How did Rome begin?

Summary

Instant Classics – "How did Rome begin?"

Podcast: Instant Classics
Host: Vespucci
Guests: Mary Beard (Classicist), Charlotte Higgins (Culture Writer)
Date: October 2, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the mysterious and multi-layered question of Rome’s origins—not just the famous myths of Romulus and Remus, but a wider set of ancient stories and modern interpretations. With characteristic wit and skepticism, Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins disentangle myth from history, delve into Roman self-identity, and argue why these founding legends matter so deeply—even when they may not be “true” in the literal sense. The conversation covers everything from Livy, Aeneas, and the she-wolf, to how Roman myth was used in politics well into the empire, and where archaeology meets (and fails) the myth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rome’s Founding Myths: Romulus & Remus

[01:13–02:46]

• Mary Beard recounts the canonical story: infant twins abandoned on the Tiber, rescued by a she-wolf, raised by a shepherd, eventual fratricide, and Romulus becoming first king.

• Acknowledges these are legendary, not historical fact:

  "We can be pretty sure that it didn’t happen quite that way." – Mary Beard [02:15]

• Highlights how Roman historian Livy himself was skeptical:

  "The Roman historian Livy thought such stories were more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the authentic records of the historian." – Mary Beard [02:41]

2. The Multiplicity and Meaning of Foundation Stories

[03:40–07:32]

• Multiple, sometimes contradictory, versions existed:

  • Some claimed Remus wasn’t killed by Romulus.
  • Others described backstories with wicked uncles and classic folklore motifs.
  • The she-wolf motif is widespread in other cultures’ mythology too.

• A completely different origin merges with Aeneas of Troy (from Virgil’s Aeneid), setting up a dual heritage for Rome—rooted in mythic migrations and foreigners.

• Higgins notes how mythic layers always peel back to show "someone else got there first"—an infinite regress.

• Mary Beard:

  "All these stories... they’re all about people coming from elsewhere. Rome is not founded by people who come from the territory of Rome. They’re sort of always outsiders." [08:16]

3. Roman Identity as Outsiders and Incorporators

[07:32–10:41]

• Roman myths stand in clear contrast to Greek stories where founding fathers are born from the soil (e.g., Athenians).
• Origin myths encode Roman openness—to an extent—to outsiders; “Roman is something you become.”
• During Rome’s recurring civil wars, the fratricidal Romulus and Remus myth gains strong resonance:

  "It’s as if for the Romans, civil war is a kind of unescapable part of their DNA." – Mary Beard [10:41]

4. Foundation Myths as Political Tools

[12:32–16:15]

• Augustus (born Octavian) almost rebranded himself as “Romulus” to launch his sole rule, drawing legitimacy from foundational myth.
• Both Augustus and Julius Caesar traced their supposed ancestry to Aeneas (and thus to Venus).
• Roman intellectuals (e.g., Livy, Varro) are skeptical yet unable to resist the pull and utility of myth—often rationalizing details (e.g., she-wolf as "lupa," also meaning prostitute).

Notable Quote:

"There is a little hut on one of the hills of Rome... it’s called the Hut of Romulus. And they keep repairing it... as a kind of heritage site of where Romulus himself actually lived." – Mary Beard [17:32]

5. Archeology vs. Myth: Can We Prove Rome’s Beginnings?

[23:41–30:01]

• The search for a factual “foundation moment” obsessed Romans themselves; Varro and Atticus set the now-famous date: April 21, 753 BCE.

• Archaeology can uncover early settlement evidence (huts, graves with trade goods), but Beard is skeptical it will ever “prove” a founding story.

• The temptation to make the archaeology fit the legend is strong and sometimes misleading:

  "As soon as you say, I want to make the archaeology fit with what I find in the soil, of course you can do it. ... I think, in some ways, the archaeology ... is used to kind of become another version of the myth." – Mary Beard [25:30]

• New discoveries are often oversold in the media as proving myths are "real" (e.g., "Romulus’ house discovered!").

  "The archaeological work... then has a sort of another life which is even more fanciful in the hands of my dear colleagues, the headline writers." – Mary Beard [29:40]

6. The Lasting Power and Value of Founding Myths

[30:28–33:21]

• Even when recognized as ahistorical, these stories have crucial value—projecting Roman values, anxieties, and ideals back onto their origins.

• Rome’s tradition of incorporation—making outsiders citizens—runs from myth (Romulus’s asylum) to history (Emperor Caracalla granting citizenship to all free men of the empire).

