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Rome was one, they are quite obviously problematic. How could the very first founders have come to possess all the knowledge and expertise that these ideas presupposed they had? Recently, A. Carandini – an archaeologist who has managed to convince himself that the foundation myth of Rome is actually historical – has hit upon a possible solution.⁹

According to Varro, the ploughing ritual was – despite Varro’s various Latin etymologies – actually Etruscan, and Plutarch, in his biography of Romulus, says that Romulus summoned people from Etruria to instruct him.¹⁰ Carandini says: ‘Romulus sent for priests from Etruria, from whom he learned how to found an urbs (which implies the prior foundation of urbes on the right bank of the Tiber).’¹¹ This, however, only really pushes the problem back in time: when and how did the Etruscans learn how to found an urbs? Moreover, since the ritual was believed – rightly or wrongly – to be Etruscan, it would be a very easy assumption to make that Romulus must have turned to the Etruscans for help (as the Romans in later times did on occasion for various issues). But it is in some ways an unnecessary assumption, since the city of Alba Longa, from whose kings Romulus was ←24 | 25→said to have been descended, was also an urbs.¹² It would, therefore, be comparable (certainly as far as the value of the evidence goes) to suppose that Romulus could have learnt how to found an urbs from his own family.¹³ Furthermore, the ruling house of Alba Longa was allegedly descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas and, according to Virgil, Aeneas certainly knew how to perform the ploughing ritual, as did – or so it is implied – even the settlers from Tyre who founded the north African city of Carthage.¹⁴ They, presumably, had not called on the Etruscans for help. It would seem that the details of this supposedly Etruscan ritual were very widely known, or so the Romans could imagine; clearly they just took the performance of the ritual for granted, no matter how improbable the results.

      When it comes to the supposed foundation of Rome, none of this evidence, the story of the Etruscan priests included, is of any historical value whatsoever, not least because the very idea of a foundation, prior to which Rome did not exist and after which Rome did, is unhistorical. And, it hardly needs to be said, Romulus is himself an entirely mythical figure. He simply did not exist. What this evidence does show, however, is just how ingrained the idea of the city-state was in the Roman mindset (as the country perhaps is in the contemporary mindset), and this has quite significant implications for the nature of the evidence (see below).

It may come as no surprise that it has long been argued that these Roman ideas about the way cities were founded actually developed at a much later date. It appears that they developed out of Roman colonising activities (and note that, in the fully developed version of the story, Rome was a colony too, of Alba Longa). While the Romans may have come to believe that they founded their colonies in the same way that Romulus had supposedly founded Rome, it is much more likely that they simply ←25 | 26→assumed that the rituals they used to found their colonies had been performed when Rome was founded.¹⁵ Although, it must be said, not everyone agrees with that.¹⁶

In contrast to the idea that Rome was founded at a specific moment – indeed on a specific day – sometime in the mid-eighth century, the archaeological evidence shows that the site of Rome had actually been inhabited from a considerably earlier date and, more importantly, that the settlement and later city had developed over a long period.¹⁷ Even without such evidence, it is reasonable enough to expect that the city and state of Rome took some time to develop, although that expectation is obviously difficult to reconcile with the ancient idea of a precise and dateable act of foundation. Under these circumstances, the only way in which the cake can be had and eaten too is to reduce the act of founding a city to little more than a ritual and/or political undertaking, something that could even be carried out inside an existing settlement, thus potentially marking out some part of that settlement from the rest of the surrounding community.

So it is that Carandini, who very much wants to have his cake as well as eat it (and in more ways than one, since his approach involves defending certain, selected ancient accounts of the foundation of Rome, while also effectively rewriting those accounts to solve all the problems that that initial defence creates), claims that the founding of Rome essentially amounted only to ‘the invention of a new form of organization and government.’¹⁸ Thus – contrary to what the ancient sources imagine – what Romulus did, Carandini claims, ‘involved not the realization of any plans for a city but a series of ceremonial acts and sacred prohibitions that instilled into ←26 | 27→the soil and the people a will to power expressed from the start in forms that we might term “modern” – that is, juridical, political, governmental, constitutional – masked but not negated by sacred and holy institutions.’¹⁹

But this approach just does not work. The story has Romulus found his city on essentially uninhabited land.²⁰ The literary evidence for the supposed foundation of Rome on the Palatine hill in the mid-eighth century bc cannot, therefore, be made to fit with the archaeological evidence for the much earlier and more extensive inhabitation of the site of Rome. Carandini’s response to this objection is, typically, to dismiss those details in the literary evidence that do not fit with his reconstruction; hence, in this instance, he claims that ‘Rome had to have arisen from nothingness [in the Roman accounts] so that Romulus’s achievement could appear to have happened without prior groundwork and constitute a miracle: the founding.’²¹ That, however, directly contradicts the ancient story (which Carandini, in this particular case, wants to retain) that Romulus had to call on the Etruscans to show him what to do. Why was that detail also not completely excised? There is after all nothing miraculous in following someone else’s instructions.²²

      As for the political and, it could almost be said, ‘constitutional’ side of things, and the supposed establishment of the state, the details are quite clearly anachronistic. The very idea of a state – that is, of an organised political community under a single government – also had to develop, and there is similarly evidence that suggests that this too was something that took time and, moreover, that this was something that was variously asserted and contested in a number of different ways (see below).

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      What all this means is that, unfortunately, what the Romans have to say about the origins and early development of their city-state is largely unusable, simply because it takes for granted the existence of the city-state from the moment of Rome’s supposed foundation and, even more improbably, presupposes the existence of the very idea of the city-state even before the creation of the city or state itself (although these are not the only reasons why the use of the literary evidence is extremely difficult). Once Rome had been founded, as far as later Romans were concerned – at least, the ones who wrote and whose works have survived – Rome existed as a city-state, with a citizen body, various political structures and so on. There are further consequences of this approach too.

      II

      At the time when the first city-states of central Italy were starting to come into existence, other social groups and structures already existed in the region, and indeed continued to exist. The first city-states did not, after all, appear from nowhere and out of nothing, as the archaeological evidence shows.

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