I will admit freely that I am not a historian in any way. History is more of a hobby, an interest, a curiosity to me. When I was performing research on my book, I decided I wanted to spotlight the time in history when democracy began. I chose around 500 BC because Athens had just come under a senatorial governing structure in 510 BC. They were the first in Greece to do so. As I was investigating a bit about other cultures of the period, I discovered that Rome had just become a Republic in 509 BC. Prior to that time, they had a ruling royal class like most cultures at the start. I had always thought Rome started off as a Republic and was intrigued to find out that both Rome and Athens, Greece started governing bodies around the same time.
Not much is known about Rome prior to the days of the Republic. The earlier years of Greece are far more widely circulated because of people like Homer, who wrote the Odyssey and the Iliad, as well as Herodotus, who wrote the Histories that detailed early Persia on into the Greco-Persian wars; just to name a few examples. Do you know of any little known historical tidbits that you have found interesting?