Sept. 9, 2024

CLAS-2160-A01 – Sept.
9, 2024
Sources of Information for Roman history
 Livy on Romulus (1.6-16)
 The origin of the Roman society is traced to
embroidered myth of two orphans left to exposure and
raised by a female wolf, before the brothers had
founded their own cities and kingdoms
 Romulus is said to have found the first senate, from
senex Latin for “old man”, of 100 patres, or “the
Fathers”, thus being the “council of elders” and of
Roman patriarchy
 Auguries were a major part of religious practice within
Roman societies, interpreting natural signs as divine
communique and receiving answers from their
pantheon of Gods
 Romulus had also created the first Assembly, as a
means of allowing votes from the peoples under the
Roman kings to speak on issues
 The patricians, otherwise being Roman aristocrats,
were supposedly born from the bloodlines of the patres
in the senate, as compared to the masses, named
plebeians
 Early conservatism and wishing to continue cultural
tradition and maintain their societal structure, albeit
embellished by Augustan recounts and idealism of
early Rome
 Rome was also fixated on staying within the favor of
their pantheon’s divinities by pledging to them with
offerings or sacrifices, each being dedications to each
God and their station
 People could join into Roman society through
accepting Roman culture and emulating it, as Romulus’
first followers were of convicts and brigands to
runaway slaves of nearby settlements as asylum-
seekers and the first citizens, thus allowing elasticity of
Roman appearance of mixed peoples and consolidation
of cultures into Rome
 To be Roman was to aspire to be and act Roman
rather than being a birthright, allowing the
openness of its populus
 The Sabine women were abducted after razing
their settlement and forcing them into joining
early Roman civilization, birthing the first Roman
children
 The rape of the Sabine women highlights the
universality of enslavement of the captured
populus, often becoming families of slaves to
Roman citizens, as well as the early Roman push
to begin prospering within the early city
 The Sabines were given the status of being
Roman citizens through marriage and that their
children would be free, as Romulus had reassured
them in accordance with the founding myth
 The Sabines and Romans supposedly reconcile that
they become one society, where the Sabine and Roman
kingship are coincided, with King Titus Tatius of the
Sabines beside King Romulus, through calling
themselves quirites, as a tribute to the Sabine city of
Quirites, and resulting in the doubling of the Roman
population
 Though Titus Tatius would be later assassinated,
the continued organized rule of two kings in Rome
remained until the Republic period
 Romans were focused on honor and appearing as
honorable to those around them, permeating
throughout their civilization’s existence into the
Republic and Empire periods
 They had also idealized fighting condition and
body mastery to endure the suffering of war,
being committed warriors
 Rivalry is a well-recognized attribute of Roman
societal organization, since the founding myth of
the rival brothers of Romulus and Remus and
subsequent political intrigue
 Worries of fratricide were remnants of Roman
fears that continued, especially as described by
Livy during the Roman period of civil wars
 The names of both Remus and Romulus are seemingly
mythological in origin based on Roma, the settlement
of the city
 There are Greco-Roman ties of the Aenean
founding myth, in which the last Trojan and his
family of Aeneas travel across the Mediterranean
Sea and eventually land in Italy, being an ancestor
of the Roman brothers, and first communicating
with the northern Etruscans
 Rome, being of Trojan myth origin, supposedly
had gotten its retribution of the Trojan War nearly
a millennia after the fact, as the founding of the
city of Rome’s site was done by Aeneas

Sept. 9, 2024

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CLAS-2160-A01 – Sept.

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