Of founders and of kings. In history textbooks the Roman state rushed from obscurity unerringly to greatness, while in actuality the Roman state took a tortuous road to imperial power. The Romans, an ethnically complex people who gradually had settled on seven hills near the Tiber, were not really masters of their fate until well after 509 b. c. Prior to that time they were just another part of the Latins, who were blessed with excellent soil for their livelihood and with the presence of two highly developed neighboring civilizations; one to their north, the Etruscans, and another to their south, the Western Greeks. For centuries, however, the Etruscan influence must have impressed Romans as more dominant than beneficial. The Etruscans, most of whom were united in a federation of city-states, pursued a vigorous cultural and political expansionism, one Rome could not escape. Only with the emergence of the Roman Republic around 509 B. c. and with the Syracusan defeat of the Etruscan naval power at Cumae (474 b. c.) did Etruscan hegemony subside. By then, however, Etruscan culture had left its indelible imprint on Roman culture.
The influence of the Western Greeks was less intense. They had reached the Italian peninsula first in the Mycenaean (or Achaean) period. Then, in the eighth century, the Greeks again moved westward in an extensive colonization movement, which transformed wide areas of southern Italy into a Greater Greece (Magna Graecia) and made much of Sicily Greek. The settlers brought along, of course, their myths, including those telling about Greek and Trojan heroes who had sailed west; among them Aeneas, Odysseus, and Diomedes.
Among the neighbors whom the Greeks acquired were the Latins, who at that time deserved no special notice. Only after 600 b. c. and still under Etruscan influence did Rome take shape, when the hill dwellers established a common marketplace, the Forum Romanum, a paved area on drained marshy lowland. That Forum, together with the Forum Boarium (the cattle market close to the Tiber) eventually developed into the municipal core of Rome.
During the early sixth century Romans must have become acquainted with elements of the Greek mythological past, judging from the fact that in those years pottery adorned with pictures of Aeneas carrying his father, An-chises, from burning Troy was used in Etruria and Rome. Such filial concern must have appealed to the always strong Roman sense of family solidarity. We may assume that Romans by then also were aware of the Greek tradition telling about Aeneas’s flight to the West. like other people of the area the Romans eventually accepted the view that Aeneas was one of their ancestors, although we do not know for certain when that acceptance occurred. It is easier to ascertain when the Greeks claimed that Rome had been founded by Aeneas or his descendants. Hellanicus of Lesbos did so in the fifth century when he told how Aeneas came to Italy, after or with Odysseus, and founded Rome.
It was one more example of the characteristic Greek reaction to the intrusion of a new people into the Greek field of vision. The new people were hellen-ized by having their early past integrated into the by then elaborately worked-out Greek mythological past. Nobody was allowed to exist outside that orbit and few people resisted being drawn into it. It mattered little that the accounts of what happened differed as long as the differing versions stayed within the proper perimeter. Thus in one version Aeneas was forced to stay in Italy by a Trojan woman named Rhome who burned the Trojan ships, while in another Aeneas became the husband of Rhome. In either case Aeneas was the common ancestor of the Romans.
But Romans also had a Roman story on Rome’s origin. In the centuries preceding 509 b. c.—a common although by no means firm date for the beginning of the Roman Republic—kings governed Rome. Seven of them, or eight if one counted Romulus’s coruler Titus Tatius, were recognized later by Roman historians, although modern scholars have not been so sure about any of them. The first of these kings, Romulus, became the core of another tradition concerning the founding of Rome. The name itself contains the Etruscan suffix - ulus, which seems to stand for “a founder of.” In the prevalent version of the story, which took centuries to develop fully, Romulus was the twin brother of Remus. The boys resulted from the rape of the vestal virgin Rhea Silvia by the god Mars. Rhea Silvia’s uncle, the king of Alba Longa, ordered the boys slain but the man charged with the deed only abandoned them. A she-wolf nursed them and a herdsman and his wife eventually raised the boys. After killing Remus, Romulus founded Rome and became its first king. When exactly Romans accepted Romulus as founder of their city and how widespread that acceptance was at a given time also remain obscure. However, by 296 b. c., the story of the two young men must have been well known since in that year a statue was erected and a coin struck both depicting Romulus, Remus, and the she-wolf.