  "We may not believe the story of Romulus and Remus, but it doesn’t mean that we just sort of kill it out as a piece of ridiculous folklore... It’s much more important than just, you know, is it right or is it not right about the origins of Rome?" – Mary Beard [31:07]

• Closing reflection:

  "Roman is something you become. And nobody, nobody is from here." – Mary Beard [33:21]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the inevitability of outsiders in Roman origins:

  "What Rome is saying, is that not only has there always been somebody else somewhere in Rome, but Romans have always come from someplace else." – Mary Beard [08:16]

• Origin myths and the cycle of civil war:

  "It’s as if for the Romans, civil war is a kind of unescapable part of their DNA." – Mary Beard [10:41]

• The duality of myth and skepticism among Roman historians:

  "I think what’s interesting about the attitude of intellectuals and writers like Livy is that they ... see that this is the story of the foundation of Rome ... but they interrogate them, and they sometimes rationalize them." – Mary Beard [16:15]

• Myth as political capital:

  "If you look at the art and the sculpture of Rome at the period when Augustus is founding his new one man rule in Rome, it is full of images of Aeneas and Romulus as kind of the twin inheritances of the city of Rome." – Mary Beard [13:37]

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Key Timestamps

• Romulus & Remus myth retold: [01:13–02:46]
• Limits of history & Livy’s skepticism: [02:15–02:46]
• Folklore patterns and Aeneas myth: [05:30–06:37]
• Infinite regress and Rome’s outsider identity: [07:32–09:10]
• Civil war & political uses of myth: [09:10–12:32]
• Augustus, naming, and mythic legitimacy: [12:32–13:37]
• Archaeology’s promise and limits: [23:41–25:30]
• Modern celebrations of foundation date: [21:30–23:41]
• Media & the myth-archaeology feedback loop: [29:08–30:01]
• Caracalla and universal citizenship: [31:07–33:21]
• Final reflection on Roman identity: [33:21–34:01]

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Episode Takeaways

• Myths reveal more about Roman self-image than about historical truth. The stories matter not for accuracy, but for how they were used to reflect Roman anxieties, politics, and identity.
• Rome’s genesis is plural, contested, and distinctly about openness to outsiders—the city’s very nature is one of incorporation, not exclusivity.
• Modern attempts (including archaeology) to ‘find’ the foundation are often seduced by myth, illustrating the enduring power of stories over facts.
• The fascination with origins continues: Rome’s birthday is still celebrated, and debates about nation, myth, and identity remain relevant.

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Further Engagement

Contact: instantclassicspodmail.com or @instantclassicspod on social media
Book club: https://instantclassics.supportingcast.fm/ Ad-free: Subscribe via your podcast app

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“Roman is something you become. And nobody, nobody is from here.”
– Mary Beard [33:21]

Transcript

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[Mary Beard]

A long, long time ago, infant twins Romulus and Remus were left to die on the banks of the river Tyga. They were rescued and suckled by a she wolf, then discovered and raised by a shepherd. They became warriors and leaders, fighting side by side. And eventually they decided to found a new city. But this was their undoing, or at

least it was Remus's undoing, because in a dispute about the city boundaries, Romulus killed his brother Remus. He gave the city his name, Rome. He became its first king. He ruled for many years and he established many of its institutions and expanded its territory.

That, in a nutshell, is one of the stories that the Roman told about how their city was founded maybe in the 8th century BCE. And while we know very little actually for sure about how the city was founded, we can be pretty sure that it didn't happen quite that way. And some Romans had other ideas too. The Roman historian Livy thought such stories were more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the authentic records of the historian.

I'm with Livy myself. I'm a bit of a skeptic here, and I'm not sure that we'll ever know how exactly this bog standard little settlement in what was actually a bog on the banks of the Tiber came to dominate the history of the Mediterranean. I mean, the Romans themselves had no authentic written records before about 300 BC, and they didn't have any firm knowledge in our terms, of what their origins were, although they debated it endlessly and were completely fascinated by it. And for us, we think that modern archaeology might come to the rescue here. Well, it can tell us quite a lot about early Rome, but what it can't do is it can't tell us the story of how it all started.

And you know what we. We think about the end of the Roman Empire a huge amount, like some men are supposed to think about the Roman Empire and the end of the Roman Empire most days, several times a day. Well, actually, we think about that stuff too, don't we, Mary? Several times a day. But the. The origins, the beginnings of the road of Rome and its empire are just as sort of mysterious and interesting, maybe more interesting than its full. Because even though we know very little firm fact, the myths and the stories that the Romans told about their origins are actually incredibly revealing and tell us so much about the way the Romans thought about themselves and thought about their place in the world. So I think origin myths are always interesting, they're always worth looking at. They contain so much about the people who are telling them, why they're telling them, what point are they proving?

