Romans had an unusually chaotic foundation myth, especially if we compare it to the almost mathematical precision of their model of society. Rome is the first major civilisation whose extremely rich symbolic apparatus allowed them to create a regime of governance that functioned independently of a State religion. Using elementary and primitive elements – the body, spatial coordinates, distance – they created a symbol structure that was so efficient that they could govern without relying exclusively on military strength.
This idealised ‘Pax Romana’ is in contrast to the many legends surrounding the delinquent twins Romulus and Remus that began to emerge in Roman literature and discourse in the 4th century BC. Why are they presented as illegitimate? Why is their father attributed an ‘oriental’ and hence ‘weak’ and ‘inferior’ origin? How did the basket in which they were abandoned by their mother at Alba Longa mysteriously float up the Tiber against the current? Why do all versions of the legend insist that they were found and adopted by a landless shepherd and his prostitute wife? Why were they portrayed as violent adolescents? Even the gods seem powerless to prevent the violence that led to the death of Remus and the destruction of Remuria, the city he founded.
Three centuries after they emerge in Roman literature, when asked by Octavius-Augustus to write the history of New Rome and the Empire, Virgil tweaks the story by giving the Giulii (Gaius and Octavius) a semi-divine origin but retains intact all the sordid and ignominious tropes of the original legend. If Remus had killed Romulus, neither Rome nor Remuria would have grown on the banks of the Tiber. Remus had to die! Here, the lecture explores a hypothesis why the Romans had to see themselves as the descendants of the bad twin.
January 18, 2018, 6pm Free Admission
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Montreal
1200 Av. du Dr Penfield
Conference in Italian
Guy Lanoue is the Director of the Department of Anthropology at Université de Montréal since 2014. Professor of cultural and social anthropology, he works on imagery structures (invisible and unspeakable) in all their forms. His main fields of research are Mesopotamia (interregional exchange in Sumerian and Akkadian age), women as symbols of community and in cultural transmission (Italy), Native North American myth and art, and Anglo-American literature. Beyond the projects about Italian museums and Montreal shopping centres, he currently works on the idea of Mediterranean city and, soon, on the semiotic importance of nature in the Italian political-cultural thinking.
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