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.
11. A fourth-century CE mosaic, from the floor of a bath-suite at Low Ham Roman villa in the south of England, was decorated with a series of scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid: Aeneas arriving in Carthage, Dido and Aeneas out hunting and here the passion of the Carthaginian queen and the Trojan hero rendered as succinctly as could be.
There is no doubt that the figure of Aeneas as the founder of Rome featured in literature – and made its mark on the landscape – well before the first century BCE. There are passing references to him in that role in Greek writers of the fifth century BCE; and in the second century BCE, ambassadors from the Greek island of Delos appealing for an alliance with Rome seem to have taken care to remind the Romans, as part of their pitch, that Aeneas had stopped off at Delos on his journey west. In Italy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus was convinced that he had seen the tomb of Aeneas, or at least an ancient memorial to him, at the town of Lavinium, not far from Rome: ‘well worth seeing,’ he observed. There was also a popular story that among the precious objects kept in the temple of the goddess Vesta in the Roman Forum – where virgin priestesses, like Rhea Silvia of the Romulus legend, guarded a sacred flame that was supposed never to be extinguished – was the very statue of the goddess Pallas Athena that Aeneas had brought from Troy. Or so one Roman tale had it. There were various rival candidates for rescuing this famous image, and any number of cities all over the Greek world claimed to possess the real thing.
It goes without saying that the story of Aeneas is as much a myth as the story of Romulus. But Roman scholars puzzled over the relationship of these two foundation legends and expended enormous amounts of energy trying to bring them into historical alignment. Was Romulus the son, or maybe the grandson, of Aeneas? And if Romulus had founded Rome, how could Aeneas also have done so? The biggest difficulty was that there was an uncomfortable gap between the eighth-century BCE date that the Romans assigned to the origins of their city and the twelfth-century BCE date that they commonly gave to the fall of Troy (also taken as an historical event). By the first century BCE some sort of coherence was reached by constructing a complicated family tree, which linked Aeneas and Romulus, and at the ‘right’ dates: Aeneas became seen as the founder not of Rome but of Lavinium; his son Ascanius was said to have founded Alba Longa – the city from which Romulus and Remus were later cast out before they founded Rome; and a shadowy and, even by Roman standards, flagrantly fictional dynasty of Alban kings was constructed to bridge the gap between Ascanius and the magic date of 753 BCE. This is the version that Livy endorses.
The central claim of the story of Aeneas is one that echoes, or rather exaggerates, the underlying theme of Romulus’ asylum. Where Romulus welcomed all comers to his new city, the story of Aeneas goes further, to claim that the ‘Romans’ really were originally ‘foreigners’. It is a paradox of national identity, which stands in glaring contrast to the foundation myths of many ancient Greek cities, such as Athens, which saw their original population as springing miraculously from the very soil of their native land. And other variant accounts of Rome’s origins repeatedly emphasise that foreignness. In fact, in one episode of the Aeneid, the hero visits the site of the future city of Rome and finds it already settled by primitive predecessors of the Romans. And who are they? They are a group of settlers under a certain King Evander, an exile from the land of Arcadia in the Greek Peloponnese. The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.
That message is most neatly summed up in a strange etymology recorded by Dionysius, among others. Greek and Roman intellectuals were fascinated by word derivations, which they were convinced gave the key not just to the origin of the word but also to its essential meaning. They were sometimes correct in their analysis, and sometimes extravagantly wrong. Their mistakes are often revealing, as in this case. Dionysius, at an early point in his history, reflects on yet another group of even more primitive inhabitants of the site that became Rome: the Aborigines. The derivation of this word should have been blindingly obvious: these were the people who had been there ‘from the beginning’ (ab origine). Dionysius, to be fair, does raise that explanation as a possibility, but – like others – he gives equal, or more, weight to the hugely improbable notion that the word derived not from origo but from the Latin errare (‘to wander’) and had originally been spelled Aberrigines. These people were, in other words, he writes, ‘vagabonds of no fixed abode’.