In his well-known and influential paper, ‘An Interim Report on the Origins of Rome’, A. Momigliano observed that ‘[n]othing was remembered of what the Fabii had done during the monarchy.’ In the accompanying footnote he suggested that this may say something about the honesty of Fabius Pictor, Rome’s first historian, for, he said, Pictor ‘must have known... that the Fabii were as old as Romulus.’Footnote ¹ According to the story that the founder of the gens was a child of Hercules, conceived during the hero’s visit to the site of Rome,Footnote ² the Fabii were much older than that. More importantly, they must have been influential from an early date too, if the naming of one of the so-called ‘Servian’ tribes after them is any indication.Footnote ³

The first Fabii to be found in the evidence, however, are the three brothers, Quintus, Kaeso, and Marcus, who allegedly held in succession one of the two consulships from 485-479.Footnote ⁴ Their father, Kaeso, must (in theory) have lived during the regal period, as must they, but if he did anything, there is no trace of it. Kaeso’s name is only found in the evidence because his sons held political office in the republican period;Footnote ⁵ had they not done so, there would be no evidence even for that. As for the rest of Kaeso’s family, there is not one word.Footnote ⁶ And the same is true for most of the other gentes that ought to have had members alive at Rome in the regal period.Footnote ⁷

Momigliano’s argument, that Fabius Pictor must have been honest because the Fabii are absent from the regal period, obviously requires that there was no evidence for the Fabii who lived at that time and thus no one was able to write anything about them. Had anyone done so, this would necessarily have been dishonest. It is fair to say that Momigliano could have drawn a comparable conclusion about any number of other gentes, including those that did not produce historians.Footnote ⁸ Nothing much, if anything at all, was said about them, because there was simply no evidence.

In contrast to this, it has been said more recently that Rome’s nobility has been ‘more or less wholly written out’ of the traditions of the regal period.Footnote ⁹ That obviously implies that Rome’s nobility was once there, in the literary tradition, but that it was later removed for some reason. This is a much more difficult proposition, and it seems better to say not that Rome’s nobility was ‘written out’, but that it was never ‘written in’. That would be in keeping too with the general trend for historical works at Rome to get longer and fuller (this is the phenomenon that E. Badian memorably called ‘the expansion of the past’Footnote ¹⁰ ); although, significantly, even then, the nobility was not written in. It would seem that there was no reason for them to be written into the traditions of the regal period, and that was, presumably, because there was nothing to be gained by doing so.

It is, however, an entirely different story when it comes to the republican period, especially after the emergence in the mid-fourth century of the office-holding nobility for whom office-holding was, naturally enough, so very important. By then, there was something to be gained by being ‘written in’, that is, at least, by being written into the traditions of the Republic. For Rome’s office-holding nobility, ancestors from the regal period just did not matter, since they did not hold political office. They could not, because, the position of king aside, there was none for them to holdFootnote ¹¹ (which is why Momigliano’s argument about Pictor’s honesty does not really work). For the office-holding nobility, only ancestors from the republican period mattered, and above all those ancestors who had held the consulship, for that office in particular was, as F. E. Adcock succinctly put it decades ago, ‘the hallmark of their rank’.Footnote ¹²

So the issue is not so much the absence of the Fabii and all the various other gentes from the traditions of the regal period, although that absence is certainly important evidence. The issue is really the sudden and almost full appearance of the Roman nobility in the traditions of the earliest Republic, and even more so since the nobility generally appears with the consulship. In the first year alone (509 BC), individuals from no fewer than eight different gentes can be found in the evidence, and that is just in terms of office-holding and priesthoods. Five of these eight gentes allegedly produced consuls in this year.Footnote ¹³ In the first thirty years of the republican period (509-480), as many as 25 different gentes supposedly made their first appearance with the consulship.Footnote ¹⁴ That is almost a new gens a year. This is, moreover, to note only the first appearance of each gens in the evidence for magistracies, other offices, and priesthoods; a number of further gentes, including some the members of which also reached the consulship in this same period, appear for the first time in positions other than the consulship.

