Episode 1: Rome – The Foundation Myth

Buongiorno! I’m Dr. Rocky Ruggiero. Join me in Rebuilding The Renaissance and making art and history come to life.

Welcome to the Rebuilding The Renaissance podcast, your guide to the art and history of Italy, from the glory of Rome to the magnificence of the Renaissance. And now here’s your host Dr. Rocky Ruggiero.

Today we are talking about the foundation myth of Rome, and of course what I mean by Rome is the Roman empire. Today I think when we think of myths involving twin boys and wolves and what have you, that it is stuff of legend, but I also want you to realize that in every myth and in every legend there is of course a certain degree of truth, and so holds true for the great foundation myth of Rome. The Romans of course are not alone historically in creating this sort of story that tells and explains exactly where there greatness comes from.

When I teach Renaissance Florence, one of the things I always comment upon is that when the economy began to boom again in medieval Europe, and Florence, which was one of the wealthiest cities in Europe at the time, began investigating into its past to find out who they were and where they came from. What allowed them the luxury of doing this was the socioeconomic well being in the city. What those Florentines realized is that once we were Romans, so in a way it was an explanation of the greatness of this Renaissance city because they had in fact carried on the legacy of ancient Rome.

Think of the United States today, all right, with this craze over companies like Ancestry.com or 23andMe, where once the United States has established what we like to allude ourselves is a general state of well being, and after generations of immigrants coming from certain parts of the world, working so that their offspring in fact have it a bit easier, we have that luxury of looking back and discovering that we are from Europe or South America or what have you as well. That’s essentially what the Romans were doing as well.

And so this myth that was essentially codified in First Century A.D. Rome, which was hen an empire, and an empire which essentially stretched to cover about half of the known world. Consider that the northernmost border of the Roman empire is still there, it is Hadrian’s wall, which serves as a border between the modern countries of England and Scotland. The Western border of the Roman empire was the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, Morocco. The southern border of the Roman empire was the northern edge of the Sahara desert, so all of northern Africa was under Roman control. And the eastern border of the Roman empire was a line that they’d drawn between the Tigris and the Euphrates river, so essentially the border between modern Iraq and Iran.

Imagine what it means to control such a vast territory two millennia ago without technology such as telephones, or wire cables, or internet and what have you as well. In fact, the Roman answer to all of that was roads, and so you’ve all heard the cliché expression that all roads lead to Rome, and in a way they did, the Romans having paved over 200 thousand kilometers of roadways throughout their territory and gave them a massive communications advantage over everyone else. And so once their society became this powerful, once their society dominated half of the known world, it became very important for the Romans to sort of get their act together and come up with an official story of who they were, where they came from, and how that legend, how that story in a way explained a kind of almost predestined power for the great city.

And in fact not surprisingly this foundation myth of Rome goes well past Roman history, and brings us all the way back to the great ancient city of Troy. In fact it was in the First Century that a Roman author named Virgil, who many of you may know as Dante’s great companion in the Divine Comedy. Well Virgil published a work called The Aeneid. Now I encourage all of my students to read this book, and inevitably of course they imagine that anything written in the First Century A.D. is a permanent cure to insomnia, while instead The Aeneid is really the sort of quintessential Hollywood action movie screen play. It involves sex and violence and betrayal and what have you. It’s a very entertaining story, and the story of The Aeneid is of a man named Aeneas who fled the burning city of Troy, which had fallen to the Greeks of course through the treachery of the Trojan horse, and he, along with his father Anchises and his son Ascanius, looking for a place where they could create a new Troy to bring Troy back to life.

And the great thing about the way this story is constructed is that Virgil has Aeneas touching upon different places. He goes to the island of Crete. He goes to north Africa, and particularly a place which would eventually become known as Carthage. He goes to Sicily. And all of the places that Aeneas visits would inevitably become ancient super powers, super powers that would challenge the authority and the dominance of Rome, but in the end would fall subject to them. So in a way anyone of those other places could have been Rome, but there could only be one Rome, and that is why Aeneas eventually settles down in an area known as the Alban Hills.

