Dr Gina May on Rome’s stolen myths and origin stories
Dr Gina May explains the origins, purpose and importance of Roman legends
Dr Gina May is an Associate Lecturer in Classics at the Open University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research interests include comparative mythology, Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy, ancient sexuality and witchcraft. As an independent academic she writes and teaches her own courses on topics such as Latin, Ancient Greek and hieroglyphs, archaeology, numismatics and academic practice.
How much of Roman mythology was influenced by the Greeks?
Many of the Roman gods were the same as the Greek, for example Aphrodite the Greek goddess of love became Venus to the Romans. This pattern is replicated across the pantheon of gods but it is too simple to say that the Romans just took the Greek gods, changed their names, and made them their own. Ancient cultures from across the world had their own names for gods of the sun, the sky, the growth of crops, dawn, night, birth, death, etc. They had gods for a whole host of other things as a way of explaining everything from emotions to why there was dew on the ground in the mornings. It seems reasonable therefore that the Romans, whose Trojan ancestors had settled with the people of Latinum, would have had a set of gods, some of whom did the same thing as the Greek gods. After all, in Homer’s Iliad, the Trojans and the Greeks do not have different gods even though they’re different cultures at war. This may well be why many of the myths surrounding the Roman gods are the same as those told earlier by the Greeks. The Romans also created myths of their own.
Was there anyone specific that contributed to Roman myth-making?
Particular writers/mythographers contributed to the corpus of Roman myth such as Virgil, Livy and Ovid. One of the many myths told by Virgil about Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Latinum includes the creation of a mythological reason for Rome’s later battles with Carthage. In Book 6 of the Aeneid Virgil tells of Carthaginian Queen Dido’s love for Aeneas and how she commits suicide after he leaves her in search of his destiny, the founding of Latinum. Livy contributes to the myths surrounding the foundation of Rome, as well as giving examples of heroic chastity in his myths of women like Verginia and Lucretia. Both women are sexually, assaulted with Verginia being killed by her father to protect her chastity and Lucretia killing herself after being raped. Both were important because they sparked revolts resulting in new political beginnings and the foundation of the Roman Republic. Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains 250 stories split into 15 books and uses myths, some of which are new and invented, to explain how everything came into being or gained its name from the very beginnings of creation up to the deification of Julius Caesar.
What was the purpose of myths in Roman culture?
One of the most important roles that myth played in Roman culture was to explain where Romans came from and how the city came to be called Rome. We are told that Aeneas, one of the princes of Troy, escaped the burning city and followed his fate to found Latinum. His journey is told in Virgil’s Aeneid, which was commissioned by Augustus, and demonstrates a clear genealogical line between himself and Venus, the mother of Aeneas. Later came Livy’s quasihistorical foundation myths of Romulus and Remus ,who were born to Rhea Silvia, a vestal virgin, after being raped by Mars the god of war. After being left to drown on the banks of the River Tiber, the babies were found and suckled by a shewolf before being taken in by a shepherd. Grown up, they fought over what to call the new city. Romulus was victorious and called the city Rome. Livy’s History of Rome also recounts the Romans’ abduction of women from neighbouring tribes, among them the Sabine women.
All of those taken were young and unmarried and were shared out between the men. By the time the men of their families came back to rescue the women, they had fallen in love with their captors and begged their relatives to join with Rome instead of going into battle. Other quasi-historical myths came into being as
a way of showing a wide range of things from why wars were fought to how women should behave.
What do these myths tell us about Roman values?
The foundation myths show how important it was to the Romans to be able to demonstrate their city’s provenance. Livy declares his intention of creating a history of Rome to show how it had shaped its people and to act as moral instruction. It includes events from Aeneas’s escape from Troy up to the age of Augustus. Being able to trace their history back to Troy meant that Rome could claim to be an ancient culture whose earliest ancestor was the son of a goddess. The myths surrounding the founding of Rome itself and how it grew were equally important to the Romans. Romulus was the first king of Rome and it was he who built the city, created the Senate, the three tribes and brought law and taxation to the city. It was also he who tried to increase the population of Rome by bringing in women from neighbouring cities. Later, as the Roman Empire spread, more and more cities were brought under the control of Rome and many chose to become enculturated with all things Roman. The Sabines and other tribes in the myth stood as a good example of cities that had done so by choice rather than by force.
How are these Roman myths seen in modernity?
Mythological stories about Rome’s beginnings together with Ovid’s myths of creation were amusing anecdotes, popular at Roman dinner parties. They may not stand up to scrutiny by modern standards, but they don’t need to. We do not know how exactly old Rhea Silvia was when she was forced to become a vestal virgin by her uncle but they were typically chosen between the ages of six and 10. He planned to ensure that she didn’t have any sons who might avenge the death of her father. When she did become pregnant, he didn’t believe her claim that the father was Mars, and ordered her twin babies, Romulus and Remus, to be thrown into the river. Verginia and Lucretia were both held up as paragons of heroic virtue, showing Roman women how they too should consider their chastity as more important than their lives. Ovid’s 700 line poem Metamorphoses covers everything from primordial chaos to Caesar but also multiple descriptions of sexual assault against both men and women. But we cannot look at these, or any other myth, with modern eyes. They were not created by or for us so as difficult as that may sometimes be, we can’t lose sight of what they really are: products of an ancient society seeking to cement its place in the world and poets who sought to cement theirs. We may not like what we see, but we cannot and should not look away.
“The foundation myths show how important it was to the Romans to demonstrate the city’s provenance”