We shall find many more of these political conflicts, disputed interpretations and sometimes uncomfortable echoes of our own times in the chapters that follow. But it is now the moment to turn back from the relatively firm ground of the first century BCE to Rome’s deepest history. How did Cicero and his contemporaries reconstruct the early years of their city? Why were their origins important to them? What does it mean to ask ‘Where did Rome begin?’ How much can we, or could they, really know of earliest Rome?
CHAPTER TWO
·
IN THE BEGINNING
Cicero and Romulus
ACCORDING TO ONE Roman tradition, the Temple of Jupiter where Cicero harangued Catiline on 8 November 63 BCE had been established seven centuries earlier by Romulus, Rome’s founding father. Romulus and the new citizens of his tiny community were fighting their neighbours, a people known as the Sabines, on the site that later became the Forum, the political centre of Cicero’s Rome. Things were going badly for the Romans, and they had been driven to retreat. As a last attempt to snatch victory, Romulus prayed to the god Jupiter – not just to Jupiter, in fact, but to Jupiter Stator, ‘Jupiter who holds men firm’. He would build a temple in thanks, Romulus promised the god, if only the Romans would resist the temptation to run for it, and stand their ground against the enemy. They did, and the Temple of Jupiter Stator was erected on that very spot, the first in a long series of shrines and temples in the city built to commemorate divine help in securing military victory for Rome.
That at least was the story told by Livy and several other Roman writers. Archaeologists have never managed firmly to identify any remains of this temple, which must in any case have been much rebuilt by Cicero’s time, especially if its origins really did go back to the beginning of Rome. But there can be no doubt that, when he chose to summon the senate to meet there, Cicero knew exactly what he was doing. He had the precedent of Romulus in mind and was using the location to make a point. He wanted to keep the Romans steadfast (to ‘hold them firm’) in the face of their new enemy, Catiline. In fact, he said almost exactly that at the end of his speech, when – no doubt gesturing to the statue of the god – he appealed to Jupiter Stator and reminded his audience of the foundation of the temple:
You, Jupiter, who were established by Romulus in the same year as the city itself, the god who, we rightly say, holds firm the city and the empire – you will keep this man and his gang away from your temple and the temples of the other gods, from the houses of the city and its walls, from the lives and fortunes of all the citizens of Rome …
The implication that Cicero was casting himself as a new Romulus was not lost on the Romans of his day, and the connection could rebound: some people used it as another excuse to sneer at his small-town origins by calling him ‘the Romulus of Arpinum’.
This was a classic Roman appeal to the founding fathers, to the stirring tales of early Rome and to the moment when the city came into being. Even now, the image of a wolf suckling the baby Romulus and his twin brother Remus signals the origins of Rome. The famous bronze statue of the scene is one of the most copied and instantly recognisable works of Roman art, illustrated on thousands of souvenir postcards, tea towels, ashtrays and fridge magnets, and plastered all over the modern city as the emblem of Roma football club.
Because this image is so familiar, it is easy to take the story of Romulus and Remus – or Remus and Romulus, to give them their usual Roman order – rather too much for granted and to forget that it is one of the oddest ‘historical legends’ of any city’s foundation at any period, anywhere in the world. And myth or legend it certainly is, even though Romans assumed that it was, in broad terms, history. The wolf’s nurturing of the twins is such a strange episode in a very peculiar tale that even ancient writers sometimes showed a healthy scepticism about the appearance of a conveniently lactating animal to suckle the pair of abandoned babies, right on cue. The rest of the narrative is an extraordinary mixture of puzzling details: not only the unusual idea of having two founders (Romulus and Remus) but also a series of decidedly unheroic elements, from murder, through rape and abduction, to the bulk of Rome’s first citizens being criminals and runaways.
7. Whatever the exact date of the wolf herself, the baby twins are certainly later additions, made in the fifteenth century explicitly to capture the founding myth. Copies are found all over the world, partly thanks to Benito Mussolini, who distributed them far and wide as a symbol of Romanità.
These unsavoury aspects have so struck some modern historians that they have suggested that the whole story must have been concocted as a form of anti-propaganda by Rome’s enemies and victims, threatened by aggressive Roman expansion. That is an over-ingenious, not to say desperate, attempt to explain the oddities of the tale, and it misses the most important point. Wherever and whenever it originated, Roman writers never stopped telling, retelling and intensely debating the story of Romulus and Remus. There was more at stake in this than just the question of how the city first took shape. As they crammed into Romulus’ old temple to listen to the new ‘Romulus of Arpinum’, those senators would have been well aware that the foundation story raised even bigger questions, of what it was to be Roman, of what special characteristics defined the Roman people – and, no less pressing, of what flaws and failings they had inherited from their ancestors.
To understand the ancient Romans, it is necessary to understand where they believed they came from and to think through the significance of the story of Romulus and Remus and of the main themes, subtleties and ambiguities in other foundation stories. For the twins were not the only candidates for being the first Romans. Throughout most of Roman history, the figure of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who fled to Italy to establish Rome as the new Troy, bulked large too. And no less important is to try to see what might lie behind these stories. ‘Where did Rome begin?’ is a question that has proved almost as seductive, and teasing, for modern scholars as for their ancient predecessors. Archaeology offers a sketch of earliest Rome very different from that of the Roman myths. It is a surprising one, often puzzling and controversial. Even the famous bronze wolf is keenly debated. Is it, as has usually been thought, one of the earliest works of Roman art to survive? Or is it, as a recent scientific analysis has suggested, really a masterpiece of the Middle Ages? In any case, excavations under the modern city over the past hundred years or so have uncovered a few traces from maybe as far back as 1000 BCE of the tiny village on the river Tiber that eventually became Cicero’s Rome.
Murder
There is no single story of Romulus. There are scores of different, sometimes incompatible, versions of the tale. Cicero, a decade after his clash with Catiline, gave one account in his treatise On the State. Like many politicians since, he took refuge in political theory (and some rather pompous pontificating) when his own power was fading. Here, in the context of a much longer philosophical discussion on the nature of good government, he dealt with the history of the Roman ‘constitution’ from its beginning. But after a succinct start to the story – in which he awkwardly evaded the issue of whether Romulus really was the son of the god Mars while casting doubt on other fabulous elements of the tale – he got down to a serious discussion of the geographical advantages of the site that Romulus chose for his new settlement.