Rome: An Empire's Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dido and Aeneas fall in love, and of course their love is doomed: this is, after all, epic not romance, although it takes Aeneas a while to realize it. For the gods have a plan, and the plan is Rome. Aeneas leads his men, his father and his son, and the sacred cult objects of Troy to the coast of Latium in central Italy. There war, prophecy, and marriage will eventually allow them to settle in the town of Alba Longa. From there, Aeneas’ distant descendant—Romulus—will set out to found the city.
    Aeneas was the son of a goddess, Venus, worshipped in Rome as Venus Genetrix, Venus our Ancestor. Julius Caesar built a temple to her at the heart of the new forum he paid for from the spoils of the Gallic War. After his assassination, his heir, the future Emperor Augustus, completed the project. The temple was finished not long before the composition of the Aeneid . Both of these monumental works mark stages in the process by which a single authorized version of Roman history was created out of a mass of contradictory traditions. One reason for this was the shift from a Republican form of government to a monarchy. Many traditions were linked to particular families, but now one family dominated the city. Julius Caesar, and so Augustus too, claimed to be direct descendants of Aeneas and Venus. Another reason was that Roman historians had only just begun to construct a reliable chronology of their own past. Scholars of the last generation of the free Republic, including Cicero’s friends Varro, Nepos, and Atticus, had worked hard to correlate events in Roman tradition and the datelines established by Greek historians. Their conclusions—although often based on what to us seem like very shaky arguments—were never seriously challenged in antiquity. It was more important that Rome had a genuine and agreed history, than that it was the right one. Augustus was equally concerned to fix the past. The historian Livy dryly records how Augustus himself engaged in research in ancient history to establish that no subordinate officer could be awarded the exceptional honour of the spolia opima awarded only to a general who killed his opponent in single combat. 2 Less controversially, great bronze tablets were set up recording the fasti , the exact sequence of consuls from the start of the Republic to the present day. The consuls were the pair of annual magistrates after which each year was traditionally named. Caesar and Augustus promoted research into the calendar, and published it. 3

    Fig 1. The Prima Porta Augustus displayed in the Braccio Nuovo new wing of Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy
    Fixed by Homer’s epic at the end of the heroic age, Aeneas lived far too early to found the city of Rome himself. Greek scholars had calculated that Troy had fallen in 1183 BC while the date of the foundation of Rome was calculated as 753 BC . That left quite a gap. But Virgil’s epic allowed Aeneas several visions of the future—Virgil’s present that is—as an imperial age in which, under Augustus’ rule, the Romans would rule the world according to the decrees of Jupiter. Most impressive was a descent into the Underworld where Aeneas’ dead father showed him the great Romans of history, waiting to be born, and gave him hints of their fates. Aeneas also took a trip up the Tiber to visit the future site of the city of Rome, still a pastoral idyll and settled by yet other refugees from the east, Greeks from Arcadia this time, who told him the story of how Hercules had passed by that very spot and defeated the terrifying monster Cacus there. Virgil wove together the many legends of ancient Rome, making out of them a narrative that could only culminate in Augustus.
    The foundation of the city of Rome itself was left to one of Aeneas’ descendants, Romulus, who with his brother Remus was the son of a princess of Aeneas’ line and also of the god Mars, conveniently giving the Romans a second divine ancestor. When Augustus built