing in the earth’s entrails. Cabirite gods were worshipped as wide vases, one placed on each domestic hearth. The potter’s art, sanctified by the Pelasgi, seemed cursed in principle by the Hellenes, along with all industry. Daedalus, the skilful—potter, smith, architect—is shown fleeing like Cain, ancestor of Tubalcain, the Hebrew Daedalus; murderer of his nephew, he withdraws to Crete and fabricates Pasiphae’s cow. He flees Minos’s anger to Sicily and Italy, where he is welcomed and protected—a symbol of colonization by industrious Pelasgi and their adventurous expeditions. Prometheus, inventor of the arts, is nailed to Mount Caucasus by the usurper Jupiter, who conquered the Pelasgic gods; the Titan predicts that Jupiter’s reign will end, as medieval oppressed Britons threatened their conquerors with Arthur’s return.
The industrious Pelasgi were treated by warlike races as Tyre was by the Assyrians of Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar, who twice furiously tried to destroy it; as in the Middle Ages were industrious or commercial populations—Jews, Moors, Provençals, and Lombards.
The gods themselves seemed to league with men against the Pelasgi. Italy’s gods were doubtless struck, after volcanic convulsions, by unprecedented scourges: drought burning pastures and drying rivers; destructive epidemics causing mothers to miscarry or bear monsters. The people accused themselves of having vowed to the Cabiri the tithe of all produce, yet not sacrificed the tenth of their children. The oracle claiming this fearful sacrifice made moral instinct revolt against the religion. The people rose everywhere, says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in defiance of their chiefs. A crowd left Italy and spread over Greece and among other lands.
Etruscan Divination and the Sacred Templum
The stars regulated agriculture. Thunder, the flight and songs of birds, and the observation of victims’ entrails determined the will of the gods and decided or halted the resolves of families or the city. This mute language was audible everywhere, but science was needed to listen properly.
The Taking of Carthagena and the Triumph of Papirius
Michelet opens with a question about the capture of Carthagena, wondering whether it was truly Scipio’s achievement or the work of some barbarian town, and pointing to Livy’s supplement for the devastations of that war. At Papirius’s triumph over the Samnites, the conquerors brought back an immense weight of copper from the sale of prisoners and silver taken from the city, all deposited in the public treasury while the soldiers received no prize money. The Falisci, after long subjection, joined the Etruscans and were fined heavily, plus the pay of the conquering army. One man, Oarvilius, contributed a great sum of copper, built the temple of Fors Fortuna, and gave each soldier a generous payment, with double to centurions and knights.
The Cave of Umbria
Livy is quoted on a small expedition into Umbria, where troops entered a cave with their standards and received wounds chiefly from thrown stones. Finding the other mouth, they filled both openings with wood and set it on fire, killing no less than two thousand men by smoke and heat, many rushing into the flames.
The Conquest of Southern Italy and the War of Pyrrhus
The narrative turns to the conquest of southern Italy and the War of Pyrrhus. The southern point uniting Italy to Sicily separates two sea basins, the region formerly called Magna Graecia. Beyond rises Etna, a snow-capped volcano ten thousand feet high, eclipsing Vesuvius, with a chestnut tree sheltering a hundred horses and African aloes sixty feet high. The Dorian hand is visible in the ruins of Magna Graecia and Sicily: Agrigentum, Syracuse, Sybaris, and Tarentum’s shore red with vase fragments. Their colossal power, wealth, industry, and navies did not delay ruin; in Magna Graecia defeat is ruin. Sybaris and Agrigentum passed away; the Crotoniates caused two rivers to flow where Sybaris stood. Nations fluctuated between furious demagogism and atrocious tyranny, regarding tyranny as a benefit compared with Carthage, more terrible to Sicily than Etna’s mouth. Pythagorean reform could not prevail; the real philosophy was that of Empedocles, or the school of Elea denying change.
Armies Without Country
The last calamity was armies without country, laws, or God, selling themselves to the first comer. This old evil in Sicily reached its height under Agathocles, the abandoned potter’s child who became king, abandoned his army and child, and was burned alive. Such was the common evil: armies sold, ephemeral tyrants, kingdoms gained and lost by dice. After Alexander’s death, his mother, wife, and children were murdered; Antigonus was supposed to succeed in Asia; Seleucus and Lysimachus, both eighty, disputed the title of last conqueror. Feeble empires subsisted by buying troops. Mercenaries had attempted to fix themselves: Mamertini from Campania occupied Messina; Rhegium was occupied by Campanian Jubellius Decius and four thousand countrymen in Rome’s service. The Mamertini raised in the Straits the ancient power of Capua; all were terrified—Carthaginians, Romans, even Hiero, new tyrant of Syracuse.