If the evidence, which is problematic and sometimes extremely so, for those other magistrates and posts is included, a further 17 gentes can – according to the material collected in T. R. S. Broughton’s Magistrates of the Roman Republic – potentially be added to the total for this thirty-year period.Footnote ¹⁵ Of these 17 gentes, six produced consuls too (the Herminii, in 506; the Larcii, also in 506; the Veturii, in 499; the Minucii, in 497; the Sempronii, in 497 too; and the Claudii, in 495) and, given the great difficulties with the evidence for junior positions, it may be that all six could have originally appeared for the first time with a consulship. The Claudii, for instance, may have first appeared with a quaestorship in 496 (the story of their arrival in Rome aside), although it is only a conjecture that they did. In any case, Broughton dismisses the evidence; the quaestorship, he says, is ‘hardly authentic’.Footnote ¹⁶ Without it, the Claudii would have appeared for the first time with a consulship in the following year (495). The same could easily apply to any of the other gentes in this same position (there are two more quaestors,Footnote ¹⁷ one prefect of the city,Footnote ¹⁸ and two men who appear as tribunes of the soldiers and as legates, or so Broughton suggestsFootnote ¹⁹ ). If so, the total number of gentes to appear for the first time with a consulship in the years 509 to 480 could potentially have been as high as 31; this would mean that, on average, a new gens appeared each year in the first three decades of the Republic with the consulship alone.

In contrast, if the evidence, which is likewise problematic, for priesthoods is included as well, just two more gentes can be added, although there may be a third, if F. Münzer’s suggestion that M. Laetorius was decemvir sacrorum in 495 should happen to be right (although it is most unlikely).Footnote ²⁰ That brings the total number of gentes to appear, in the context of magistracies, priesthoods, and other positions, in the period from 509 to 480 up to 44 (or 45, if Laetorius is included). This means that, again on average, a new gens and a half appeared each year during this time.

It is reasonable to suppose that most, if not all, of those who held an office or priesthood in the first few decades of the Republic would have been born in the regal period, although there is scarcely any evidence for them in the traditions of that period. Members of Rome’s nobility do appear in regal times, but not in great numbers and not in circumstances that encourage much faith in the historicity of the evidence.Footnote ²¹ In any case, the nobility goes from conspicuously absent (hence the discussions of Momigliano and others) to conspicuously present (and excessively so, in the case of 509 BC) in a very short period of time, and, just as significantly, for the most part, the nobility appears with the consulship.Footnote ²²

It is probably fair to say that most scholars are not that distrustful of this evidence for the nobility, because it is widely maintained, firstly, that consuls were indeed elected immediately after the expulsion of the kings, and secondly, that a list of the names of the men who had held that office was made, if not from the very outset, then at least from early enough to ensure that an accurate record was preserved.Footnote ²³ So much faith has been placed in this hypothesis – and a hypothesis is all that it is – that the appearance of an individual in the consular fasti is apparently enough to prove that he really existed. Thus G. Forsythe, for example, accepts that L. Iunius Brutus, the founder of the Republic and one of the very first consuls, must be historical, effectively because his name appears in the consular fasti, while T. J. Cornell has used essentially the same argument with reference to M. Furius Camillus.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, the early consular fasti are also crucial for a range of modern reconstructions, including, most famously, the idea of the ‘closing’ of the patriciate.Footnote ²⁵

But are the fasti really worthy of such extraordinary trust? The means by which the names of the earliest consuls were preserved is entirely a matter of conjecture. The most common hypothesis is that the names were kept in the pontifical records.Footnote ²⁶ No one knows when those records began to be kept, and an early date for a written document in an essentially oral society may seem unlikely.Footnote ²⁷ Besides, if these priestly records contained the names of the chief magistrates of the state, it is just as likely that they would have also contained the names of the chief priests of the state, at the very least when they died and replacements were appointed.Footnote ²⁸ But the nobility appears with the consuls, not with the priests, for whom the evidence is almost entirely lacking.Footnote ²⁹ This is the case even though nobility was at first supposedly based on patrician status, and not primarily on the holding of office (that allegedly depended upon patrician status); priesthoods, like magistracies, were supposedly the special preserve of the patricians too; and the grounds for excluding the plebs from the consulship included religious considerations.Footnote ³⁰ And yet, despite all this, there is scarcely any evidence at all for priesthoods. The special focus specifically on office-holding and the holding of the consulship in particular was a distinctive feature of the office-holding nobility, since that nobility’s status was based above all on the holding of office, and also on the things achieved while in office. But the office-holding nobility developed at a later date. For the early patrician nobility, holding office was undoubtedly still important, but it does not appear to have been entirely fundamental to their status, which was based first of all on being patrician and all that came with that.

