Birth of Rome

The birth of Rome: What eventually became the Roman Empire began as settlements around the Palatine Hill along the river Tiber in Central Italy. The river was navigable up to that place. The site also had a ford where the Tiber could be crossed. The Palatine Hill and hills surrounding it presented easily defensible positions in the wide fertile plain surrounding them. All these features contributed in the success of the city. The traditional account of Roman history, which has come down to us through Livy, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and others, is that in Rome's first centuries, it was ruled by a succession of seven kings. The traditional chronology, as codified by Varro, allots 243 years for their reigns, an extraordinary average of almost 35 years (much longer than any historically documented dynasty), which, since the work of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, has been generally discounted by modern scholarship. The Gauls destroyed all of Rome's historical records when they sacked the city in the Battle of the Allia in 390 BC, so no contemporary records of the kingdom exist, and all accounts of the kings must be highly questioned. Archaeological evidence does, however, support that a settlement was founded in Rome around the middle of the 8th century BC.

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