In Our Time - Romulus and Remus

Episode Date: January 24, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Romulus and Remus, the central figures of the foundation myth of Rome. According to tradition, the twins were abandoned by their parents as babies, but were saved by a she-wolf who found and nursed them. Romulus killed his brother after a vicious quarrel, and went on to found a city, which was named after him.The myth has been at the core of Roman identity since the 1st century AD, although the details vary in different versions of the story. For many Roman writers, the story embodied the ethos and institutions of their civilisation. The image of the she-wolf suckling the divinely fathered twins remains a potent icon of the city even today.With:Mary Beard Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge Peter Wiseman Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter Tim Cornell Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Capitaline Museum in Rome contains a small but magnificent room known as the Chamber of the She-Wolf. Its marble walls are covered in Latin inscriptions and colourful murals, and its floor has an elaborate mosaic.

But the centrepiece is a bronze statue of a wolf. suckling two human infants, an image revered by Romans as a symbol of their city. A similar object was described by Cicero as adorning the Roman Forum more than 2,000 years ago. The statue depicts the most celebrated of Rome's foundation myths. The children of the twins, Romulus and Remus, who, according to tradition, having been left to die,

were discovered and fed by the wolf and miraculously survived. Roblinus went on to give his name to Rome, the city he founded. Remus was killed. It's a powerful story and one that encapsulates many of the world, the peculiarities of ancient Rome, its society and people. With me to discuss Romanus and Remus are Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, Peter Wiseman, Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History

at the University of Exeter, and Tim Cornell, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester. Mary Beard, can you give us a basic outline of the Romulus and Remus story? Yeah, there's lots of different versions, so I'm going to give you a kind of composite beard-like version of it. And it starts, not in Rome, it starts a little town outside Rome, and it starts with two rival kings, as it were, Numitor and his brother Amulius.

It's the town of Alba Longa, and Numitor is the rightful king, but he is deposed by his brother Amulius. In order then to ensure there shouldn't be any nasty rival claimants, amulius disposes of Numerous. Mitterr's male family and takes his daughter and turns her into a virgin priestess in order to prevent her having kids. But he doesn't manage that because the daughter, who's called Rea Sylvia, gets pregnant. She says the father is the god Mars. In some versions, she says he came, he appeared from the flame of her temple fire in the form of a phallus.

So she's pregnant, turns out to be twins, divine twins, if Rea Sylvia's story is true. Amulius decides he has to get rid of them because they're obviously rival claimants. So he asks his servants to throw him away. Most versions of servants feel a bit iffy about this. Put them in a little basket. They're close to the tiber. The tiber happens to be in flood. They do, they leave them.

they sort of think they might get found. Indeed, the little basket with the kids in does get washed up, found not to start with by a human, but by a wolf. And it's a rather friendly female wolf who suckles the kids and keeps them alive, long enough for them to be found by a noble old shepherd called Faustulus who takes the kids back to his wife, Akka Laurentia, to be brought up. We then fast forward 18 years and in a kind of rather complicated series of events

involving robbery and brigandage they manage to get reunited with their granddad that deposed to King Numitor to dispose of Amulius and put Numitur back on the throne of Alba Longa. They think they'd like to have a city themselves in a kind of sort of Prince Charles-like way I suppose they think they're going to have to wait a very, very long time if they have to wait until Numitor has finished his rule at Alba Longa. So off they go to a nearby

place, which is going to be Rome, and decide to establish a city there. There's a problem because they're twins, and so they don't know who's going to be the boss, who's going to be the king, and who's going to have the right to give his name to the city. So they have a kind of contest in which they ask the gods to help them decide. They look for signs from the heavens, Remus sees six vultures and says, right, it's my turn to found the city. Romulus suddenly sees 12, says, no, no, I might have seen them later, but I saw more. Claims is right to find the city, starts to get a rampart and everything built. The quarrel goes on. Romulus kills Remus. And so Romulus is left as. soul twin in command of the city, a little proto community, and it's going to be Rome. Is that enough?

I think that'll do for the moment, really. We can develop a week's programme on that, but we'll play with what we've got. We'll investigate the basis for some of those stories as we go along. Peter Wiseman, the central element of the story, let's go back to being found and suckled by a wolf. Why does this seem so important? Well, the idea of infants being exposed is quite a familiar one in lots of different mythological stories.