And what we've just said about Romulus and Remus? Well, that's not half of it. I mean, for a start, there are all kinds of variants on their story. I mean, the one I like most is the idea that actually Romulus didn't kill Remus, really, and Remus lived happily to a right of old age. But not many Romans, I think, thought that. But still, that was in the ether. And there are all kinds of backstories to Romulus and Remus. I mean, you've got these little twins about to be got rid of. Well, why? Well, it's because they got a mother who had a wicked uncle who thought that the mother's kids would become powerful and deposing, which of course they did. But it's a kind of classic wicked uncle story.

Yeah. And the whole idea of the abandoned little children being suckled by some kind of animal, that's also a very recognisable story from folklore and fairy tale, and it crops up in other myths, in Greek myths. So, you know, there's a kind of folkloric pattern going on there.

Meanwhile, from stage right, we've got a completely different story about how Rome started. And that takes us back to the Trojan War, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. And one Trojan hero flees his defeated city, he's called Aeneas, and he flees westward and he fetches up eventually in Italy. And even if he doesn't found Rome Itself, he, he founds the race of Romans in Italy. And that's the story that Virgil tells in his great poem, the Aeneid, written in the first century bc, telling of that foundation of the whole people of Rome.

And that's not even the last of it, because also in this poem, the Aeneid by Virgil, when Aeneas arrives in Italy and in what will become the future site of Rome, there's already somebody there. And he is also part of the foundation myth of Rome. So some guy called Evander, who is also from elsewhere, who is an exile from Arcadia in Greece, he is knocking around what will become the future site of Rome and kind of gives Aeneas a kind of rather extraordinary little guide round what will become, you know, the Capitoline Hill and other parts of Rome, which would have been recognisable in turn, very much so, to Virgil's audience. So, you know, there are these competing stories of Rome's origins, none of which quite line up and they all have something in common, I think. Mary.

Well, there's two things that leap out to me from all these stories. First of all, somehow whenever you think you found the origins of Rome, there's always somebody there before for you, sort of that Rome, Rome has always been there somehow. And you peel back the layers and you know, oh, you think Aeneas has got there first? No, it's Evander, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there's that kind of infinite regress of the origins of Rome and I think that's very important. But also the thing that is really, really striking is that all these stories that we've just told, they're all about people coming from elsewhere. Rome is not founded by people who come from the territory of Rome. They're sort of always outsiders. And that contrasts really, really vividly with quite a lot of the stories you find in the ancient world, Greek world in particular, of cities who are founded by, by men. It's usually men who spring directly from the soil of the city. Right. So they, the men come up from the soil of Attica, Athens, and they've always been Athenian. Now what Rome is saying, the stories of Rome is saying not only is there always been somebody else somewhere in Rome, but Romans have always come from someplace else. And it's a very marked bit of that mythology.

Yeah, I think we're going to find that that becomes a super important vision of Rome's sort of self identity. Like, it's not like Thebes, it's not like Athens where people came from there. People have always come from elsewhere. And you can't ever really find the beginning. But, you know, I talked at the beginning about how these stories tell you so much about the tellers and whether we've already hinted towards that. But to me, there's a particular moment in Rome's history, Rome's later history, in which these origin myths become extremely important and we see them sort of bubbling up in the culture and historians are writing and poets are writing, and these stories sort of become full of significance and full of meaning and full of something that the Romans can grasp hold of and think about themselves through. And I think that moment can be, for example, this period of extraordinary civil violence and war that becomes increasingly prevalent at the beginning of the first century bc and in those moments of kind of internecine strife of. Of Romans versus Romans, of colleague versus colleague, the idea of Romulus and Remus, the sort of fraternal strife, the brother killing brother, it's become very resonant myths to those Romans at those moments, Right?

