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Lecture 13: Roman Myth
Roman Mythology
=Sources
-The principal sources of information about Roman mythology
appeared during the early years of the empire, between about 20 B.C.
and A.D. 20.
-By creating an official Roman mythology, the authors gave Rome an
ancient, distinguished, and glorious heritage.
-Virgil: Rome's national epic, the Aeneid
-Ovid: the Metamorphoses, a collection of Near Eastern and Greek
myths that the Romans had adopted.
-Ovid: Fasti describes Roman myths about the gods according to the
festivals in their calendar.
-Livy: the history of Rome portrayed legends about the city's
founding as though they were historical events.
=Greek influence on Roman myth
-The early Romans, like other early civilizations, believed in forces
or spirits, and the Romans needed gods and goddess
-When Rome was founded in the 8th century B.C., many of the Greek
city-states were already well-established and later over the Europe:
colonies on the Italian peninsula and Sicily which would become a
part of the early Roman Republic.
-Thus, the Romans were influenced by the Greeks in terms of myth,
art, philosophy, literature, drama, etc.
-Greek mythology was an essential part of an elite Roman’s
education. He would learn the myths from a core curriculum of
literary works, as well as from art and religious ritual. The epics of
Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were key texts.
=Differences between Greek and Roman
-While Rome was able to adopt Greek myth, it had to be adapted to
reflect a Roman set of values.
-Names changed in Roman myth: Zeus -> Jupiter; Apollo ->
Phoebus; Ares -> Mars; Poseidon -> Neptune; Aphrodite -> Venus;
Dionysus -> Bacchus; Eros -> Cupid; Athena -> Minerva; Hera ->
Juno; Nike -> Victoria; Artemis -> Diana
-In Greek, the appearance of a god was important and the gods were
portrayed as elegant and gorgeous beings, but Roman Gods did not
have an actual personality. The looks of the god had to be imagined
by the reader or listener. Physical appearance wasn’t given to Roman
Gods until the 6th century B.C.
-Greek mythology tells great stories of mortals who participated in
dangerous adventures and heroic deeds, but Roman mythology
disregarded the idea of mortality and said that only life after death is
important.
-Much of Greek mythology was transmitted through their poetry and
drama, but the Roman myths were written in prose
-Greek gods and goddesses have their own names, such as Zeus,
Hermes, Ares and Hera, but Roman gods and goddesses have names of
planets of the sun system, such as Jupiter, Mercury, Neptune and Mars.
=Roman interpretation of the myth of Marsyas: from hubris to liberation
-In Greek, the myth of Marsyas is a cautionary tale or a form of state
propaganda designed to frighten and control people. So the myth affirms
Apollo’s supremacy and the dangers of challenging the gods.
-But in Rome the politics of this myth is reversed. In the Roman
Republic, Marsyas’ myth hailed the state’s liberation from patrician
(elite) authority. Marsyas had not been killed by Apollo, but was instead
rescued by Liber, god of Liberation, who brought him to Italy, where he
founded the Marsic people, ancestors of the powerful non-patrician
family, the Marcii. Apollo represented what the Republic had fought to
=Had Freud chosen the Roman myth rather than the Greek myth
-If Freud had selected another myth through which to explain the
workings of the psyche, how might things have been different for
psychoanalysis?
-Freud could have chosen the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It is
obviously rich material for psychoanalysis
-It is a story of the relationship between Cupid, the god of love, and
Psyche, a mortal woman whose name means ‘soul’. The myth
survives in a Latin novel written in the 2nd century A.D. by the North
African writer Apuleius, called Metamorphoses or, perhaps, The
Golden Ass.
-Psychologist and critic Carol Gilligan: the myth is a new map of love
that reveals what Freud’s treatment of the Oedipus myth eclipsed:
the female voice, and the joyousness of equal love between a man
and a woman.