I mean, think of Moses and the Bullrushes, among others, and quite often it's a way of explaining how some legendary figure who come from nowhere turns out to be a significant figure. The Oedipus story is an example of that. and exposed children, of course, are always the results of unwanted pregnancies, and so the reason why the pregnancy might be unwanted varies from story to story. Sometimes, as in the Romulus and Remus case, it's because the mother is unmarried, the supposed virgin daughter of the king or the would be king. Sometimes it's because the queen herself is pregnant,

but has a dream or there's an oracle, which tells her that her offspring is going to have a disastrous career or whatever. And so they try to frustrate the will of the gods by destroying the child. And that kind of story shows that, you know, you can't do that. And eventually the gods will make sure the child survives and comes back. And the idea of the exposed infants not just being rescued, as they always are, but actually being kept alive by being suckled by wild beast, that too is not universal in these kind of stories.

Quite often you just get the rescue and not the suckling. But the suckling does occur in quite a few. For instance, Paris, the Prince of Troy, son of Prime and Hacuba. Hacuba had the portentous dream. And so the infant was exposed, and he was suckled by a she bear. And there was another

an Arcadian hero called Telophis who was exposed on Marthaniol in Arcadia, and he was suckled by a doe, and he went on to be a hero. Is there any recurring significance? Is this to show their deep connection with nature, or that nature is part of the human condition, or something like that,

or is it just a good story that keeps cropping up? Well, it's a good story that keeps cropping up for, as it were, structural reasons. In Aristotle's poetics, there's a whole chapter on recognition scenes in tragedy, which means it legendary stories and ignorists. And nearly all of these are when it suddenly becomes clear that the protagonist is not who you thought he was, but somebody else. And that is often a result of his having been exposed as an infant.

Again, the Oedipus one is the classic case. Another one is Cyrus, King of Persia, who he was suckled by a bitch, supposedly. And so you have different types of friendly female. I'm searching desperately for a sort of straight marriage family in ancient world. No, such thing. It's all down in the forestry that is happening, isn't it? Are there any significant variations as to the story as outlined by Mary Beard?

Oh, lots, lots. Well, could you give us two or three? Yes, well, there are some versions of the story in which, which Remus doesn't even get killed. And indeed, Virgil in the Neid assumes a story in which Romulus and Remus rule together. He says, he sees the, this is a prophetic passage in which Quirinus, that's Romulus,

with his brother Remus, will give laws, Eurodabland. And so the implication there is that he is wanting to, Augustus, perhaps, in Virgil's time, is wanting to emphasize a version of the story in which there is not a quarrel, there is not a fratricide. And the idea of twins, the city being founded by the twins together,

does exist in quite a few authors. I mean, in a way, the beard version is the one we all know because it's in the great, the great authors, Livy and Plutarch, and so this is the, if you like, the privileged version,

But you root around in the more obscure corners of classical literature, and you can find references to all kinds of different versions. And also the very fact of where Remus does get killed, it's not always by Romulus. The idea of a farcicide, of course, is very, very shocking. But quite often it's not Romulus at all. It's a guy called Keller, who is Romulus's sidekick. He's in charge of building the wall.

and when Remus contemptuously jumps over the wall, Keller hits him with a shovel. And sometimes this is at Romulus's order. Sometimes it's just because jumping over the wall is sacrilege as well as treason. And that gives Romulus the opportunity to give this wonderful one-liner. So perish all who cross my walls. So you can turn the story from a horrific fratricide into a kind of inspiring patriotic tale.

There's another version, of course, in which Remus is killed as a sacrifice to make the wall stronger. Tim Cornell, after the founding of the city of Rome, there follows an episode which is popularly known as the rape of the Sabine women. Now, can you unravel that for us? Yes, and the death of Remus really is only the beginning of this story. I mean, the city has to be founded, and that means not just building the physical city. They need people as well.

And Romulus, he's got a few friends, I mean, some shepherds, but basically they need to get enough people to make a viable city. So the first thing Romulus does is to create an asylum. And he founds this space on the Capitoline Hill where anyone is welcome to come along. and political exiles and asylum seekers and so on and runaways and runaway slaves, criminals, etc., all gather there. And these are the first Romans.

