SPQR, 'the Senate and People of Rome', still appears on Rome's coat of arms and city documents.

509 BC

Italians jokingly expand it as Sono Pazzi Questi Romani: 'These Romans are crazy.'

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The event

• Founding of the Roman Republicc. 509 BC · Rome. According to tradition, the Romans expelled their last king, Tarquin the Proud, and created a republic led by two annually elected consuls. The Republic lasted nearly five centuries and inspired modern political thought.

6th century BC

More amazing facts

• 509 BC · 508 BC Rome expelled its last king in 509 BC and Athens got democracy from Cleisthenes in 508: republic and democracy were born almost side by side.
• 500 BC · 1847 The word 'gorilla' was coined not by zoologists but by Carthaginian sailors 2,500 years ago. Hanno described hairy wild people on an African island whom his interpreters called 'gorillai'. In 1847 the name went to the ape.
• 500 BC · 767 · 1869 A canal linked the Nile to the Red Sea some 2,400 years before Suez.
• 500 BC Legend says a Pythagorean was drowned for discovering irrational numbers.
• 500 BC The Amazons may not be pure myth.
• 500 BC The tattoos of the 'Ukok Princess' are some 2,400 years old. The mummy of a 5th-century BC Pazyryk woman was found in 1993 in an ice-filled Altai kurgan, with deer still visible on her shoulder and wrist.

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