Pyrrhus, the Scanderbeg of Antiquity
What this power wanted was a chief, a head, a mind. Pyrrhus, son-in-law of Agathocles, chief of the Epirotes, the Scanderbeg of antiquity, was despite his tactics only brute force. His helmet’s goat horns recall Ezekiel’s animals. At his birth his father had just been killed; servants carrying him were stopped by a stream. Three times master of Macedonia, at one time of Sicily and Magna Graecia, he left all to fortune at death, answering his children: “To the sharpest sword.” His dialogue with Cineas is probable; projects on Magna Graecia and Carthage appear in Thucydides’ Alcibiades speech. Italians had called in Cleonymus the Lacedaemonian and Alexander the Molossian, brother-in-law of Alexander the Great. Pyrrhus wished to throw a bridge across the Adriatic between Apollonia and Otranto.
The Tarentines and the Roman Ambassadors
The Tarentines, assembled in their theatre, saw ten vessels of Latium. Philocharis, surnamed Thais, argued an ancient treaty forbade Romans to double the promontory of Lacinian Juno. The people seized the vessels; Roman ambassadors were mocked at a banquet, and a Greek soiled an ambassador’s robe. The Roman said: “Laugh, my robe will soon be washed in your blood.” The Tarentines called in Pyrrhus, writing that with Lucanians, Messapians, and Samnites they could levy twenty thousand horse and three hundred fifty thousand foot. A citizen with dried flowers, a torch, and a flute-player warned them to dance while they could. Pyrrhus arrived at Tarentum, disciplined the people, closed gymnasia and theatres, placed guards at gates, and sent citizens home to be killed.
Heraclea and the Elephants
At Heraclea the Romans were astonished at elephants, calling them “bulls of Lucania.” Pyrrhus said: “Another such, and I shall return alone to Epirus.” Supported by Samnites, Lucanians, and Messapians, he pressed his advantage.
The Ligurians
The Ligurians, hidden at the foot of the Alps between the Var and the Macra, in rugged districts, were harder to find than to conquer—an indefatigable, active race, a people of robbers rather than warriors, trusting to rapid flight and inaccessible retreats. The ferocious mountaineers—Salieni, Deceates, Euburnates, Oxibeni, Ingaunii—long evaded the Roman arms.
The Fall of Prusias and Cato’s Defense of the Rhodians
Prusias of Bithynia came to Rome in the garb of a freed slave, head shaved, and threw himself down at the threshold, hailing the senators as saviours and gods and calling himself their freedman ready to obey any order. His humiliation deepened the suspicion already hanging over Eumenes and the Rhodians. The senate handed the crown to Eumenes’s brother, leaving the old king a diminished realm designed to bleed him dry through Galatian raids. Only Cato’s intervention spared the Rhodians the same treatment. A man of stubborn principle, Cato took up the cause of a free people who had merely wished to keep their liberty. He rebuked the senate’s tyrannical pride, arguing that the Rhodians had never wished Rome to conquer Perseus—no more than many other nations did, who feared servitude once an enemy was gone—yet they had not aided Macedon either. Was it just, he asked, to punish a mere wish, as if one fined a man for coveting more than five hundred acres or too many cattle, laws Romans themselves broke without consequence? To the charge that the Rhodians were haughty, he answered that he would not want his own children speaking so to him, but what did it matter if others were prouder still? Through this bitter plainness he won, after seventeen years, freedom for the Achaeans detained in Italy awaiting trial. The senate had long debated their return; Cato remarked that they seemed to have nothing better to do than decide whether a few decrepit Greeks should be buried by Roman or their own grave-diggers—a barbarous joke that nonetheless served humanity’s cause.
