Rise of Rome The legend of Roman Empire, the strongest empire lasted more than 1, 000 years in regions of minor Asia, Northern Africa, Europe including Spain, Britain, german and Gaul, which now we call France, was not created in one single day. The stories of ancient gods, heroes, and myths are part of their splendid chronicle, they are both practical facts and fantasies. Much of what we know today about the historical foundations of Rome comes to us from ancient writers such as Livy and Herodotus, along with the findings of archeology. The early history of Rome, so deeply rooted in legend and mythology, is a A mix of fact, fiction, educated guesses and established notions on the conditions of the ancient Mediterranean world@ (). The Romulus ruled as the first King of Rome from 753-715 BC.
AThe legend of Rome’s origin would have been poorer if the gods had had no role in it. @ (encyclopedia) Romulus was the founder of Rome and Remus was his twin brother. Their story begins with their grandfather Numitor, king of the ancient Italian city of Alba Longa, was deposed by his brother Amulius. Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, was made a Vestal Virgin by Amulius – this means that she was made a priestess of the goddess Vesta and forbidden to marry.
Nevertheless, Mars, the god of war, fell in love with her and she gave birth to twin sons. Deciding to found a town of their own, Romulus and Remus chose the place where the she-wolf had nursed them. Romulus began to build walls on the Palatine Hill, but Remus jeered at them because they were so low. He leaped over them to prove this, and Romulus in anger killed him.
(online) Romulus continued the building of the new city, naming it Roma after his own name. It’s first citizens were outlaws and fugitives, to whom Romulus gave the settlement on the Capitoline Hill. Ther were however not enough wives for all these men, and so Romulus decided to steal women from the Sabines, an Italian tribe. He there proclaimed a festival and invited many Sabines to it. While the attention of the men was elsewhere Romulus’ men rushed in and carried off the women. This was the famous ‘Rape (carrying off) of the Sabine women’, which later became a subject for painters.
It seems unlikely that any part of this legend is true. Almost certainly it is a copy of a Greek tale, invented to explain the name of Rome and certain customs. (online) However, Romulus is considering as a successful emperor in modern society. In 753 BC Rome was a small community. Its people, the Romans, were Latins mixed with Sabines. The Latins spoke an Indo-European language, which they called the lingua Latina, the Latin tongue.
Down the center of Italy, through the Umbrian, Sabine, and Samnite country, were other Indo European tribes. All these peoples were blond intruders from the north, and were cousins to the Greeks. In Venetia and in Perugia, on the east coast, were Illyrian settlers. In Liguria, which is in the northwest of Italy, and on the fringes elsewhere, were dark-skinned Mediterranean stocks. Indo-Europeans, Mediterraneans, Illyrians — all three were in a primitive stage of culture. For civilization, as you know, began in the Near East, and the harbors and plains of Italy are on the west coast.
Civilization came to Italy later than it did to Greece. When it did appear, it was brought by Carthaginians, Greeks, and Etruscans. Etruscans settled in Rome somewhere between 900 and 800 BC. archaeologists suspect that they came from the eastern Mediterannean, possibly Asia Minor. We will, however, never really know where they came from or why they colonized Italy. We do know that when they came to Italy, they brought civilization and urbanization with them as Radice asserts AThe advance of Rome was due to the expansion of the mysterious neighbors from the north, the Etruscans.
@ (17) They founded their civilizations in north-eastern Italy between the Appenine mountain range and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Their civilization stretched from the Arno river in the north to the Tiber river towards the center of the Italian peninsula; it was on the Tiber river that a small village of Latins, the village that would become Rome, sat. So the Romans, who were only villagers during the rise of the Etruscan civilization, were in close contact with the Etruscans, their language, their ideas, their religion, and their civilization; the Etruscans were the single most important influence on Roman culture in its transition to civilization. The Etruscans lived in independent, fortified city-states; these city-states would form small confederacies. In the earliest times, these city-states were ruled by a monarch, but were later ruled by oligarchies that governed through a council and through elected officials.
Like the surrounding peoples, the Etruscans were largely an agrarian people, but they also had a strong military, and used that military to dominate all the surrounding peoples. These dominated populations were forced to do the agricultural labor on the Etruscan farms, so the Etruscans had time to devote to commerce and industry. In the seventh and sixth centuries, the Etruscan military had subjugated much of Italy, including Rome, and regions outside of Italy, such as the island of Corsica. They were a sophisticated people, with an alphabet based on the Greek alphabet, a powerfully original sculptural and painting tradition, a religion based on human-type gods which they had learned from the Greeks, and a complicated set of rituals for divining the future, which they handed down to the Romans. Unlike most civilizations of the time, gender inequality seems not to have been very pronounced. One of the most important things for the early history of Rome was its geographic features.
Italy is a peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean west of Greece. Unlike Greece, Italy is poor in mineral resources and surprisingly devoid of useful harbors. However, the most stunning difference between Greece and Italy is the exponentially larger amount of fertile land. While Greece is poor in fertile land, Italy is wealthy in both land and precipitation. So the two peoples developed very differently; the Italians began and remained largely an agrarian people. Even in its latest stages, Roman culture would identify its values and ideals as agrarian.
According to their landscape, Italy had one other significant difference from Greece: it was easily accessible from Europe to the north. The Greeks lived behind a formidable mountain range; the Alps to the north of Italy were not quite as invulnerable. The Greeks also had a warlike Greek population to the north, the Macedonians, to serve as a buffer between themselves and other Europeans. The Romans had no such buffer civilization. As a result, conflict was a fairly constant affair on the Italian peninsula and the Romans, along with other peoples on the Italian peninsula, developed a military society fairly early in their history. BiblographyLivy, The History of Rome, by Titus Liv ius 4 vols.
, Trans. D. Spill an and Cyrus Edmonds. New York: G. Bell & Sons, 1892 Wikipedia: Founding of Rome 2004 Radice, Betty The Early History of Rome New York: Aubrey de Selincourt, 1960. P 17.
Cornell, Tim and John Matthew Atlanta’s of the Roman World New york: Andromeda Oxford Limited, 1986. P 120-125 Nar do, Don The fall of the Roman Empire Sandiego: California Green Haven Press, 1998. p 90-100.