SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

In fact, when the people of the Greek island of Chios wanted to demonstrate their allegiance to Rome in the second century BCE, one of the things they decided to do was to erect a monument depicting, as they put it, ‘the birth of Romulus, the found...

Edgy in a different way was the idea of the asylum, and the welcome, that Romulus gave to all comers – foreigners, criminals and runaways – in finding citizens for his new town.

There were positive aspects to this. In particular, it reflected Roman political culture’s extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders, which set it apart from every other ancient Western society that we know. No ancient Greek city was remotely as incorporating as this; Athens in particular rigidly restricted access to citizenship.

This is not a tribute to any ‘liberal’ temperament of the Romans in the modern sense of the word. They conquered vast swathes of territory in Europe and beyond, sometimes with terrible brutality; and they were often xenophobic and dismissive of people they called ‘barbarians’. Yet, in a process unique in any pre-industrial empire, the inhabitants of those conquered territories, ‘provinces’ as Romans called...

That culminated in 212 CE (where my SPQR ends), when the emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant ...

Even before then, the elite of the provinces had entered the political hierarchy of the capital, in large numbers. The Roman senate gradually became what we might now describe as a decidedly multicultural body, and the full list of Roman emperors contains many whose origins lay outside Italy: Caracalla’s father, Septimius Severus, was the first emperor from Roman territory in Africa; Trajan and Hadrian, who reigned half a century earlier, had come from the Roman province of Spain.

When in 48 CE the emperor Claudius – whose avuncular image owes more to Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius than to real life – was arguing to a slightly reluctant senate that citizens from Gaul should be allowed to become senators, he spent some time reminding the meeting that Rome had been open to foreigners from the beginning.

There was a similar process with slavery. Roman slavery was in some respects as brutal as Roman methods of military conquest. But for many Roman slaves, particularly those working in urban domestic contexts rather than toiling in the fields or mines, it was not necessarily a life sentence. They were regularly given their freedom, or they bought it with cash they had managed to save up; and if their owner was a Roman citizen, then they also gained full Roman citizenship, with almost no disadvantages as against those who were freeborn.

The contrast with classical Athens is again striking: there, very few slaves were freed, and those who were certainly did not gain Athenian citizenship in the process, but went into a form of stateless limbo.

This practice of emancipation – or manumission, to follow the Latin term – was such a distinctive feature of Roman culture that outsiders at the time remarked upon it and saw it as a powerful factor in Rome’s success. As one king of Macedon observed in the third century BCE, it was in this way that ‘the Romans have enlarged their country’. The scale was so great that some historians reckon that, by the second centur...

The story of Romulus’ asylum clearly points to this openness, suggesting that the diverse make-up of Rome was a characteristic that went back to its origins. There were insiders who echoed the view of the king of Macedon that Romulus’ policy of inclusiveness was an important part o...

But there were also dissenting voices that stressed a far less flattering side to the story. It was not only some of Rome’s enemies who saw the irony of an empire that traced its des...

Some Romans did too. In the late first or early second century CE, the satiric poet ‘Juvenal’ – Decimus Junius Juvenalis – who loved to pour scorn on Roman pretensions, lambasted the snobbery that was another side of life at Rome, and he ridiculed those aristocrats who boasted of a family tree going back centuries. He ends one of his poems with a sideswipe at Rome’s origins. What are all these pretensions based on, anyway? Rome was from its very beginning a city made up o...

In short, Romans could always see themselves following in Romulus’ footsteps, for better or worse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was always the possibility too of adjusting or reconfiguring the narrative, even when it had reached a relatively fixed literary form.

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 stand...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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 Ath...

The idea that any serious ancient scholars could turn a blind eye to the obviously correct etymology that was staring them in the face in favour of a silly idea that derived Aborigines from ‘to wander’ via a tendentious alternative spelling is not a reflection of their obtuseness. It shows just how ingrained the idea was that ‘Rome’ had always been an ethnically fluid concept, that the ‘Romans’ had always been on the move.

However hard we try, it is impossible to construct a coherent narrative that could replace the legends of Romulus or Aeneas.

One way of doing this is by turning away from the foundation stories and seeking out clues lurking in the Latin language or in later Roman institutions that might point back to earliest Rome.

Yet Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of ‘fossils’ – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost. As one modern writer has nicely put it, the Romans were rather like people who acquire all kinds of brand-new kitchen equipment but can’t ever bear to throw away their old gadgets, which continue to clutter up the place even though they are never used.

Just possibly we could. There is little doubt that the Septimontium is related in some way to Rome’s distant past. But in exactly what way, and quite how distant, is very hard to know.

Much more tangible is the evidence of archaeology. Dig down deep in the city of Rome, below the visible ancient monuments, and a few traces of a much earlier, primitive settlement, or settlements, remain.

The dead and buried are often much more prominent than the living in the archaeological record.

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.

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.

Precise dating is even more contentious; hence my intentionally vague use of the word ‘early’ over the last few pages.

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.

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’.

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.