The Alban Hills, located about 12 miles east of the city of Rome, and that is where he would fight for supremacy and dominance and establish his son Ascanius, who is also known as Iulus. And that Iulus is a very important one because it would be the name of a later historical figure we’ll talk about in a later podcast, named Gaius Iulius Caesar. In fact Julius Caesar would claim descendancy from Aeneas and his son. Ascanius becoming the first king of the Alban Hills and would be followed by a series of successors, one of whom was named Amulius. Now Amulius was the king of the Alban Hills but was deposed by his ambitious and treacherous brother named Numitor. And the story goes that Numitor was in fact fearful that Amulius’ grandsons, newly born, named Romulus and Remus, would seek revenge for their deposed grandfather. Romulus and Remus, born of the vestal virgin named Rhea Silvia. And this is important because it was a virgin birth.

The legend maintains that Rhea Silvia, who was a vestal virgin, which is kind of incorrect because technically the cult of Vesta did not exist at this particular time, but we’ll overlook this minor technicality, was loved by Mars, by the Roman god of war, so that Romulus and Remus were fathered by the Roman god of war. Now this is important because technically Rhea Silvia’ line, her father being Amulius and before him, generations before him, Ascanius himself, Ascanius’ father Aeneas had been born of Venus. And so the idea that Venus’ blood flew through the veins of the family of Romulus and Remus, and now of course with Mars. So Rome kind of imagining self as this perfect dichotomy between love and war, and in fact that would be one of the most characteristic themes of Roman society, either at peace or at war, on extreme or the other. You actually get that sense of a kind of social dichotomy in this myth, Venus joined by Mars in the union with Rhea Silvia.

These boys were born and immediately their nasty uncle Numitor decided to rid himself of any potential threat by exposing the boys on the Tiber river. Now the idea essentially of taking them, putting them in the basket, and setting them afloat. Now the parallel’s between this particular myth and of course the Old Testament story of Moses, who essentially met the same fate. The more you look at these myths the more you begin to see similarities and parallels between different cultures in different times. The boys were meant to die, the idea of course that Romulus and Remus would meet their end on the river. Instead they come to shore on a place called Tiber island, and if you visit Rome today you can still see the Tiber island dividing the river. They were discovered by a she wolf, and the story goes that the she wolf nursed the boys as her own for quite some period of time, until they were discovered by a shepherd. The shepherd then taking the boys and raising them as his own, and when they came of age it was time for them to go off and found their own city, their own settlement.

The problem of course was that they were twins, and as such, since neither of course could remember being born, did not know which of the twins was born first. In ancient societies of course it is the rule of the primogeniture, on other words the first born inherits everything. The first born takes control. So because of this problem the twins decide that hey would have the gods decide which of them should be the head of this new settlement, and decided that they would, for at least the time being, separate.

So the story goes that Romulus decides to settle down on the Palatine Hill in Rome, and his twin brother Remus instead on the Aventine Hill, of what today is modern Rome. And they began to build their wigwams or tents or whatever it was that they were planning on living on, looking around, waiting for some sort of divine omen to appear, when suddenly Remus looks up into the sky and sees a flock of six vultures fly over his head. Now in the ancient world it was very common for priests to interpret the flights of birds, they called these auguries, and auguries could be positive or auguries could be negative. Well when Remus saw this flock of vultures he immediately thought that this was a message delivered to him by the gods to essentially assert his role as the ruler of the new settlement.

So he ran down the Aventine Hill and up to the Palatine Hill to inform his brother, not knowing that in the mean time Romulus had instead seen a flock of 12 vultures fly over his head. And so an argument ensued. The argument was about what was more important: who saw them first, or who saw more vultures. The argument became heated, and the story goes that it eventually degenerated into a physical altercation, and in the heat of combat Romulus slew his brother Remus, and therefore by process of elimination became the head of this new great city of Rome. In fact that’s why we call it Roma and not Rema. Had Remus won the fight then history would have changed, as would the name of the city itself.

