Talk:Romulus

Cornell Citation in Historicity

I couldn't find this. Can someone verify that it's accurate? "fn 7". — Preceding unsigned comment added by InformationvsInjustice (talk • contribs) 10:51, December 2, 2016 (UTC)

I believe the reason you can't find it is because the Google Books preview doesn't include those pages. But there's no reason to doubt it, really, and it's properly cited. P Aculeius (talk) 16:47, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Edit: even without all of the pages, I was able to see the relevant portion. Although it was written as a quotation of Cornell, it looks like it was really a paraphrase. I've revised the paragraph again. P Aculeius (talk) 17:56, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

I suspected as much, no doubt that was why I couldn't track it down. I've been considering ordering a couple of print editions of the secondary sources that I've been turning to during my recent projects, but WOW, some of them are prohibitively expensive. I will keep my fingers crossed for approval of my JSTOR and Cambridge University Press applications. Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 00:03, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

NPOV with respect to the different accounts

It's important that we do not favor one source over another in the article. Where there are different accounts of an episode, please use language that is general enough so as not to give undue weight to one source over another. For instance, rather than:

"In a fracas on the Palatine Hill, Remus overleapt the wall that Romulus had begun, and was killed, either by the unruly supporters of his brother, or in some versions by Romulus himself."

This would be better:

"The dispute culminates in the slaying of Remus, either by a follower of his brother or by Romulus himself."

There is enough variation in the accounts to not single out the "wall jumping" or the "unruliness". Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 01:09, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Livy is quite specific about the wall; not sure what Dionysius says, but simply omitting it because it isn't in all accounts wouldn't be a "neutral point of view". "Unruliness" may not be the best adjective, but again, that's not a matter of neutrality. Most of the main section was unsourced (and some of the facts were misstated, misplaced, or clearly wrong, such as the claim that Romulus and Titus Tatius conquered a province in Iran), and In sourcing the contents I used the source I had in front of me. The text can be modified to reflect what's found in Dionysius or other sources. In either case, the "vivid present" is not an appropriate tense for this sentence. P Aculeius (talk) 04:30, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

@P Aculeius: Thanks for helping. Apologies if I clumsily misused "NPOV". This article was created to prevent just that type of "content sprawl" that arises when the various accounts are incorporated. The Livy account is and should be found in the Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Livy) article. The idea is to keep this article (and the new Romulus and Remus article) limited to the broad story and give links to the detailed descriptions of the various accounts.

There is a section of the R & R talk page that you might take a look at so as to get a better feel for the concerns that these new articles are designed to address. Also, please take a look at the articles for the other sources.

I'm thinking that the Iran Province is probably vandalism(?). There is no question that the article needs to be better sourced. It is new and I and others are continuing to work on that. Please feel free to help out. That would be most welcome. Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 05:24, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Just FYI, the article history shows that the "Iran" error was introduced by a well-meaning editor in an effort to disambiguate the name of the town. It's their only edit to this article. Haploidavey (talk) 09:44, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Went ahead and started adding citations to Dionysius; this may take a while, and I should probably set it aside overnight and continue in the morning. Made a few revisions based on Dionysius' account. I don't think the Romulus and Remus subsection is too long; it's two paragraphs and summarizes things relatively well. I think it's necessary to give at least this much detail on the death of Remus, however, since that tends to be one of the more important parts. It's still just one sentence. I decided the best way to deal with the word "unruly" was just to delete it rather than trying to find a better substitute. It wasn't really necessary. The account of Remus leaping over the wall is mentioned by both Livy and Dionysius, even though both mention alternative traditions; since this is just a summary, probably best to go with the best-known version, and leave variations to the main article, unless the summary would be confusing without more detail. P Aculeius (talk) 05:41, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

@P Aculeius: The fratricide is another good example. Livy tells the wall story with Romulus killing him. Dionysius' supports the account that he was slain in a melee between the (perhaps unruly) supporters. Plutarch says "wall" but he was killed by Celer. At the least, the article should give equal weight to these three histories and the best way to accomplish that is with sufficiently general language so as to conform with all three without having to lay them each out. And keep in mind that there is an R & R article wherein this incident should be better expounded on. This article shouldn't be a different version of the same content. It should make mention of it and link to the other article.

Another example is in the section on the Battle of the Lacus Curtius. Your edit is dead on: Livy does tell the story of Hostilius' heroics on the front line of the battle. However Plutarch makes only a passing mention of him. Dionysius does not mention him at all. Dionysius does, however, make the only mention of Lucumo and the auxiliaries he brought with him to support Rome.

