Rome's famous founding revolution may be mostly a story borrowed from Athens
Every Roman schoolboy learned how Brutus drove out the tyrant Tarquin in 509 BC and swore Rome would never again have a king. Modern historians suspect much of that tale was invented centuries later, and some doubt Brutus himself ever lived. Even the year is disputed.
In the traditional version, the king's son Sextus Tarquinius assaults the noblewoman Lucretia, who tells her kinsmen and then takes her own life. Outraged relatives of the royal family, led by the king's nephew Lucius Junius Brutus, lock the city gates while Tarquin is away besieging Ardea and win over his army. Brutus and Collatinus, Lucretia's husband, become the first pair of annual magistrates. Brutus later has his own sons executed for plotting a restoration, and dies fighting the Etruscans at Silva Arsia.
Tarquin does not give up easily. He recruits Etruscan cities, then Lars Porsenna of Clusium, whose march is famously held at a bridge by Horatius Cocles, and finally the Latin League under his son-in-law, beaten at Lake Regillus with help from the divine twins Castor and Pollux. He dies in exile at Cumae in 495 BC.
The trouble is that Rome's first written history, by Quintus Fabius Pictor, appeared around 200 BC, roughly three centuries after these events. Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch built on such writers, and senatorial historians used the past to flatter their own families. T. P. Wiseman argues many figures were inventions of the fourth and third centuries BC, while James Richardson thinks Brutus never existed. The parallels with Athens are striking: the Peisistratid tyrants were expelled there around 510 BC, and Collatinus's exile echoes the ostracism of Hipparchos.
Dating is just as slippery. The canonical 509 BC comes from Marcus Terentius Varro's chronology, which probably runs four years out in its early stretch. Counting consul pairs in Livy's list gives about 502 BC, Polybius's reckoning points to 508, and a temple dedication recorded by Gnaeus Flavius implies 507. How the stories survived before being written down is also debated; Niebuhr imagined banquet ballads, while Wiseman favours staged historical plays.
Source: Overthrow of the Roman monarchy
