LEADING FAMILIES IN ANCIENT ROME
These annals, which began no later than the fifth century, identified the chief elected officials who held office each year, noted victories and perhaps defeats, recorded the foundation of temples, and set out a wide range of unusual or dramatic events that were thought to reveal the will of the gods in some way: Such events included famine, earthquakes, freak storms, and lightning strikes sustained by prominent buildings or monuments.
However, few Roman historians seem to have consulted the old texts directly. Instead, they largely relied on interpretations of them (not always accurate) encountered in the works of earlier writers. They also resorted to other sources that modern historians might find less dependable. For example, popular or priestly aetiologies—stories told to explain or justify a religious rite by setting out an account of its first appearance—often found their way into histories.
Historians made use of family traditions too. In fourth-century Rome, as well as later, a relatively small circle of prominent families held most of the high offices and commanded most of the armies. These leading families asserted their greatness by proclaiming the offices and deeds of their ancestors; in the process, it was often suspected, they also exercised their powers of imagination. When recounting Rome’s early history, both Roman and (later) Greek historians often imagined the city’s first leaders as initiating and performing practices that later would be typical of its officials. Here Plutarch presents Romulus as founding Rome with just the same rites that the founders of Rome’s own colonies used in the fourth century and later (see Chapter Three). Plutarch, Romulus 11: Romulus buried Remus in the Remonia, together with the ser¬vants who had reared him. He then began to build his city, after summoning experts in sacred customs and writings from Etruria, who taught him everything as if in a reli¬gious rite. A trench was dug around what is now the Comitium, and in it were deposited first fruits of whatever was considered good by custom and necessary by nature. And finally, each man brought a small portion of their native soil and threw it in, where it mixed together. They call this trench the mundus, as they do the heavens. Then, they marked out the city in a circle around this center.
And the founder, after placing a bronze ploughshare on the plough and yoking to it a bull and a cow, ploughed a deep furrow around the boundary lines, while those who followed behind turned the clods thrown up by the plough inwards toward the city, leaving none to face outward. With this line, they mark out the course of the wall, and it is called by contraction the pomerium, in other words ‘behind the wall’ (post murum). And where they intended to place a gate, they lifted the plough and left an empty space. And this is why they regard the entire wall as sacred except for the gates.