It simply becomes too confusing and cumbersome to include all this here. It's better to keep that content in the Battle's own article or in the articles for the histories and the historians. Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 06:15, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Date of the founding of the city

How should this be dealt with? Other editors have pointed out the importance of the date in the writings. I think it could be broken out into a subsection w/in the Traditional account. OR, it could be a separate section. It could be under "Historicity". Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 04:05, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Why would this need a section or subsection? It's a one- or two-sentence mention at most, and belongs with the event as it occurs in the narrative of Romulus. There's no good reason for making a special section for it. P Aculeius (talk) 04:44, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. This article's a narrative. We have an article on Foundation of Rome; the date is discussed there. Haploidavey (talk) 13:35, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Birth date of Romulus

There's been a bit of edit warring recently regarding the year Romulus was born. In the articles's body text, It's already mentioned that Plutarch gave his birth date as 771 BC. I initially added this to the infobox, And InformationvsInjustice decided to revert it, Citing disagreement among sources. On his talk page, I asked him to elaborate on this disagreement, But he has yet to respond. 2 IP users decided to add the Birth date anyway. Can we try do discuss and reach a consensus about his birth date? Koopinator (talk) 07:44, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

When this started, I wasn't aware that anyone had worked out when Romulus was born, and simply went along with the idea that without a source giving his age, and with modern scholarship either dismissing or or at least being highly skeptical of his existence, it didn't make sense to include dates of birth and death in addition to the dates of his reign. Insisting that they be there without any apparent source seemed pedantic. Interestingly, I was just reading Anthony Everitt's The Rise of Rome, in which he refers to Varro obtaining the date from an Egyptian astrologer, placing it in the first year of the second Olympiad (i.e. 772 BC) (p. 20). A few pages earlier (p. 15), he describes the restoration of Numitor and founding of Rome "when the brothers were about eighteen", probably relying on Varro's date. The source for this account seems to be Plutarch, and the notes to the Bernadotte Perrin translation (from the Loeb Classical Library, the one on Lacus Curtius) gives 772 in the footnotes. Which makes sense; the second Olympiad began in 772, not 771, and the month of Thoth probably began in late summer, hence 772, rather than 771 (apparently the Egyptian calendar "wandered" by about a day every four years, due to the lack of a leap year, but by the time it was fixed by Augustus, it couldn't have wandered by more than a few days since Varro's time; at least, one supposes the astrologer was referring to the calendar of his day, with or without knowing that it might have been different seven centuries earlier).

Livy is rather vague; the only time reference he gives is, "by the time they were grown boys" (De Sélincourt translation), which, together with his general description fits well with the date of 772, since at eighteen they would be young enough still to be called boys, but old enough to be considered men when it came to leading a colony to the septimontium, and for Romulus to become king. Cassius Dio, in book 1, apparently says that Romulus was in his eighteenth year when he founded Rome; as Thayer's note on Lacus Curtius astutely points out, that means he was at least seventeen but not yet eighteen (your first year is the year before your first birthday). However, one of the fragments from Zonaras says that Romulus was said to be eighteen. Florus says, "when Romulus had come to the first ardour of youth", Diodorus Siculus "when they had come to manhood", Dionysius says "when they were about eighteen." So if we accept the Parilia of 753 as the founding of Rome, that Romulus was born toward the end of summer, and that he was eighteen during the events leading to the founding of the city, then he would have been born in 772 (his nineteenth birthday would have been in early September of 753, several months after the founding of Rome).

However, note that not all of the authorities used the era of Varro, and if we go by the eclipses mentioned by Plutarch (who attributes them to Varro's astrologer) and Cassius Dio, then Romulus would have been born on February 10, 765 BC (by our calendar), and have founded Rome in 748, when he was seventeen. Since, as Thayer notes, the dates of eclipses were well known by the time this history was being written down, the tradition about eclipses may have been a late addition to the story. Anyway, looking over all of this, I suppose I would be comfortable with 772, provided that we give some context due to the uncertainty. P Aculeius (talk) 12:57, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi, I’m a bit late to this conversation. Looking at the evidence, I think 772BC seems good to add in. I Guess while Romulus is largely considered a folk hero, he may be based on a real person born around then. A bit like Merovech of the Franks (Grandfather of Clovis) PrinceofFrancia (talk) 02:24, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

However we got to discuss this with informationvsinjustice. PrinceofFrancia (talk) 02:27, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Infobox and dates

As the above discussion illustrates, there are no agreed upon "years" for his reign, birth and death. However we deal with them in the article, they should stay out of the infobox. Informata ob Iniquitatum (talk) 07:00, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

The real founder was the son of a prostitute...