The Last Days of Greek Liberty
A Greek friend of Rome coldly catalogued Greece’s persecutions and humiliations down to her ruin, a task the narrator confesses he lacks the heart to perform. It is strange to watch nations dilute their liberty inch by inch against a power that could destroy them with a breath, and painful to see the weak struggle beneath the strong. What could Philopoemen’s tactics and courage achieve against the conquerors of Carthage? Flamininus’s quip about the Achaean hero—”beautiful legs, beautiful head, but no body”—captured the league’s condition. Philopoemen never hid his country’s weakness; he told an orator who had sold himself to Rome, “Art thou so desirous to see the last days of Greece?” Sparta was torn from the Achaeans, and Messene too. After Perseus fell, a thousand Achaeans were deported to Rome; when the survivors returned seventeen years later, they could not bear to watch her degradation. A man claiming to be Perseus’s son raised Macedonia, beat Roman generals, and pushed as far as Thessaly. The Achaeans tried to exploit this to destroy Sparta, which Rome’s intrigues had set against them. Metellus, conqueror of Macedonia, sent word to Corinth that Corinth, Sparta, Argos, Heraclea, and Orchomenos no longer belonged to the league. The people’s fury was such that they massacred every Lacedaemonian in Corinth; Roman commissioners barely escaped. Deputies Metellus sent to stall them were sent back in disgrace, and the league, resolved to perish gloriously, dared declare war on Rome. Only the Boeotians and Chalcis shared their ruin. Beaten in Locris, the confederates held firm at the Isthmus, at Leucopetra. In that last solemn battle of liberty, Greek women and children watched from the heights as their men died; Roman tactics won. Greece was vanquished. Mummius, a barbarian, took Corinth in 146, sold its people, burned the city, and laid his ignoble hands on Apelles’s paintings and Phidias’s statues. When the king of Pergamus offered a hundred talents for one picture, Mummius declared there must be magic in the canvas and shipped it to Rome, warning the transporters not to spoil it on pain of having to repaint it. Before such a man, traitors who had sold Greece denounced the statues of Aratus and Philopoemen, heroes of liberty. The narrator grieves that only one Greek spoke for them, sparing the conqueror that shame. Polybius, cold and cautious, client of the Scipios, gained honour cheaply by defending these illustrious dead, who likely would not have wished to justify their opposition to Rome. That same year Greece and Macedonia became Roman provinces, and Rome’s ancient rival fell too: 146 years before our era, Carthage and Corinth were ruined.
The Slow Strangulation of Carthage
Numantia followed close behind. Finding their enemies weak enough, the Romans no longer contented themselves with arbitrating between nations; they meant to become absolute masters. By the treaty ending the second Punic war, Rome had bound Carthage and attached to her a vampire to drain her blood until she sank exhausted—the restless, ferocious Massinissa, who lived a century to the Carthaginians’ utter despair. This barbarian, at eighty and ninety, stayed on horseback night and day, hungry for his disarmed neighbours’ ruin. He stripped them of a province in 199, another in 193, a third in 182. The Carthaginians stretched supplicating hands to Rome. At their first plea Rome sent Scipio Africanus, who witnessed the injustice and would not stop it. In 181 Rome guaranteed the Carthaginian territory; some years later she let Numidia seize a province and seventy towns and villages.
The Helvetian Migration and the Campaign in Gaul
The Helvetii, having burned their twelve towns and four hundred villages and destroyed what they could not carry, resolved to cross all of Gaul and settle among the Santones by the great ocean, hoping for more rest there than in their rude homeland ringed by Gauls, Cimbrians, Teutons, Suevi, and Romans. Their number, counting wives and children, came to 378,000, and the cumbersome train pushed them toward the Roman province. Near the lake of Geneva they found Caesar, who blocked them long enough to build a wall ten thousand paces long and sixteen feet high from the lake to the Jura. Forced into the rocky vales of the Jura, they crossed the lands of the Sequani and went up the Saône. Caesar overtook them at the river, attacked the isolated Tigurini, and destroyed them. Needing provisions, and hindered by the ill will of the Aeduan Dumnorix and the party that had summoned the Helvetii, he turned toward Bibracte. The Helvetii, thinking he fled, pursued him; caught between foes and unfriendly allies, he escaped by a bloody victory. Stopped again as they fled toward the Rhine, they gave up their arms and promised to return home. Six thousand who slipped away by night were brought back by Roman cavalry and treated as enemies.
Repulsing the Helvetii meant little if the Suevi invaded Gaul, for emigrations were incessant and 120,000 men had already crossed; Gaul was about to become Germany. Caesar appeared to yield to the prayers of the Sequani and Suevi, oppressed by barbarians, and the same druid who had solicited Rome’s aid guided him toward Ariovistus and scouted the road. The Suevi chief, who had obtained from Caesar during his consulship the title of ally of the Roman people, was astonished at being attacked, saying, “This is my Gaul; you have yours.” His words impressed the army; men made their wills. Caesar shamed them, saying the tenth legion would suffice. He led them to Besançon, took the town, came up to the barbarians’ camp near the Rhine, forced them to fight though they wished to wait for the new moon, and destroyed them; almost all who escaped perished in the Rhine.
