Themes to consider as we read Roman Foundation Myths

SLL258F Themes to consider as you read Roman Myths:

I. History is not determined or inevitable, one political function of myth is to confer on the accidents and haphazard forces that shape history the order of narrative and the justification or rightfulness of apparent determination, fate.
II. Much Roman history is legend that has become canonical: myth in Rome was a mode of history.
III. The works of Virgil, Livy and Ovid are works of patriotic Roman Italians for a patriotic Roman audience.
IV. What is history for? Pleasure, education, moral exemplum: it is not our collection of data and analysis of primary sources but edifying acoount of how things have been and how they have come to stand the way they do.
V. Human history is the story of migrations, population dynamics exchanges, conflicts, resolutions: transforming circumstance. As you read about the early history of Rome think about how legend is a vehicle of explanation of the forces in Roman history and the role of those forces in determining how things have come to stand as they did by the age of Augustus:
i. Hellas: explaining the relationship with Greece.
ii. Diverse unity: the Romans are fused out of several peoples.
iii. Italy: Etruscans, Sabines, indigenous tribes: everybody needs good neighbours.
iv. Carthage, Provinces, Macedon, Gaul, Britain, Germania: the History of Rome is the history of the Romanization of a region in Western Italy, the Italian peninsula, a sphere of influence and finally the Hellenistic Mediterranean.
VI. The Romans are defined more and more clearly through time then by their common difference from outsiders, foreign others, whom they either conquer or assimilate into their globalizing hegemony. But they are weakened internally by:
i. Internecine strife.
ii. Dangerous class inequalities and tensions.
iii. The dangers of moral decadence.
VII. Roman moral & political values:
i. Devolution of executive power.
ii. Peace & stability- the Roman finds Novae Res repugnant, he wants no revolutions and initaites hostilities against a likely threat to the sacrosanct safety within the walls of Rome. Augustus: Pax Romana, ubique pax=peace everywhere
iii. Strength, efficiency, justice, loyalty, endurance, stoic resignation.
VIII. What is woman for?
i. Woman is family, family is the crucible and nexus of history: the continuation of race, the expansion of nation, the bearer of warriors and workers. To have women, land and strength is to have a future.
ii. Marriage seals bonds between communities.
IX. Man/Woman; Citizen/Slave; Patrician/Plebeian; Insider/Outsider; Peace/War: an economy of relations we must try to decode in Roman Historical Myth.