-Jacques Lacan: the story is not about men and women at all: it is an
allegory of the soul’s relationship to desire and loss. It reveals that
the soul only becomes animated at the moment when it loses the
desire that has fulfilled it. The moment when Psyche reveals and
loses Cupid.
-Both Gilligan and Lacan moves beyond the model of Oedipus through
the Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche
-Freud’s promotion of the Oedipus myth was a significant factor in
the privileging of Greek over Roman myth in the modern shaping of
classical myth. Had he promoted Cupid and Psyche instead, classical
mythology as we know it would be differently configured.
=Romulus and Remus
-There is no single story of Romulus. There are scores of different,
sometimes incompatible, versions of the tale.
-The story of Romulus and Remus is by turns intriguing, puzzling,
and hugely revealing of big Roman concerns, at least among the elite.
-Why twin brothers (one redundant)?, Why wolf?, Why killing
brother?, Why asylum?, Why Rape of the Sabine women?, etc.
-Nurtured by the wolf:
1. Livy was one of those Roman sceptics who tried to rationalise this
particularly implausible aspect of the tale.
2. The Latin word for wolf (lupa) was also used as a colloquial term
for prostitute. Could it be that a local whore rather than a local wild
beast had found and tended the twins? Whatever the identity of the
lupa, a kindly herdsman or shepherd soon found the boys and took
them in. Was his wife the prostitute?
-Murder of Remus:
1. The twins disagreed about where exactly to site their new
foundation. Romulus for the hill of the Palatine (later palace), Remus
for the Aventine.
2. Remus insultingly jumped over the defences that Romulus was
constructing around his preferred spot.
3. Romulus responded by killing his brother and so became the sole
ruler of the place that took his name.
4. As he struck the terrible, fratricidal blow, he shouted: “So perish
anyone else who shall leap over my walls.” It was an appropriate
slogan for a city which went on to portray itself as a belligerent state,
but one whose wars were always responses to the aggression of
others, always “just.”
-Rape of the Sabine women:
1. Romulus’s Rome consisted of just a handful of friends and
companions. So Romulus declared Rome an asylum and encouraged
the rabble and dispossessed of the rest of Italy to join him: runaway
slaves, convicted criminals, exiles and refugees. Now plenty men.
2. In order to get women, he invited the neighbouring peoples, the
Sabines and the Latins, for a religious festival and entertainments and
gave a signal for his men to abduct the young women among the
visitors and to carry them off as their wives.
3. Livy’s interpretation: they seized only unmarried women; this was
the origin of marriage, not of adultery. / They were resorting to a
necessary expedient for the future of their community, which was
followed by loving talk and promises of affection from the men to
their new brides. / This is a just war because the Romans first asked
the neighbours for a treaty of conubium, or 'intermarriage', which the
refused.
4. Ovid’s interpretation: Ovid presents the incident as a primitive
model of flirtation: erotic, not expedient. Ovid's Romans start by
trying to spot the girl they each fancy most and go for her with
lustful hands once the signal is given.
5. Ovid was as subversive as Livy was conventional - ending up
banished in A.D. 8, partly for the offence caused by his witty poem,
Love Lessons, about how to pick up a partner.
6. The English word "rape" is a conventional translation of Latin
raptio, which in this context means "abduction" rather than its
prevalent modern meaning in English language of sexual violation.
7. The girls' parents went to war with the Romans for the return of
their daughters. They bravely entered the field of battle and begged
their husbands on one side and fathers on the other to stop the
fighting. They said: “We'll better die ourselves than live without
either of you, as widows or as orphans”
8. Notion of marriage: it shows the violence upon which the marriage
contract was founded. Early Roman marriage ceremonies
incorporated ritual practices that recalled the rape of the Sabines: the
husband carrying his bride over the threshold.
=The story of the Trojan hero Aeneas
-There are as many puzzles, problems and ambiguities in this story with
unresolved questions about where, when and why it originated.
-The story is more complicated and enormously enriched through the
Aeneid, Virgil's great twelve-book poem on the theme, written during
the rule of Augustus. One of the most widely read works of literature
ever: some of its most powerful literary and artistic highlights, including
the tragic love story of Aeneas and Dido, the queen of Carthage.