The northern Gauls, Belgians and others, judged that if the Romans drove away the Suevi it was only to take their place. They formed a vast coalition, and Caesar seized the pretext to enter Belgica, with Divitiacus of the Aedui as guide and interpreter. He was invited by the Senones, ancient vassals of the Aedui, and by the Remi, lords of the druidical land of the Carnutes. These tribes, devoted to druidism or the popular party, welcomed the friend of the druids to oppose the northern Belgae—just as five centuries later the Catholic clergy of Gaul favoured the Frankish invasion against the Visigoths and Arian Burgundians.
This war in the muddy plains and virgin forests of the Seine and Meuse would have daunted a less adventurous general. Like the conquerors of America, Caesar often used the axe to clear a path, throw bridges over marshes, and advance with his legions sometimes on firm ground and sometimes fording or swimming rivers. The Belgae intertwined tree branches as American forests are linked by creepers. But Pizarro and Cortez, with superior arms, waged a war whose outcome could not be doubtful; what were the Peruvians compared with the harsh, choleric Bellovaci and Nervii, who attacked Caesar a hundred thousand at a time. The Bellovaci and Suessones were reconciled through Divitiacus; but the Nervii, supported by the Atrebates and Veromandui, surprised the Roman army on the banks of the Sambre, buried in deep forests, and thought themselves on the point of destroying it. Caesar seized a standard and rushed forward; this brave nation was wholly destroyed. Their allies the Cimbri, occupying Aduat, frightened at Caesar’s works, feigned to yield, threw part of their arms over the walls, and with the rest attacked the Romans. Caesar sold fifty-three thousand of them as slaves.
No longer concealing his project of subjecting Gaul, he undertook to reduce all the tribes on the coasts. He pierced the forests of the Menapi and Morini; one lieutenant subdued the Unelli, Eubarovians, and Lexovians; another, the young Crassus, conquered Aquitania, though the barbarians had called from Spain the ancient companions of Sertorius. Caesar himself attacked the Veneti and other tribes of Brittany. This amphibious people dwelt neither on sea nor land; their fortresses, on peninsulas alternately inundated and left dry by the tide, could be besieged neither by land nor sea. The Veneti held constant intercourse with the other Britain, whence they procured aid. To subdue them it was necessary to master the seas. Caesar made vessels and sailors, and taught the latter to fix the ships of Brittany by seizing them with iron hands and cutting their cords. He treated this harsh nation harshly; but little Brittany was only to be conquered through Great Britain. Caesar resolved to go.
The Spanish War and the Death of Caesar
Caesar knew the war was not ended; Spain was Pompeian. Pompey had aspired to it; Caesar had accomplished Gaul; he had given citizenship to a crowd of Spaniards, but the fierce, intractable genius of Spain made as warlike a people as a docile and inseparable instrument of war. Pompey’s sons found favour there, and the Spaniards were probably jealous of the Gauls who, under Caesar, had gained glory and money in the civil war.
The Twelve Tables: Theft, Debt, and the Power of the Father
The appendix opens with the actual text of the Twelve Tables, beginning with the law of theft. A robbery committed at night may be answered with killing, and the slayer is justified. By day, a thief caught in the act is beaten with rods and handed over as a slave to the man he robbed; a slave thief is beaten and hurled from a rock, while a boy is whipped at the judge’s discretion and restitution made. A thief who defends himself with a weapon may be lawfully killed, provided the person robbed calls a witness. Theft discovered by searchers counts as open theft; private theft forfeits double. Cutting another man’s trees illegally costs twenty-five pounds of copper per tree, and compounding with a thief extinguishes the action. Stolen goods can never be acquired by long possession.
The third table turns to debt and default. Fraud on a deposit forfeits double, and interest above twelve per cent forfeits fourfold. A confessed or judged debtor gets thirty lawful days; after that comes arrest, binding with cords or fetters of no more than fifteen pounds, and a daily pound of bread from the creditor. Sixty days in chains follow, with the debtor presented at three successive market days nine days apart. If no one redeems him, the creditors may divide his body or sell him across the Tiber.
