Rome was not built in a day, but it was built, consciously and with intentionality.
Roman civilization as we understand it is the product of millions of people: men and
women, young and old, weak and powerful – working over millennia to make their culture something
spectacular.
We can see that they built and accomplished amazing things across three continents, but
what’s less obvious is what they built on.
Not literally, mind you, that’s usually brick or stone; but what cultural foundation
sustained so huge an idea as “Rome”?
That’s the kind of question that takes us to the very beginnings of their history, as
we’d try to figure out what inciting incident led to all of this.
However, any records from the earliest Roman chronicles are agonizingly absent, as the
city was sacked and burned in 390 by a tribe of Gauls, so we are instead left at the mercy
of Roman Legend: completely ahistorical, and hella propaganda.
But despite this rather considerable setback in understanding the earliest roots of Roman
history, we can work with this – because later Romans also didn’t know where exactly
they came from, and were voraciously curious to fix that.
So, lacking a verifiable answer, they instead concocted one, consciously and intentionally
compiling a narrative out of half-remembered myths and historical foreshadowing of the
later Rome they knew.
This web of folktales, retold and refined by centuries of storytellers until their codification
around the turn of the millennium, is our best source of cultural intent and ambition
for the Rome that was to be.
So, to untangle this Roman Creation Myth and better understand the underlying Roots of
Rome, Let’s do some History!
If we take the Romans at their word, their
origins goeth thusly: 1100-something-or-other BC, Troy’s on fire and one lucky prince
Aeneas escaped.
He made his way to Italy, with interruptions, and won kingship of the plain of Latium, but
it’s not Rome Time quite yet.
His descendants ruled in Alba Longa a short ways south of the Tiber river for four centuries,
until the Alban king Numitor got deposed by his brother Amulius, who made Numitor’s
daughter Rhea Silvia a vestal virgin to ensure the bloodline ends with her.
This was always a failing strategy when Olympians were afoot, and sure enough the war god Mars
slid in to give her twin sons Romulus and Remus.
Amulius demanded they be killed river-style, but they were saved at the banks of the Tiber
by a she-wolf, who then nursed them through early childhood before they were taken in
by shepherds – bringing the twins’ parent count to one dad, two moms, one god, and a
wolf.
They grew up and deposed that nasty awful Amulius, and later set about founding a new
settlement along the Tiber.
A brotherly quarrel escalated as they were plotting out the course of their new walls,
and Romulus killed Remus in the first but distinctly not last Roman-on-Roman violence.
That, kids, is why it’s called Rome and not Reme.
With his kingship secure and the city founded in the year 753, Romulus got to populating
his new town, so he welcomed bandits, exiles, and other such ruffians, and then captured
the Sabine women en-masse to ensure Rome would have heirs.
Unlike Rhea Silvia , we can’t all be slammed by the god of war, but the Romans sure learned
from his example.
Romulus also implemented several core features of Roman society: the tribes, Patrician and
Plebeian classes, marriage laws, the patron-client system, even the Senate arose as if springing
fully-formed from the head of Romulus.
After him, six more kings ruled over Rome, the last three of whom were from the Etruscan
Tarquinii clan, and the very last was Tarquinius Superbus, AKA Tarky-Tark Super-Bus, who was
a total knob.
His incessant assholery enraged the Romans into throwing their very first coup-d’état,
very exciting, ousting Tarquin and establishing Rome as a republic in 509 BC.
From there, the Italian peninsula was destined to one day fall under the stunning force of
Rome’s military and kickass civic institutions, and the whole Mediterranean would undoubtably
be next.
This origin story is dignified, tidy, a little
self-indulgent, but above all else, convenient.
So let’s go through this and, you know, rip it apart.
First off, Rome’s founding date of 753 is a guess, posited in the first century BC to
roughly line up with the earliest Greek Olympics.
As far as the story itself goes, the Italy-bound journey of Aeneas the perfect Roman OC Do
Not Steal is suspiciously Odyssean enough as is, but it’s first attested by Greek
sources during the Republic.
Aeneas is also way back in the Bronze Age compared to 753; that hefty 4-century gap
between Aeneas and Romulus went largely unexplained until Dionysius of Halicarnassus seemingly
invented the entire concept of the Alban Kings in his “Roman Antiquities” from the first
century BC.
The Kings of Alba longa have very little characterization, and some can be mapped onto nearby Latium
place-names, so it’s not a stretch to think Dionysius decided that hill over there is
totally derived from this ancient king you guys I promise, don’t google it, I promise,
please, please don’t investigate it.