-The central claim of the story of Aeneas is one that echoes the
underlying theme of Romulus' asylum. The story of Aeneas goes further,
to claim that the Romans really were originally foreigners.
-In one episode of Aeneid, the hero visits the site of the future city of
Rome and finds it already settled by primitive predecessors of the
Romans, who exiled from the land of Arcadia in the Greek Peloponnese.
However far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already
from somewhere else.
=Roman mythology and religion
-Blurring boundary between mythology and factual history: it was
common for the citizens to accept mythology as factual history,
rather than a set of parables and philosophies.
-Gods native and foreign:
1. Its original inhabitants had come from nearby towns and regions as
seen in the foundation myths of Romulus and Aeneas.
2. The Roman world was a place full of gods, reflecting the multiethnic character of the Empire itself.
3. Adding foreign gods to one's pantheon was for the Romans an
accepted practice
4. For centuries, the Romans had sought to establish
correspondences between their gods and those of their neighbours.
This process, referred to as interpretatio romana, allowed native
religious traditions to be assimilated within a Roman mythological
narrative
5. The many gods competed for pride of place and adherents within
the Pax Romana while the people rename their own deities
6. These deities were not all equal just as not all inhabitants of the
Empire were equal, but there was no central pagan religion in the
manner of the monotheistic Jews and Christians
-A balance between religious conservatism and change:
1. A delicate balance between religious conservatism and change
existed throughout the Republic. The state continued to keep a
careful watch over which gods could be brought to and installed in
Rome, adjusting its religious practice to fit the particular needs of the
city.
2. A censorious reception of foreign cults was particularly in
evidence when they entered Rome as a result of private initiatives
rather than stale action.
3. One such incident concerned the worship of Dionysus (Latin
Bacchus) who had long been revered in Rome as Liber Pater, an
Italian god of fertility and wine. Since Liber was a rustic deity, his
major cultic presence in the city was in association with Ceres at a
temple dedicated in 493 B.C. on the Aventine Hill, which was then
outside the sacred boundaries of Rome. In the second century B.C.
Bacchic rites of worship involving ecstatic celebrations spread in
Italy and came even to Rome, attracting a following of men and
women of all social strata. Members of the senatorial elite became so
concerned that a law was passed in 186 B.C. which resulted in what
came to be called the “Bacchanalian incident”, the first organized
Roman state persecution of a religious group.
-Wars and religion:
1. From the fourth century B.C. onward, Rome organized an aggressive
and efficient military apparatus, managing hegemony and expansion first
within Italy, then within the Mediterranean basin, finally as far as
Scotland, the northern German lowland plain, the southern Carpathians,
the coast of the Black Sea, and the northern edge of the Sahara.
2. These processes had consequences for the shape of religion at Rome.
There is a strong emphasis on control, of both centralization and
presence. Public rituals were led by magistrates, priestly positions filled
by members of the political elite, mass participation directed into
temporary and then more and more permanent architectural structures
in the center of Rome.
3. Control and the Emperors: in the transformation from Republic to
Empire, the emperor became Rome's supreme political and religious
authority. Julius Caesar had reformed Roman religious customs while
holding the office of pontifex maximus, the chief of a college of priests.
Augustus inherited this office.
4. Constantine and the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312:
Constantine looked up to the sun before the battle and saw a cross of
light above it, and with it the Greek words: “in this sign, you will
conquer.” Constantine commanded his troops to adorn their shields
with a Christian symbol, and thereafter they were victorious.
5. Greek gods and goddesses were usually given a beautiful and
perfect physical appearance. They were dressed into white and light
cloth. By contrast, Romans were more focused on warfare and valued
bravery. Rome gods and goddesses had military clothes, and are
more military and aggressive.
Group Discussion
-What are the bright side and the dark side of the Korean Pop Idols
(girls and boys)