Scholars' incredible inability to add two and two
125 years ago, Theodor Mommsen gave crushing evidence to prove that no piece of Roman history - meaning the traditional history, as told by Livy, Appian, Polybius and the other ancient historians - before 380 BC, and few before 275 BC, were reliable. Theodor Mommsen was not only one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome who ever lived, but one of the most widely read. Every specialist since is familiar with his work. And in fact his powerful argument - first set out in an article in a magazine called Hermes in 1886 - has been expanded and proved again and again by many other scholars, in particular the Italian Ettore Pais.
Get it? No story told about Rome before 380 BC, and precious few before 275 BC, are reliable history. The matter is complicated by the fact that, while the stories are certainly unhistorical, the stages in political evolution they describe do seem to have happened as they are described. Rome started out as a monarchy of sorts; it was ruled by Etruscan kings for about a century; when the Etruscans were driven out, it became a republic. And there seems to be a basic reliability, in spite of numerous variants, about the lists of consuls and other officials that were handed down. But the history, the history itself, is not history. It is a bunch of stories. It is a vast, indeed amazing, body of legends.
This is perhaps more significant to me than to many of my readers, because, being Italian - and with family connections with the city of Rome itself - these are my heroic past. Italian children learn stories about Romulus, Numa, Tarquinius the Proud, or Furius Camillus, at school, like American children learn about Washington and Lincoln and Irish children about Brian Boruma and Daniel O'Connell. But the fact that these stories are all just stories struck me very forcefully.
Now when the Greeks came to look at the Romans, the one thing they did not find was a large body of stories such as they had, about various gods and their interactions with each other and with heroes who were themselves sons of gods and often hardly to be distinguished from gods. (Herakles, Helen, Menelaus and Diomedes, to mention only a few, received divine as well as heroic cult.) And not seeing the kind of mythology they were familiar with, they concluded that the Romans - these people with their enormous amount of "historical" stories and heroes - had no mythology.
The Greeks could be excused for this gross category mistake. Scholars ever since Mommsen cannot. That textbooks, and indeed scholarly investigations, about Roman origins, continue to be produced, in which "the problem of Roman mythology" is seriously argued and repeated, is inexcusable and an intellectual scandal.
Get it? No story told about Rome before 380 BC, and precious few before 275 BC, are reliable history. The matter is complicated by the fact that, while the stories are certainly unhistorical, the stages in political evolution they describe do seem to have happened as they are described. Rome started out as a monarchy of sorts; it was ruled by Etruscan kings for about a century; when the Etruscans were driven out, it became a republic. And there seems to be a basic reliability, in spite of numerous variants, about the lists of consuls and other officials that were handed down. But the history, the history itself, is not history. It is a bunch of stories. It is a vast, indeed amazing, body of legends.
This is perhaps more significant to me than to many of my readers, because, being Italian - and with family connections with the city of Rome itself - these are my heroic past. Italian children learn stories about Romulus, Numa, Tarquinius the Proud, or Furius Camillus, at school, like American children learn about Washington and Lincoln and Irish children about Brian Boruma and Daniel O'Connell. But the fact that these stories are all just stories struck me very forcefully.
Now when the Greeks came to look at the Romans, the one thing they did not find was a large body of stories such as they had, about various gods and their interactions with each other and with heroes who were themselves sons of gods and often hardly to be distinguished from gods. (Herakles, Helen, Menelaus and Diomedes, to mention only a few, received divine as well as heroic cult.) And not seeing the kind of mythology they were familiar with, they concluded that the Romans - these people with their enormous amount of "historical" stories and heroes - had no mythology.
The Greeks could be excused for this gross category mistake. Scholars ever since Mommsen cannot. That textbooks, and indeed scholarly investigations, about Roman origins, continue to be produced, in which "the problem of Roman mythology" is seriously argued and repeated, is inexcusable and an intellectual scandal.