Yeah. And those bits of the myth then become stressed and the Romans invest in them, they invest in themselves and in the story of Romulus and Remus, because it's sort of saying to them Rome was always destined to be a city of civil war from the very beginning, brother killed brother. And it. So it's as if for the Romans, civil war is a kind of unescapable part of their DNA. And I think that's true in very general terms, but it's also true in sometimes quite specific terms where you can see probably myths being adjusted to take on board particular historical circumstances. And I love the stories that the Romans tell about the death of Romulus in the end, because they have two versions of the death of Romulus. One is he is dramatically taken up to heaven to join the gods. As he finally leaves Earth, he becomes a revered deity. The other is they tell side by side with that. Is that a certain point, they get really fed up with him and he's hacked to death by the senators. Now, it doesn't take much to see in some ways that that must be a story which is reflecting Roman debates about Julius Caesar, who does himself become a God after his assassination, but he was also hacked to death by the senators. And so in some cases you get this very close tie in between the myth story and the historical later version of what's going on in the city of Rome.

Yeah. And if you also think about the Emperor Augustus, you know, he emerges as the beginning of one man rule again after Rome's centuries as a republic. But actually Romulus was a one man ruler, the first king of Rome. So there was a period of kings before the Republic emerged. And then one man rule takes over again. That's an extraordinarily potted history of an incredibly long period. But when Augustus becomes this one man ruler, I mean, his real name is Octavian, right? His birth name is Octavian. And when he ascends to the great power of the sort of authoritarian leader, he changes his name and he looks right back to the origins of Rome and apparently he toyed with calling himself Romulus after the founder of Rome itself. And his name, Augustus actually does relate to Romulus, doesn't it Mary? In a slightly etiolated way you can

see why he decided or he was advised not to take the name Romulus. I'm very tempting to say that here I am, I'm the new emperor and I'm the second founder of Rome and I got the same name as the first founder. But Augustus's problem, or Octavian's problem was that he didn't want to look like he was the kind of king you killed his, his brother. And in fact he had emerged out of civil war. But even though he doesn't go so far as to take Romulus's name, if you look at the art and the sculpture of Rome at the period when Augustus is founding his new one man rule in Rome, it is full of images of Aeneas and Aromulus as kind of the twin inheritances of the city of Rome. And actually Augustus, as he becomes and Julius Caesar, they did actually trace their own ancestry back to Aeneas and through Aeneas to Aeneas's mum, the goddess Venus. So they saw or they reconstructed a direct connection between the rulers of the early Roman Empire and the mythical founders of Rome.

So what I find super interesting about this is that the Romans that we're talking about in this particular period, 1st century BC, 1st century cell, are absolutely capable of being historical skeptics like Livy and saying we don't really believe these myths. You know, they're more suitable for poetry than the craft of a historian or the art of a historian. But at the same time they're captured and enraptured by the stories to the extent that they actually trace, capable of tracing or trying to trace the family line back to these mythical figures and indeed to gods. I mean, there was a work by a writer called Varro. I mean it doesn't exist anymore, but we have the title of it and it was called on the Trojan Families, which was as Far as we know, it was an attempt to trace back prominent Roman families of his period right back to these mythical people.

I think what's interesting about the attitude of intellectuals and writers like Livy in the first century BC and AD is that they sort of take these myths as historical. They sort of see that this is the story of the foundation of Rome. And, you know, Livy says, oh, I think they're more. More appropriate to poets and historians. But he then goes on to tell the myths. It's his history. Yeah, but they're not. They. They interrogate them and they sometimes rationalize them. And one great rationalization goes back to the story of Romulus and Remus and being being found by the she wolf, who suckles them, and then taken in by the. By a shepherd family. And some of these writers are saying, what's the Latin word for wolf? Well, it's lupa. Right. And they say, what else does lupa mean in Latin? Well, actually, it means prostitute. So they start to build up a kind of rationalized story, which is not that these twins were found and suckled by a she wolf, but they were found and suckled by a prostitute, which is slightly easier to believe in, and then handed over to the shepherd family. So, you know, you're seeing them debate the details of the story while at the same time really taking the overall historical truth of them as almost for granted. And I think you see that very, very clearly in the layout, the city of Rome. I mean, there is a little hut on one of the hills of Rome. It's where the emperor's palace later was on the Palatine, a little hut. And it's there until, oh, 2nd 3rd century CE. And everybody believes it's the hut that Romulus lived in. It's called the Hut of Romulus. And they keep repairing it. When it needs a bit extra thatch, they put. They keep it up as a kind of heritage site of where Romulus himself actually lived. And they can pinpoint places in the city where Romulus's battles took place and so forth. So you've got a very vivid kind of real historicity here at the same time as a kind of sense that, well, you have to be careful with these stories.

