by Mary Beard
It was a desperate, and no doubt unconvincing, attempt to escape the bleak message of the story: that fratricide was hard-wired into Roman politics and that the dreadful bouts of civil conflict that repeatedly blighted Rome’s history from the sixth century BCE on (the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE being only one example) were somehow predestined. For what city, founded on the murder of brother by brother, could ever escape the murder of citizen by citizen? The poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (‘Horace’) was just one writer of many who answered that question in the obvious way. Writing around 30 BCE, in the aftermath of the decade of fighting that followed Caesar’s death, he lamented: ‘Bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the crime of a brother’s murder, ever since the blood of blameless Remus was spilt onto the ground to be a curse on his descendants.’ Civil war, we might say, was in the Roman genes.
To be sure, Romulus could be, and often was, paraded as a heroic founding father. His unease about the fate of Remus did not prevent Cicero from trying to take over Romulus’ mantle in his clash with Catiline. And, despite the shadow of the murder, images of the suckling twins were found all over the ancient Roman world: from the capital itself – where there was once a statue group of them in the Forum and another on the Capitoline Hill – to the far-flung parts of the empire. In fact, when the people of the Greek island of Chios wanted to demonstrate their allegiance to Rome in the second century BCE, one of the things they decided to do was to erect a monument depicting, as they put it, ‘the birth of Romulus, the founder of Rome, and his brother Remus’. The monument does not survive. But we know about it because the Chians recorded their decision on a marble plaque, which does. All the same, there remained a definite moral, and political, edginess to the character of Romulus.
Edgy in a different way was the idea of the asylum, and the welcome, that Romulus gave to all comers – foreigners, criminals and runaways – in finding citizens for his new town. There were positive aspects to this. In particular, it reflected Roman political culture’s extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders, which set it apart from every other ancient Western society that we know. No ancient Greek city was remotely as incorporating as this; Athens in particular rigidly restricted access to citizenship. This is not a tribute to any ‘liberal’ temperament of the Romans in the modern sense of the word. They conquered vast swathes of territory in Europe and beyond, sometimes with terrible brutality; and they were often xenophobic and dismissive of people they called ‘barbarians’. Yet, in a process unique in any pre-industrial empire, the inhabitants of those conquered territories, ‘provinces’ as Romans called them, were gradually given full Roman citizenship, and the legal rights and protections that went with it. That culminated in 212 CE (where my SPQR ends), when the emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the empire a Roman citizen.
9. Romulus and Remus reached the furthest corners of the Roman Empire. This mosaic of the fourth century CE was found at Aldborough in the north of England. The wolf is an engagingly jolly creature. The twins, apparently floating perilously in mid air, seem as much an afterthought as the Renaissance additions in the Capitoline group.
Even before then, the elite of the provinces had entered the political hierarchy of the capital, in large numbers. The Roman senate gradually became what we might now describe as a decidedly multicultural body, and the full list of Roman emperors contains many whose origins lay outside Italy: Caracalla’s father, Septimius Severus, was the first emperor from Roman territory in Africa; Trajan and Hadrian, who reigned half a century earlier, had come from the Roman province of Spain. When in 48 CE the emperor Claudius – whose avuncular image owes more to Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius than to real life – was arguing to a slightly reluctant senate that citizens from Gaul should be allowed to become senators, he spent some time reminding the meeting that Rome had been open to foreigners from the beginning. The text of his speech, including some of the heckling that apparently even an emperor had to endure, was inscribed on bronze and put on display in the province, in what is now the city of Lyon, where it still survives. Claudius, it seems, did not get the chance that Cicero had to make adjustments for publication.