The first Greek mention of Romulus and Remus appeared in the work of the Sicilian historian Alcimus (ca. 300 B. c.), although in that version Romulus and Remus belonged to different generations. Some scholars have maintained that Eratosthenes was the first Greek to credit Romulus with founding Rome.
Traces of the past beyond the legends. The Roman Republic came about, so tradition has it, when the series of seven kings ended with the fall from power of Tarquinius Superbus (the Proud). The event, usually dated as happening in 509 B. c., was the subject of an early historiographical reference to Roman history. A historian, some have suggested Hyperochus, wrote about the life of Aristodemus the Effeminate who, as a ruler of the city of Cumae (ca. 504-480), wished to diminish Etruscan influence and to that end interfered in the struggle of Rome against the Tarquinii—a fact mentioned in Hyperochus’s record.
The Roman sense for history, the strong Greek influence notwithstanding, was rooted in the basic social units, the gens and the familia. The gens consisted of kinspeople who claimed to descend from a common prehistoric ancestor, were tightly bound together by common rituals, and even had their own burial rites and cemeteries. The family (/anr/Wa) centered around a similar ancestral cult although it did not reach so far back in time. Waxen masks of ancestors and inscriptions listing honors and offices of the ancestors were displayed at a prominent place in the Roman home. As a part of the funeral rites, speeches praising the deceased’s merits were delivered (laudationes funebresj and copies eventually were preserved next to the pictures of the ancestors. These biographies, flawed by flattery, formed a loose record of past generations and became a rudimentary source for later writers. For the individual Roman the past and the present were joined through the memories and records of the gens and of the family, sources that inspired piety and offered historical exempla as standards for current conduct.
The Greeks had used the sequence of generations as a means of creating a rudimentary chronology, but the Romans did not do so. For centuries Romans were content with a record of the past whose segments were uncoordinated. They did develop a calendar, which according to tradition received its lasting shape through the reforming work of the second king, Numa Pompilius. It was essentially a lunar calendar with solar rectifications. Romans used it to make sure that sacrifices, religious rituals, the gathering of assemblies, and other activities were all executed at the proper time. But the early Romans, who tried to be accurate about measuring time within the year, have left us few traces of their systems for the counting of years. We only know of the pounding of nails into the cella wall of the Capitoline Temple (Minerva’s room), presumably for counting the years, and of a method to reckon years according to the year of the rex sacrorum.
The keepers and compilers of past records were the Roman priests, all of whom belonged to specific priestly groups, one each for the sacred dimensions of agriculture, processions, ceremonial public meals, and auspices. The pontifices who supervised these groups of priests were subject to the pontifex maximus. That supreme priest compiled a master list of those days on which sacred law permitted business and court transactions to take place (the dies fasti), implying of course, the forbidden days (the dies nefasti). How far back these records went we do not know. By 304 b. c. the records, written on wooden tablets, were exhibited in the regia, once supposedly the palace of King Numa Pompilius, later the residence of the pontifex maximus. The Annales Maximi gradually began to include also the names of high officials, proper dates for religious functions, the death of priests and the names of their successors, and notes on fires, floods, famines, battles, laws, and treaties. It is not too farfetched to assume that the habit of recording year by year the events in the collective life of the state shaped the historiographical genre of annals, which became characteristic of much of Roman historiography. Annals stood in stark contrast to the Greek love for freer literary forms and testified to the intimate and lasting connection between Roman public life and Roman historiography. A number of other records in annalistic form, which also began early in the Republic’s life, testified to that link. The fasti consulates recorded the highest officials for each year. Lists of magistrates were kept in the temple of Juno Moneta (until ca. 50 b. c.), of treaties in the Capitoline Temple (destroyed by fire at the time of Sulla), of statutes in the temple of Saturn (until Julius Caesar), and of Senate acts in the temple of Ceres (until Augustus).
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