I love that. I love that sort of sense that the Romans were really interested in the sort of topography of their very, very ancient beginnings. Because there's a similar effect in Virgil's Aeneid, where, as we mentioned before, Evander gives this little tour guide to Aeneas, who's coming in for the first time. And this is a brilliant effect in Virgil, where he talks about Evander showing Aeneas the Capitoline hill, which is all thorny and covered in bushes now, but in the future, that is, in the time that we're reading, supposedly reading the Aeneid, it's all gilded in gold. Or there are cows grazing in the Forum at the moment of the little guide around the future Rome. But it will be the Forum one day. So you get this sort of wonderful kind of clash of times, which, of course, is particularly resonant as a modern reader now, because it's all gone back to the sort of the ruinous and empty nature that Evander's describing. It's a sort of extraordinary sort of weird time machine. And I also really love Livy, the Roman historian, when he says words to the effect of, you know, I don't really believe this stuff about Mars being the originator of the Roman race, but it adds an enormous amount of dignity to our story. And of course, people believe it's around the empire because we're so strong and militaristic. There's a kind of sense in which he recognizes that Rome as an entity has the kind of immensity and grandeur that it kind of requires some kind of mythical origin. Almost as if, like, it's so hard to explain why Rome is so powerful. It's so impossible to explain for themselves why Rome started as this little kind of ridiculous village on the edge of a bog and became an empire, that it has to have some kind of divine or mythical underpinning because it's really difficult to explain otherwise. We find it difficult to explain.

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[Mary Beard]

I think the other thing that would surprise us if we would do a bit of time travel back to, let's say, Rome in the first century BCE and what would we find these guys talking about at dinner parties? These posh Romans, what would we find them writing about? What's the kind of. What sort of intellectual questions did they have? Well, actually, one of the really big questions that were preoccupying people in the middle of the first century BC was when was Rome founded? Exactly what was the date? The very date when Romulus established the city and in most accounts killed Remus. And this was. It was really hard fought. And eventually this guy Varro, who we have just mentioned, but also Atticus, the friend of the Roman orator Cicero, really big intellectual at the time time they came up with the idea, which, which was absolutely took hold, was that Rome was founded in our terms, by Modern Dating on the 21st of April, 753 BCE. Now, what I think is amazing is that we might sort of joke about the spurious specifics of all this, but you go to rome today on the 21st of April, you'll find that every year the foundation of the city of Rome is still being celebrated on April 21st.

I remember at school the figure 753-BC being chalked up on the blackboard as the foundation date for the first Rome. So I think not even as the traditional foundation date, but as that was the year.

Yeah, yeah. And we've got, you know, we've got these two 1st century BCE intellectuals, Sparrow and Atticus, to thank for that date. And they would be, I tell you, they would be so pleased to discover.

They would be. They would be delighted and, yeah, probably weirdly unsurprised in their, you know, in their arrogance, bless them. Can we just sort of wheel back to. At the beginning, we were a little bit dismissive about the possibility of archaeology giving us all the answers and sort of how difficult it is to line up the myths and the stories with anything tangible that's actually in the soil in Rome and any, you know, the product of archaeological excavation, any kind of ruins or fragments of evidence. Now, why is that, Mary? Can we talk a bit about the archaeology of early Rome and how far it can get us? I mean, I don't think either of us is going to argue that ever, that it's going to get us to Romulus or Remus or Aeneas. But where does it get us?