It’s only when we run into the twins’ backstory that the Alban kings Numitor and
Amulius actually do anything.
The boys’ story is overtly mythical, and even Livy questions Mars and the wolf, but
what might be less believable than divine parentage is the idea that 7 kings ruled Rome
for a combined 244 years, which requires an unbroken string of seven 35-year reigns on
average.
That is a royal runtime matched by only two emperors before the fall of Western Rome.
And yes, that of all things is where I draw the realism line; because each segment of
this story feels abundantly retrofitted to clean up a messy set of chronologies between
key events: the well-known establishment of the republic in 509, the vaguely-understood
foundation of the city in the mid 700s-ish, and the heavily mythologized Trojan origins
of Aeneas back in the Bronze Age.
Everything else is just narrative-scaffolding.
Republican-era Romans wondered aloud how exactly
their history could fit two founders in the same folk-tradition, and it took until the
Augustan period to square all that by having Aeneas found the Roman dynasty and Romulus
build the city itself.
Other classical states didn’t struggle this much with contradicting narratives – Athens
certainly didn’t mind having multiple founder heroes, and one of them was Theseus, eugh
– but in the first century BC, Rome took an organic storytelling tradition and forced
all those disparate threads to play by History’s rules: one continuous narrative.
It didn’t need to be what we would call “Factual”, it just needed to fit.
Of course the Alban kings were retconned into existence to tidy up the timeline, Aeneas
and Romulus are the only two who narratively matter.
Rome’s legendary origins only needed to make sense to The Romans, and in the absence
of records from before Rome’s first sack in 390 BC, that’s the closest thing to a
primary source we have.
As pure history, it’s bound to leave us wanting anything more substantive – but
as an artifact of their culture, this origin tells us everything the Romans needed to know
about themselves and wanted anyone else to know: Their heroes are divine descendants
of Venus and Mars, their lineage runs back as far as anywhere in Greece, they come from
disparate places and backgrounds, civil war is in their blood, they 100% have a wolf kink,
and they kill tyrants.
That’s Rome – everything else is Livy’s filler arcs.
Now, for a supposedly ancient story, two of
Romulus’ deeds point decidedly forwards in Roman history, and reveal what later Romans
thought must have been intrinsic to their identity.
His first act as king was to welcome Italy’s dispossessed and outlaws as Rome’s citizens,
which may seem rather unheroic on the face of it, but this reflects Rome’s most peculiar
trait: its openness to cultures and people.
Rome, of course, thought it was the best civilization ever, and made that known loudly and frequently,
but Rome took good ideas wherever they found them, and was willing to let any barbarian
become Roman so long as they took on Rome’s customs and learned Latin.
Romans always started as outsiders, be they exiles from across Italy or refugees from
far off Troy, supposedly.
Rome was also remarkably comfortable with granting citizenship to freed slaves, a quality
the Greeks absolutely did not share.
This seemingly undignified story actually enshrines the idea that regardless of social
class or cultural boundaries, it was possible to become a Roman – and that idea is the
stuff that pan-Mediterranean civilizations are made of.
But alongside Rome’s great aspirations, their deepest anxiety is also present in the
Romulus story: as their ruinously blood-soaked hobby of civil wars finds its start in that
fratricidal founder.
Rather than being intended as justification to go out murdering (as if they needed that),
this looks like the closest thing to Rome’s Original Sin, the foundational crime they
will be doomed to repeat over and over and over and over and over for more than two thousand
years.
These stories take their most permanent forms
seven centuries after the supposed founding of the city, in the pages of Livy’s History
of Rome and Virgil’s Aeneid – and as we wait for potential discoveries in archaeology
to illuminate the earliest settlements amid those hills beside the Tiber, that’s all
we’ve got to go on.
The image sharpens into historical focus as we depose king Tarquin, start the republic,
and embark on the slow process of building Rome’s civic institutions and establishing
a domain across central Italy, but the further we progress along the timeline, the more meaningful
and relevant their origin story becomes.
The roots of Rome ultimately tell us nothing about the earliest Romans – if they even
called themselves Romans, even came from Troy, even had kings, even did any of the things
their myths take for granted – but this narrative reveals so much about the civilization
they would become and the kind of people the Romans would one day be: Crafty Bastards.
As the next two thousand years will amply demonstrate, they were crafty bastards.
Thank you for watching!
Hopefully I can make it in and out of here before Red catches me snooping into some of
her mythological territory, so I’ll leave by saying a tremendous thank-you to all of
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