Unit 3 Roman Mythology
2.MYTHS OF THE FOUNDING OF ROME
Skim and scan the following passage and answer the following questions.
1.What does the story of Romulus and Remus tell about the founding of the city of Rome?
2. What does the story of Aeneas tell about the founding of the city of Rome?
Reading
The Romans did not develop a story about how the world was created, but they did attach great importance to how the city of Rome was founded. Two more popular stories developed about the city¨s beginnings: the story of the twins Romulus and Remus, and the tale of Aeneas.
The story of Romulus and Remus is best known from its account in the work of Livy, a Roman historian of the 1st century bc. The twins were the sons of the god Mars and a woman named Rhea Silvia. When they were babies, Romulus and Remus¨s great uncle set them floating on the Tiber River to die. The great uncle had stolen royal power from the twins¨ grandfather and did not want the boys to survive to challenge his right to power. But a female wolf found Romulus and Remus and cared for them until a man who looked after sheep (shepherd) discovered them. The man and his wife took the boys in and raised them as their own children. Years later, after restoring their grandfather to his throne, Romulus and Remus decided to found a city of their own. However, the two quarreled, and in the following fight Remus died. In some versions of the story Romulus killed him, in other versions people who followed Romulus did so. After his brother¨s death, Romulus named the new city Rome and became its first king. According to Varro, the date that Romulus founded Rome was 753 bc.
Romulus and Remus
Left to drown at the edge of the flooding Tiber River, Romulus and Remus were found and raised by a wolf. As men, the brothers returned to the spot where they had been abandoned. There, they founded the city of Rome. The Romans celebrated the festival of Parilia, today called the Natalis Romae, or the birth of Rome, on April 21 to commemorate the day the brothers founded the city.
The other story of Rome¨s founding followed the origins of the city to Aeneas, the son of the female god, or goddess, Venus and the Trojan prince Anchises. Aeneas came from the city of Troy in Asia Minor, which according to tradition was seized by Greek forces during the Trojan War. The war was fought in the late 13th or early 12th century bc, and it forms the time and place for the epic poem the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer. Although Aeneas¨s role in the Iliad is small, Roman story holds that after the war he led a group of Trojan survivors who left Troy and eventually arrived at Carthage, where the queen, Dido, fell in love with Aeneas. But he left her and traveled to Italy, where he founded Rome.
Aeneas and Anchises
Aeneas was the mythological prince of Troy and the hero of the Aeneid, the epic written by the Roman poet Virgil in the 1st century BC. This painting depicts Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, on his back while fleeing from Troy. The painting by Lionello Spada (1576-1622) is in the Louvre museum in Paris, France.
Scholars believe that the story of Aeneas was accepted during the 3rd century bc, when Rome was developing as a nation and its citizens sought to make the city more respected by connecting it to the famous figures of Greek mythology. It was difficult, therefore, for later writers to make the 400-year interval consistent between the story of Aeneas, which took place in the 12th century bc, and the story of Romulus and Remus, which occurred in the 8th century bc. The poet Virgil found a method to deal with the problem in his epic the Aeneid, which describes Aeneas marrying Lavinia, daughter of the king of Latium, a kingdom that occupied the future land of Rome. Through this marriage, Aeneas became the first of a line of kings and a direct ancestor of Romulus and the Romans.
Most of the other early stories of Rome have to do with the traditional Seven Kings, who were the first seven rulers of Rome. One of the best-known stories about the rule of Romulus is the so-called Rape of the Sabines. According to this story, to make certain the future of Rome, Romulus and his band of followers needed wives who would bear children to make certain the future of the new city. They invited their neighbors, the Sabine people, to a festival and then took away by force the daughters of the Sabines. A war broke out between the two countries, and peace was recovered only when the Sabine women declared their preference for their Roman husbands. The Sabines then joined the Romans in a single country.
The second Roman king was Numa Pompilius, whom the Romans believed to have invented their religious institutions. Works of art describe Numa as a man who looked like a religious minister with a long white beard. Some story tells that the fourth king, Ancus Martius (whose name means ＾warlike￣), seized many neighboring towns and greatly increased Roman land. The sixth king, Servius Tullius, developed the first census, or counting of the population and their land and houses. According to tradition, Servius Tullius also built the first city wall.