Myth, History and Archaeology

Essays and Reviews, 2000-2025

Series: 

Author:
T.P. Wiseman
A bronze mirror of the fourth century BC shows a she-wolf suckling infant twins. You may think that’s a familiar story, but who are the other figures in the scene, and why is there a lion so prominent in the foreground? The image typifies the problems involved in studying the history and evolution of mythic stories in the ancient world. This collection of studies, prompted by a famous archaeologist’s quasi-historical reinterpretation of the Romulus legend, seeks to achieve greater clarity by avoiding abstract concepts like ‘oral tradition’ or ‘cultural memory’ and paying close attention to what the primary sources presuppose.
Copyright Year:
2026
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978-90-04-74290-1
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27 Oct 2025
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-74253-6
Publication:
06 Nov 2025
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T.P. Wiseman is Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His books include Remus: A Roman Myth (1995), The Myths of Rome (2004) and The Lost History of Roman Drama (forthcoming).
List of Figures

Introduction

1 The Start of a Long Story
 1 Review of Andrea Carandini, La nascita di Roma
 2 Review of Andrea Carandini, Rome: Day One

2 Reading Carandini
 1 The exhibition
 2 Divine kings and mythic memory
 3 What were the Lares?
 4 Twins and Quirites
 5 The altar and the trench
 6 Giornale di scavo

3 The Prehistory of Roman Hellenism
 1 Romans and Greeks
 2 Greek in Latin

4 The City that Never Was: Alba Longa and the Historical Tradition
 1 The city
 2 Pliny on archaic Latium
 3 The dynasty

5 Velleius Mythistoricus
 1 Beginnings
 2 Hercules
 3 Campania

6 Gods in Roman History
 1 Visible gods
 2 Audible gods
 3 Believers and agnostics
 4 Popular belief
 5 Ambivalence

7 Memory and Stories: An Anthology
 1 Memory and history
 2 The historian’s problem
 3 First pseudo-solution
 4 Second pseudo-solution
 5 History and fiction
 6 Dramatic presentation
 7 Information and education
 8 Ritual and remembrance

8 Alföldi’s Early Rome and the Latins
 1 Dogma
 2 Evidence
 3 Authority

9 Archaeology and Legend: The Grave on the Palatine
 1 A site with a history
 2 The memory fallacy
 3 Whose grave was it?
 4 Making it too easy

10 From Romulus to Tarquin: Reconstructing Rome’s Expansion
 1 An exemplary work
 2 ‘Hypercritics’
 3 Multiple foundations
 4 Roma quadrata and the pomerium
 5 Gates and walls
 6 The beginning of Rome

11 The Migrant Queen
 1 Theiosso
 2 Elissa
 3 Dido

12 Herakles at Hartland
 1 An unexpected temple
 2 An ocean-going hero comes to Rome
 3 The tin route

13 Not the Tomb of Romulus (but perhaps something more interesting)
 1 Ossa Quirini
 2 A pignus?

14 Plutarch, Dionysius and the Creation of Romulus
 1 Dionysius and Plutarch
 2 The wars of Romulus
 3 Myth creation
 4 A Latin founder
 5 Expanding the hero’s story
 6 Uniting the peoples
 7 Contemporary evidence
 8 Plutarch’s perspective
 9 Rome before the culture wars
 10 Conclusions

15 The Black Stone and the Tomb of Romulus: January–June, 1899
 1 Finding it and naming it
 2 The reaction
 3 ‘Non è in alcun modo sostenibile’
 4 Festus (and Verrius Flaccus)
 5 The Horatian commentators (and Varro)
 6 Dionysius of Halicarnassus (and Varro?)
 7 The lions and the pillar
 8 Chronology and stratigraphy
 9 Faustulus and Hostus Hostilius
 10 What has been learned?

16 Making Myths: Hostus Hostilius and his Grandson
 1 Two items in Pliny
 2 An explanation in Macrobius
 3 A catch-up paragraph in Dionysius
 4 A burnt page in Festus
 5 A battle in Livy and Plutarch
 6 King Tullus
 7 The historical Hostilii
 8 Wartime festivals
 9 Two urban praetors
 10 The backlash

17 Propertius on Triumphs and Tarpeia
 1 The house-door’s complaint
 2 Triumphs
 3 Tarpeia before Tatius
 4 Tarpeia the betrayer
 5 Varro and the Vestal
 6 Roman stories
 7 Back to the house-door’s complaint

18 Orosius, Justin and the Afterlife of Myth
 1 Rewriting Romulus
 2 Artwork captions
 3 Tapestries
 4 Romelus and Remelus in Cornwall
 5 ‘Where did you learn this story?’

Epilogue 2025

Bibliography
Index
Anyone with an interest in the mythology of the Greco-Roman world.
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Publisher:
Brill
Language:
English
Pages:
xiv, 354 pp.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004742901

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