Myths of 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 1

1

THE TRIUMPH OF

1.1 TIEPOLO IN CALIFORNIA

Let’s begin in San Francisco, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. Through the great colonnaded court, past the Corinthian columns of the porch, we enter the gallery and go straight ahead to the huge Rodin group in the central apse that dominates the visitor’s view. Now look left. Along a sight line passing through two minor rooms, a patch of colour glows on the far wall. We walk through the Sichel Glass and the Louis Quinze furniture to investigate. The scene is some grand neo-classical park, where an avenue flanked at the Colour plate 1 entrance by heraldic sphinxes leads to a distant fountain. To the right is a marble balustrade adorned by three statues, conspicuous against the cypresses behind: a muscular young or , carrying a lamb on his shoulder; a mature with a heavy figure, who looks across at him; and an upright water- in a belted tunic, carrying two urns from which no water flows. They form the static background to a riotous scene of flesh and drapery, colour and movement. Two Amorini wrestle with a dove in mid-air; four others, airborne at a lower level, are pulling a golden chariot or wheeled throne, decorated on the back with a grinning mask of . On it sits a young woman wearing nothing but her sandals; she has in her hair, and a ribboned garland of flowers across her thighs. The golden drapery that might have covered her billows out behind, perhaps blown by the wind or tossed aside by one of the two maids at the back (the other one beats a tambourine). Her route is marked on each side by an urn and a long staff bound with red ribbon. On the right dances a bare-breasted girl (darker-skinned than the beauty enthroned

1 of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 2

THE MYTHS OF ROME

behind her), in a flying red petticoat and a golden garter. On the left, two men are kneeling and offering flowers; one has a plumed helmet and a round shield. In the foreground, dark greenery contrasts with the brilliant light in which all this action is bathed. Whatever is going on? This excellent gallery provides full information, and the panel on the wall reads as follows:

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Italian, Venetian, 1696–1770 The Empire of Flora, ca. 1743 Oil on canvas Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum 61.44.19 Forming a pair with Maecenas Presenting the Arts to (Hermitage, Leningrad), The Empire of Flora was commissioned from the artist in 1743 by Francesco Algarotti, Venetian author and art connoisseur. The two paintings were ordered by Count Heinrich von Brühl, artistic adviser to Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Within the frivolous 18th century interpretation of the mythological subjects of these two paintings are specific references that flatter the Count. For example, the garden fountain in the background of our painting records the group by sculptor Lorenzo Mattielli that graced the gardens of Brühl’s Marcolini Palace in Dresden. More obvious allusions to Brühl’s patronage of the arts appear in the Leningrad painting, which depicts Maecenas counseling the ancient Augustus on the arts, in much the same way as Count Brühl advised Augustus III. Current scholarship suggests the specific subject may be drawn from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered and represents Armida’s garden. That’s a very helpful account of its origin, but it tells us more about the companion-piece in the Hermitage than about the painting we are looking at. We want to know what the frivolous mythological subject is. ‘Current scholarship’ is a little disingenuous in suggesting Armida’s garden from Tasso. When Algarotti wrote to Brühl in July 1743, he promised him that Tiepolo’s picture ‘will represent the empire of Flora, who changes the wildest places into scenes of delight’; and he should have known. In fact, the chariot suggests that the artist had in mind the triumph of Flora—and that is what our painting is called in the standard catalogue of Tiepolo’s work. The central figure must be Flora herself. The gorgeous girl in the chariot flaunts her body and looks out at us as if we were hardly worthy of her notice. Colour plate 2(a) Her pose is like that of in Tiepolo’s ‘Venus and ’ in Philadelphia, where the adulterous goddess seems to taunt her husband with her naked beauty. There is also a hint of it (shoulders back, right arm akimbo) in ‘The Colour plate 2(b) Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra’ in Edinburgh. In the San Francisco picture, the kneeling men to the left are perhaps like Vulcan and Antony, helpless in the presence of such high-voltage erotic power.

2 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 3

THE TRIUMPH OF FLORA

But we know about Venus; we know about Cleopatra. The triumph of Flora is not so familiar a story. Algarotti’s letter is helpful as far as it goes: the goddess of flowers will preside over the great man’s luxurious park. But that doesn’t account for her haughty look, the homage of the men or the sheer sensuality of the scene. Nor does it explain why the bold beauty’s triumphal chariot is being towed out from somewhere outside the park, off to the right, as if it has been garaged in an outhouse. Flora certainly makes her entrance in style—but where has she been?

