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XI. A BIT OF EARLY HISTORY
The salt-marsh Tiber plain, with its small hills on which the ancestral Romans lived in huts, lay near sea level among the nestling mountains that form most of the Italian Peninsula. Iron Age Rome was surrounded by enemies, whom Rome either killed or absorbed. Most of these were tribal in nature, much like—let’s say—North American Iroquois, or African Zulus, or the European Kelts. As with modern cities like Greater Tokyo or Greater London or even Greater New York, Rome started out as separate villages that were swallowed up over time by a single urban juggernaut.
To the north and northwest of Rome (by distances measured a few miles at a time, often from hilltop to hilltop) across the Tiber were the Etruscans. To the east, in the Sabine mountains, which themselves lie in the embrace of the Appenines, were the Sabines and other mountain tribes that harried the early Romans. To the south lay the Alban Mountains (little more than large hills, most of them, none over 1,000 feet high, but still rumbling and smoking with geothermal forces).
Most of what you know about the dim origins of earliest Rome, you learn from later Roman writers (Livy, Pliny, Ovid, et al) who themselves relied on legends and histories embroidered over centuries. Sometimes, you put the archeological record together with the legends, and you get surprising concordance, as on the legendary founding date of Rome (753 B. C. ). In some ways, we know a lot more about primordial Rome than did the merely ancient Romans just mentioned.
According to one ancient legend—which Ovid doctored and embroidered for The Aeneid, the great court epic of Augustus in the so-called Golden Age around the birth of Jesus—Rome was founded by a Trojan refugee from the Homeric Wars. In fact, Ovid used Homer’s The Iliad as source material, telling the story of how Aeneas and his father Anchises escaped from burning Troy at the end of that Bronze Age epic (c. 1200 B. C. ) and made their way to Latium after many adventures (recalled The Odyssey) around the Mediterranean. Ovid wove in elements of other ancient myths (in fact, he even wove in a creation story that has startling resemblance to those told in the Hebrew Genesis, which itself borrows from ancient Mesopotamian creation myths like The Epic of Gilgamesh).
The best-known story is probably that of Romulus and Remus, two brothers reared by wolves. They were offspring of the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia after she was raped (common story in ancient mythology) by the god Mars. Flung into the Tiber by an evil great-uncle, the babies floated (like a double Moses) down into the marshes at the foot of the Palatine Hill. They were suckled by a she-wolf and then discovered by shepherds. When the two grew up, they decided to found a settlement of their own. Remus pictured it as a village, but Romulus envisioned a great empire. Romulus plowed up a furrow to mark the sacred boundaries of the new city. They got into an argument when Remus mocked his brother, saying this was indeed a ludicrous little city wall. Remus jumped over the furrow to demonstrate his sarcasm, and Romulus killed him in a fit of rage.
There is an even more dreadful story that every schoolchild used to learn, in the days when Latin was widely taught. It’s the Rape (Seizure) of the Sabine Women, memorialized in Roman tales and artwork, and derivative Western paintings through the Middle Ages and practically into modern times. Apparently, the guys who lived on those hills didn’t have women (a favorite setup of guys in TV sitcoms). They therefore invited their neighbors, the Sabines, to come down out of them thar hills with their wives for a big picnic. When the afternoon grew hot, and the Sabines were good and soused, the Romans killed the men and stole their women. Now they had not only wives, but offspring, and that’s how later Romans came to be. It’s a horrific tale by modern standards, but gospel truth to Republican Romans, and piously recited with a shrug by generations of puzzled Victorian and Modern school children. Old legends often have some basis in truth, and the Roman tales like this mass kidnapping tale are no exception. Some historians suspect that maybe the early Romans were really runaway slaves who escaped into the wilderness of the Tiber marshes where nobody else wanted to live. In this historical guesswork, they would have banded together for security, not only against marauding enemies, but against each other.
