FROM THE BEGINNING:

Exactly how the Roman republic came into existence remains shrouded in mystery. Critically so. As with our tradition of English common law and the necessity of knowing that its origins are "beyond the memory of man," from "time immemorial," "ancient beyond memory or record," and "time out of mind," so it is with the best republics. If we could identify the exact moment of origin and the originator or originators, a republic would lose one of its most important components: that it is a reflection of cosmic nature and not of human will. Its continuation must be of the will--just as with a trial by jury and the presumption of innocence. These must be guarded by the will, but they cannot rest in their origins in the mind of man (or men). If they did, they would lose their power and their very essence.

The Roman Republic, then, arrived not by the hand of any one founder, but by the revolution of a whole people against the political tyranny and moral corruption of the rulers, the Etruscans. Of all the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean, modern scholars know very little about the Etruscan people, other than their language (not fully) and the art that remained long after the Romans overthrew them. In contrast to the rustic simplicity of the Latins, the Etruscans appear to be a soft, sensual, and decadent people. The Romans must have despised them not just for their intrusive governance, but for their sexual libertinism and their effete civilization.

Whatever their successes--and they were many, especially in art and engineering--the Etruscans lost favor with the Romans, and the Romans violently overthrew them in 510 B.C. The following year, the Romans established a republic, only the second in recorded history. The Carthaginians had beaten them to it, but the North Africans had established a commercial republic, while the Romans desired a virtuous one.

Certainly, the Roman republic was not a democratic one, but, rather, an aristocratic one, with most of the power residing in the Senate (meaning "wise old men"), a body of the ruling families that controlled the finances, internal security, and foreign affairs. In his history of Rome, the Greek thinker Polybius claimed that Rome had a tripartite balance of powers from the beginning, even if power resided in the aristocracy. Around the Senate, according to Polybius, the people as a whole provided checks and balances, as did the executives through various offices. Almost nothing is recorded of the first few centuries of Roman republican history, so one theory or one guess, generally, is as good as any other. One way or another, the Roman constitution evolved to incorporate formal institutions representing the aristocratic, the democratic, and the executive elements of government.

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