The precise nature of the earliest Roman nobility is of course highly uncertain; but, whatever it may have been, it is necessary to believe that the Romans were apparently capable of preserving a complete list of the names of the consuls, but were seemingly incapable of doing the same for all the other offices and all the priests, even in documents made by priests.Footnote ³¹ This point is potentially also valid for the various other means of preservation that have been put forward: why record just the names of the consuls, but virtually nothing else?

The obvious difference is that the consuls were eponymous, but it is highly unlikely that the consulship was created as an eponymous magistracy.Footnote ³² That would require not only the significant political change that came with the creation of annually-elected magistrates, and with the introduction of power-sharing and collegiality (all of which were new ideas, since Rome had previously been ruled by monarchs); it would also entail the creation of appropriate systems of record-keeping (also inevitably new) as well as significant changes in the very means by which time was measured (or, better, events dated). This requires radical and wide-ranging transformations in several areas of Roman life and, when it comes to the idea of a ‘consular year’, it is highly unlikely that any such concept could have developed until the consuls were in office for a regular period of time and for a period of time that reasonably equated to a year.Footnote ³³ Moreover, comparative evidence – such as for lists of Olympic victors, archons, the priestesses of Argos, and the like – suggests that these sorts of lists were assembled at a later date and not even then necessarily for dating purposes.Footnote ³⁴ There is no good reason to believe that the circumstances of the consulship were any different.

Instead of revisiting all the various hypotheses about how the consular fasti may have been preserved, because they are after all only hypotheses, it is better to focus first on the evidence of the fasti themselves. Two arguments in particular are commonly used in defence of the earliest consular fasti.

First, there is the appearance in them of what have been called ‘rare’ or ‘obsolete’ names, and there is also the appearance of ‘foreign’ names, and names such as these, it is argued, cannot have been invented at a later date.Footnote ³⁵ The difficulty with this argument, however, is that, if the evidence from which early lists were made was compiled, created, and modified over a period of time, which is not at all an unreasonable assumption (note, for instance, the inclusion of cognomina in the names of the earliest consuls which may very well be evidence of later intervention),Footnote ³⁶ it is simply impossible to know what pressures were exerted on it, when, and from what sources, and it is not known how the early lists of names were put together in the first place anyway. What counts as a rare or obsolete name can so often only be measured by office-holding, since the names of the magistrates make up so much of the evidence, and this inevitably distorts things. Those families whose members were holding the highest offices of the state, which are the families that are most clearly visible, were conceivably the ones with less pressing need to bolster their position with invented achievements and fictitious magistracies, and their names are not usually rare either. On the other hand, any fictitious claims made by such families are less likely to look unexpected or out of place. It is, however, those families that are no longer visible, the ones that were reaching perhaps only junior magistracies – for which there is seldom any evidence – and were just outside the inner circle that may have felt the need to resort to other means of acquiring prestige.Footnote ³⁷ Besides, what really constitutes a rare or obsolete name in the fifth, fourth, third, second, or even first century BC? It is generally impossible to know.Footnote ³⁸

The other argument that is very frequently used to defend the list of the early consuls is to note the general uniformity of it in the different sources,Footnote ³⁹ but that is a difficult argument to make when the extant evidence is so very late, and it is even more difficult to make, if it were the case – as may seem likely enough – that some sort of list, or lists, of consuls already existed in Fabius Pictor’s day, or soon thereafter.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such a list, or one such list, may then have been used and developed by subsequent historians, irrespective of what other claims and stories were in wider circulation.Footnote ⁴¹ Even if the uniformity in the different accounts is evidence that the names of the consuls ultimately come from a single source, it is entirely an assumption that that source is an early one. This single source need be no older than the late third or second century BC. But, even then, the matter is not quite so straightforward.

