Lore of the Founding- Founding of the Roman Republic

A king gets exiled, a republic gets born, and the story is so brutal it still shapes how people talk about tyranny today. We dig into Rome’s founding legend with Joanna Kenty, starting with the Roman monarchy, the reign of Tarquin the Proud, and the moment one crime becomes the final straw that makes Romans swear off kings forever. It’s not clean hero worship. It’s a reminder that unchecked power can turn private violence into a public crisis, and that “freedom” sometimes begins as a vow made in anger and grief. 

From there, we follow the thread straight into the American founding. You’ll hear why Thomas Paine insists “the law ought to be king,” how the Declaration of Independence frames King George III as a tyrant through a “long train of abuses,” and why revolution is presented as a last resort rather than a casual choice. If you’ve ever wondered why early American political writing sounds so obsessed with monarchy, Rome is a big part of the answer. 

We also break down what the Roman Republic actually looks like: res publica as the commonwealth, a powerful senate, elected magistrates, two consuls with short terms, and a voting system shaped by wealth and class. That opens up the real debate behind “republic vs democracy,” why many founders distrust direct democracy, and why “an empire of laws and not of men” becomes the ideal. If you like civics, history, and the origins of checks and balances, hit subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest question about Rome’s influence on the United States.

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Transcript

Why Rome Matters To Founders

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Welcome back to Civics in a Year. We are on episode two of our series about the lore of the founding. And we have our friend Joanna Kenti back with us. And today we're talking about the founding of the Roman Republic. So again, the founders didn't just make up all of this stuff themselves. They were really looking at history. And as part of it, the Romans told a story about overthrowing a king. So we're going to talk about that today. Joanna, welcome back. So who is the king we are talking about? Kind of give us this story because when I hear about Rome, all I think about is Roman Republic. I don't think about monarchy. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

So, like if you're familiar with kind of Roman literature and mythology, you might have read the Aeneid, the story of Aeneas leaving the Trojan War, and then he comes and establishes a society like where Rome is gonna be, but not the city of Rome yet. Later, one of his descendants, Romulus and his twin brother Remus, create the city of Rome. They name it after Romulus. Romulus kills his brother at different points in the story, depending on who you ask. And then, so when they found that city, Romulus is king for the rest of his life. Then he dies in sort of strange circumstances and maybe becomes a god. And he is succeeded by more kings. So Rome, when it is established, is a monarchy. It might make more sense to think about it as like warlords than, you know, it's a little bit rough and tumble in the early going. Um so, you know, this is more like mythology than history, as we would call it. I'm not sure the Romans really made that distinction. So if we imagine, you know, somebody like Romulus founds the city. There are seven kings in Rome. Some are better than

Rome’s Kings And Tarquin’s Tyranny

SPEAKER_01 2:56

others, they're different. The second king is mostly into religion and does like a lot of really interesting religious stuff. One of them invents the census as a way of organizing society. He was pretty good. The last king is bad. Like everything about him is bad. His name in Latin is Tarquinius Superbus, Tarquin the Proud is usually how that's translated. Or like Tarquin the Arrogant might be more accurate. So he is a tyrant in a lot of different ways. He's really interested in really big building projects in Rome, which could be good, but he forces all of the citizens to do like manual labor and become construction workers, which they do not appreciate. His wife is also quite a schemer, Tullia, who's the daughter of the previous king. She like conspired to put him on the throne, involving killing her own father. So they're like a pretty terrible pair. And yeah, so everyone is feeling oppressed under this monarchy of Tarquinius Superbus, including one leading citizen, Lucius Junius Brutus. And he gets the name Brutus because he is actually just pretending to be stupid, to be a dumb brute, so that the king won't notice him and feel threatened by him. Because one of the other things Tarquin is doing is killing his competition. That includes people in Rome, and that includes people actually in other cities in the area. Like they go around just massacring powerful people to preserve their own power.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Tarquin has several children, including a son, Sextus, who is maybe even worse than his father. He is the one like doing the assassinating of all of these powerful neighbors. And it's actually the son, Sextus Tarquinius, who commits like the crime that will be the last straw for the monarchy in Rome. He is out with his drinking buddies, other, you know, princes and leading young men of the city. They're out drinking one night and they get in a fight about whose wife is the most virtuous. And he says, Well, let's go see. Let's go see what they're up to. They go check, you know, go riding from house to house, and they find their wives drinking and partying at home and are like, Well, that's not what I thought she was doing. That's not what she's supposed to be doing. Except for one, Lucretia. Lucretia is just sitting at home, sitting at her spinning wheel or her loom, doing classic women's work of making, you know, clothing or other, like upholstery or whatever it is, weaving at home with her maids quietly, having a quiet night, staying out of trouble, contributing to her household. So sex to Starquinius, when he sees Lucretia, because no one has ever told him no, and because he's a comprehensively terrible person, he decides he wants to have sex with Lucretia. She is married to his cousin. But he just has to have her. And I'll give like content warning that this is headed in an assault direction. So Tarquinia,