So that's a very interesting sort of aspect of the story. But of course in order to ensure its future, these are all males and most of them near do well. And they need women in order to ensure the future of this community. Romulus apparently went around asking neighbouring cities if they would engage in a kind of intermarriage arrangement and they all refused because nobody wanted anything to do with this bunch of riffraff.

So Romulus then organises a festival and this is just a few months after the city's being created and invites all the neighbouring communities including the Sabines who are people living to the north-west. of northeast of Rome up in the hills, to come to this festival. So they all come to the festival with their young women, the daughters of presumably. And when Romulus gives a signal,

all the young Romans dash out and each grab a woman. And this is the abduction of the Sabine women, which involves rape as well. But the word rape in Latin rapery means to seize. So it's the seizure of the Sabine women. The result is, of course, that the people are very angry, and this starts a war. So the neighbouring communities start a war against Roman, and some of the nearby places are defeated very quickly,

but the people who really mean business and have got a strong leader are the Sabines under their king Titus Tatius. And everybody says, look, will you organise this war? So Titus Tatius and his army come to Rome. They set up camp on the Quirnal, which is the hill on the north-east side towards the Sabina. They capture the Capitoline, and the thing ends up with a great battle in a valley between the hills, which is later to become the Forum. So this battle in the forum takes place, and while it's raging, the women themselves intervene

and urge the men to stop fighting them. each other. So their husbands and fathers must stop, pull themselves together and come to some agreement. So they do. And the result is a joint community in which the Sabin's decide to stay on and Romulus and Titus Tatius actually become joint kings of the new double community. And finally, before we start to unpick all this, which needs some on picking. Yeah. What eventually happened to Romulus in these versions briefly? Well, he rules for many years, several decades.

He creates constitution, the Senate, all sorts of institutions and so on, fights wars against neighbouring peoples, Rome grows, and so on is very prosperous. The joint King Titusatius dies in mysterious circumstances, and Romulus was certainly in some versions to blame for this. And then in old age, Romulus himself finally disappears, and that literally happens. Different versions of what had happened to him circulated. According to the sort of pious version, he was taken up to heaven.

Right, and we've got the story, really. In the outline, I think, as detailed, almost in a shorter time, as it's possible to have from the three of you. We've got the She-Wolf, we've got the backstory, we've got the Taibo, we've got the 18-year-olds, we've got the founding of the city, we've got the bringing in, I think Mary Beard called it, it became America of its time, they all piled in. And then we've got the Sabine women, we've got the joint, we've got...

So there we are. Right, now let's try to unpick it for the rest of the program. Mary Beard, the earliest references, can you give us the earliest references for this story and how valid they are? No. I think in a word. I mean, I think the important point really is to see that all the detailed accounts that we have are really from the first century BC and later. You mean detailed in the sense of being literary, so you...

Yeah. So you don't count out as a detailed... I'm going to come to that. I'm just, you know, steering along. You want to tell the story and the narrative, you've got first century BC and... later accounts, and as Peter said, of all sorts of different varieties. Now, the game with this story has always been to say, well, look, okay, you can see it, you know, you can see it in a pretty fully fledged form in the first century BC, which is,

if we imagine, in broad terms, it's all supposed to have been sort of mythically taking place in the 8th century BC. The big question is, how does this story originate and where can we first see it? At that point, there are all kinds of different conjectures and guessing games that come along, which, of course, involve art because we have visual images of this long before we have any real Roman writing. And there are, for example, many people, me included, would point to a 4th century BC Etruscan mirror, which has on it, I can see already Peter shaking his head. Not it, Druskin.

Which has on it a very clear picture of an animal that is a plausible wolf and two kids underneath it, probably about 325 BC, perhaps 350 BC. Now, for many people, that is a clear sign that you have a wolf and twins story, i.e. Romulus and Remus in the 4th century BC. Now, that opens up a can of worms, however, because you can come along as Professor Wiseman has memorably done and say, well, I know it looks like Romulus and Remus, but actually, you know, as he's already said,

there's all sorts of stories about animals and babies and people being suckled. Just because we think of the wolf and twins as being Romulus and Remus in that canonical way, It doesn't mean that this mirror is Romulus and Remus. And you might then say, well, where do you find the first reference to it? If you knock out that mirror, you go to the third century BC, where we have a clear literary reference to a statue of twins and a wolf being put up in the centre of Rome in 296 BC.