In fact a later Roman historian would justify this act of fratricide, and in fact if this story of Romulus killing his brother is ringing a bell, one needs only think again … the book of Genesis and the great act of fratricide between Cain and Abel. So again another common theme, and this notion of twins in conflict as well. So the story goes that Romulus kills his brother and a later historian justifying this act by saying that Remus deserved it, and he deserved it because he jumped over the walls that Romulus was building. The historian writes that essentially only enemies sneak over walls, friends instead come through doorways and gates. And so it’s almost as if this act of trespassing was justification for Romulus to kill his brother.

Anyway, so now Romulus decides to establish this new society, what we today would call a utopia. Now the word utopia being a Greek word: u meaning no, topia meaning place. Utopia is no place because it’s an ideal place, one that we’re striving to achieve, and this is exactly what Romulus wanted to create. So the story goes that he decides to declare the area between the Palatine Hill and the Capatoline Hill in Rome as an asylum, a place where people could come to live free of religious oppression, to live free of military oppression as well, and many young men joined Romulus in this sort of primitive tribe hat he was creating, but there was a severe shortage of woman. And obviously if he wanted his tribe to succeed and prosper he needed the other, more gentle half of our species.

So he began asking around the neighboring tribes just where were the most beautiful, just where were the most virtuous, just where were the most fertile of women in the area. And the answer was always the same: the Sabine Hills. Now consider that the Sabine Hills is a place. If you go to Rome today, about 50 kilometers north you will actually find Sabina. This is where the tribe originated. And the story goes that Romulus decides to throw a party up in the Palatine Hill and to invite the neighboring tribes, and a great bunch of invitations were sent to the Sabine tribe, and in the p.s. on that invitation he wrote, “Please, bring women.”

And so these women and the rest of the Sabine tribe attend the party and at the height of the party, when all the Sabine men had drunk to excess, and the Roman men feigning to drink but in the end remaining sober, these Roman men drew their swords, slew the Sabine men and took the Sabine women as their wives. This is the infamous episode of the rape of the Sabine, and again, often times in these mythological contexts that word rape meaning kidnapping or seizure from the Latin rapto. And so the idea, the legend that their trying to construct is that it was the best of the men, the best of the women, coming together to produce this extraordinary society.

Now, Romulus would rule as the first king of Rome, and would be succeeded by a series of six other kings. What’s so extraordinary about this foundation myth is that each of these kings wold in turn bring a major contribution to what eventually becomes the historical identity of Rome. In other words, the immediate successor to Romulus was a king named Numa, Numa Pompilius, and he brought a concept called religio, religio which is the root of religion, which translates most literally as fear or awe of the gods. Now consider that today we’re so used to religions essentially spooning out morality, but in the ancient world religion had nothing to do with heaven and hell, it had simply to do with establishing a place for ourselves in the universe, creating a relationship between ourselves and the infinite.

That is what Numa established with the Romans, this sort of structure for religion. Well another king came along and he introduced military organization, which would be fundamental later on to Rome’s military supremacy. Another king came and drained the area that today we call The Forum, which is the downtown area of Rome. So each king bringing another important historical aspect to Rome itself. And the seventh of those kings bringing another surprisingly important aspect to Rome’s historical identity, and that was tyranny, okay, the seventh king, whose name was Tarquin The Proud, or Tarquin Superbus in Latin.

He was an Etruscan king, and he ruled Rome as a tyrant. In fact imposing severe laws and abusing his power and his son eventually raping the most virtuous woman in Rome, whose name was Lucretia, and Lucretia denouncing this disgrace publicly and then taking her own life. And that was the straw that broke the camels back, and so essentially at this point the people of Rome drove the Tarquin clan out of of the city and transformed the monarchy, the kingdom of Rome, into the republic. And it is then, in the year 509 B.C. that the great acronym, SPQR, took hold in the city: Senātus Populusque Rōmānus, the senate and the people of Rome, the new great Roman republic which was ruled by its senate, which in turn was elected by the people. And this is the beginning of another phase of Roman history that would last approximately five centuries and end with the rise to power of a man that I like to call JC, by which I don’t mean Jesus Christ, but instead Julius Caesar. In fact in our next podcast we’ll talk about the transformation of the Roman republic into the Roman empire, which took place right around the time of the other JC, who is Jesus Christ.

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