The city of Rome, as the center of the world and the symbol of Roman civilization, plays a role in much of what was written by authors living in that civilization (as emphasized by literary scholars such as C. Edwards 1996, W. Jaeger 1997; cf. Stambaugh 1988: 61-66; for source collections see Dudley 1967, Neumeister 1993, and above all Lugli 1952-60). Of particular interest to historians are contemporary literary sources that specifically refer to life in the city of Rome and to the physical setting itself. They range from frequent references in Cicero’s letters or Propertius’s description of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine (Prop. 2.21) to Juvenal’s Third Satire (Braund 1996) and Martial’s epigrams (Rodriguez Almeida 2003). The literary sources further include passages by historians such as Tacitus’s lamentation at the destruction of the Capitol in ad 69 (Hist. 3.70-74, cf. 3.72.1 “the saddest and foulest crime ever perpetrated on the Roman state”) or Ammianus Marcellinus’s account of the events during the imperial visit of Constantius II to the city in 357 (Amm. Marc. 16.13-18).
The earliest surviving contemporary mention of Rome is to be found in Greek texts from the late fifth century. Somewhat later, Aristotle’s writings show awareness of the famous attack on Rome by a band of Gauls in 387 bc (Plut. Cam. 22.3). That episode is much elaborated in the historian Livy’s account (5.32.5-49.7), but Livy, whose romantic national history of Rome has ideological affinities with the Western films directed by John Ford, is not a trustworthy source for the earlier centuries of Roman history. As is well known, Livy’s canonical list of Rome’s kings in Book 1 takes the city’s history back to 753, but the only thing one can claim with absolute certainty for the regal period 753-510 is that Rome was not ruled by a series of seven kings, regardless of what Livy tells us. The government was surely monarchical (“tyrannical”) in the beginning, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, but there can be no certainty about the number of rulers nor about most of the names.
Not everyone agrees, and in fact references to the Roman kings as historical figures appear more frequently today than fifty years ago in serious scholarship. A common denominator in such works, which sometimes are marshaled under the slogan “The Great Rome of the Tarquinian dynasty,” is their strong reliance on recent excavations that have reached very early layers in the city’s archaeological record (Cristofani 1990; Carandini and Cappelli 2000). Discoveries such as those of the foundations of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol (Mura Sommella 2000), the early date (before 500 bc) and impressive size of which seem to confirm Livy’s account of the Tarquinian dynasty, has shown that Rome was indeed a rich and powerful city at a much earlier stage than skeptics (cf. Gjerstad 1953-63) used to think. Blind faith in Livy and the rest of the historical tradition can, however, also lead seriously astray (Wiseman 2000 on Carandini 1997; cf. Carandini 2004).
There have been three major periods of archaeological discoveries in Rome since the city became the capital of modern Italy in 1870. The decades after that moment saw furious construction all over the city, and while much was brought to light, far too little was properly recorded (well illustrated by Lanciani 1988). A similar frenzy centered on the very heart of ancient Rome during Mussolini’s urbanistic revolution of the area between the Colosseum and the Piazza Venezia in the 1930s; again proper documentation of the findings was deficient (Munoz 1932, and Erskine, ancient HISTORY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY, for the context). A new period began in the late 1970s, when a revitalized archaeological administration under A. La Regina authorized a large number of excavations and studies with the objective both of making new discoveries and of preserving the existing structures (La Regina 1999). As an aid to future scholarship on the city of Rome and its physical structures, and as the legacy of a particularly creative generation of Rome scholars, the six-volume Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae was published in 1993-2000 (LTUR). The work contains numerous contributions by Filippo Coarelli, the recognized current master of Roman topography, whose work combines the history of art, epigraphy, Roman politics, and social history in an often unparalleled, yet not unchallenged, way.
World History