We don't have the statue. But Livy, great historian of Rome, from whom one of the canonical versions of Romulus and Rhema's story comes, does talk explicitly about a statue in being erected of them in 296. And some people would say, look, actually this is a story which is really that late. It's a third century BC story. Who knows?

Peter Wiseman, can we stick to, So far we've got a mirror and we've got a reference as the reference in Livy to statute. Is there anything else to go on? You dispute the mirror. I dispute it as referring to Romulus and Remus because one of the other characters on the mirror is recognisably the God Hermes, Mercury. And there is another story which comes in the poet of it of Mercury being the father of the protecting gods of Romulus, the Laras, who were twins.

And so this mirror, you either have to say, well, it's a totally different version of the Romulus and Remus story in which Mercury is involved, or you say, well, Mercury is involved because the twins aren't Romulus and Remus, they're the Lari's. You can play it either way. But Mary's right, that is the earliest, as it were, contemporary pre-1st century BC evidence for the story.

Is there a certain feeling here inside this conversation that you wanted to push it back? You wanted to push it back to the 5th and 6th century BC, so you're looking for something there? Is there a reason why you want to push it back? I want to push it forward. I don't think the story of Romulus and Remus goes much back beyond 300 BC.

You see, the story that Tim was telling that the Subhine Women's story, the outcome of that is a joint community of Romans and Sabines. And that is actually what happened in the early third century when the Romans conquered the Sabina in the two 90s. And they gave the remaining subines, they incorporated the whole area into the Roman state. And they called the joint Roman state,

Quirites, no longer Romans, no longer even Latins, because the Sabine spoke a different language. So you have to have a different concept for what this new joint state is. And of course, as it turned out, you know, the Romans still were the dominant force and all the rest of it. But nevertheless, in theory, it was a joint enterprise. And so other things to be equal, I mean, this was, this idea was put forward by the great historian Momsom way back in the 19th century. And it's never been refuted, I think, that this is the obvious context. historical context for the creation of the story. And so I would, my feeling is that the story is created

some point after about 320 and developed in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries be seen. Tim, Tim Connell. I don't see why the story has to be created in that way. I mean, consciously, you know, in order to fit contemporary political circumstances, it doesn't seem to me to be that sort of story. it strikes me that there are all sorts of aspects I mean if you were going to invent a nice patriotic story about your city's origins

you wouldn't invent one that involved fratricide and rape and so on these are things that are rooted in their sort of folk tale character of it it seems to me it's much more likely to be an older story which the Romans of the third century Sorry can I just interrupt because I'm trying to get when you say older if I can reverse

I'm talking about the fifth and sixth century BC? You're just saying older than 300 years BC? Yes, I mean, of course. Right, okay. I would like it to be 5th, 6th century. I think that's perfectly reasonable. But of course, I don't know any more than anyone else. But I suspect that it's much

older than 300, yes. Mary, you wanted to go to. Yeah, because I think this is not just a kind of disagreement about evidence and about, you know, whether the twins are Romulus and Remus and what on Earth, Mercury is doing there. There's, what underlies this kind of disagreement

is really a bigger question about what we think these Roman stories were for. And my hunch is that Peter tends to think that Roman myth is a wonderfully brilliant construction, which is always in debate and trying to explain contemporary political circumstances. So if you're of a wiseman mentality, you take your story and then you think about what political circumstance might it. explain and that gives you the date. The Cornell version is to see that probably as an epiphenomenon, but an epiphenomenon on sets of much kind of more primitive, basic human stories that may go back, well, you know, six, seven, why stop at the sixth century?

You know, could go back to the 10th century BC, if you like. Peter Weissman. Well, I think what one has to remember is that myths are stories. And for every story, it is possible to ask when was it first told. I mean, every story was once told for the first time. That is necessary and necessary fact. And so for the historian, it is perfectly reasonable to say, okay, when and why, and in what circumstances,

and for what purpose was this story likely to have been created? Stories don't simply appear out of nowhere. They are told. They are created. They are told to an audience. That's what... I have to report to the listeners. There's deeply puzzled disagreement on the heart of the other.

