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Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae 2.30 and Herodotus 1.146*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
In this well-known passage of his Antiquitates Romanae, Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes how Romulus and his companions seized and married the Sabine virgins. Romulus justifies his actions by stating that this method of acquiring wives was a Greek custom:
Dionysius' report of a Greek tradition adopted by Romulus is rather enigmatic. It has previously been noted that this passage bears similarity to passages of Plutarch and in particular his description of the Spartan marriage ceremony. This Spartan marriage ceremony does bear some relation to the situation being described by Dionysius in that the women are captured before being married, but other elements of the ceremony—the bride having her hair cut off and being taken in a darkened room—are quite out of place here and would appear to be a peculiarly Spartan tradition. As Plutarch was writing some time after Dionysius, it is not possible for Dionysius to be making a parallel with the ceremony as decribed by Plutarch, but he may have had access to a common source about that ceremony, now lost. However, I would like to suggest that there is another well-known source which may have been the source of the Greek tradition referred to in Dionysius 2.30 that is connected to neither Plutarch nor marriage.
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References
1 In his Loeb edition Cary suggests it may be a marriage practice similar to the Spartan marriage ceremony described by Plutarch (Lycurgus 15.3–5) which is being referred to here (p. 401, n. 1). Cary's translation is based on that of Spelman, whose commentary also discusses similarities between this passage and wedding ceremonies described by Plutarch (Cary, pp. 45–6; Spelman, E, The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius Halicarnassensis [London, 1758], pp. 277–80, n. 61). It is interesting to note that Dionysius compares the Sabines to the Spartans in Ant. Rom. 2.49.5 in respect of their liking for war and austere culture, and this may have led Spelman to connect Dionysius' Antiquitates Romanae 2.30 with the Spartan marriage ceremony of Plutarch's Lycurgus 15.Google Scholar
2 Herodotus' work would also have been familiar to Dionysius' philhellene contemporaries— see C., Schultze in I.S., Moxon, J.D., Smart, and A.J., Woodman (edd.), Past Perspectives(Cambridge, 1986), pp. 121–4.Google Scholar
3 Dion. Hal. Ad Pomp. 3 praises Herodotus for his choice of historical subject matter. Although Herodotus was Dionysius' major influence, he also owed something to the works of Thucydides, whom he considered to be generally inferior to Herodotus. See S. Usher, ‘The style of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the Antiquitates Romanae’, ANRW230.1 (1982), 817–38
4 Pausanias 7.2.5–6.
5 There are many myths dealing with the origins of Miletus. As well as the account given in 1.146, Herodotus makes mention of Neleus son of Codrus as founder of Miletus in 9.97; he also describes the Athenians claiming the Ionians as their colonists in 9.106; and the colonization of the Ionian mainland by the Leleges in 1.171. In addition to Herodotus' versions of the origins of Miletus there are several by other authors (discussed by A.G Dunham, The History of Miletus [London, 1915], pp. 31–43).
6 This seems to have been the norm as there are very few instances in the literature where it is stated that the colonists took women with them. Examples where women were included in the first wave of colonization include Herodotus 1.164, Strabo 4.179, and Pausanias 10.10.6–8, and in all these cases there are exceptional circumstances that have led to the inclusion of women; see A.J., Graham, ‘Religion, women and colonisation’, Atti: Centro ricerche e documentazione sull' antichita classica (Rome, 1980–1), 294–314Google Scholar
7 In the case of Rome the settlers are ultimately descended from Trojans and other Greeks (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.61–2). At Miletus the colonists were Ionians of the purest blood who started their journey from the Government House of Athens (Hdt. 1.146).
8 There are very few examples in ancient literature of settlers taking wives from the indigenous population, although one exception is the foundation of Massalia, where Protis, one of the Phocaean leaders, married the local king's daughter and his companions were found wives among the locals (Justin 43 [63] 3 and Aristotle, frag. 549 Rose). However, modern opinion supports the view that the practice of intermarriage was well-established in Greek colonies (see Dougherty, C., The Poetics of Colonization [Oxford, 1993], pp. 61–80Google Scholar, esp. p. 67 n. 28, for a detailed bibliography). There may also be archaeological evidence for intermarriage from the early burials at Pithekoussai (Ridgeway, D, The First Western Greeks [Cambridge, 1992], p. 67). Although this evidence is not in itself conclusive, it has stimulated recent debate on intermarriage and Greek colonization (N. Coldstream, ‘Mixed marriages at the frontiers of the early Greek world‘, OJA 12/1 [1993], 89–107).Google Scholar
9 This in itself is not surprising as colonies were often founded amid violence. See Dougherty, C, ‘It's murder to found a Greek colony’, in Dougherty C. and Kurke L., Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 178–98Google Scholar
10 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.66.5.
11 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.45–6.
12 For example: Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.9, 2.16–17, and 2.18–19.