The missing link
The final question for this chapter, however, is whether the archaeological material must remain quite as separate from the mythic traditions of Romulus and Remus as I have presented them. Is it possible to link our investigations into the earliest history of Rome with the stories that the Romans themselves told, or with their elaborate speculations on the city’s origins? Can we perhaps find a little more history in the myth?
This is a seductive temptation that has influenced a lot of modern work on early Rome by both historians and archaeologists. We have already spotted the attempt to make the story of the Septimontium reflect the dual nature of the city – Roman and Sabine – which the myth of Romulus emphasises. Recently the discovery of some early earthwork defences at the foot of the Palatine Hill has prompted all kinds of wild speculation that these were the very defences over which Remus jumped, to meet his death, on the city’s foundation day. This is archaeological fantasy. There is no doubt that some early earthworks have been discovered, and that in itself is important – though how they relate to the early hut settlement on the top of the Palatine is puzzling. They are nothing whatsoever to do with the non-existent characters Romulus and Remus. And the attempts to ‘massage’ the dating of the structure, and its associated finds, to end up on 21 April 753 BCE (I am exaggerating only slightly) are special pleading.
There is just one location in the whole of the city Rome where it is possible to link the early material remains directly with the literary tradition. In so doing, we find not agreement and harmony between the two but a wide and intriguing gap. That location is at one end of the Forum, close to the slopes of the Capitoline Hill, a few minutes’ walk from where Cicero attacked Catiline in the Temple of Jupiter Stator, and just next to the main platform (or rostra) from which speakers addressed the people. There, before the end of the first century BCE, in the pavement of the Forum was set a series of slabs in distinctively black stone forming a rectangle of roughly 4 by 3.5 metres, marked out with a low stone border.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the archaeologist Giacomo Boni – a celebrity at the time to rival Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, and with none of the dubious reputation for fraud – excavated below the black stone, where he found the remains of some much earlier structures. These included an altar, part of a large free-standing column and a short stone pillar that is covered in mostly unintelligible early Latin, probably one of the earliest texts in the language that we have. The place had been intentionally buried, and the fill included all kinds of extraordinary as well as everyday finds, from miniature cups, beads and knuckle-bones to some fine pieces of sixth-century BCE Athenian decorated pottery. The most obvious explanation, to judge from the finds, which seem to include religious dedications, is that this was an early shrine, possibly of the god Vulcan. It was covered over when the Forum was repaved sometime in the first century BCE – but to preserve the memory of the sacred site underneath, the distinctive black stone was laid above.
Later Roman writers were well aware of the black stone and had various ideas about what it signified. ‘The black stone,’ one wrote, ‘marks an unlucky spot.’ And they knew that there was something underneath it, going back centuries: not a religious shrine, as archaeologists are now fairly confident it was, but a monument connected with Romulus or his family. Several assumed it was the tomb of Romulus; others, perhaps worried that, if Romulus had become a god, he should not really have a tomb, thought it was the tomb of Faustulus, the foster father of Romulus and Remus; still others made it the tomb of one of Romulus’ comrades, Hostilius, the grandfather of one of the later kings of Rome.
They also knew, whether because they had seen it before it was covered or from hearsay, that there was an inscription down there. Dionysius records two versions of what it was: the epitaph of Hostilius, ‘documenting his bravery’, or an inscription ‘recording his deeds’ put up after one of Romulus’ victories. But it was certainly neither of those things. Nor was it, as Dionysius claims, ‘written in Greek letters’: it is bona fide early Latin. But it makes a marvellous example of both how much and how little Roman historians knew about the buried past – and how they so liked to imagine the traces of Romulus still present on, or just below, the surface of their city.
13. A diagram of the remains of the early shrine excavated by Giacomo Boni underneath the black stone in the Forum. On the left is an altar (a squared U-shape structure found elsewhere in Italy at this period). On the right stands what is left of the column, and just visible behind it is the inscribed pillar.
What this text actually says – so far as we can make any sense of it – takes us into the next phase of Roman history and the series of almost equally mythical kings who were supposed to have followed Romulus.