Not puzzled, agitated. Start with you, Tim, and then go to Mary. Yes, I suppose, yes, they can't come from nowhere, but the idea that they must begin with somebody sitting there and saying, let's make up a story, surely not. Surely not. I mean, what happens, I think, is rather like the, you know, the Grimm's fairy tales.

I mean, the Brothers Grimm go around collecting stories, which are being told, but which more or less by definition are much older folk tales. But they're still first told. No, Peter, I don't buy your idea that myth is like a piston engine, you know, and somebody's invented it, you know, and here we are. One day we don't have the story of Romulus and Remus, and my goodness me, there's clever old sausage here. he invents it and now we've got it.

But I think it's an important disagreement because I think both Tim and I would probably see myth. I mean, I don't much like the term folk tale because I don't really think it explains very much. I think myth is a conversation that people are having, an imaginary conversation. And it doesn't really ever have a beginning point. The conversation shifts and changes

and it's a dynamic way of thinking about yourself in relation to the world, which isn't susceptible to saying, right, here we are in the 3rd century BC, and Remus is invented. I think if, as soon as you start talking about myth as an abstract noun, you can make statements like that and they sound plausible. Once you talk about myths, plural, myths are stories, and a story is created. And that's the way it is.

I mean, I may be wrong about when it was created, why it was created. But it was created. Somebody dreamt up the story of the twins and the she-wolf. At some point in history, pre-history, God knows when. My suggestion is around about 300. Tim's is maybe 600 or something before that. There could be a million other ways of doing it.

But at some point, somebody created the story. Tim. The trouble is that the stories aren't as convenient as that. The Romans were always extremely embarrassed, actually, by their own origin myth. and they tried to apologise for it. I mean, the fratricide itself, you know, there are all sorts of ways of getting around that

and saying, well, it wasn't Romulus, he gave the orders to his henchmen who then did it, and Romulus was terribly upset and so on. Or the she-wolf, you know, I mean, wolves are notorious predators and enemies of Rome were able to say, well, these Romans... They were the prime enemies of human being for a long time, right? The wolf from the fold. That's right.

So the Romans, you know, these beastly imperialists coming along and so on, They're the children of the wolf. Well, Roman historians are terribly upset about this, and they found ways around this, and they said, well, actually, it didn't happen like that. What happened was that the shepherd, Faustulus, who was supposed to expose the children and so. He didn't do so.

He took them home to his wife to bring up, and it so turned out that his wife was actually a prostitute, for which the Latin word is lupa. I mean, it's a slang word meaning prostitute. Same as wolf. Yeah, exactly. And so they weren't really the sons of a real wolf, they were the sons of the lupa. Do you see what I mean?

So it's a rationalisation. They were suckled by the lupor. Yeah, yeah. Not suckled by the she-walt. That's what makes it so complicated to try to analyse these stories. Because I think the bottom line is that the Roman writers are as puzzled as we are by them. And so what we are reading is both some kind of oer primitive, folk tale or whatever, and somebody's attempt to make sense of it.

And the Roman writers are as busy making sense of this the whole time as we are. Yes. And one interesting thing is there's a great deal of it comes from oral history, which we haven't mentioned, and in many civilisation for a lot of the time, oral history was considered it more reliable than writing anyway. They didn't do writing, but it was more reliable because the writing, they thought perverted history was capable of perversion that oral history wasn't. And so you have an interplating and interweaving of oral histories in different villages, town, states.

And that's another exploration, the validity of oral history, which is much stronger, I think, generally, and people give it credit for. But if we could move on just a moment, unless, Peter, you have some massive repost. I mean, it's expressed in discrete emeritus professorial terms, but still, there we go. We're talking about why it was there, why it was cleaved to, and what was significance about its contradictions, piecemeal nature. they held on to the idea of twins. There were particularly significant twins and one twins supposed to on the whole killed another twin.