Lucretia And The Breaking Point

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Sex is Tarquinia sneaks into Lucretia's room at night and he says he's gonna have sex with her. He threatens her that if she resists or like yells for help, he will stage it so that it looks like she has had sex with a slave to embarrass her and humiliate her. So, you know, she gives in. After he leaves, Lucretia calls in her husband, her, his friend Brutus comes along, she tells them what happened, and she wants to make it really clear that she is telling the truth about resisting. She doesn't want to live with dishonor, and so she dies by suicide. And in that moment, Brutus takes the knife that she used, he holds it up in the air and says, We're done not only with Sextus Arquinius, but also with his father, the king, and actually with the entire idea of monarchy in general. If having a king means that somebody can behave like this, like power has gone to his head such that he thinks he can do anything he wants, then we're done. No more monarchy. He goes out into the forum and he asks all the Roman people to swear, we're gonna get rid of the king and we'll never have one again. So everyone in the city swears this oath with Brutus. And it's a really strange and horrible story about like a transition of government. The story is told, like the most familiar version is from a historian named Livy. This is book one of his history. It's a very long history, but this is this is how it starts. And Livy makes it really sound like a tragic event, what happened to Lucretia. There's no question that like what happened to her was unacceptable in a civilized society. And it was the symbol of how the Tarquinius family, so not just the king, but his whole family, had so much power that no one could tell them no. And they didn't follow laws or kind of respect the boundaries of uh decorum. And so that's how we get a new form of government in Rome, which is the Roman Republic. And I wanted to pause here. So, like the idea of swearing an oath that we'll never have monarchy again. We also get a lot of that rhetoric in the American Revolution. So when we think of like Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty, he'll talk about how, you know, now is the time, the we've had our own last straw with King George III and the Boston Tea Party or the blockade of Boston, the Stamp Act, these kind of escalations of hostility between the colonies and King George. And we need to overthrow the monarchy the way Brutus did. So Thomas Paine, when he writes Common Sense in 1776, he asks,

Brutus’ Oath Against Monarchy

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Where is the king of America? I'll tell you, he reigns above. So the king in America might be God in some sense. Paine says he doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain. And in America, he says, the law will be king. In absolute governments, the king is law, but in free countries, the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other. And so that's one of the ways Thomas Paine argues for independence, is by saying we should get rid of kings and just have the law be the king. And then once we get the declaration of independence, we still get this kind of rhetoric about the king being a tyrant. So at the beginning of the declaration, Jefferson and Adams and Franklin and their committee, and eventually the whole Continental Congress, they write that prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they're accustomed. So, like it takes a lot to overthrow a government. You don't just go around declaring independence willy-nilly over small objections. So they say, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design

