A Politics and the state

Aeneas and the origins of Rome

The beginnings of Rome: legend and history

The men who poured the myths about the origins of Rome into their classical mould were the historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) and the poet Virgil (70 BC–19 BC). The genealogy of the legendary founders of the city, the twins Romulus and Remus, went back to the Trojan hero Aeneas. The Roman myths tied in with the greatest epic of Greek civilisation, Homer's Iliad. According to this epic, the Greeks, after a war lasting ten years, destroyed the city of Troy on the Hellespont, the narrow strait separating Europe from Asia. Of the Trojan heroes only Aeneas managed to escape. After lengthy wanderings, he landed on the coast of Latium. There, he founded the town of Lavinium, from which the later kings of Alba Longa came. Romulus and Remus were the grandsons of one of the kings of that town.

The fact that the Romans traced their roots back to a hero from Greek literature is telling. Nor is the choice of an enemy of the Greeks as the forefather of Rome accidental. Rome was influenced by Greek culture. The poet Horace (65–8 BC) had already written ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.’ Greek literature, philosophy, rhetoric and art were admired, adopted and imitated by the Romans. That influence precedes the Roman conquest of Greece in the second century BC; through the Greek colonies in southern Italy, Rome had already come into contact with the Hellenic civilisation at a much earlier point of its history – probably as early as the seventh and sixth centuries BC.

In this light, it comes as no surprise that the Romans looked to the Greeks in constructing their foundational myth. Even so, it is striking that it should have been Aeneas – the loser in the most famous Greek epic – who was adopted as a forefather, rather than a Greek hero like Odysseus or Herakles.