In a few places in his work, Livy notes that there were problems concerning the consuls and other magistrates of the state, and this was still the case after more than a century and a half of historical writing and research. Two passages in particular are especially significant. About a third of the way into his second book, Livy comments that there are so many uncertainties about chronology, because the order of the magistrates in the different lists varies, making it impossible to know which consuls followed which, or what was done in any given year.Footnote ⁴² By this stage in his work, Livy has already noted a couple of problems, and later in the same book, he will note further difficulties,Footnote ⁴³ but it is especially clear from his comments about the different lists and the great number of uncertainties that there were considerable problems, and it may be that those problems which Livy does discuss constitute only the tip of a potentially large iceberg. Naturally Livy does not dwell on these problems, because that would have resulted in a different sort of work from the one he was writing, and such an approach would certainly have destroyed his narrative as well.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is quite clear, however, that Livy just did not have access to a single list of magistrates that he could actually trust.Footnote ⁴⁵

Later, at the end of his eighth book, Livy addresses the origins of these problems in a brief but important passage. The record, he suggests, has been corrupted by funeral speeches and false claims made in tituli, the inscriptions which accompanied the imagines and which evidently detailed individual careers, as families dishonestly claimed for themselves great deeds and honours (which must include magistracies). The result is that individual careers (so again, the record of magistracies) and the public records have become confused.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is no momentary observation either; elsewhere in his work Livy mentions the problems with tituli and he also notes discrepancies between claims made in funeral speeches and other sources.Footnote ⁴⁷

What Livy says was not without precedent. Cicero, in his Brutus, had earlier noted that claims made in funeral speeches had made Roman history somewhat faulty. Many things, he said, which had not happened had been included in those speeches: spurious triumphs, multiplied consulships, false genealogies, and transitions to the plebs. Cicero offered an example of the sort of claims that were made: it would be, he said, as if he (M. Tullius Cicero) were to claim to be descended from Manius Tullius, the patrician consul who held office alongside Ser. Sulpicius (500 BC).Footnote ⁴⁸

It is unclear if, by ‘false genealogies’ (genera falsa), Cicero was referring to claims to be descended from gods or heroes, or that sort of thing. Such claims could certainly be put forward in funeral speeches, as Iulius Caesar’s speech for his aunt shows, although whether or not this was a long-standing practice is another matter.Footnote ⁴⁹ If Polybius’ famous account in his sixth book is any indication, the focus of noble funerals and funeral speeches was clearly on office-holders and their achievements.Footnote ⁵⁰ It may be that Cicero means only false genealogies along the lines of the example he offers: descent from patricians and consuls. That would certainly make sense, since such claims were after all more useful for a nobility whose standing was based on office-holding, and since office-holding (according to tradition, at least) had originally required patrician status.Footnote ⁵¹

A further piece of evidence can be included in this context as well. According to Plutarch, a certain Klodios claimed that the ancient records had been lost when the Gauls sacked Rome; what was on display, he said, was forged, made up to please those who wished to claim descent from leading families and illustrious houses.Footnote ⁵² This is obviously comparable with what Cicero had to say in his Brutus about transitions to the plebs and false genealogies. The idea that the earliest records of the city were destroyed in the Gallic fires was long a staple argument of the sceptical historians, those who denied the historicity of the literary evidence for early Roman history.Footnote ⁵³ The lack of archaeological evidence for widespread destruction of the city at this time may, at first sight, seem to make that argument untenable. But, if there was no fire to destroy the city’s records, why should ancient writers have claimed that those records had been lost? The most obvious explanation is that the story of their destruction is aetiological. It was invented to explain the general lack of documents, which later writers clearly assumed must have been made. But that assumption was simply anachronistic.Footnote ⁵⁴

That lack of documents presumably extended to the putative list of consuls. Like Klodios, Livy also says that documents were lost at the time of the Gallic sack, and he mentions in particular the pontifical records; however, Livy adds that some effort was subsequently made to recover Rome’s treaties and laws, such as the Twelve Tables and certain laws of the kings.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is reasonable to suspect that Livy (or his source) claims that documents of precisely that kind were recovered, simply because documents of that kind were still extant, or believed to be so, in Livy’s (or his source’s) day. If that is the case, the fact that Livy does not have anything else recovered, other than laws and treaties, is extremely significant.

