Blackwell Sourcebooks in Ancient History
This series presents readers with new translations of the raw material of ancient history. It provides direct access to the ancient world, from wars and power politics to daily life and entertainment, allowing readers to discover the extraordinary diversity of ancient societies.
Published
The Ancient Near East
Edited by Mark W. Chavalas
The Roman Games
Alison Futrell
Alexander the Great
Waldemar Heckel and J. C. Yardley
The Hellenistic Period
Roger Bagnall and Peter Derow
Ancient Greek Religion
Emily Kearns
Ancient Greece from Homer to Alexander
Joseph Roisman and J. C. Yardley
Early Rome: Myth and Society
Jaclyn Neel
This edition first published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for.
Hardback: 9781119083795
Paperback: 9781119083801
Cover image: Wolf Mosaic, Aldborough Roman Town, Yorkshire, 300 AD (mosaic) / Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Leeds City Museum) UK / Bridgeman Images
For my parents
The scholarly community has become increasingly aware of the differences between Roman myths and the more familiar myths of Greece. Early Rome: Myth and Society steps in to provide much-needed modern and accessible translations and commentaries on Italian legends.
This work examines the tales of Roman pre- and legendary history, discusses relevant cultural and contextual information, and presents author biographies. This book offers updated translations of key texts, including authors who are often absent from classical mythology textbooks, such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Servius. Editor Jaclyn Neel debunks the idea that Romans were unimaginative copyists by spotlighting the vitality and flexibility of Italian myth -- particularly those parts that are less closely connected to Greek tales, such as the story of Caeculus of Praeneste. Finally, by calling attention to the Italian rather than Roman nature of the collection, this book suggests that Roman culture was broader than the city itself. This important work offers:
Fresh and readable, Early Rome: Myth and Society offers essential reading for students of ancient Rome as well as those interested in Roman and Greek mythology.
Jaclyn Neel is Assistant Professor of Instruction at Temple University, USA. She is the author of Legendary Rivals: Collegiality and Ambition in the Tales of Early Rome (2014) and several articles on Italic myth.
Students inspired me to write this book. I was teaching my first class on early Rome when I realized that the only translation of Dionysius was over 100 years old and so antiquated that the majority of the class simply refused to read it. After a few weeks, I couldn't blame them; I'd switched back to the Greek. I found myself skipping material that was interesting, but essentially unteachable: not only Dionysius, but also passages from Servius and other writers who lack any English translation.
This book cannot fill that gap, but I hope that it makes some progress in doing so by providing a selection of material that can be used to teach (or simply read) about early Rome. There is far more material than I've had space to provide, both textual and iconographic. Space restrictions inevitably mean that I've had to limit some authors (notably Dionysius and Plutarch) whose prose is more elaborate.
In selecting texts, I have tried to hew closely to two principles. The first is novelty: if two authors tell essentially the same story, and one of those two authors has a modern translation, I have translated the other. In doing so, I have omitted several of Rome's most famous authors almost entirely; this book contains little Vergil. But the world is so rich in translations of Vergil that I think the fault is forgivable. The other principle is variety: when many variants of a given tale exist, I have translated as many as possible. That has yielded a book whose organization is as imbalanced as surviving Roman narratives: there's far more Romulus than Numa, for example. Astute readers will notice that the variety diminishes in later chapters, again matching the character of the sources.
This book is intended for a rather disparate audience, ranging from advanced undergraduates to graduate students in non-classics fields. The explanatory material will doubtless be too detailed for some and not sufficient for others. I have assumed basic knowledge of Greek myth (e.g., the names of the gods and their major activities) and of Roman history (e.g., the identity of Julius Caesar). The chapters can be read in any order, although the organization is largely chronological. As a result, there's some repetition in the explanatory material between chapters, which I've tried to limit as much as possible. Within the chapters, the sources are organized chronologically.
The “Further Reading” sections aim to be accessible and cover a range of methods. Because the scholarship on early Rome is international, I've pointed to some important arguments in the ``Introductions'' – but there is, of course, far more available. Advanced students will benefit from the additional bibliography maintained by Alain Meurant at the excellent Lupa Capitolina Electronica website (http://lupacap.fltr.ucl.ac.be/LCE.ang/default.htm). Instructors will want to supplement to suit their own aims; my plan was undertaken with Cornell's The Beginnings of Rome (Routledge, 1995) and Richardson and Santangelo's The Roman Historical Tradition (Oxford, 2014) in mind.
All translations are my own. Generally speaking, I have translated the Greek texts from the TLG; the Latin texts came from more varied sources (Loeb, OCT, and Teubner). References to Ennius always use Skutsch. For Cicero's De Republica, I've used the Teubner. The Propertian text is my own hybrid of Fedeli, Richardson, and Goold. Although I used Lindsay for Festus, I've referred to the lemma rather than the page; anyone with good Latin can find the original in the freely-available Mueller. When necessary, I have indicated textual problems and variants in the notes; although perhaps not strictly necessary in a sourcebook, it may inspire classroom discussion. When significant textual variances exist, I have tried to put the most common reading in the text and the variant(s) in the notes. References to ancient works always cite the original language.
Books rarely succeed without assistance. The entire team at Wiley has been unfailingly helpful; I owe particular thanks to Allison Kostka, Brinda Balasubramanian, and Denisha Sahadevan for fielding inquiries, and immense gratitude to Haze Humbert for bringing the project to publication. Alessia Argento, Stefano Anastasio, Angela Carbonaro, Stefano Casciu, Elisa Dal Canto, Maria De Francesco, Rosanna Di Pinto, Maria Daniela Donninelli, Maria Cristina Guidotti, Laura Minarini, Marco Pierini, Valentina Prestigiovanni, and Manuela Santini helped me secure permissions and photographs. The Textbook and Academic Authors Association generously covered part of the permissions costs, and I am grateful to its Executive Director, Michael Spinella, for his quick communications about the process.
Gabe Moss at the Ancient World Mapping Center was unfazed by a complete map novice, and managed to corral my list of several hundred sites, mythical and real and spanning the entire Mediterranean, into the two lovely maps found here. Rebecca Sears, Amy Russell, and Gwynaeth MacIntyre read almost the entire book in draft form, as did my former student Leah Bernardo-Ciddio; I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude for their comments and suggestions, many of which I hope they will recognize in the finished product. Isabel Köster deserves special mention: she and her students road-tested the Romulus and Remus, Lucretia, and Horatii and Curiatii narratives, and pointed me to many areas that needed further clarification.
I am also immensely grateful to my team of student researchers, who read a textbook without a class in addition to their normal workload: Berat Barzanjee, Noah Brinder, Christina Cannavicci, Sandy Dief, Daniel Jankulovski, and Kim McCullough. Their diligence and enthusiasm for an independent project was exemplary, and I hope that they, too, will recognize some of their suggestions in the completed work. Their participation was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Janet Friskney was a great resource in securing this grant. I'm also grateful to the students of my original Early Rome class at York University in 2012/2013, whose discussions helped me decide what material was most interesting to an undergraduate audience.
Finally, many friends and family outside the discipline provided fresh eyes and enthusiastic encouragement: my parents and sisters, Debbie Pollack, David Neel, Julia Abbott, and Tamar Zeffren. Garnet and Barb Wallace put up with me for an entire summer, during which most of the book was written in otio. As always, my most immense debts are to Chris, who knows why.