There was a similar process with slavery. Roman slavery was in some respects as brutal as Roman methods of military conquest. But for many Roman slaves, particularly those working in urban domestic contexts rather than toiling in the fields or mines, it was not necessarily a life sentence. They were regularly given their freedom, or they bought it with cash they had managed to save up; and if their owner was a Roman citizen, then they also gained full Roman citizenship, with almost no disadvantages as against those who were freeborn. The contrast with classical Athens is again striking: there, very few slaves were freed, and those who were certainly did not gain Athenian citizenship in the process, but went into a form of stateless limbo. This practice of emancipation – or manumission, to follow the Latin term – was such a distinctive feature of Roman culture that outsiders at the time remarked upon it and saw it as a powerful factor in Rome’s success. As one king of Macedon observed in the third century BCE, it was in this way that ‘the Romans have enlarged their country’. The scale was so great that some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.
The story of Romulus’ asylum clearly points to this openness, suggesting that the diverse make-up of Rome was a characteristic that went back to its origins. There were insiders who echoed the view of the king of Macedon that Romulus’ policy of inclusiveness was an important part of the city’s success; and for them the asylum was something to be proud of. But there were also dissenting voices that stressed a far less flattering side to the story. It was not only some of Rome’s enemies who saw the irony of an empire that traced its descent back to the criminals and riff-raff of Italy. Some Romans did too. In the late first or early second century CE, the satiric poet ‘Juvenal’ – Decimus Junius Juvenalis – who loved to pour scorn on Roman pretensions, lambasted the snobbery that was another side of life at Rome, and he ridiculed those aristocrats who boasted of a family tree going back centuries. He ends one of his poems with a sideswipe at Rome’s origins. What are all these pretensions based on, anyway? Rome was from its very beginning a city made up of slaves and runaways (‘Whoever your earliest ancestor was, he was either a shepherd or something I’d rather not mention’). Cicero may have been making a similar point when he joked in a letter to his friend Atticus about the ‘the crap’ or ‘the dregs’ of Romulus. He was poking fun at one of his contemporaries, who, he said, addressed the senate as if he were living ‘in the Republic of Plato’, referring to the philosopher’s ideal state – ‘when in fact he is in the faex (crap) of Romulus.’
In short, Romans could always see themselves following in Romulus’ footsteps, for better or worse. When Cicero gestured to Romulus in his speech against Catiline, it was more than a self-aggrandising appeal to Rome’s founding father (though it was certainly that in part). It was also an appeal to a story that prompted all kinds of discussion and debate among his contemporaries about who the Romans really were, what Rome stood for and where its divisions lay.
History and myth
The footsteps of Romulus were imprinted on the Roman landscape. In Cicero’s day, you could do more than visit Romulus’ Temple of Jupiter Stator: you could enter the cave where the wolf was supposed to have cared for the baby twins, and you could see the tree, replanted in the Forum, at which the boys were said to have washed up from the river. You could even admire Romulus’ own house, a small wood-and-thatch hut where the founder was supposed to have lived, on the Palatine Hill: a visible slice of primitive Rome in what had become a sprawling metropolis. This was, of course, a fabrication, as one visitor at the end of the first century BCE half hinted: ‘they add nothing to it to make it more revered,’ he explained, ‘but if any part of it is damaged, by bad weather or old age, they make it good and r
estore it as far as possible to what it was before’. No certain archaeological traces of the hut have been found, unsurprisingly, given its flimsy construction. But it survived in some form, as a memorial to the city’s origins, until at least the fourth century CE, when it was mentioned in a list of notable landmarks in Rome.
These physical ‘remains’ – temple, fig tree and carefully patched-up hut – were part and parcel of Romulus’ status as an historical character. As we have seen, Roman writers were not gullible dupes, and they queried many details of the traditional stories even while retelling them (the role of the wolf, the divine ancestry and so forth). But they expressed no doubt that Romulus had once existed, that he had made crucial decisions that governed the future development of Rome, such as the selection of the city’s site, and that he had more or less single-handedly invented some of its defining institutions. The senate itself, according to some accounts, was the creation of Romulus, as was the ceremony of ‘triumph’, the Roman victory parade that regularly followed the city’s biggest (and bloodiest) successes in war. When, at the end of the first century BCE, a monumental list of all the Roman generals who had ever celebrated a triumph was inscribed on a series of marble panels in the Forum, Romulus headed the roster. ‘Romulus, the king, son of Mars,’ ran that first entry, ‘year one, on 1 March, for a victory over the people of Caenina’, commemorating his speedy defeat of one nearby Latin town whose young women had been stolen – and not admitting a glimmer of public scepticism about his divine parenthood.