This evidence, of Livy and Cicero, and Klodios too, is absolutely unequivocal, and it cannot simply be dismissed, nor is it easy to explain away (indeed, it would require a deliberate and concerted effort), although anyone who has confidence in the early consular fasti inevitably must do one or the other. Such an approach, however, means that the modern belief that the fasti are reliable is effectively being treated as better than explicit ancient evidence to the contrary.

Consular ancestors mattered, and the effects of this importance are perfectly predictable – multiplied, that is, too many, consulships, says Cicero – and when so many potentially stood to benefit (individually and collectively), and when perhaps many may have been making exaggerated, if not simply fictitious claims, it is difficult to imagine that Rome’s nobles were busy reining in each other’s inventions and deriding each other’s distortions and fabrications, as has sometimes been suggested, when it comes to historiography in particular.Footnote ⁵⁶ Of course, some individuals – people like Cicero and Livy – may have expressed concern or disapproval, but their comments, where they happen to survive, only really serve to show what was actually going on, and also that such expressions of disapproval were clearly not inhibiting anyone. To argue that Rome’s nobles were engaged in some sort of exercise in collective self-censorship is to assume not only that they would have wanted to do this, but also that they even knew who had been consul in any given year, or how many consuls a family had produced, and this may be unlikely, certainly for the distant past. Livy had problems, and he was writing after more than a century of historiographical work and, presumably, with various texts directly in front of him. Beyond the achievements of their own ancestors (who may not always have been entirely familiar),Footnote ⁵⁷ at the forefront of many nobles’ minds may have merely been the stock of exemplary tales that they used during the course of their day to day political activities.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, while the consuls were eponymous, their names were associated with specific events, not with numbers, and that inevitably will have made the fabrication of early consuls (and their achievements) much easier to effect and much more difficult to detect than it would otherwise have been, had the consuls’ names been associated with an ordered and continuous sequence of numbered years, as they are today.Footnote ⁵⁹ It would only have been after the consuls’ names were first placed into a numbered sequence (and one of a precise length too) that so many of the problems would have become apparent, and it is in this context that comments such as Cicero’s about there being too many consulships (plures consulatus) should probably be understood. (Hence, too, Cicero can only talk of false triumphs, alongside the plures consulatus; triumphs only took place irregularly, so the same criterion could not so readily be used in their case.)Footnote ⁶⁰

To all this, it can be added that the consulship itself appears to have been projected into the past – even some of the most optimistic historians accept thatFootnote ⁶¹ – and it must have been so in an entirely anachronistic way. Livy knew that the consuls had once been called praetors.Footnote ⁶² Yet, after the Tarquins had been expelled and the Republic established, Livy has Brutus and his colleague elected to the consulship, not to the praetorship.Footnote ⁶³ By Livy’s day the consulship and the Republic went together, and it was clearly impossible for him to write an account in which Brutus, his colleague, and their successors in office were praetors.Footnote ⁶⁴

Anyone who wishes to maintain that the early consular fasti are reliable must necessarily suppose that the change from praetors to consuls, whenever that happened, was largely just a change in name, and certainly did not affect the number of magistrates appointed each year.Footnote ⁶⁵ Consequently, when those early praetors were anachronistically relabelled as consuls, nothing other than the name of the magistracy was affected. That is not impossible, of course, but changes in name usually do reflect more than just a change in name; rebranding is a modern phenomenon, and even rebranding normally involves considerably more than changing only the name. Moreover, any argument for such continuity also has to explain why one of the new magistracies said to have been introduced in 367-6 BC was the praetorship. The use of that particular name for what was believed to have been a new magistracy (whether or not it was is another matter) may tell against any sort of straightforward continuity between the earlier praetorship and the consulship.Footnote ⁶⁶ If there was any continuity involved, it may be easier to look for it between magistracies that had the same name.