1.2 , BELLINI AND

Tiepolo’s source for ‘The Triumph of Flora’ was a Roman poem much more widely read in the eighteenth century (and indeed the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth) than it is in our time. A wonderful poem, despite its modern neglect, it had long been a source of inspiration for Tiepolo’s great predeces- sors, the ‘old masters’ of the Venetian school. The author was Publius Ovidius Naso—‘Venus clerk Ovyde’ in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, ‘the most capri- cious poet, honest Ovid’, for Touchstone in As You Like It. The poem is called , ‘The Calendar’ or ‘The Festivals’, an artfully kaleidoscopic collection of tales based on the ritual calendar of the Roman religious year. Alas, it never found a Dryden or a Pope, but a London schoolmaster called William Massey— a contemporary of Tiepolo—did his best to render it into English verse in 1757. Here is a piece of Massey’s Ovid, an episode in the first book (9 January, the ), which takes off from Ovid’s various explanations of animal sacrifice:

The sluggish ass to is killed, Of whom a story’s told, jocose and odd, But vastly suitable to such a god. When Greece once celebrated Bacchus’ feast In honour of his triumphs in the east, Thither resorted from the Arcadian plains The jovial rural gods, and many swains: Pan, sylvan , of woods, And inhabiting the crystal floods; Here old on his ass appears, Ovid Fasti And he who birds from fruitful orchards scares. . . 1.391–400 The last reference is to Priapus; Massey has bowdlerised Ovid’s line, which actually means ‘and the red (god) who scares the timid birds with his penis’, or perhaps ‘and the (god) with the red penis who scares the timid birds’. Ithyphallic statues of Priapus, with the projecting member painted red, were often set up in gardens as scarecrows.

3 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 4

THE MYTHS OF ROME

. . . Who gathered all to a delightful place And feasted jocund, sitting on the grass; Bacchus afforded wine in plenteous store, And on their heads they flowery garlands wore. Some of the ’ tresses artless were, And some were decked with diligence and care; One, with a sprightly air, tucks up her clothes, Another does a beauteous breast expose; By this a naked taper arm is shown, And that, in a long vestment, sweeps the lawn. Pan and the Satyrs burned with amorous fire. Nor would Silenus check his fond desire; Old as he was, the lecher would renew Those pleasures which in youthful days he knew. But of the nymphs in all that lovely train, Fair gave the garden-god most pain; With her inflamed, for her he sighs alone By nods and signs, and makes his passion known; Ovid Fasti But pride and haughtiness attend the fair. 1.401–420 Thus, she despised him with a scornful air. She could have been a subject for Tiepolo—but it was a Venetian of an earlier age, , who painted ‘The ’. Colour plate 3 It was done for the ‘alabaster chamber’ in Alfonso D’Este’s ducal palace in , along with other Bacchic themes (Titian’s ‘The Andrians’ and ‘’). In Bellini’s scene, Bacchus is the ivy-crowned child on the left, filling a jug from the barrel; behind him, a respectable, grizzled Silenus pets his donkey; two satyrs are fooling about, unused to eating off crockery; Pan quietly plays his pipes in the background; and the waitress-nymphs, their clothes revealingly disordered as the text requires, are behaving with much more decorum than the senior gods satirically portrayed in the front row—Mercurius with his ; with his eagle; Neptunus with his trident, making free with the unidentified goddess to his right (and perhaps also with the nymph in blue, to judge by her glance); with her crown of corn-ears; with his laurel-wreath and ‘lyre’. To understand what is happening at the right of the scene, we must go back to Ovid’s narrative:

Toiled with the gamesome pleasures of the feast, The night came on, and all retired to rest; All o’er the copse they different places chose, And laid them down to make their soft repose. Lotis the last beneath a maple’s shade, Upon the ground, reclined her drowsy head.

4 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 5

THE TRIUMPH OF FLORA

Her lover rose about the dead of night, Who holding in his breath, and treading light, Came softly to the place where Lotis slept, And all the way the utmost stillness kept; He lays him gently down by Lotis’ side; Her eyes the god of sleep had firmly tied. Flushed now with joy, to greater he prepares Ovid Fasti And boldly with his hand her covering rears. . . 1.421–432

That is Bellini’s scene. His Priapus (the gardener) is fully clothed, but the folds of his tunic, picked out in appropriate red, betray his nature. Far above his head is a bird, not at all frightened now the scarecrow god has his mind on other things. Bellini has Priapus holding a tree to balance his weight, just as Ovid says (corpus librabat: ‘he lays him gently down’ is Massey’s mistranslation). What happened next? Well, remember that all this is to explain why asses are sacrificed to Priapus:

. . . When lo! Silenus’ ass, with sudden bray, Stopped short the lecher in his wanton way. The nymph affrighted struggled from his arms, And with her cries the sleeping crowd alarms; In form obscene Priapus stood confessed, Ovid Fasti By moonlight, to the giggling nymphs a jest. 1.433–438