Roman scholars worked hard to define Romulus’ achievements and to reach an accurate chronology of the earliest phases of Rome. One of the liveliest controversies of Cicero’s day was the question of when exactly the city was founded. Precisely how old was Rome? Learned minds ingeniously counted back in time from the Roman dates they did know to earlier dates they did not and tried to synchronise events in Rome with the chronology of Greek history. In particular they tried to match up their history with the regular four-year cycles of the Olympic Games, which apparently offered a fixed and authentic time frame – although, as is now recognised, this was itself partly the product of earlier ingenious speculation. It was a tricky and highly specialised debate. But gradually the different views coalesced around the middle of what we call the eighth century BCE, as scholarly opinion reached the conclusion that Greek and Roman history ‘began’ at roughly the same time. What became the canonical date, and one still quoted in many modern textbooks, partly goes back to a scholarly treatise, the Book of Chronology, by none other than Cicero’s friend and correspondent Atticus. It does not survive, but it is supposed to have pinpointed Romulus’ foundation of the city to the third year of the sixth cycle of Olympic Games; that is to say, 753 BCE. Other calculations narrowed this down further, to 21 April, the date on which modern Romans still, to this day, celebrate the birthday of their city, with some rather tacky parades and mock gladiatorial spectacles.
There is often a fuzzy boundary between myth and history (think of King Arthur or Pocahontas), and, as we shall see, Rome is one of those cultures where that boundary is particularly blurred. But despite all the historical acumen that Romans brought to bear on this story, there is every reason for us to see it, in our terms, as more or less pure myth. For a start, there was almost certainly no such thing as a founding moment of the city of Rome. Very few towns or cities are founded at a stroke, by a single individual. They are usually the product of gradual changes in population, in patterns of settlement, social organisation and sense of identity. Most ‘foundations’ are retrospective constructions, projecting back into the distant past a microcosm, or imagined primitive version, of the later city. The name ‘Romulus’ is itself a give-away. Although Romans usually assumed that he had lent his name to his newly established city, we are now fairly confident that the opposite was the case: ‘Romulus’ was an imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’. ‘Romulus’ was merely the archetypal ‘Mr Rome’.
Besides, the writers and scholars of the first century BCE who have bequeathed to us their version of Rome’s origins had not much more direct evidence of the earliest phases of Rome’s history than modern writers have, and in some ways perhaps less. There were no surviving documents or archives. The few early inscriptions on stone, valuable as they are, were not as early as Roman scholars often imagined, and, as we shall discover at the end of this chapter, they sometimes hopelessly misunderstood early Latin. True, they had access to a few earlier historical accounts that no longer survive. But the earliest of these were composed in about 200 BCE, and there was still a great chasm between that date and the city’s origins, which could be bridged only with the help of a very mixed bag of stories, songs, popular dramatic performances and the shifting and sometimes self-contradictory amalgam that makes up oral tradition – constantly adjusted in the telling and retelling to changing circumstances and audiences. There are a few fleeting glimpses of the Romulus story back to the fourth century BCE, but then, unless we bring the bronze wolf back into the picture, the trail stops.
10. Found in Etruscan territory this engraved mirror (the reflecting face was on the other side) appears to show some version of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the wolf. If so, dating to the fourth century BCE, it would be one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the story. But some, perhaps over-sceptical, modern scholars have preferred to see here a scene from Etruscan myth, or a pair of infinitely more shadowy and mysterious Roman deities, the twin ‘Lares Praestites’.
