be willing to stake their reputation even on Romulus being a historical person, but these stories are still the place where we must start our work of understanding the Romans. At the very least, they represent the stories that the Romans themselves told about the foundation of their city. As historians, we can only work with the material that we have; we cannot create stories out of thin air, but parts of the narrative – the she-wolf nourishing infant twins, the ascension of Romulus into heaven – seem too fanciful to believe. Sometimes we can use our common sense to decide what to accept, but sometimes our assumptions about what is possible are not reliable. The story of Romulus’ ascension may seem unbelievable, but the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven has billions of believers around the world, and in principle is no different from Romulus. So how do we, as people living twenty centuries or more after the Romans, handle these stories? That is our task as practitioners of historical thinking.
The most important element to understand about a historical source is not its date, or the identity of its author, or the bias of the author, although those are all important. It is understanding what the author is trying to do and what their purpose is in writing. The first question we should ask about Livy’s account is: what is he trying to accomplish with these stories about Romulus?
Fortunately, Livy, like most ancient and many modern historians, reveals his purpose at the very beginning of his text. He indicates that he will concern himself with:
the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended… so that you see, set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you may select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, being disgraceful in its origin and disgraceful in its conclusion, you are to avoid (Livy, Preface).
How might the knowledge that Livy wants to use Romulus to suggest something of the “life and morals of the community” help us understand his stories? For one it helps make sense both of the she-wolf story and of Romulus becoming a god. Livy wants us to know that the Romans viewed Romulus as someone so special that he must have had a direct link to divinity. Ancient texts are full of stories of the miraculous rescue of infants exposed to a premature death: Oedipus from Greek mythology or Moses from the Bible are similar examples. All of these stories are meant to tell the reader that an individual was destined for greatness, and in some way connected to the divine. If we read the story as Livy’s attempt to make us understand the greatness of Romulus rather than as a literal description of facts, the text becomes more understandable.
We can go further with our analysis. In the story about the death of Remus, the brother of Romulus, Livy actually offers two versions. He first describes how Romulus and Remus engaged in a battle of words over the founding of the city: the verbal fighting led to physical fighting where Remus was killed. But Livy goes on to tell another version in which Remus leaped over the walls of the new city as a way to mock his brother, leading his brother to strike him dead with the words “So perish all who leap over my walls!” Livy here makes the morals of Rome’s founder clear: Romulus placed the honor and protection of the city above the ties of family, a character trait that reappears frequently in episodes from Roman history. It might be seen as a part of Roman morality. However, we have to grapple with the fact that Livy tells us two stories, and seems to tell us this second story only because it was “more frequently told.” Did Livy not believe the second story? Does he want us not to believe it? Is the lesson really that Rome’s founder placed civic ties above family ties, or was it that he killed his brother out of anger? Perhaps Romulus is not an example to be imitated after all, but an example to be avoided. Note that once we know that Livy wants us to draw moral lessons from Roman history, we can start asking different questions rather than asking whether it really happened that way.
In the story of Romulus’ own death Livy again gives us two versions, and again forces us to confront a series of problems. On the one hand is the miraculous disappearance of Romulus, which is clearly intended to indicate divine intervention; in this version Romulus is never said to have died, only that he was no longer seen. On the other hand, Livy notes that some people claimed that Romulus was torn to pieces by senators. To Livy’s readers, the second story must have sounded an awful lot like the death of Julius Caesar, which occurred when Livy was around 15 years old. Caesar was stabbed 23 times by a group of senators as he conducted a meeting of the Senate. Again Livy presents an example that might well be worthy of imitation immediately alongside an example to be avoided. In this instance, Livy’s purpose seems more directly relevant to his own day: is the lesson that Romans should avoid being ruled by a dictator or that they should avoid the habit of assassinating people? Livy again does not give us a clear answer: he asks us to think for ourselves.
This habit of retrojecting current history into the past – of explaining past events according to present circumstances, as if history never changes – is widespread among all historians and even other writers. Often this is simply a product of being shaped by our own experiences: if I think the world works in a certain way, then I am more likely to think that events in the past happened that way.
Key Debates: How Do We Tell the Story of the Past?
For many people, one of the frustrations of studying the past is that there often seems to be no clear answer, no story that scholars can agree on. William Cronon, an environmental historian, in an article titled “A Place for Stories” (1992), once noted that two books, published in the very same year, looked at the same materials drawn from the same past and reached almost completely opposite conclusions. How can this be? Are there no answers in history?
Not exactly. History is a humanistic discipline: that is, it deals with human beings. Human beings often have fundamentally different views about the world. What makes a person good or evil? What makes a person happy? Does nature or nurture shape human character? These questions do not admit of a single answer that can be found scientifically.
Cronon, in analyzing the two books mentioned above, suggested that most historians tell one of two types of stories: either that the world today is better than it was yesterday or that the world was better before. Cronon says that “the one group of plots might be called ‘progressive,’ given their historical dependence on eighteenth-century Enlightenment notions of progress; the other might be called ‘tragic’ or ‘declensionist,’ tracing their historical roots to romantic and antimodernist reactions against progress”(Cronon, 1992, p. 1352).
Roman historians also participated in these types of debates. For the most part, they subscribed to the tragic narrative. For instance, Livy wrote that “as our standard of morality gradually lowers, let my reader follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin” (Livy, Preface). There’s no beating around the bush here: the arrival of wealth corrupted the good morals of the Roman people, making people of his own day unable to bear either the diseases or their remedies. However, others saw Roman society differently: the very wealth that Livy criticized allowed the first emperor Augustus to famously claim that he found Rome a city of brick but left it a city of marble, a place with all the amenities that an imperial capital should have. Clearly Augustus felt that Rome of his day was better than earlier generations.
Discussions like these continue to this day. We have probably all heard stories about how our parents had to walk three miles to school in the snow (mine used to say uphill both ways!): is the point of the story that today’s world is better because I did not have to do that, or that today is worse because I lack the character and strength built over the course of those journeys? These questions depend on what we consider to be the key factor in making a judgment: is having a house filled with the latest gadgets more important than spending time with one’s grandparents? Each person needs to decide for themselves: there is no one answer, just as there is no one answer to our historical questions.
Think of the hit musical Hamilton: it suggests that politicians in the eighteenth century were, just like politicians today, making deals in back rooms and engaging in brutal partisan politics. It even presents a character approving of a Presidential candidate because “it seems like you