The Law of the Family and of Property
The fourth table grants a father the right to kill a monstrously deformed newborn, and holds over his lawful children the power of life, death, and sale; a child sold three times becomes free, and a child born within ten months of the father’s death is lawful. The fifth table governs wills and intestacy: the nearest male agnate inherits, then the heir of the race; freedmen’s property passes to the patron; debts and credits are divided among heirs, with three arbitrators for partition, guardianship of a minor heir falling to the nearest male relation on the father’s side, and care of a madman or prodigal to his male relations.
The sixth table covers sale, delivery, and usucapion. Land is acquired by use in two years, other things in one; a woman is acquired as wife by a year’s cohabitation unless she absents herself three nights. Timber fixed in another’s house or vineyard cannot be removed, but double damages are paid; loose timbers may be claimed. Divorce requires a specified legal ground. The seventh table addresses harm: a quadruped that does damage may be surrendered or paid for; blasting corn by incantation, secretly feeding it down, or cutting arable produce is punished by death as a victim to Ceres, a boy by whipping and double forfeit. Burning a house or corn-stack means being bound, beaten, and burnt alive, with accidental burning compensated. Insults are fined twenty-five pounds of copper; public defamation or disgraceful verses are punished by beating with a stick. A broken limb demands retaliation unless settled; a broken bone of a freeman costs three hundred pounds of copper, of a slave one hundred and fifty. A witness or scaleholder who refuses to testify is deemed infamous; false testimony is punished by throwing from a rock. Knowingly killing a freeman, or using evil incantations or poison, makes one a murderer; killing a parent is punished by binding the head, sewing into a sack, and throwing into a river. A fraudulent guardian pays double after his guardianship ends, and a fraudulent patron is held accursed.
Boundaries, Funerals, and the Closing Tables
The eighth table sets two and a half feet between house walls, allows private associations to make bye-laws that do not injure the public, requires lopping boughs above fifteen feet that overhang a neighbour, and lets the neighbour take fallen fruit. Three estimators are appointed for injury by artificial rain-water channels, with the fabricator giving security. A straight road is eight feet broad, sixteen at a turning, and cattle may be driven over unenclosed roadside fields. The ninth table forbids exceptional laws for individuals, requires the same law for obligor and obligee, makes a judge or arbitrator who takes a bribe a capital offence, forbids capital punishment of a Roman citizen except in the Great Assembly, provides for inquisitors of murder created by the people, makes nightly meetings in the city capital, and makes inciting an enemy or betraying a citizen capital.
The tenth table forbids burial or burning within the city, abolishes funeral expense and mourning, limits mourning women to three and flute-players to ten, forbids women tearing their cheeks or loud howlings, and forbids preserving separate bones for a second funeral except for one killed in battle or in an enemy’s country. It abolishes anointing of slaves and the banding round of liquors, forbids perfumed liquids, long garlands, and altars covered with perfumes before the corpse, but allows celebrating the praise of the deceased and ancestors and placing a crown of honour before the corpse if gained by bravery. It forbids several funerals for one man or many couches, forbids gold except gold used to fasten teeth, forbids a funeral pile or sepulchre within sixty feet of another’s house against his will, and makes the sepulchre and its vestibule forever incapable of private property. The eleventh table makes the people’s last ordinance settled law and forbids marriage between patricians and plebeians. The twelfth treats pawns as a blank and fines double the value for dedicating a thing to a god that is not one’s own.
Key Ideas
The templum and sacred boundaries. Etruscan divination was not superstition but science. The augur, facing north, traced the cardo and decumanus, dividing the heavens into sixteen regions. This celestial temple could be transported to earth by parallel lines, forming a square. The temple’s limits were sacred and inviolable, with its sole entrance in the south and sanctuary in the north. From this practice sprang both the city and property, private and public law. Field boundaries without walls, guarded by the gods, excluded the vagabond still in savage life. Property communicated a sacred character to contracts and inheritances.
The atrium and the Italian family. The temple of the lares and penates was the atrium; their altar, the focus. This space was wanting in Greek houses, and that absence eminently distinguishes Greek from Italian society. While Greek women and children were confined in the gynaeceum, in Italy women, children, and slaves born in the house assembled in the atrium. Italian society is founded, like modern society sprung from it, upon the atrium and focus.
The duality of the Roman people. The Twelve Tables made the duality of the Roman people legally visible. Remus revived; the Aventine looked on the Palatine with equality. The plebeian myrtle flourished, the patrician would wither. Duality appeared in jus civile and jus gentium, in marriage, paternal authority, and property. De facto equality was long denied; plebeians had to penetrate judicial formulas, employing patricians as mediators.
