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This thesis will argue that the development of early Rome can be described using a sequence of large, socio-political dichotomies based on Rome's activity in the sphere of warfare. The use of dichotomies in early Roman history is not new,and indeed the confrontation between two opposing groups, typically the patricians and plebeians, can be found at the heart of even the earliest extant histories of the period. The problem which plagued these early models, and indeed many subsequent models based on their premise, is that they assumed that the same prescriptive set of social and political divisions which existed in the late Republic and early Empire also existed in early Rome. This study will discard this highly anachronistic assumption and redefine the dichotomies present in early Rome using active characteristics (i.e. behavior), rather than the prescriptive labels assigned by late republican authors. In particular, this study will attempt to view early Rome through the lens of warfare, where the formation of distinct 'in-group' and 'out-group' biases is most evident, in an effort to redraw the divisions of early Roman society. The end result of this redefining process will be an entirely different, albeit related set of socio-political groupings; for example 'mobile' vs. 'sedentary' and 'Roman' vs. 'Latin', whose interaction is visible behind much of Rome's early development.

Most studies of Roman architecture cover the third century BCE to the fourth century CE, a period of luxurious building projects like the Colosseum and Pantheon that remain relatively well documented in the archaeological and literary record. Yet Rome did not spring fully formed from the ground in the third century, its architecture relying entirely on precursors and precedents in buildings from far away times and places. In this study I fit remains of architecture from early Rome (ca. 650 to 450 BCE) into the cultural framework of the contemporaneous Mediterranean and try to assess how the changing cityscape effected both archaic Romans and later Roman architecture and topography. Because many studies of archaic Rome have attempted to fit archaeological remains with the literary record, and because this has created much controversy, I put the literary record to one side and focus on material remains in an attempt to see what they can reveal on their own.