When in Rome did they start doing as the Romans did?

Archived from Revise and Dissent

Julian Forum. Photo by Gauis Caecilius.

You may have noticed a the news story that the skeleton of a 30-year-old woman had been uncovered during excavations in the Julian Forum. They tend to share a headline which suggests that the skeleton is 300 years older than Rome. This is peculiar. The LA Times for instance says that the skeleton dates from the tenth century BC. Rome was said to have been founded in 753 BC, which is the eighth century BC. Mathematical puzzles aside, how do the archaeologists know this woman dates from before Rome?

As it happens she was found with a necklace and some pins, and she’s not alone. There are many cremations, so there’s plenty of ways of giving a rough date to the burial. It’s not the date of the burial that I’m questioning. It’s the foundation of Rome. Famously it wasn’t built in a day, but does it really make sense to say it was built in a specific year either?

According to popular belief in the Imperial period Rome was founded on the 21st of April, 753 BC. There are no historical records from this period. The earliest Roman historian we know of is Quintus Fabius Pictor of the third century BC, but his work has since been lost. The main sources for the foundation of Rome date from the Augustan period. Livy’s History of Rome starts with Aeneas fleeing Troy and fetching up in Latium. It moves on to tell of the Kings of Alba Longa and then on to the tale of Romulus and Remus. The story is told in more poetic form by Vergil in his Aeneid. Academics might argue over the precise definition of myth, but this would appear to be firmly in that category. How reliable is it?

To some extent this is a matter of personal taste. Heinrich Schliemann read Homer as history and found Troy. Though his desire to find a rich Troy meant he smashed through the city of Priam, inadvertantly causing damage more thorough than anything Homer mentions. Moses Finley tackled the relationship between myth and history in the paper “The Trojan War” JHS 84 (1964) pp 1-20 (available via JSTOR). In it he looks at other myths which can be tested. like the Song of Roland, a four thousand line poem from the eleventh or twelfth century about a battle in AD 778.

In the Song of Roland, a nephew of Charlemagne, fights against a Saracen ambush and is victorious against overwhelming odds, though he is still dead by the end. In reality the battle was fought against Christian Basques. If you belong to the “there may be something in it” school of mythological interpretation, there appears to have been a battle, but beyond that the myth is a reflection of contemporary times. Finley also tackles the Nibelungenlied and tales of the battle of Kosovo and comes to the conclusion that myths are unreliable when it comes to times they purport to describe. Why therefore should we place faith in myth as many people do? He notes “In the absence of literary or archaeological documentation, there is no immediate control over this will to believe.”

That the Iliad is questionable should be no surprise. There’s a mention of wealthy Corinth supposedly describing the city in a period when it was nowhere special. The inclusion is clearly from the period when the Iliad was being written, when Corinth was wealthy. What contemporary events could have influenced the myth told by Livy and Vergil?

Both Livy and Vergil were writing in the Augustan period when Augustus was reshaping Rome. Augustus was a master propagandist and was also re-writing the past. Augustus gained his position by constantly referring back to Rome’s past. In the Res Gestae he states: “I received no magistracy offered contrary to the customs of the ancestors” (section 6), despite becoming the first emperor. History is not the only way of connecting yourself to the past, there’s also genealogy, and Augustus was keen on this. He drew his inheritance back to mythical time. He considered renaming himself Romulus, and in his own forum stood statues of the kings of Alba Longa and Aeneas. Augustus was drawing explicit parallels between his own position and Rome’s origins and for Rome to have an origin it needed a founder and a foundation. The tradition of Rome being founded by Romulus is all part of Augustus’s genealogy tracing him back to the divine. Does a modern history need a foundation moment for Rome?

I recently attended a seminar by T.P. Wiseman (who pointed me to the Finley paper) on Archaeology and Myth which touched on this in relation to ongoing work by Andrea Carandini. Carandini, if it didn’t sound like an unwarranted slur on his excavation technique, could be described as a modern Schliemann. His work is the opposite of Schilemann’s treasure hunting, but he does share a belief that you can read myth as history. The news reports also follow this line by suggesting the woman found is from before Rome by 300 or 200 years which only makes sense if you accept the Roman foundation myth. As an interpretation this works for both the pro-myth and anti-myth camps, but as excavation continues it will be interesting to see how interpretation develops, because if there are burials from this period then where did the bodies come from?

My guess is that they date the settlements on the nearby hills (see this map from a UTexas course). The Julian Forum is in an area that used to be marshy, near the Palatine, Capolitine and Esquiline Hills. It would make an adequate burial ground for anyone living on those hills in the same period, so we should also expect settlement in what is now Rome from the period 300 or 200 years before the Romulan foundation.

How do we reconcile this earlier settlement with the idea that Rome dates from April 21, 753BC? Was the area abandoned for a couple of centuries before refoundation? What happens a settlement from the ninth century is found? Is this settlement found dating from 100 years before Rome? What about settlement on site from 50 years before Rome’s foundation? At the moment it would be premature to say this woman is an early Roman there is a gap between this burial and the possible foundation. It’ll be interesting to see if this gap is real, or simply a result of people being reluctant to dig beyond classical levels in search of Iron Age Rome.

Our relatively poor knowledge of early Iron Age Rome is understandable. Put yourself in the position of an archaeologist who has permits to dig to find Rome’s earliest history. If you find remains from the late eighth century would you really be willing to rip them up and go deeper to see if there’s anything earlier? What happens if you find nothing? It’s good science. You would have tested your hypothesis that you had found the earliest layer and the lack of finds would be consistent with this. But in the process you would have destroyed irreplaceable structures from the period you were investigating.

A modern myth is that one find will overturn everything we thing about the past. Historical evidence, particularly for ancient history, is often patchy and conclusions a drawn on the balance of probabilities rather than certainties. Yet this cemetery could be part of a process that, in twenty years time, leads to textbooks ceasing to draw a firm divide between prehistoric settlement in Rome and the historical city.

In the news at:

• The Discovery Channel
• The Mumbai Mirror, with an enlargeable photo
• The BBC

among many other places.
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