That became significant in and out of Roman history and mythmaking from then on. Why do you think that was? Tim, do you want to start? Yeah, this is so puzzling, actually. And I think the trouble is that there's a lot of discussion about why twins and anthropological parallels and so on. But actually, the trouble with this twin story, I mean, normally twin stories are to explain things that are duplicated,

so that in Sparta you have two kings. Why do they have two kings? Because once there were twins and they had to share the kingdom and therefore their descendants were the two royal vandalism. And there are ways in which you could say Rome was a kind of double community. I mean, I've already talked about Romans and sabines forming two halves of a community. And the Romans had two consuls. So, you know, there are, which was Monson's explanation of,

of the twins. The trouble is that as soon as the story gets underway, one of the twins is eliminated. So you've got twins, but one has to be killed so the thing can go ahead. So you have the fratricide.

The fratricide, yes. That's what's key. I mean, there are lots of stories about not necessarily twins, but brothers quarrelling. I mean, the numitorium-moonist thing that starts off the whole thing is precisely that, but one has usurped his brother's role. And Romulus does trick Remus, doesn't he, in some versions of the story?

You know, that it really should have been Remus's right to found the city. But I think that... Sorry, Mary first and then Peter. I think it's almost impossible to say, you know, to say, why did they have this? But I think it's quite easy to see what they do with the story that they have

and how they think about it. And it becomes absolutely sensibly central in Roman political thought about themselves that they are a community which is destined to fratricide and civil war. You know, Romans... He's nodding his head, of course, he is. He always does when I say this. The point about Rome is it's absolutely destined to tear itself apart,

brother versus brother. That is indeed the version that we... was understood all too well in the middle of the first century BC when Rome was doing that. And there's that wonderful, wonderful poem by Horace when he imagines himself talking to the Roman people saying, why are you going to war against each other again? And he imagines the Roman people totally zonked out pallid, unable to answer.

And he says, I know how it is. It's because of the curse of the killing of Remus. And that sacred blood running into the earth has destroyed his descendants. Okay, very understandable in the 30s BC when there was a civil war going on. But Tim's absolutely right about the Monaster point about two consuls.

Rome was indeed ruled by two consuls. Why? Because there was a historic compromise between the so-called patricians and the so-called plebeians in the 4th century BC, which is a very good context for the creation of twin

founders in order to illustrate a double community. You know, what mattered to that community varied enormously from the 4th century BC when twins mattered most to the 1st century BC when fratricide muttered most.

Well, that would be all right if the patricians had killed all the plebeians, you know, that would be a good reason to have a brother killing a brother. But, I mean, you know, the civil wars rather interesting, you know, because on your view, Peter, the origin of the fratricide story,

it ought to be the Civil Wars. That was the time when they had to invent this, but we actually know that the Fratricide was in much earlier historians writing in 200 BC. That's certainly true, but remember that the fratricide is not the only story. There was also the version in which Remus accepts Romulus's victory in the augury contest. There's also the version in which the twins rule together. That's very, very tenuous.

I think you'd be very hard put to find anything. It's virtual. thought so. No, no, no. The trouble is with your view, Peter, is that you can go to the fourth century and you can join up all the dots and you can with your kind of ingenuity because you're brilliant at it, you can make it all fit and sound terribly convincing. But I think we perhaps ought to explain to listeners that there is no primary, contemporary evidence for that whatsoever.

You know, it is all in your head. It's a hypothesis, a historical hypothesis, which, defends on evidence and argument, and the evidence, as you rightly say, is utterly inadequate. However, if you look at the first century BC, when we have got all this material, when we really do have versions and competing versions of this, you can see all sorts of ways

in which those extremely clever Romans are using that story to talk about themselves. Absolutely, in the first century. I agree. And that's when we have the written, that's when I've been Ovid and on it goes. Tim, can we talk then about the ideological baggage that Romanus and Rima's story gave to writers that Mary's hinted out on, said this is when the thing got going. She said at the beginning of somebody got going for her when the literary source is turned up.

And what sort of baggage, what ideology, people just took what they wanted from it, it was so contradictory and so on? Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean, first of all, this whole story was used as an emblem for Rome from the very beginning. I mean, the thing you didn't mention when you talked about early representations of this was the first set of silver coins that the city of Rome produced, which have on the reverse 270, 270, 269 is the sort of date that the experts give it. that on the reverse

you have the wolf and the twins and Romano, the Romans. So the wolf and twins already stands for Rome, you know, at that date. So it means an awful lot to them. But looking at it in another way, I think the most interesting ideological aspect of this is the story of the asylum.

