There are vivid glimpses of human and other life here, from the little girl laid out in her grave in her best dress to the poor ‘mouser’ whom no one let off his leash when the fire blazed. The question is what those glimpses add up to. The archaeological remains certainly demonstrate that there is a long and rich prehistory behind the ancient Rome we see, but quite how long is another matter.
Part of the problem is the conditions of excavation in the city itself. The site of Rome has been so intensively built on for centuries that we find these traces of early occupation only in spots that happen not to have been disturbed. The foundations dug in the first and second centuries CE for the vast marble temples in the Forum obliterated much of what then lay beneath the surface; the cellars of Renaissance palazzi cut through even more in other parts of Rome. So we have only tiny snapshots, never the big picture. This is archaeology at its most difficult, and – although new fragments of evidence emerge all the time – its interpretation, and reinterpretation, is almost always contested and often controversial. For example, there is an ongoing debate about whether the small pieces of wattle and daub found in excavations in the Forum in the mid twentieth century indicate that there was an early hut settlement there too – or whether they were inadvertently introduced as part of the rubble used a few centuries later to provide a new raised surface for the area. It has to be said that, though fine for a cemetery, this would have been a rather damp and marshy place for a village.
12. A typical cremation urn from the early cemeteries of Rome and the surrounding area. In the form of a simple hut, these houses for the dead are one of the best guides we have to the appearance of the accommodation for the living.
Precise dating is even more contentious; hence my intentionally vague use of the word ‘early’ over the last few pages. It cannot be stressed enough that there is no certain independent date for any of the archaeological material from earliest Rome or the area round about, and that arguments still rage about the age of almost every major find. It has taken decades of work over the past century or so – using such diagnostics as wheel-made pottery (assumed to be later than handmade), the occasional presence in graves of Greek ceramics (whose dating is better, but still not perfectly, understood) and careful comparison from site to site – to produce a rough chronological scheme covering the period from around 1000 to 600 BCE.
On that basis, the earliest burials in the Forum would be around 1000 BCE, the huts on the Palatine around 750–700 BCE (excitingly close to 753 BCE, as many have observed). But even these dates are far from certain. Recent scientific methods – including ‘radiocarbon dating’, which calculates the age of any organic material by measuring the residual amount of its radioactive carbon isotope – have suggested that they are all too ‘young’, by as much as a hundred years. The hut at Fidenae, for example, was dated around the middle of the eighth century BCE according to traditional archaeological criteria, but that is pushed back towards the end of the ninth century BCE if we follow the radiocarbon. Currently, dates are in flux, even more than usual; if anything, Rome appears to be getting older.
What is certain is that by the sixth century BCE Rome was an urban community, with a centre and some public buildings. Before that, for the earliest phases, we have enough scattered finds from what is known as the Middle Bronze Age (between about 1700 and 1300 BCE) to suggest that some people were then living on the site, rather than just ‘passing through’. Over the period in between, we can be fairly confident that larger villages grew up, probably (to judge from what ends up in the graves) with an increasingly wealthy group of elite families; and that at some point these coalesced into the single community whose urban character was clear by the sixth century BCE. We cannot know for sure when the inhabitants of those separate settlements first thought of themselves as a single town. And we have absolutely no idea when they first thought of, and referred to, that town as Rome.
Archaeology is not, however, just about dates and origins. The material dug up in the city, the area around it and even further afield has important things to tell us about the character of Rome’s early settlement. First, it had extensive contacts with the outside world. I have already mentioned in passing the ivory bracelet of the little girl in the cemetery and the Greek pottery (made in Corinth or Athens) that turned up in Roman excavations. There are also signs of links with the north, in the form of a few jewels and decorations in imported amber; there is no clue of how these reached central Italy, but they certainly point to contact, direct or indirect, with the Baltic. Early Rome, from almost as far back as we can see it, was well connected, as Cicero hinted when he stressed its strategic location.
Second, there were similarities, and some important differences, between Rome and its neighbours. The Italian peninsula between about 1000 and 600 BCE was extremely mixed. There were many different independent peoples, with many different cultural traditions, origins and languages. The best documented are the Greek settlements in the south, towns such as Cumae, Tarentum and Naples (Neapolis), founded from the eighth century BCE on by immigrants from some of the major cities in Greece – conventionally known as ‘colonies’ but not ‘colonial’ in the modern sense of the word. To all intents and purposes, much of the southern part of the peninsula, and Sicily, was part of the Greek world, with a literate and artistic tradition linked to match. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest specimens of Greek writing to survive, maybe the very earliest, have actually been discovered there. It is much harder to reconstruct the history of any of the other inhabitants of the peninsula: from the Etruscans to the north, through the Latins and Sabines on Rome’s doorstep to the south, to the Oscans, who formed the original population of Pompeii, and Samnites beyond them. None of their literature, if they had any, has survived, and for evidence of them we depend entirely on archaeology, on texts inscribed on stone and bronze – sometimes comprehensible, sometimes not – and on Roman accounts written much later, often tinged with Roman supremacy; hence the standard image of the Samnites as tough, barbaric, non-urbanised and dangerously primitive.
What archaeological finds do show, however, is that Rome in its early days was very ordinary indeed. The development, from scattered settlements into an urban community, that we can just about detect in Rome seems to have happened at roughly the same period throughout the neighbouring region to its south. And the material remains in the cemeteries, local pottery and bronze brooches, as well as more exotic imports, are fairly consistent there too. If anything, what has been discovered in Rome is less impressive and less suggestive of wealth than discoveries elsewhere. Nothing has emerged from the city to compare with, for example, the finds from some extraordinary tombs in nearby Praeneste – though that might just be bad luck or, as some archaeologists have suspected, a case of some of the best finds from the nineteenth-century excavations in Rome having been stolen and directed straight to the antiquities market. One of the questions we shall have to address over the next couple of chapters is: when did Rome cease to be ordinary?
The missing link
The final question for this chapter, however, is whether the archaeological material must remain quite as separate from the mythic traditions of Romulus and Remus as I have presented them. Is it possible to link our investigations into the earliest history of Rome with the stories that the Romans themselves told, or with their elaborate speculations on the city’s origins? Can we perhaps find a little more history in the myth?