CITY LIT CLASSICS DAY 2016
ROMAN IDENTITY AND THE LAND: FROM CENTRE TO FRINGES
Lecturer: Deborah Hyde1
Passages read during the lecture
the king's flock-master found her [the wolf]
licking the boys with her tongue.
According to the story his name was Faustulus.
He took the children to his hut and gave them to his wife Larentia to bring up.
.....Some writers think that Larentia, due to her unchaste life, had got the nickname
of "She-wolf" amongst the shepherds, and that this was the origin of this marvellous
story.
As soon as the boys, thus born and thus brought up, grew to be young men, they did
not neglect their pastoral duties but their special delight was roaming through the
woods on hunting expeditions.
As their strength and courage were thus developed, they used not only to lie in wait
for fierce beasts of prey, but they even attacked brigands when loaded with plunder.
They distributed what they took amongst the shepherds, with whom, surrounded by
a continually increasing body of young men, they associated themselves in their
serious undertakings and in their sports and pastimes.
Taken from Livy. Books I and II With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919: available
online:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0151%
3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D4
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Then Romulus shall receive the people,
wearing with joy the tawny hide of the wolf which nursed him.
The walls he builds will be the walls of Mars and he shall give his own name to his
people, the Romans.
On them I impose no limits of time or place.
I have given them an empire that will know no end....
Taken from Virgil: The Aeneid. Translated by David West. (Penguin Classics, revised
edition, 2003)
1
Images shown during my lecture are not reproduced here, as I do not own the copyright, but you
should be able to find them online by using their descriptions below as key words in an internet
search.
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“The sole hope of the rule of the Roman people cultivated
a field of some four acres across the Tiber.....
Whether he was bending over his spade as he dug a ditch
Or plowing, he was certainly, it was generally agreed,
intent on the job of working the land.
After they had exchanged greetings, he was asked to put
on his toga and listen to the senate’s mandate.....
Amazed, he asked, “Is everything all right?” as he
ordered his wife Racilla to bring his toga quickly from the
hut. Wiping off the dust and sweat, he put on his toga and
stepped forward. The delegates saluted him as dictator....
Taken from Livy: The History Of Rome, Books 1-5, translated by Valerie M Warrior,
Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis (2006).
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Meliboeus: Tityrus, lying back beneath wide beechen cover,
You meditate the woodland Muse on slender oat;
We leave the boundaries and sweet ploughlands of home.
We flee our homeland; .....
.... the countryside’s
All in such turmoil. Sick myself, look, Tityrus,
I drive goats forward; this one I can hardly lead.
For here in the hazel thicket just now dropping twins,
Ah, the flock’s hope, on naked flint, she abandoned them.......
I keep remembering how the oak-trees touched of heaven,
If we had been right-minded, foretold this evil time.
But give us that god of yours: who is he, Tityrus?
Tityrus: The city men call Rome I reckoned Meliboeus,
Fool that I was,.......
.....But she has raised her head among the other cities
.....It was here to my petition he first gave reply:
‘Graze cattle as before, my children, and yoke bulls’.
Meliboeus: Lucky old man, the land then will remain your own,
And large enough for you, although bare rock and bog
With muddy rushes covers all the pasturage:
No unaccustomed feed will try your breeding ewes,
And no infection harm them from a neighbour’s flock.
Lucky old man, among familiar rivers here
And sacred springs you’ll angle for the cooling shade;
The hedge this side, along your neighbour’s boundary,
Its willow flowers as ever feeding the Hybla bees,
Will often whisper you persuasively to sleep;.....
....But we must leave here, some for thirsty Africa,
Others for Scythia and Oaxes’ chalky flood
And the Britanni quite cut off from the whole world.....
.....Some godless veteran will own this fallow tilth,
These cornfields a barbarian. Look where strife has lead
Rome’s wretched citizens; we have sown fields for these!
Graft pea-trees, Meliboeus, now, set vines in rows.
Go, little she-goats, go once happy flock of mine
Not I hereafter, stretched full-length in some green cave,
Shall watch you far off hanging on a thorny crag; .....
Taken from Virgil: O Cruel Alexis (Number 76 in the Penguin Little Black Classics
series, translation by Guy Lee and Kimberley Johnson, 2009
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“....let’s emigrate from the country we currently own, which is small and rugged, and
take over somewhere better. There are plenty of countries on our borders, and
plenty further away too, any one of which, in our hands, will make us even more
remarkable to even more people. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for people with
power to do. Will we ever have a better opportunity than now, when we rule over so
many peoples and the whole of Asia?”
“.......become subjects instead of rules, on the grounds that soft lands tend to breed
soft men.”
[The Persians] “.....chose to live in a harsh land and rule, rather than cultivate fertile
plains and be others’ slaves.”
Taken from Herodotus: The Histories. Translation by Robin Waterfield. Oxford World
Classics (2008).
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[Unlike Greeks, the Cyclopes] “.....have no assemblies for the making of laws, nor
any established legal codes, but live in hollow caverns in the mountain highs .... and
nobody has the slightest interest in what his neighbours decide.”
[They] “.....never lift a hand to plant or plough”....
[Their land has never been] “....used neither for grazing nor ploughing,
it lies for ever unsown and untilled.”
From ‘Homer: The Odyssey’ translated by E.V. + D. C. H. Rieu. Penguin Classics
(2003).
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“It is a hard thing to say, gentlemen, but we are loathed abroad because of the
damage our generals and officials have done by their licentiousness. No temple has
been protected from them by its sanctity, no state by their oaths, no home by its
locks and bars. In fact there is now a shortage of rich and prosperous cities for us to
declare war on so that we can loot them afterwards.....So it will not do, gentlemen,
merely to produce a general who could probably defeat King Mithridates’ forces in
pitched battle; for unless he is also a man who can keep his hands, eyes and mind
off our allies’ property, their wives and children, the treasures of their temples and
cities, and from the gold and jewels of the king, he is not the man we can send out to
fight....”
“In the fair city of Rome, with its wealth of art treasures, there is not a statue or
painting that was not fairly captured from our enemies in war. But the country houses
of these dreaded few are stuffed full of masterpieces looted from the cities of our
most loyal allies. What do you think has happened to the wealth of the penniless
nations of today, Athens, Pergamum, Cyzicus, Miletus, Chios, Samos – all Asia
Minor in fact – Achaea, Greece, Sicily? You will find it all hoarded in the homes of
these same few men.”
Both passages taken from Res Publica: Roman Politics And Society According To
Cicero, edited by W K Lacey and B W J G Wilson (Bristol Classics Press, 1976).