two enemy cities, rather than bleed each other dry in a total war, agreed to settle the entire matter with a fight of three against three. whichever side won the duel would win the war; the defeated people would accept submission without further bloodshed. so tradition tells one of the strangest episodes of regal rome.
it places the affair around the middle of the 7th century bce. after the death of the pious numa, tullus hostilius came to the throne, a monarch of opposite temperament who sought any pretext to return to war. he found it in alba longa, the old mother-city from which, according to the myth, rome herself descended. to set the two cities against each other was, in a sense, a war between kin, and perhaps that is why both sides looked for an outcome that would avoid mutual annihilation.
the pact was as theatrical as it was brutal. each city would name three champions, and the clash between those six men would decide the fate of thousands. fighting for rome would be three triplet brothers, the horatii; for alba longa, another three triplets, the curiatii. the combat began as a disaster for rome: two of the horatii fell almost at once, leaving the surviving horatius alone against the three albans. yet, rather than die fighting, he resorted to cunning. he feigned flight, and the three curiatii pursued him at different paces, each according to the gravity of his wounds, until they were separated. then the surviving horatius wheeled round and cut them down one by one, in isolation. rome had won the war without fighting a battle.
in rome, loyalty to the state weighed more than the bonds of blood. the hero of the day was condemned to death because of the sister he had just killed.
the hero returned laden with the spoils of his foes, but tragedy awaited him at home. his sister recognised among the booty the cloak of one of the curiatii: she had been betrothed to him, and she burst into tears for the dead man. the horatius, seeing in those tears a betrayal on the very day of victory, drew his sword and killed her on the spot. the avenger of his country had become, in an instant, a murderer, and for that he was sentenced to death.
here lies the historical kernel of the story, and it is worth being precise about it. the legend does not explain the origin of civil law, as is sometimes claimed, but that of the provocatio ad populum: the right of a citizen sentenced to capital punishment to appeal to the people as a whole gathered in assembly. it is, therefore, an institution of public criminal law, not of private. condemned to die, the horatius appealed, and the people — moved by his services — acquitted him. tradition thus dated, to the age of the kings, a principle that the republic would turn into one of its most prized guarantees: that not even the state could execute a citizen without granting him the option to appeal.
the episode condenses two lessons rome would tell itself for centuries. the first, severe: loyalty to the community stands above love and family, and a citizen who weeps for an enemy of rome commits a fault. the second, civilising: not even that principle justifies an execution without appeal. modern historians read all this as an aetiological myth constructed to lend venerable antiquity to the provocatio, rather than as a real event.
it matters to understand why rome cared to date that guarantee so far back. the provocatio ad populum would become one of the cornerstones of republican liberty, reaffirmed time and again by later laws. the lex valeria and, later, the leges porciae would protect the citizen from being scourged or executed without the people having the chance to review the sentence. from that same principle would spring, centuries later, the pride contained in the formula civis romanus sum, “i am a roman citizen”: the idea that to belong to rome conferred rights no magistrate could trample with impunity. by placing the origin of that protection in the age of the kings, tradition was not narrating a fact: it was proclaiming that the appeal was as old as rome itself.
be that as it may, tullus hostilius had shown what the sword could conquer. his successor would discover that sustaining a city demands more than armies: it demands money, and he would build rome’s first great commercial monopoly.
