2, that I should try to publish a collection of my papers on early Rome. It is an additional pleasure and privilege to be able to offer it to him in the year, if not quite on the occasion, of his eightieth birthday.
Thanks are also due to Philip Dunshea, the commissioning editor at Peter Lang, for his help with organising the project and for his supportive approach from the very start, Lucy Melville, for seeing the book through the various stages of production and the press’ anonymous referees for all their useful feedback. With such excellent advice from so many different sources, it goes without saying that all the problems and errors that remain are entirely my own. The research and writing of Chapters 1, 2 and 6 were greatly helped by a Marsden grant and I am extremely grateful to the Royal Society of New Zealand for its financial support. Finally, special thanks are also due to my wife Catherine and my son Aiden, for their support and for everything else.
It was Joachim Fugmann’s incredibly useful and excellently produced commentary on the De viris illustribus that first prompted me to think of Peter Lang. It seemed altogether not without a certain appropriateness.
With one exception, all of the following essays have been published before: ‘The People and the State in Early Rome’, in Andrew Brown and John Griffiths, eds, The Citizen: Past and Present (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2017), 63–91; ‘The Oath per Iovem lapidem and the Community in Archaic Rome’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 153 (2010), 25–42 (Bad Orb: J. D. Sauerländers Verlag); ‘Rome’s Treaties with Carthage: Jigsaw or Variant Traditions?’, in Carl Deroux, ed., Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History XIV, Collection Latomus 315 (Brussels: Éditions ←ix | x→Latomus, 2008), 84–94 (Leuven: Peeters); ‘Ancient Historical Thought and the Development of the Consulship’, Latomus 67 (2008), 328–41 (Leuven: Peeters); ‘The Roman Nobility, the Early Consular Fasti, and the Consular Tribunate’, in Jeremy Armstrong and James H. Richardson, eds, Politics and Power in Early Rome (509–264 bc), Antichthon 51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 77–100; ‘“Firsts” and the Historians of Rome’, Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte 63 (2014), 17–37 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag); ‘L. Iunius Brutus the Patrician and the Political Allegiance of Q. Aelius Tubero’, Classical Philology 106 (2011), 155–61 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
I am grateful to the several publishers for their permission to reprint these works. I have made some modifications to each, to try to take into account more recent work, where it may be useful or may have affected the argument, to address various other matters and also to reduce some of the repetition of material between the different chapters. It should be noted, however, that a certain amount of repetition could not be avoided: although this is a book, designed to be read like most other books, from start to finish, I wanted to ensure that each individual essay nonetheless remained intelligible in and by itself. I have also added translations of the Greek and Latin.
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For early Rome, historiographic study must precede historical.1
It is now twenty-five years since the publication of T. J. Cornell’s magisterial history of early Rome, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 bc). And it is some measure of Cornell’s achievement that, even after a quarter of a century and even though recent archaeological discoveries have made sections of it obsolete, his book remains the standard work of its kind on the subject in the English language. At the time of its publication, reviewers were full of praise. The book was welcomed as ‘a truly magnificent achievement’, and rightly so.2
As any good book should, The Beginnings of Rome also prompted disagreement and debate. There was one issue in particular about which many expressed reservations, and that was Cornell’s handling of the literary evidence, in the historicity of which he had placed considerable confidence. For a number of reviewers, that confidence was misplaced.3
The problem is simple: while the Romans generally came to date the foundation of Rome to sometime in the mid-eighth century bc, no one at Rome wrote history until the end of the third century, and it is not clear that Rome’s first historians had access to anything much in the way of genuine or reliable evidence from more than a century or so before their own day. Recent archaeological discoveries, which have pushed Rome’s origins further back in time, have only (or ought only to have) made the ←1 | 2→situation worse. Since historians of antiquity are so used to dealing with lengthy periods of time, on account of the paucity of the evidence, it is all too easy to overlook the sheer length of time involved and all that that means. How could Fabius Pictor, Rome’s first historian, have possibly known anything much, or even anything at all, about what had happened several hundred years before his own day?
Further complicating matters is the fact that Fabius Pictor’s work has not survived, while the literary evidence for early Rome that has comes from some century and a half later, and often even later still. Much had happened during that time, and not all of it was beneficial to the preservation or reconstruction of an accurate account of the events of Rome’s past. A lot of it may have been detrimental. There are all manner of issues that need to be taken into account, from questions of evidence, research, methods and purpose, to conceptions of truth and plausibility, standards of honesty, the influence of later events on the traditions of the past, and even the simple understanding of historical change and development. It cannot just be taken for granted (although it often is) that people living more than 2,000 years ago consistently worked with methods and to standards that are recognised today and that the only difference is one of degree.
It is really very easy to see why Cornell’s reviewers did not share his optimistic assessment of what the Romans had to say about Rome’s distant past. And yet, despite the nature and scale of the problem, the seriousness of the criticism and, it must be said, the overwhelming persuasiveness of many of the objections to Cornell’s position and approach, it is fair to say that Cornell’s general assessment of the literary evidence has nonetheless been influential and can readily be detected in the work of a number of British scholars in particular. Even more significant, however, is a recent assessment of Cornell’s book as ‘more skeptical’ in its handling of that evidence.4 That claim was made in comparison with the work of A. Carandini and should be understood in that context, but it nonetheless stands in striking contrast to the views of a quarter of a century ago. So what has happened to move scholarship so far in the direction of the very position, and indeed even beyond it, that had earlier invited so much stern and valid criticism?
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The specific circumstance behind Carandini’s optimism – that optimism that makes Cornell’s position one of scepticism by comparison – is, of course, the discovery of traces of what may be a wall at the foot of part of the Palatine hill, a discovery that has prompted Carandini to claim that the foundation myth of Rome is actually historical.5 And it may well seem to follow that, if the stories the Romans told about the very origins of Rome are somehow historical, then what they said about later times ought to be historical too.
The position of Carandini and his followers is not new. A comparable reaction can be found in scholarship – work that has long since been abandoned – from about a century ago, following the archaeological discoveries of G. Boni, in this case in the Roman Forum. At that time, as more recently, the archaeological evidence was used to justify the almost complete
