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 Hilclass="underline" 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 restore 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.