I said before I was a bit of a skeptic about the myths. In a way, I'm even more of a skeptic, I think, about the archaeology. Now, that's not because I'm trying to undervalue what archaeology can tell us about early history. And I think if you look at the excavations in Rome itself, and you look at the ones that have gone to the earliest layers that you can see in the city, they did tell us all kinds of things that we can start to see. For example, this is not just the hut of Romulus. But we can start to see what the habitation was like the wooden huts that they lived in. We can start to see how they were buried. We can start to see the kind of contacts these very early inhabitants had with the outside world. I mean, one of the graves that this has been excavated, going back to one of the earliest levels of the city of Rome, contains amber, right? And you can see there is a. They're part of a world of trade and exchange and so forth. And it's. I find that all absolutely fascinating. What. What it doesn't do and what archaeology can almost never do is tell us a story. It can't say this is the first place that the Romans put their spade in. It can't tell you the story of the foundation. And I think in the case of Rome, it's a bit worse than that because we have these very strong myths, particularly about Romulus. And I think an awful lot of archaeologists, and I don't mean to point the finger at Italian archaeologists, but I'm afraid I'm partly going to, is there's been a huge, huge effort to try to make the archaeology fit with the mythical story. So, you know, you find an early shrine, you can tell that it's some kind of religious place, it's got a kind of an altar and it goes back a long way. Quite how long, it's very hard to know. And before you know where you are, it's been reinterpreted as a shrine of Romulus. And there is an extremely charismatic archaeologist who's operating in Rome now, and he's called Andrea Carandini. And you can find many of his books translated into English. And he's been very, very concerned to pin down the myth in the soil of Rome. And Carandini is the kind of guy who will say, right, this is the boundary over which Romulus and Remus disputed and which led to the murder of Remus. Now, I'm saying this without Carandini being here, and he would tell a very different story, but I think he wouldn't be insulted to know that quite a lot of people don't agree with him, but he has a great desire to just try to make the archaeology fit. Now, I think it's all smoke and mirrors. I think that as soon as you say, I want to make the archaeology fit with what I find in the soil, of course you can do it. The earliest level is always dated to the 8th century BC, because that's when Rome was founded, wasn't it? I think in some ways, the archaeology We've got to a point where the archaeology is not being really used for what it's most interesting, but is used to kind of become another version of the myth. And that's my problem. Of course, you know, you know, of course, you know, at some point there was the. They were the earliest settlers on the site, were there. But don't let's get hung up with Romulus. Don't let's get hung up with Romulus. Because actually, we say now Romulus gave his name to Rome, Right? Got this guy Romulus, he founds Rome and the city's called Rome. The other way of seeing it is actually Romulus takes his name from the city of Rome. Who founded Rome. Well, a guy called Mr. Rome Romulus. And that's just one example of the repeated circularities you get when you try to pin this down in any historical way.

Yeah. And I think there's a secondary wave effect through the media, actually, when. I mean, I've noticed a few headlines when there's been work, archaeological work supposedly identifying a shrine to Romulus much later than the supposed romulus of the 8th century BCE, but a later Roman shrine to Romulus that sometimes in the headlines gets identified as archaeologists have discovered Romulus's house.

Yes, yes.

Well, it's not the same thing, guys. So, you know, there can be these sort of flurries of excitement so that the archaeological work even, you know, however far one may sort of agree with that research, that then has a sort of another life which is even more kind of. Which becomes genuinely quite fanciful in the hands of my dear colleagues, the headline writers.

Sometimes, sometimes we can't stress enough the fact that they're neither for us nor for the Romans. Were there any reliable, authentic historical records of their city before 300 or so? What they have is they have their stories, and we try to add to that with the archaeology, but they're all in the same kind of feedback loop.

Yeah. And to me, it's just so interesting that these Romans of the sort of late republic, early empire that we've been talking about, they are mystified by how they began. They are kind of looking at those myths and sometimes trying to rationalize those myths and at the same time connecting themselves to those myths. Personally, it's a completely fascinating mixture, I think. And I think that's why we don't junk the story of Romulus and Remus. Mary. I think, you know, that we may not believe the story of Romulus and Remus, but it doesn't mean that we just sort of Killed kick it out as a piece of ridiculous folklore. I mean, we treasure it because it's

fascinating and it's much, in some ways, for me, it's much more important than just a, you know, is it right or is it not right about the origins of Rome? What it's really important for is how the Romans think about themselves and what it is saying about the way they project their own values and, and conflicts back into their early history. And I think if there's one thing that for me marks the Romans out and that matches the mythical stories, it is that sense that the Romans see themselves as incorporating people from the outside. I mean, Romulus, at the very beginning of his city, he hasn't got enough citizens. So, you know, he gets up and he says, rome is an asylum. Asylum seekers come here. And the history of Rome is constantly marked by that sense that Rome is always incorporating people from outside, making them citizens. And you can, if you like, you can fast forward kind of almost a millennium from the notional foundation of Rome in 753, and you find the Emperor Caracalla in 212 CE issuing an edict which says every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire is now a Roman citizen, bona fide citizen. Now, in some ways, that's the sort of, that's the, that's the final moment. That's the final episode in this history of Rome, which starts notionally in saying, come to Rome. You can be welcomed here. You can be a citizen here. Now, that's not to say, of course, that Rome wasn't also a brutal conqueror. It sure was. But there is this sense of that they are. They're sucking people in rather than keeping them out.

Yeah. So this idea that the foundation myths of Rome somehow tell you that Roman is something that you become, Roman is something that you can become. And nobody, nobody is from here. Mary, I think that's a really great place to leave this episode. But I want to say to you, dear listeners, please do get in touch with us if you would like to make a comment or make a suggestion or just say hi. And you can do that on our email, which is instantclassicspodmail.com or contact us on our social media stantclassicspod.

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