In those days, the marshes were used as a common burial ground for the communities immediately around the area. The center of Rome itself, later called the Forum Romanum, was originally a cemetery in the finest, foggiest, spookiest traditions of every vampire movie you have ever seen. Remember that the climate in those days was rather wet, windy, and cold, and an abundance of smoking calderas and flowing lava made Latium a scary area—picture, sort of, a cinematic Transylvania (‘across the forest’) with not only fog, but also bubbling, glowing lava, mysteriously moving shores, and sheep that dropped dead in mid-bleat. If you were born there, spent your life there, knew nothing else outside the area, and your mythology was wrapped around it, you had yourself a spooky and tempestuous little universe. It seems quite plausible that ‘the guys’ had a few beers one Friday night and concocted this crazy scheme to steal their neighbors’ wives. It’s a story so wild—like the wildness of those demon-haunted marshes in which it takes place—that it’s almost plausible. At least, the Romans told this tale with a straight face and a certain pride for a thousand years.
Speaking of escaped slaves, there is yet another suggestive primordial tidbit. Near Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills south of Lake Albano, is a ruined temple of the huntress Diana set in a grove of trees. Since earliest times this grove was sacred to the primordial mother of nature, and tended by a priest called the Rex Nemorensis, or King of the Woods (Nemus). This priest was always an escaped slave, and he was entitled to food, drink, anything he needed, until he was slain by the next escaped slave, who then took his place. Early legend, therefore, records the unsettling image of this wild-looking mountain man (as such men are known in the wild woods of North America) appearing and disappearing among the rocks and trees. He carries a huge club and grunts in fear and divine rage as he seeks to kill any man who wants to approach. He is on the run for his life night and day, yet tied to this place that both sustains his life and brings his death—sounds like a good launch pad for mental illness. Such are the glimpses of the dim past, before it was sugared and candied with state-sanctioned, safe deities that titillate all and offend none. No wonder Roman religion over time became a cartoon—not because of its origins, which indeed have the strength of primordial psychophoria (being carried away in the mind), but because of how cautious bureaucrats (state poets, priests, politicians, and the like) sanitized them over time.
Aeneas ends up marrying Lavinia, daughter of the King of Latium, and founds a new city he names in her honor (Lavinium). Lavinium becomes part of the kingdom of Alba Longa. The best guess is that Alba Longa was eradicated early on by the Romans (judging by their treatment of Carthage, a very thorough job) and now a papal summer residence sits on the site overlooking Lake Albano. Alba Longa is the city from where Romulus and Remus hailed. They were born, Virgil tells us amid the endless soap opera of ancient mythology, when Mars raped King Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia. We see how a string of legends and myths (imperial Augustan propaganda) leads us from Bronze Age Troy to Carthage on the North African shore (where Aeneas breaks Queen Dido’s heart by leaving her after she falls in love with him) to Latium and thence to the founding of Rome under the blade of an iron-age plow. Romulus, having killed his brother and his neighbors, whose wives he and his gang members stole, sets the pace for the future as the Romans either wipe out or absorb their neighbors. Think of it sort of like The Wild Ones without motorcycles—plus they all have onion breath, wear sandals instead of cowboy boots, and speak Latin.
You continue to enjoy your drive south from Rome into the balmy Alban Hills. Amalthea races the car around hairpin turns, and you hang on to the overhead strap for dear life. In the back seat, Darwin momentarily looks gray and sweaty in his illness, but the fresh air and sunshine seem to revive him. He sips from a bottle of water and watches the passing countryside. All has been inoculated with time and peace. The medieval castles with their surgical battlements and cruel windows are draped in flowers and open to the sky. A man on a tractor passes slowly, engrossed in his thoughts under a dark hat that shadows his face, and earphones dangling over his sweat-stained suit suggest he may be listening to American rock music or perhaps the wail of a female Arab singer from North Africa or just an old-fashioned love song from Naples. Anything is possible as the world takes a breather between epochs of horrific change and disaster. For the moment, all is peaceful, just like the steaming fissures in the green meadows around volcanic mountains. Not a rumble to be heard anywhere, unless it is from one of the myriad Boeing 747 and Airbus airliners passing between the Eternal City and the modern world, crossing a huge chalky moon set in a light blue sky that could be from a 14th Century painting by a Renaissance master. It is a moment you will remember before your entry into Avernus: all time is present, as T.S. Eliot might have said, time past and time future.
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