Of course, to put it another way, it is precisely because the story of Romulus is mythic rather than historical, in the narrow sense, that it encapsulates so sharply some of the central cultural questions of ancient Rome and is so important for understanding Roman history, in its wider definition. The Romans had not, as they assumed, simply inherited the priorities and concerns of their founder. Quite the reverse: over centuries of retelling and then rewriting the story, they themselves had constructed and reconstructed the founding figure of Romulus as a powerful symbol of their preferences, debates, ideologies and anxieties. It was not, in other words, to go back to Horace, that civil war was the curse and destiny of Rome from its birth; Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder.
There was always the possibility too of adjusting or reconfiguring the narrative, even when it had reached a relatively fixed literary form. We have already spotted, for example, how Cicero chose to draw a veil over the murder of Remus, and Egnatius to deny it entirely. But Livy’s account of the death of Romulus gives a vivid glimpse of how the story of Rome’s origins could be made to resonate directly with recent events. The king, he explains, had ruled for thirty years when suddenly in a violent storm he was covered by a cloud and disappeared. The sorrowing Romans soon concluded that he had been snatched from them to become a god – crossing the boundary between human and divine in a way that Rome’s polytheistic religious system sometimes allowed (even if it seems faintly silly to us). But some people at the time, Livy concedes, told a different story: that the king had been assassinated, hacked to death by the senators. Livy did not entirely invent either of these parts of his plot: Cicero, for example, had earlier reported Romulus’ apotheosis, albeit with a degree of scepticism; and an overambitious politician in the 60s BCE was once threatened with ‘the fate of Romulus’, and that, presumably, did not mean becoming a god. But writing just a few decades after the murder of Julius Caesar, who was both hacked to death by senators and then given the status of a god (ending up with his own temple in the Forum), Livy offers a particularly loaded and emphatic account. To miss the echoes of Caesar here would be to miss the point.
Aeneas and more
The story of Romulus and Remus is by turns intriguing, puzzling and hugely revealing of big Roman concerns, at least among the elite. And, to judge from the designs on coins or the themes of popular art, knowledge of the stories was widespread – even if hungry peasants did not spend much time worrying about
the niceties of the Rape of the Sabines. But the extra complication, to be added to this already complex picture of the legend of Rome’s origins, is that the story of Romulus and Remus was not the city’s only foundation story. There were several others that existed side by side. These included minor variants on standard themes, as well as alternatives that seem to us frankly idiosyncratic. One Greek idea, for example, brought the renowned Odysseus and echoes of Homer’s Odyssey into the story by suggesting that Rome’s real founding father was a man called Romus, the result of Odysseus’ affair with the witch Circe, whose magical island was sometimes imagined to lie just off the coast of Italy. This was a neat, although implausible, bit of cultural imperialism that gave Rome a Greek parentage.
The other legend that was equally firmly embedded in Roman history and literature is the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escaped from the city of Troy after the mythical war between Greeks and Trojans that is the backdrop of Homer’s Iliad. After leading his son by the hand and carrying his elderly father from the burning ruins, he eventually made his way to Italy, where his destiny was to refound his native city on Italian soil. He brought with him the traditions of his homeland and even some precious talismans rescued from the destruction.
There are as many puzzles, problems and ambiguities in this story as in the tale of Romulus, and unresolved questions about where, when and why it originated. These are made even more complicated, as well as enormously enriched, thanks to the Aeneid, Virgil’s great twelve-book poem on the theme, written during the rule of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, and one of the most widely read works of literature ever. This has become the story of Aeneas. And it has bequeathed to the Western world some of its most powerful literary and artistic highlights, including the tragic love story of Aeneas and Dido, the queen of Carthage, where Aeneas washes ashore on his long journey from Troy (on the coast of modern Turkey) to Italy. When Aeneas resolves to follow his destiny and leave for Italy, abandoning Dido, she commits suicide by throwing herself on a burning pyre. ‘Remember me, remember me’, runs her haunting aria in Henry Purcell’s seventeenth-century operatic version of the theme. The problem is that it is often hard to know which elements of the story we owe to Virgil (including, almost certainly, most of the encounter with Dido) and which are part of a more traditional tale.