We will be able to look at Rome closely. It will be an extremely well-documented Leviathan because it is enamored with its own His-story. We will be able to ask if Latin tribes really did step out of the “darkness” of the Eurasian steppes into the “light” of Mediterranean Civilization because the productive forces were ripe and waiting for them, if the “Barbarians” stormed the gates of Civilization because they were eager to take on the refinements and enjoy the amenities of the Higher Stage. In the case of Rome, we will not have to speculate; the story is set down and preserved.

Only the beginnings are shadowy. The Romans say they desended from twins suckled by a wolf. They share this myth with Turks, so it may be that one group borrowed its origin myth from the other, or that a section of a once-single people changed its language but retained its origin myth. In any case, a totem animal is important in Rome’s past, and a wolf at that.

We first see the Romans camped on the outskirts of Etruria.

The Etruscans, we may remember, are Phenicia’s clients. They are the Greeks of Italy. The Etruscans are octopus-like. The Greeks call Etruscans Pirates, which means merchants whose competition the Greeks don’t want. The Etruscans have fleets of ships, like the Greeks and Phoenicians. They have cities with temples and shrines, like the Sumerians.

The Latins are to the Etruscans what the Mushki were to the Assyrians and the Scythians to the Greeks. The Latin language, in fact, is of the same family as that of the Mushki and Scytians, and it seems likely that these people were close kin in a not too distant past, and that women and Earth deitities were as important to them as they remain among other kindred people called Sarmatians.

Etruscan merchants, in order to placate and please their gods, exploit not only overseas victims, but also those in their hinterland, namely Samnians, Sabines and Latins.

The exploited tribes form a league to defend themselves from the exploiters.

The Etruscans try to pacify or exterminate the federated resisters. But like Phoenicians and Greeks, Etruscans are not overly strong on land. They are an octopus. Their strength is in the holds of their ships.

Thefederated tribes of Latins, Sabines and Samnians do not aspire to install themselves in the mercantile establishments of the Etruscans. On the contrary, they figght to eradicate Etruscan Civilization from the Italian Peninsula. They are animated by revulsion toward the “fleshpots,” not by admiration.

They war against Etruria for four generations.

The fighters’ goals and souls are maimed by the long war. Yet even then the former outsiders do not rush to become what the Etruscans were. They let the Etruscan commercial empire sink into the sea. They let the ships rot. Romans will still be shy of ships when they themselves set out to sea many generations later.

The Latins and their confederates are not lured by the “ripeness of the productive forces.” They are repelled by these forces and they federate to destroy them. But while federated for four generations something happens to them. They undergo what P. Clastres will call a “political revolution,” although the transformation is gradual. The generals become permanent, and so do the soldiers. The peasants who feed the army also become permanent, and their contributions come to be expected and finally enforced.

During four generations a community of equals is metamorphosed into a society of three classes, and the federated tribes become terribly similar to the destroyed Etruscans.

Roman narrators speak of two classes: plebs and nobles.

The plebs are under consraint. They are no longer free human beings. In some respect they haven’t changed much: they hold festivals to the goddess Ceres, Mother Earth, who nurses their seeds. This Ceres is the twin sister of Demeter and other Indo-Iranian goddesses.

The nobles have changed much. Their war god is an abstraction they call Optimus Maximus, and thiks god is surprisingly like a deified Etruscan merchant: on receiving a given quantity of offerings, he is expected to confer a given of number of advantages or military victories. The nobles have become suspiciously like Etruscans. They are not at all the men of the people their grandfathers were.

The magnitude of the challenge maimed the original community, and in this sense, despite their seeming victory, the Latins are defeated. They are maimed because most of them cannot cope with the new-fangled military machine and some of them can cope with their most basic requirements only be coercing and expropriating others.

At this point the Romans themselves look like Etruscans to some of their own confederates and to other outsiders, but not to themselves. The Romans do not realize that Samnites and Celts are turning against the very things Romans turned against earlier. Perhaps plebian soldiers do realize this, but they are dpendent on the grains the noblemen expropriate from peasnats, and the Roman military nobility is renowned for an unusual lack of imagination. The Romans turn their forces against the egalitarian Celts as if the Celts were Etruscans, and then they lead their armies against their former allies, destroying every Samnian village.

The Roman nobles, like the earlier Spartans, have become armors frozen to their spears, but unlike the Spartans, the Romans are going to try to spread their armors over the world’s entire surface. They begin by annexing and repressing their former Sabine allies.

Roman plebs seced and refuse to give further support to the arrogant nobles. The haughty nobles face this challenge by resroting to a Periclean device: they raise the plebian soldiers to the status of lesser nobles with plebs of their own. Now the interests of the former plebs coincide with those of the highest nobles. This is a device we will call cooptation or recuperation.

The Romans then set out to swallow every other tribe, federation and city on the Italian Peninsula. The Romans are more singlemindedly militaristic than the Assyrians ever were. Rome not only has a powerful army; Rome is a powerful army, and it is nothing else.