From Rome To King George

SPEAKER_01 11:06

to reduce people under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security. They say the history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states, these United States of America. They go through this whole list of grievances, the specific things that they think King George did. And by the way, like they could have been accusing parliament of doing all of this, but it's King George. And I think it is a way of calling out that Roman history of saying, you know, overthrowing a king to establish a free government, like the world has seen this before. So they're kind of borrowing from that tradition. After they list all the grievances, then they conclude a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. And hence that is why we are declaring independence. That's why we'll be the United States instead of the British colonies. So this story from Libby about the establishing of a Roman republic and the abolition of the monarchy. I feel like you can kind of see the illusions, the references, like the flavor of the Roman history showing up in the Declaration of Independence a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Definitely you can see the threads, right? Like I've done so much on the Declaration of Independence. And as you were telling the story, it was like I can like I can see, I can start to pull these things together. And I mean, what an awful story, first of all. And just as these Roman like kings just are awful, awful people. But the you know, the overthrow of the Roman monarchy is because something so awful happened, right? You're talking about in the declaration, we we just we don't overthrow things because of light and transient causes. Like looking back there, that's not a light and transient cause. Wow. So we have that. What about kind of the establishment of our legislature? How did that borrow from the found like the Roman Republic?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah. So I mean, I'll take a step back to say, like, okay, what even is the Roman Republic? Well, like, look so a republic come comes from the Latin word race publica. Race is like property, can also just mean like a thing, but it can mean a property or an estate, and then publica means belonging to the people or public. So a republic is the property of the people. So it's popular government. It's all it can be translated literally as commonwealth and often is, so wealth that is held in common. Just an interesting idea that, like, in some sense, the government is all of our property. Like we have ownership over how we make decisions together. So, what the Romans did is they already had a senate. The word senate comes from the word for old man. And so it was basically a council of elders who would advise the king on what to do. And they said, Well, we're gonna keep the senate. Those guys still have good ideas about what to do. In fact, we're gonna give them more power to make laws. And then we're gonna take all the powers that the king had, including power over the army, and we're gonna transfer that into elected officials or magistrates. And at the top, there's sort of a hierarchy of magistrates. At the top, instead of one chief executive, we're gonna have two. We're gonna have two consuls. So the two consuls are the top magistrates. They're elected each year. They only serve for a year. It's a very short term. They are commanders-in-chief of the army and they alternate back and forth. So only one is commanding the army at one time. And Brutus becomes one of the first consuls. And actually, Lucretia's husband becomes the other. But then because he's a cousin of the former king, they end up asking him to leave. And so he is replaced by someone else. One of the other early consuls

