Romulus

Romulus appears in Rousseau’s account less as a biographical character than as the founder whose institutional choices shaped Rome’s earliest political order. His divisions organized a people made up of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners into tribes, curiae, and military units; his assemblies balanced popular numbers against patrician power, while his division of land set aside a third for public use. Yet Rousseau distinguishes this initial mixed government, which soon deteriorated into despotism, from the later republic born with the expulsion of the Tarquins.

Founder and Early Institutions

After Rome’s foundation, the new republic consisted of the army assembled by its founder: Albans, Sabines, and foreigners. Romulus divided this population into three tribes, each containing ten curiae, which were themselves subdivided into decuries. Leaders called curiones and decuriones headed these smaller units. The arrangement gave the emerging community a structure that was at once social and organizational, though Rousseau emphasizes its military origin.

Each tribe also supplied one hundred Equites, or Knights, forming a century. Rousseau takes this organization as evidence that the original divisions were not devised simply for a town’s civic life: they were first military. But the design also seemed to anticipate Rome’s future scale. A small township, he suggests, equipped itself in advance with a political framework suited to becoming a world capital.

The curiae became more than administrative subdivisions. In the earliest arrangement, thirty curiae made up the Roman people within the city walls. Each had its own temples, gods, officers, priests, and festivals, including the compitalia. These institutions gave the divisions a shared religious and ceremonial life as well as a place in the political order.

Assemblies and Political Balance

Rousseau explains the assemblies organized by curiae through Romulus’s aim of checking the senate by the people and the people by the senate, while retaining his own ascendancy over both. The assembly gave the people the strength of numbers to counter the power and wealth held by the patricians. It did not, however, erase patrician advantage: the influence of their clients tilted the majority of votes toward them. Rousseau therefore describes the institution of patron and client as a means by which the patriciate could survive despite its tension with the republican spirit.

The curiate assemblies endured under the kings until the time of Servius, and royal laws consequently came to be called leges curiatae. Their later standing changed. When the curiae were confined to the four urban tribes, they represented the city populace but suited neither the senate, which led the patricians, nor the tribunes, who headed well-to-do plebeians. They fell into disrepute; eventually thirty lictors assembled and performed the business that the Comitia Curiata should have handled.

Romulus’s settlement thus contained both a balancing mechanism and a hierarchy. Popular participation was given formal weight, but clients’ votes preserved the patricians’ influence. Rousseau’s account makes this arrangement significant not because it established equal political power, but because it created a durable means of holding competing bodies in check while leaving the founder above them.

Public Land and the Founder’s Legacy

In discussing how a republic should finance public offices and expenses, Rousseau identifies land reserved for the state—public demesne—as preferable to a fund consisting of money. He invokes Romulus’s division of land as an early example: the founder’s first concern, in this account, was to set aside a third for state use. Rousseau’s point is institutional rather than biographical. Public resources require a settled basis and a clearly designated purpose; Romulus’s land allocation stands as a precedent for placing a share of the community’s resources beyond private use.

That precedent also fits Rousseau’s broader concern with the integrity of administration. Public funds, once accepted or assigned by an assembly for a specified purpose, acquire a status that makes their misuse a grave betrayal. The founder’s reservation of land supplies an example of how a republic might provide for its common needs from the outset, although Rousseau also warns that such resources can be squandered through bad management. The land itself is not a guarantee of virtue; the political arrangement and the honesty of officials remain decisive.

Mixed Government and the Republic’s Birth

Rousseau rejects the simple account of Rome as a state that passed in sequence from monarchy to aristocracy and then to democracy. What Romulus first established, he argues, was a mixed government, and it soon deteriorated into despotism. The state met an untimely end before reaching maturity, an outcome Rousseau compares to the death of a newborn child. This framing limits the founder’s achievement: his system began Rome’s political organization, but it did not yet create the stable republic that the later history would make possible.

The decisive birth of the republic came with the expulsion of the Tarquins, not with Romulus’s foundation. Even then, the new order initially lacked a settled form because it retained the patriciate and so left its work incomplete. Hereditary aristocracy remained in conflict with democracy. Rousseau locates the formation of a true government and a genuine democracy only in the establishment of the tribunate. In that later arrangement, the people was sovereign and also acted as magistrate and judge; the senate served as a subordinate tribunal, while the consuls, despite their patrician standing and command in war, were in the city no more than presidents of the people.

This distinction gives Romulus a deliberately bounded place in Rousseau’s political history. He founded the original institutions and supplied examples of political foresight, but the republic was not fully born under his settlement. Rousseau’s contrast between the mixed government’s rapid decay and the republic’s later, incomplete formation shows that founding a state and establishing a durable popular government are different achievements. The structures associated with Romulus helped organize and balance early Rome; they did not prevent its first political order from ending in despotism.