Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

The Monarchy

Roman legend has it that the city was ruled by kings from its founding (in perhaps 753 bc) until a coup which removed not only the last king but the kingship altogether (in 509 bc). Modern scholarship finds these dates (especially the one for the founding) highly suspect, and questions how and even whether the individual events happened. Most historians today do not believe stories that attribute any particular act to any of the legendary kings. Nearly the only agreed-on truth about this period is that Rome was ruled by a series of kings in the early days. Fortunately, for our purposes, we do not need to resolve any of the more specific historical ques tions. I just want to give a general idea of what kind of gov ernment was putting laws into place. Still, even saying there was a “king” (Latin rex ) is potentially misleading. These kings were not hereditary rulers. In fact, some of them seem not to have been born Romans at all. Instead, they were elected, sometimes by the populace, sometimes by a Senate, when the previous king died. Once in office, they seem to have acted as lawgivers (as well as generals, priests, judges, city plan ners), but their power was not unlimited in the manner of some later European monarchs. It has been suggested (though not proven) that the kings were meant to be relatively weak, serving more as arbiters between the other leading men than as real heads of government. The later Roman government featured a “Senate,” which appears to go back to this earli est period. It seems to have been an advisory body for the

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