The Gracchi and the agrarian question. Tiberius Gracchus, traversing Italy en route to Spain, grieved to see the country abandoned or cultivated only by slaves. His first agrarian law was neither unjust nor violent: he took only usurped public territory, leaving each holder five hundred acres plus two hundred fifty per male child, with indemnification for the remainder divided among poor citizens. The rich, considering long-usurped lands their own, resisted. Irritated, Tiberius proposed a new law lessening the indemnity and ordering immediate appropriation. He deposed his colleague Octavius, had himself named triumvir, and ordered the inheritance of the king of Pergamus distributed to poor citizens. Fearing loss unless re-elected, he promised the knights a share of judicial power and led the Italians to hope for citizenship. Thus he sought a contradictory thing and was supported by no one.
The social war and Italian citizenship. The allies, who composed two-thirds of the Roman army in the Cimbrian and slave wars, expected rewards. Drusus proposed dividing tribunals between equestrians and senate, adding three hundred knights, giving lands to the Roman people, and citizenship to all Italy. This satisfied no one. Abandoned like the Gracchi, Drusus was assassinated in his own house. The Italians built Corfinium, an “Italian Rome,” with forum, curiae, and a senate of five hundred. Rome triumphed, owing success to Pompeius and Sylla, but granted citizenship to Etruscans and Umbrians, then to the Marsi.
Themes
The corruption of conquest. As Rome conquered the world, she lost her original spirit. The first political relations between Greece and Rome were friendship and mutual flattery; each thought it had deceived the other. Greece lost her liberty, Rome her original spirit. The stay of Hannibal at Capua corrupted his army, though the conquerors would have found a Capua everywhere. After the second Punic war, Rome bound Carthage and attached to her a vampire to suck her blood until she sank exhausted—the restless Massinissa, who lived a century to the Carthaginians’ utter despair.
The failure of the weak to unite. Neither the Osci nor the Etruscans could of themselves accomplish the great work of Italy’s re-union. The Etruscans had no faith in themselves, and therein did themselves justice. Their society, enclosed by the jealous spirit of a sacerdotal aristocracy, could not easily open to strangers. The Cyclopean enclosure of the Pelasgic city resisted by its mass and refused to enlarge. As to the Osci, their various genius was shown: here the Sabellians, brigands or armed shepherds wandering with flocks; here the Latins, agricultural tribes dispersed over lands they cultivate. It is not labourers, warriors, or priests who will found the city to adopt and combine Italy.
The tragedy of the vanquished. Michelet grieves over the destruction of Greece. The barbarian Mummius took Corinth, sold its inhabitants, burnt the town, and laid his ignoble hand on Apelles’s pictures and Phidias’s statues. Before such a man, traitors who had sold Greece denounced the statues of liberty’s heroes, Aratus and Philopoemen. The narrator grieves that one Greek defended them, sparing the conqueror this shame. The cold and cautious Polybius gained honour at little cost by speaking for these illustrious deceased, who probably would not have desired to justify their opposition to Rome’s interests.
The slave as mirror of the master. The servile wars revealed the moral bankruptcy of the Roman order. Slaves, enraged that their right to liberty was both recognized and despised, armed themselves under Salvius and Athenion, who disciplined them in the Roman manner. Manius Aquilius reserved a thousand to throw to the beasts in the Roman amphitheatre, but they killed each other rather than let the people enjoy their agony. According to Athenaeus, a million slaves perished in the two servile wars.
Why It Matters
Michelet wrote this history not as antiquarianism but as a meditation on how republics are made and unmade. His Rome is a case study in the costs of empire, the fragility of liberty, and the way class conflict can both energize and destroy a state. The plebeians, he insists, were the engine of Rome’s expansion; the patricians, its soul. When the balance broke, when the Gracchi were murdered and the Italians denied, the Republic was already dead, though it took a Caesar and an Octavius to bury it.
The book endures because Michelet refuses to separate politics from religion, law from landscape, or war from the daily life of the atrium and the field. He sees the sacred boundary of the templum in the same breath as the agrarian law, and the flight of the augur’s birds in the same breath as the revolt of the gladiators. This is history written as if the past were alive, and it remains one of the most vivid accounts of how a small Italian town came to rule the world—and what that rule cost.