It has been shown time and again that Roman thinking was often unhistorical, as the conditions of the present were frequently assumed to have existed in the past.Footnote ⁶⁷ That is almost certainly part of the explanation for why the consulship appears immediately after the expulsion of the kings, that is, at the earliest possible date for its existence. Something similar applies in the case of the Senate, which was likewise assumed to have existed from the earliest possible moment, which was Romulus’ day.Footnote ⁶⁸ Something similar applies to so many of Rome’s priesthoods too, although they usually go back to Numa rather than Romulus, because of the way that king was viewed.Footnote ⁶⁹ And something similar applies to the Servian tribes, the creation of even all thirty-five of which could be attributed to Servius Tullius, even though there was – and still is – plenty of evidence to the contrary.Footnote ⁷⁰ No one today would argue that Servius Tullius had established all thirty-five tribes, because there is evidence to the contrary; and yet, it is still quite widely maintained that the consulship was established immediately after the expulsion of the kings, even though there is evidence to the contrary.Footnote ⁷¹

To this anachronistic thinking can be added the importance of the consulship itself for a family’s standing. From the mid- to late fourth century BC onwards,Footnote ⁷² having an ancestor who had reached only the praetorship meant something else: success, but falling short of the consulship. It is, then, no surprise at all that the consulship appears as soon as it possibly can, that the nobility that generally based its standing on the holding of that office in particular by and large appears along with it, and that the memory of the early praetorship was almost entirely lost. Since the consulship could not be projected back any earlier than 509, it is also no surprise that the nobility barely appears before that date; appearing earlier just did not matter. If prestige and influence depended on the holding of office, why should anyone have been concerned about the regal period? It is quite clear that no one seriously was.

If the early consulship was indeed an anachronistic, and even tendentious, reconstruction, that would also accord nicely with, and may even help to explain, some of the confusion surrounding the mysterious consular tribunate that was allegedly introduced in the mid-fifth century and subsequently dispensed with in the mid-fourth. The confusion surrounding this magistracy is really quite considerable, although the usual approach is generally to seek to solve it,Footnote ⁷³ rather than simply recognise it for what it is and what it reveals. It may very well be that this is because, once the full extent of all the different problems is properly acknowledged, the possibility that the historical reality may be recoverable from the extant evidence starts to look extremely remote.

First of all, there is the date. The first consular tribunes supposedly held office in 444 BC, although, according to one version of events, they did so only briefly. They were apparently forced to step down and were replaced by consuls.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some sources, however, clearly had only consuls in this year.Footnote ⁷⁵ For the next five years, consuls allegedly held office, with the consular tribunate only reappearing in 438.Footnote ⁷⁶ It is possible that, in those sources that had only consuls in 444, the consular tribunes of 438 were the first, although, according to a tradition found in Eutropius, the first consular tribunes did not hold office until as late as 389.Footnote ⁷⁷

Second, there is the name of the magistracy, which is variously reported. This seems an unlikely situation, if records had been made at the time.Footnote ⁷⁸ Livy alone uses a very wide range of terms (tribuni militares consulari potestate, tribuni militum consulari potestate, tribuni consulari potestate, tribuni militum consulares, tribuni militum pro consulibus, tribuni militum pro consule, tribuni consulares, tribuni militares, tribuni militum, and tribuni); the shorter of these can probably be attributed to convenience, given that the fuller ones are cumbersome, but even still, the variation is striking and it does not inspire any confidence in Livy’s (and his sources’) knowledge of what was supposedly happening.Footnote ⁷⁹ Further variation in the name of the magistracy can be found in other sources too, and some of the variation is extremely significant, as it directly affects the powers that the tribunes supposedly had. Several of the titles Livy uses credit the tribunes with consular potestas; at least two later sources, however, replaced the word ‘potestas’ in the name of the magistracy with ‘imperium’. The Emperor Claudius called them tribuni militum consulari imperio, and Aulus Gellius, tribuni militares consulari imperio.Footnote ⁸⁰ This may be nothing more than an attempt to smooth away apparent inconsistencies. Livy does say that, according to some writers, the tribunes possessed imperium;Footnote ⁸¹ besides, if they led the army, which they were said to have done, then they surely must have had imperium, or so it could very easily be assumed. Equally, however, it has been argued by some scholars that they simply cannot have had imperium.Footnote ⁸² So not only was the title itself a matter of some confusion, so too was the very nature of the power supposedly wielded by the consular tribunes.