The fact that Rome is a community that is open to outsiders that accepts people, even if they're criminals and runaways and so on. Because Rome was throughout its history, a society that expanded and incorporated, first of all, its neighbours, through conquest, through intermarried, that's another thing. And then through the institution of slavery, where they brought outsiders, outsiders into Rome as slaves, and then freed them. And freed slaves in Rome automatically obtained the Roman society. citizenship, which is very remarkable fact.

So by the first century, the time when these sources are being written, the population of Rome is very largely consisting of people who were either themselves outsiders, who'd become citizens, or were descended one or two generations back from non-Rombs, from outsiders. Marybeard. Yeah, I think that's about the most important thing. And I think Rome's story about itself is so very, very different. from any other story that we, so far as we know, that any ancient city told about itself.

Rome is constantly saying we somehow originate elsewhere. We originate with migrants. We're in asylum. Or certainly don't want to take us to the rival foundation myths, but there is a rival foundation myth in the story of Aeneas founding Rome coming from Troy. And Aeneas, yeah, again, Aeneas is the refugee. and Rome is seeing itself quite unlike the Athenians and the Spartans. The Athenians and the Spartans think that they kind of come up directly from the soil of their city.

They're autotoxygenous. They come from the very ground. Rome envisages itself as always foreign. So Rome is a city that is always foreign to itself. It's an extraordinary and very powerful political myth. Yes. And all its cultural attributes and so on, were borrowed from elsewhere.

So everything the Romans are able to do, the engineering, their warfare and so on, these are things that they've borrowed from other people, from the Carthaginians, from the Greeks or whatever. There's nothing that's sort of intrinsically Roman. It's all borrowed. I think the point about the asylum is absolutely crucial that right from the start, the idea that, you know,

everyone's welcome. You know, if you can make a contribution, no questions are asked, you're welcome. But it's also true. Here too, we have a great variety of attitudes in the surviving literature. Some authors refer to the asylum admiringly. Many authors refer to the asylum in a shocked toe. The riff-ruff of, that was the phrase Tim used earlier on,

and that's characteristic of some of the ancient sources themselves. So, and this too is familiar from our own time. Not only do you have the community proud of being well-futable, to incomers, but you also have forces within that community who resist it and are furious about it. We shouldn't forget the gender aspect here either, truthfully, because the other thing that you can fit interestingly into that is the story about the rape of the Sabines.

That phrase kind of has become a bit of a slogan, the Rape of the Sabines. What the Rape of the Sabines is, is the origin story of Roman marriage. That is the first Roman marriage. And Roman marriage, then, is conceived in terms of abduction, rape, seizure. And that also, I think, is something terribly important, absolutely buried in deep inside Roman views about domestic life, the family, and the role of women.

Because when the women interfere between these two forces fighting each other, the women we get from the reports that they are, have already had children by their Roman camps, so they are saying, you're killing the father of my child. That's right. And to the other chap, you're killing the mother of me, the father of me. so that gives them unique peacemaking possibilities. We have managed to get through this without mentioning Andrea Carandini, a contemporary scholar,

who has found physical evidence for the existence of Romulus and Remus, which doesn't carry much weight with any of you from your notes, but I have mentioned his name. Does anyone want to say anything before we move out? Well, Andrea discovered an 8th century BC wall on the Palatine on the approximate line, which was supposed to be that of Romulus's wall, in one version of the story. But again, there are lots of versions of the story.

Some people say, some ancient sources say that Romulus fortified just the Palatine. Some say his wall went all the way around the Palatine and the Forum and the Capitol. So, you know, it's a wall that he's found. The rest of it is his interpretation. The important thing about Carandini is that he is an extremely distinct. English archaeologist who has made this, in our terms, completely barking conclusions about what he's found on the Palatine. What it shows you, though, is that go to Italy now,

and the idea of finding Romulus's Rome really still is important. You know, when you go to Rome on the 21st of April, and they are still celebrating the foundation of the city by Romulus. Thank you. And the Aeneas may have tied up because Aeneas is supposed to found it, Albert and Alba directly run down to it. Ammeles, though there's a very much. all that. That's another program. Thank you very much, Mary Beard, Peter Weissman, Tim Corny.

And next week we'll talk about the War of 1812, that is, to say, the war between America and Britain. Thank you for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4.