[Sidenote: The abolition of the monarchy at Rome may have been a revolution whereby the patricians wrested the shadow of sovereignty from the plebeians and transferred it to themselves, who already wielded the substance.] If that was so, it confirms the view that the old Roman kingship was essentially a religious office; for the conquerors would be much more ready to leave an office of this sort in the hands of the conquered than a kingship of the type with which we are familiar. “Let these puppets,” they might think, “render to the gods their dues, while we rule the people in peace and lead them in war.” Of such priestly kings Numa was the type. But not all of his successors were willing to model themselves on his saintly figure and, rejecting the pomps and vanities of earth, to devote themselves to communion with heaven. Some were men of strong will and warlike temper, who could not brook the dull routine of the cloister. They longed to exchange the stillness and gloom of the temple or the sacred grove for the sunshine, the dust, and the tumult of the battlefield. Such men broke bounds, and when they threatened to get completely out of hand and turn the tables on the patricians, it was time that they should go. This, we may conjecture, was the real meaning of the abolition of the kingship at Rome. It put an end to the solemn pretence that the state was still ruled by the ancient owners of the soil: it took the shadow of power from them and gave it to those who had long possessed the substance. The ghost of the monarchy had begun to walk and grow troublesome: the revolution laid it for centuries.
[Sidenote: At first the intention seems to have been to leave the annual kingship or consulship to the old royal family.] But though the effect of the revolution was to substitute the real rule of the patricians for the nominal rule of the plebeians, the break with the past was at the outset less complete than it seems. For the first two consuls were both men of the royal blood. One of them, L. Junius Brutus, was sister’s son of the expelled King Tarquin the Proud.[944] As such he would have been the heir to the throne under a strict system of mother-kin. The other consul, L. Tarquinius Collatinus, was a son of the late king’s cousin Egerius.[945] These facts suggest that the first intention of the revolutionaries was neither to abolish the kingship nor to wrest it from the royal family, but, merely retaining the hereditary monarchy, to restrict its powers. To achieve this object they limited the tenure of office to a year and doubled the number of the kings, who might thus be expected to check and balance each other. But it is not impossible that both restrictions were merely the revival of old rules which the growing power of the kings had contrived for a time to set aside in practice. The legends of Romulus and Remus, and afterwards of Romulus and Tatius, may be real reminiscences of a double kingship like that of Sparta;[946] and in the yearly ceremony of the _Regifugium_ or Flight of the King we seem to detect a trace of an annual, not a life-long, tenure of office.[947] The same thing may perhaps be true of the parallel change which took place at Athens when the people deprived the Medontids of their regal powers and reduced them from kings to responsible magistrates, who held office at first for life, but afterwards only for periods of ten years.[948] Here, too, the limitation of the tenure of the kingship may have been merely the reinforcement of an old custom which had fallen into abeyance. At Rome, however, the attempt to maintain the hereditary principle, if it was made at all, was almost immediately abandoned, and the patricians openly transferred to themselves the double kingship, which thenceforth was purely elective, and was afterwards known as the consulship.[949]