Let's talk about the actual founder of the City of Rome, whoever that real person may have been (as opposed to the at-least-somewhat fictionalized version of Romulus who was written down centuries later). Even though the period is very poorly documented, the one thing we know with near-certainty is that the real founder of Rome was the son of a prostitute.

How do we know this? Well, the linguistic evidence is hard to interpret any other way.

In the same way that the Romance Languages derive from Latin, Latin itself derives from an even older language called Ancient Etruscan. In Ancient Etruscan, and subsequently in very early Latin, the word Lupa means both "prostitute" and "female wolf." The Ancient Romans were utterly embarrassed by the fact that their city was founded by the son of a prostitute. (Given how much stock the Ancient World placed in lineages and birth circumstances, this was even more understandable than it would be now!) Out of that embarrassment, they invented later myths specifically designed to cover up their founder's bastard pedigree.

The Lupa who raised Romulus was in actuality his human mother, despite the subsequent legend that she was a wolf. His "Vestal Virgin" mother was invented, along with the involvement of Aries Mars, to cover up further that he was the son of a loose woman. His biological father may as well have been a non-physical spirit such as the God of War, however, considering he was most likely a customer that his son never even met. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 08:32, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, but this appears to be your personal theory, and adding it to the article would constitute original research, and perhaps synthesis. Moreover, it relies on the broad outlines of the Roman foundation myth as related by historians of the late Republic and early Empire being true—except of course, for the portions that you choose to disregard in order to suit your hypothesis. But the prevailing scholarly opinion for more than a century has been that "Romulus" is a later development of a foundation myth concerning Rhome or Rhomus, and that in either case the name likely derives from the city of Rome itself, rather than the city's name being derived from an eponymous founder.

As for the founding of the city by Romulus, or whoever might later have become known by that name—since Numa Pompilius is still widely thought to have been, in some form, a historical person, and is nowhere suggested to have been the city's founder or first king, it's reasonable to suppose that someone preceded him, even if the name passed down by tradition is a later development—archaeology suggests that the seven hills had been the site of various settlements and villages for centuries before the mid-eighth century BC, when Romulus is supposed to have lived. So we can't even be sure whether the "founding" of Rome occurred at the time ascribed to Romulus—perhaps some formal alliance or amalgamation of existing settlements occurred, or one ruler obtained the submission of the rest, and some archaic rituals mentioned by Roman antiquarians suggest ancient warfare not corresponding with any of the events known from Roman myth, which would seem to recall battles between rival settlements on the site of Rome itself—but this is no more than speculation.

And the main point is, that if Romulus may not have existed at all, or if some historical figures underlying the Romulus myth have been so transformed by later retellings of the story as to become unrecognizable, there isn't any point in treating the minutiae of the latest version of the myth into proof of a shameful past that the Romans wished to cover up. Or as Cornell puts it, if Rome's enemies thought to use the stories of Romulus to embarrass the Romans with their shameful past, it was a signal failure: the Romans don't seem to have worried too much about the blemishes or character of their legendary founder, as the various traditions (some of them contradictory) still circulating in the time of Dionisius, Livy, and Plutarch demonstrate. The Romans were certainly capable of inventing a less impeachable character for their foundation myth, had they wished to do so.

All of these details are, of course, fair game for inclusion in this and related articles, provided they come from and can be cited to reliable sources, such as the aforementioned Roman writers (and I believe that the antiquarians, such as Cicero and Varro, may have had something to say about the topic as well), or contemporary scholars (Michael Grant's Roman Myths is particularly accessible, and describes the myth-making process in detail). I'm sorry I can't remember where I read about the ritual wars between two neighborhoods in Rome concerning some ancient tower or other, since I'm pretty sure it relates to a period before the legendary founding of the city by Romulus, when two rival communities on the later site of Rome contended for the possession of some ground or fortification. If anyone else knows what I mean, perhaps it merits discussion in this article. But key to adding any of it is that it comes from a reliable source—not your hypotheses or my memory. P Aculeius (talk) 14:34, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

It's hard to take the ‘linguistic evidence’ seriously from someone who claims Latin derived from Ancient Etruscan. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.61.180.106 (talk) 07:11, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Galleries

Why are there such extensive galleries on scenes from Romulus's "life" as depicted in the mythological tradition? Really just wondering, as I found it distracting. And maybe better as a subject for another article, with explanatory text. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:06, 9 June 2024 (UTC)