How The Roman Republic Works

SPEAKER_01 15:32

is Publius Valerius Publicola, or uh sort of a man of the people. And it's his name that gets to be the pseudonym on all of the Federalist papers. So the Federalist papers are supposed to be written by Publius, that's who that is. So yeah, the magistrates do a lot of other things. They also oversee like public works, and they're also the judges and the courts. The judiciary is not separate in the Roman system. It's also the Roman Republic is not, it's an electoral system. So the people are choosing who they want their magistrates to be. They do have elections, but it's not a one-man, one vote situation. So they have a census, and one of the things the census does is divide society into classes based on wealth. The senators are actually the wealthiest class. Right below them are the knights in the army, the people who could afford to have a horse. And then there's everyone else, the plebs. And the voting units, instead of having like geographic districts, they divide them into groups within their classes. And the people in the upper classes have fewer people. This is gonna get a little complicated. The people in the upper classes have fewer people in their voting unit. So, like if you're a senator, there's not a whole lot of people in your voting unit, which means that each person's vote actually counts for more because each voting unit has like equivalent power. So the vote of a senator carries a lot more weight than the vote of like a farmer. All the plebs are supposed to be farmers. There's also, there was kind of a class of wealthy families under the kings. They were, you know, the king's closest friends and advisors and allies. They get to be called patricians. Poter is Latin for father. So these were kind of like the more authoritative families, the wealthiest and most powerful families. Those patrician families like still hold almost all of the power in Rome. Then you can't really move up from the class of the plebs to the senators. So like it has some oligarchy features to it. We're actually going to talk about that in the next episode. Stay tuned for that. So, in any case, the the Roman Republic is a system of laws. They do not have a written constitution, but they do have a system of laws that applied the same to everyone. They have a system of elections, they have courts where, you know, if somebody commits a crime against you, even if it's a wealthier person, like you have a place you can go to get justice. And over time, the plebs end up getting more power within this system. Every once in a while, when they're really being oppressed by the wealthy families, they will just leave and refuse to show up for a war. And when your entire infantry refuses to show up for a war until you concede them some political powers, then you tend to listen to them. So there's a little bit of a like power struggle, kind of class struggle throughout the history of the Roman Republic. But yeah, in general, this is a pretty stable system. It's a little bit different. People talk about the difference between a democracy and a republic, and actually argue like which one is the best way to describe America. I give kind of like a facetious ancient historian answer, which is like, well, democracy is Greek and Republic is Latin. So we're neither of those, so who cares? To give like a more serious answer. Democracy in Greek means power of the people. So actually, like the words mean very similar things. But a democracy in the city of Athens, so if we're talking about like classical history, they were electing a lot of magistrates. Some of them were chosen by lottery, and some of the people who make decisions are chosen by lottery. But a lot of them are chosen by election. You've got citizens voting on legislation, on political decisions, serving on juries. The same things kind of happen in the Roman Republic also. But in the Roman Republic, most of the work of making political decisions is being done in the Senate and people from that social class. So in Athens, if you opened a citizen's assembly, you would ask who wishes to speak, and anybody could get up and give their opinion. That is not true in Rome. In Rome, you have to be one of the higher-ranking magistrates or invited to give your opinion by one of those people, or you have to be in the Senate. So Rome doesn't really use direct voting to make political decisions the way Athens does. We don't either in the United States. And most of the founders of the United States talked about the states as a republic. They thought the direct democracy of Athens was too chaotic for the reasons we talked about in the last episode. And the Roman Republic was a little bit more stable. That's not to say there weren't kind of power struggles, especially between the different classes of society. But for the most part, because you have this relatively constrained group of highly educated, fairly wealthy people invested in the good of the state, they thought, you know, that reduces the extremism and the sort of like mob mentality part of democratic decision-making in Athens, which was something they wanted to avoid. And then over time, ever since the constitution was ratified, the United States has also like gotten more democratic. So Andrew Jackson, we think of as kind of an opening salvo, or even Thomas Jefferson, founding a party known as the Democratic Republicans, was kind of pushing in a democracy direction. And we've continued moving in that direction over time. So I'll end where I started, which is that I'm not sure it makes a huge amount of difference if we call ourselves a Republican or a democracy. But I do have, like, as an example, a quote from John Adams. He wrote his thoughts on government in 1776 about what he thought Massachusetts state constitution should look like. And he says the wretched condition of this country has convinced me that there's no good government but what is Republican. He actually thinks the British Constitution is to some extent Republican, also, because the definition Of a republic is an empire of laws and not of men. And as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws is the best of republics. The more you can have the law applying equally to everyone, the better. And that's also part of the founding of the Roman Republic. So Brutus has gotten everyone to swear we'll never have a monarchy again. But functionally, all they do is exile

