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Concept
Founding of Rome
Summary
The founding of Rome is a legendary event much embellished by later Roman myth. Archaeological evidence indicates that Rome was developed from earlier hilltop villages and was never so singularly founded. Habitation of the Italian peninsula goes back far into prehistory; evidence of settlement on the Capitoline hill goes back to 1700–1350 BC, in line with more general archaeological evidence of settled habitation 1600 BC. Evidence of graves on the site goes back to 1000 BC. Likely influenced by a trend for city-state formation emerging from Greece, these hilltop settlements agglomerated into a single polity by the later eighth century BC.
Contrary to the gradual account given by material evidence, the Romans believed that their city was founded by the legendary king Romulus at a specific time and date, the most famous of which is 21 April 753 BC given by Marcus Terentius Varro in the first century BC. Other dates, however, are scattered through the Roman tradition. Roman myth cast Romulus and his brother Remus as sons of Mars and princes from the royal line of Alba Longa, a city which itself had been founded by Aeneas following his departure from Ilium after the fall of Troy. Almost no historians take these myths as historical and there is no evidence of Alba Longa's historicity. The alleged royal line connecting Romulus and Remus to Aeneas is almost certainly an antiquarian fiction from the third century BC.
The conventional division of pre-Roman cultures in Italy deals with cultures who spoke Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The Italic languages, which include Latin, are Indo-European and were spoken, according to inscriptions, in the lower Tiber valley. It was once thought that Faliscan – spoken north of Veii on the right bank of the Tiber – was a separate language, but inscriptions discovered in the 1980s indicate that Latin was spoken more generally in the area. Etruscan speakers were concentrated in modern Tuscany with a similar language called Raetic spoken on the upper Adige (the foothills of the eastern Italian Alps).
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