Rome : day one
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Rome : day one
Princeton University Press, 2011
- : hbk
- Other Title
-
Roma: Il Primo Giorno
Available at / 2 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Andrea Carandini's archaeological discoveries and controversial theories about ancient Rome have made international headlines over the past few decades. In this book, he presents his most important findings and ideas, including the argument that there really was a Romulus--a first king of Rome--who founded the city in the mid-eighth century BC, making it the world's first city-state, as well as its most influential. Rome: Day One makes a powerful and provocative case that Rome was established in a one-day ceremony, and that Rome's first day was also Western civilization's. Historians tell us that there is no more reason to believe that Rome was actually established by Romulus than there is to believe that he was suckled by a she-wolf. But Carandini, drawing on his own excavations as well as historical and literary sources, argues that the core of Rome's founding myth is not purely mythical. In this illustrated account, he makes the case that a king whose name might have been Romulus founded Rome one April 21st in the mid-eighth century BC, most likely in a ceremony in which a white bull and cow pulled a plow to trace the position of a wall marking the blessed soil of the new city.
This ceremony establishing the Palatine Wall, which Carandini discovered, inaugurated the political life of a city that, through its later empire, would influence much of the world. Uncovering the birth of a city that gave birth to a world, Rome: Day One reveals as never before a truly epochal event.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION First Thoughts 1 An Epochal Event 12 The Site of Rome before Rome 15 The Places of Rome 27 Remus and Romulus and the Kings of Alba Longa 33 THE PALATINE The Preliminary Rite on the Aventine 41 The Blessing of the Palatine and the Founding of Roma Quadrata 50 THE FOUNDING OF THE FORUM, THE CAPITOL, AND THE CITADEL The Forum 64 The Capitolium and the Arx 93 THE ORDERING OF THE REGNUM, OR THE CONSTITUTIO ROMULI The Ordering of Time 101 The Ordering of Space and Men 102 Enemies 110 CONCLUSION 116 Literary Sources 123 Index 165
by "Nielsen BookData"