Next, there is the inconsistency in the numbers appointed. Although, in Livy at least, the election of six consular tribunes eventually (that is, after 405 BC) seems to become reasonably standard,Footnote ⁸³ there is considerable fluctuation in the later fifth century.Footnote ⁸⁴ Alongside this, there is also the intermittent appearance of consuls, most notably in the later fifth century.Footnote ⁸⁵ If three or four consular tribunes were usually appointed at this time, is it possible that the election of two men may simply represent further fluctuation in the numbers, instead of the appointment of consuls? It would be natural enough for ancient writers to assume that the appearance of two names meant that consuls must have been elected. Be that as it may, the variation in the numbers remains completely mysterious.Footnote ⁸⁶

Finally, and most significantly, there is the question of why the consular tribunate was created in the first place. The impression that ancient writers did not possess much information about this magistracy and consequently did not really know what they were writing about seems to be confirmed, not just by the unpersuasive nature of their explanations for the tribunate, but also by the fact that they ended up offering two very different explanations for it.

One of these was that the consular tribunate had been created to allow plebeians to have access to the state’s highest office,Footnote ⁸⁷ an explanation that is undermined by the fact that so very few plebeians appear to have held the office and by the lateness with which those few reached it. The other explanation is that it was created for military reasons, to ensure that there were more commanders available to lead Rome’s armies.Footnote ⁸⁸ That explanation, however, is undermined by the continued use of the dictatorship, the appointment of consular tribunes in peaceful years, the general lack of success of the consular tribunes in the field, and so on. All these problems have received considerable attention over the years, and it has long been recognised that neither of the ancient explanations for the magistracy’s creation is convincing. Nor, it must be said, has any convincing explanation been found since.Footnote ⁸⁹

Part of the problem is that ancient writers did not need just to devise an explanation for the creation of the consular tribunate. They also needed to come up with an explanation for why the consulship had been put to one side in favour of the consular tribunate.Footnote ⁹⁰ This inevitably meant that the circumstances of the consulship set the terms for their explanation of the consular tribunate. The most prominent differences between these two magistracies, as they appear in the sources, are really just two. First, there is the difference in the number of men appointed each year, and second, there is the belief that plebeians could hold the consular tribunate, whereas they were supposedly ineligible to stand for the consulship.Footnote ⁹¹ It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the explanations for the creation of the consular tribunate that were offered in antiquity were also just two in number, and that one of them was based on the number of the tribunes, and the other, on the idea that plebeians could hold this office. It looks suspiciously like these explanations are simply inferences made from the most obvious differences between the two magistracies.Footnote ⁹² If these explanations are unpersuasive (and they are), that is probably just because the initial assumption on which they are based, namely that the consular tribunate replaced the consulship, is entirely mistaken.

So ancient writers disagreed about when the consular tribunate had been created, and they quite clearly did not know why it had been created. They were uncertain about what it had been called, and about what powers were associated with it, and they do not seem to have known either why the numbers of tribunes appointed each year fluctuated or why consuls were sometimes still appointed (if they even were). So why should they have been better informed about the earlier period, from 509 down to the moment when the tribunate was supposedly introduced (whenever that was)? There is no reason whatsoever to believe that they were. The difference is that they thought that consuls had been elected in this period, and since consuls were elected in their own day, they knew about the consulship. It was easy for anyone in the third, second, or first century BC to say something plausible about consuls. On top of that, spurious claims had helped to provide the necessary material: lots of consuls (indeed, plures consulatus) and – to stay with Cicero’s complaint – false triumphs too, although the lists of early triumphators, unlike the lists of early consuls, have not won quite such extraordinary confidence in their historical value (after all, they begin with Romulus, which the consular fasti obviously do not; how differently would the consular fasti be perceived, if they did?). This is the case, even though the issues at stake are the same, and those issues are of course politics and power, although not, perhaps, of the late sixth or fifth century BC. The politics and power that may have been most relevant to the earliest consular fasti may have been those of the later fourth and third centuries BC, that is, in the period following the emergence of Rome’s office-holding nobility and before the advent of historiography, although the advent of historiography certainly did not bring about an end to the making of spurious claims.

As for the realities of Roman government in the first century and a half or so of the republican period, there is simply insufficient reliable evidence to allow for anything approaching a certain answer. There is, of course, plenty of scope – indeed perhaps too much scope – for hypothesis and conjecture, although it is important to realise first that much of the extant evidence is similar in nature; that is to say, it too represents an attempt (or an amalgamation of different attempts) to reconstruct the past, and it too is equally based on various hypotheses, a good many assumptions, as well as some highly questionable methods.