Every culture and society has its own understanding of its origins. These tend to be conceptualised in a myth, or a founding legend, which provides the justification for a society’s existence and its current form. In India, for example, this takes place in the form of the legendary emperor Bharata, who (allegedly) conquered all of India. These founding legends tend to resonate very strongly with any society decades or even centuries after its original “founding”.
Therefore, it is not surprising if we observe that many of these founding legends tend to be heavily biased (to lightly put it). Good values, divine intervention and heroic characters perfect in every way are common themes of most founding stories. The emperor Bharata was said to have “counted the teeth of lions and tigers” for fun as a child, and soon grew up to be a virtuous and pious ruler. Similarly, the image of the brave, adventurous conquistador forging a new future in the New World has become a core tenet of Spanish mythos. In this case, the legend of the conquistador represented a new era of Spanish dominance and superiority in the 15th century – a new beginning for Spanish identity.
However, there is one interesting exception: Rome. The story of the founding of Rome is a far cry from “moral righteousness”, or the heroically virtuous figures in Indian and Spanish literature. According to Roman legend, Romulus and Remus were twins who were left by a stream (which in itself is another complicated story that we will not go into). After an interesting childhood involving a nurturing she-wolf and an adoptive farmer, the twins decided to establish a village on the banks of the river Tiber, in Central Italy, at around 700BC. However, the twins had a disagreement on the precise location of their new settlement: Romulus preferred one site, while Remus preferred another (We don’t know why). The dispute escalated, and Romulus killed Remus when he jumped over fortifications that Romulus was constructing at his site.
And it doesn’t get better: Romulus made it known that his settlement was to be a refuge for anyone who wanted to join – even including those cast out by other Italian cities such as criminals and murderers. However, he faced a problem: the riff raff he attracted were all male. To resolve the scarcity of the opposite sex, Romulus invited residents of neighbouring cities for a huge celebration in the new, growing settlement of Rome. At a certain point during the festival, Romulus gave a prearranged signal, upon which his men seized the wives and daughters of his guests and claimed them as their own. When his disgruntled guests declared war Romulus and his men, with divine help from the god Jupiter, forced them back and in so doing secured a stable position for their new settlement.
A large portion of this story does seem like enemy propaganda, designed to vilify the Romans and their aggressive behaviour. In fact, many of the underlying themes of this story, such as civil conflict, kinslaying, as well as belligerence against foreign cities are common points of contention held against Rome. If this were the case, we would expect a more whitewashed version of this tale from Roman writers and leaders. However, even Roman sources from multiple time periods repeat this story when talking about the origins of Rome. At best, we have an “alternative” version of Rome’s founding: The famous Aeneid, which talks about the Trojan hero Aeneas who travelled to Italy following the Trojan War to become the ancestor of the Romans. But even that has been worked in to reconcile with the story of Remus and Romulus. This foundation story isn’t propaganda – it is genuinely what Romans believed to be the story of their forefathers. Were the Romans glorifying the violent manner of their origin? Could they – as many of their ancient enemies so vehemently claim – really be inherently savage and aggressive?
To draw that conclusion, however, one would have to adopt an inflexible view of foundation stories. Founding myths are created by societies as a projection of their own values and ideals. Roman writers could thus be projecting their own, contemporary concerns into their interpretation of their origins. For example, the famous historian Livy frequently criticized Rome’s aggressive foreign expansion, and wrote much of his work during the civil conflict and Roman-on-Roman bloodletting in the 1st Century BC. With this context in mind, Livy’s work on the founding of Rome suddenly makes sense: it was a parallel to his “present”. With all likelihood, Roman writers could have consciously or unconsciously framed their past with the issues that formed their contemporary surroundings.
On a slightly more positive note, this also explains the diversity of Romulus’ people. Rome’s founding story is also unique in that its original citizens are not homogenous or monolithic. The narrative of ethnic “purity”, prevalent in many other founding myths, just isn’t present. In fact, Roman writers are fairly open about the imperfect nature (to put it lightly) of their ancestors. This is once again no surprise: Rome was famously multicultural for its time (not by ours of course). Roman citizenship was often granted to conquered territories as a means for pacifying and integrating their populations. By the reign of the Emperor Caracalla in 212 AD, almost every free individual residing in a Roman Empire stretching from Spain to Turkey was likely to be a Roman citizen. No other classical civilisation can claim this merit, particularly because Roman citizenship wasn’t just titular, but also denoted legal protection and the right to vote (in a limited form). Therefore, it is not surprising that Roman writers projected the multicultural nature of their contemporary societies into their past.
This theory is obviously not bullet-proof, as it does have its weaknesses. It would be a stretch for us to assume that the story of Romulus and Remus is a direct translation of the concerns that Roman writers hundreds of years later grappled with. Livy and Cicero obviously did not spontaneously think of the same founding story: the legend of the founders of Rome predated their lives, and was more likely preserved through oral tradition before being solidified in text. There is, however, no way for us to gauge oral traditions in say the 5th Century BC – and as a result, we have no way of knowing if the oral tradition was different before it was articulated textually. Perhaps Romans in the 5th Century had different concerns, and thus, had a different version of Romulus and Remus. Maybe it wasn’t as gory and violent, and maybe it was more akin to the more traditional founding myths that we are familiar with – we may never know.
To me, the story of Rome’s founding is poignant as it shows us that there is a lot of history in our myths. Our mythical ancestors probably did not exist – but in their portrayal, we may be able to find out more about our societies at different points in our past. Perhaps we should take a look back at the legends taught to us and wonder – if there are biases of our own that we have unconsciously projected onto our ancestors.
Historia Populi 