Republic Versus Democracy In Practice

SPEAKER_01 23:26

the king. They don't kill him. And he still has friends and allies in Rome that no one has gotten rid of. Some of them are still in the city. And in fact, they conspire to bring the king back. They're like, you know what? This whole laws applying equally to us, like, not a fan. We were doing great under the king, and we want him back. And two of the people who joined that conspiracy are Brutus' own sons. And so this is reported to him. He has them hauled in front of him as he's like standing in the Roman Forum in chains. And he kind of has to decide Am I gonna be a father and forgive my sons for being idiots? Or am I gonna follow through and say, like, the law is king? And he has them executed. And there are many famous paintings of like the bodies of his sons being like carried back into his home and him having to choose between kind of like the public magistrate self and the personal self. He's responsible in this horrible way for making sure that the law does apply equally to everyone. And he goes through with it. And so he comes off as kind of like this heroic but slightly terrifying founding figure in the Roman Republic.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Hi, listeners, I know this is not a video podcast, but I like just have my mouth open because it's so this is what I don't understand when people are like, I don't like history, it's boring. Like it is just like stuff like these stories. And I'm glad that you brought up the whole democracy versus republic. Like it is, it always cracks me up because you know, as you're talking, right? You're you're talking about John Adams, and he wants to bring a little bit of the British system in, and we have a little bit of the Greek system and a little bit of Rome, and we're seeing all of these systems, you know, and our system has changed over time. And I I feel like we have ourselves a unique system, so it doesn't matter what you call it, our system is the US system. And you brought up Publius. Brutus is a famous anti-federalist, right? That's one of the pseudonyms that's used is is Brutus. And it's again, all of these things are starting to really connect all of these threads to the founding. Thank goodness nobody is having to kill their sons, though, in our founding. Yeah. But good golly.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

I'm sure, you know, there probably were families that were divided in 1776 of like Tories versus Cameron.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Benjamin Franklin's his son was a loyalist, wasn't he? Oh, I forgot that.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Yeah. So, like, you know, this was this is a feature of any civil conflict, is like families get divided over things like this. But most people aren't in the position that Brutus was in. I mean, Roman fathers do have like the power of life and death over their household. So, like, that is a decision he could have made as a father in any case. This is one of like the more extreme features of Roman society, but yeah, it's it's a really intense founding story. By the way, if you've been thinking this whole time, like, wait, I thought Brutus was the one who killed Julius Caesar, that's a descendant of this Brutus, and like it's not a coincidence. He's very much looking to his famous ancestor, and Livy is actually writing after the death of Julius Caesar, so like he knows what the Brutus family is gonna go on to do, and is very much thinking about it. So, even for the the Romans, like this had a lot of resonance with later history and became a founding legend that like directly informed how they thought they should act later on.

Brutus’ Sons And The Cost

SPEAKER_00 27:36

I mean, just literally speechless because it's just because I I was thinking that I was like, wait a minute.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Like Yeah, that's so that that one is Marcus Junius Brutus, this one is Lucius Junius Brutus, and they're like 450 years apart, so many generations later, but yeah, the Roman Republic lasts for a long time, and it's sort of bookended by by Brutus's just to make Roman history final exams like extra confusing.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Well, yes, obviously. Oh my gosh, and you uh kind of teased our next episode, too. We're talking about in our next episode kind of checks and balances and these influences from Rome on our US Constitution. Jenna, I literally I feel like I'm watching a Bravo reality show when you tell me these stories because they're so just violent. Not that Bravo is violent, but it is very violent. This is much more violent than that. Full of drama.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Yeah. Honestly, Roman history, the from the first time I studied it in college, it does have these like really wild stories and twists and turns, and a lot of these themes of civic virtue and people who use power the right way or the wrong way, and the impact that they have on that society. Like, this is a really important way that the Romans thought about how to act in public, and especially Roman leading citizens. That it is, it does like really draw you in the way they wrote about it. This is more, I don't know, in kind of the legend category. Like I compare it sometimes to the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, where people are like, I mean, is that real? Probably not. Like maybe it was connected to some something that really happened. So that's kind of how I think about Roman mythology, also. But yeah, at the same time, there's stories that teach Romans like how to act and how to think about politics and how to think about free self-government, which became really important for Americans to think with, too.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Okay. Well, thank you again for all your knowledge, your storytelling, and I am so excited again for our next episode. Listeners, as we're like talking, I'm looking through our episode list, and it's just it's fun. You're gonna get some good stories. We will be talking about Julius' Caesar, but not until a little bit later. But again, these connections to you know the Roman Republic and how the founders thought about that and where we kind of see that in our own government. So, Joanna, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Thanks for listening to me nerd out again.