Not all the Fasti stories are so farcical. Ovid is always surprising his reader with changes of subject and mood, and he can handle tragedy as well as burlesque. His second book ends with a long episode to explain the day called ‘Kingsflight’ (, 24 ). He tells of the rape of by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the , and the consequent uprising that drove out Tarquin and his family. That is a story we shall look at in Chapter 6. What matters here is Ovid’s description of the rape (this time in L.P. Wilkinson’s translation), and Titian’s interpretation of it:

He rose, and drew his gilded sword, and hied Straight to the chamber of that innocent bride, And kneeling on the bed, ‘Lucretia,’ breathed, ‘’Tis I, Prince Tarquin, with my sword unsheathed!’ She nothing spake: she had no power to speak, Nor any thought in all her heart to seek, But trembled, as a lamb from sheepfold strayed, Caught by a wolf, lies under him dismayed. Ovid Fasti What could she do? Struggle? She could not win. 2.793–801

It was a scene evidently more significant to Titian than the more common subject of Lucretia’s suicide. He painted it at least three times, most famously

5 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 6

THE MYTHS OF ROME

Colour plate 4 in the version for Philip II of Spain, now in Cambridge. This brutal exercise of power is as far as can be from the comic frustration of Priapus at the bacchanal. Right across the emotional range, the stories in Ovid’s Fasti provided rich material for the Venetian painters of the golden age, as they did two centuries later for Tiepolo.

1.3 OVID AND BOTTICELLI

Ovid introduces Flora at the end of Fasti book 4, on 28 April:

Ovid Fasti The goddess Flora decked with flowers appears 4.945–6 Who a soft scene of jesting freedom bears. . . ‘Scene’ is meant literally, in the theatrical sense. For this was the start of the games of Flora (28 April to 3 May), at which, as Ovid’s text has it, ‘the stage’s custom is for freer fun’. What exactly that custom was is revealed by an author writing a few years after Ovid, Valerius Maximus in his collection of moral examples. That work too was much better known in the than it is today. Valerius has a section on maiestas, the prestige or moral authority of great men, which concludes with an example about Marcus Cato the younger, Stoic philosopher and champion of old-fashioned morality. He was watching the games of Flora in 55 BC, when his friend Marcus Favonius, who was sitting next to him, pointed out that he was causing an embarrassment to the audience. ‘The populace was ashamed [in his presence] to call for the showgirls to undress.’ When Cato realised, he got up and went out, to the accompaniment of warm applause from the audience. ‘They called back on to the stage their traditional custom of fun, confessing that they attributed more prestige to that one man than they claimed for themselves as a body.’ Even as he praises Cato, the moralist author reveals that erotic entertainment was itself traditional, an old custom at the games of Flora. The poet Martial makes the same point more cynically:

You know of sprightly Flora’s ritual fun, The festal jests and licence of the rout. Martial Epigrams Then why, stern Cato, come to watch? Have done. 1.pref Or did you come in simply to walk out? Ovid puts off his treatment of Flora to the following book, where he gives her her due on the final day of her games (3 May): ‘Fair Flora! now attend thy sportful feast¬’ Last month, he says, I postponed your role (partes tuas)—as if the goddess herself were one of her showgirls on the stage. From time to time in the Fasti, Ovid gets his information from the gods in

6 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 7

Nymphs and Shepherds

Nymphs and Shepherds, come away; In the Groves let’s sport and play; For this is Floras holyday Sacred to ease and happy Love, To Dancing, to Musick and to Poetry. Your Flocks may now securely rove Whilst you express your Jollity. Schoolchildren sing Henry Purcell’s pretty song innocently unaware that ‘Flora’s holiday’ was a festival of sexual licence. The song comes originally from Act IV of Thomas Shadwell’s play The Libertine (1675), but there the third line was ‘Where each day is a Holy-day’. Purcell’s music was written for the revival of the play in 1692 (and published in the first volume of Orpheus Britannicus in 1706); presum- ably the reference to Flora dates from then. Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 8

THE MYTHS OF ROME

person. This is just such a passage, and interviewing this goddess was a partic- ular pleasure. He begins with the question that puzzles the San Francisco gallery visitor: who is Flora? She tells him, and her breath as she speaks is the scent of spring roses. She used to be , a nymph of the Elysian Fields. ‘It’s hard to tell you modestly what my figure was like¬’ One day, the god of the West Wind saw her and pursued her. Rape became marriage, with a garden for a wedding gift. Zephyrus made his bride a goddess, mistress of the flowering spring, and her name was Latinised as Flora. Colour plate 5 Botticelli’s ‘’ shows us the scene. Without prejudice to the more arcane, neo-Platonic interpretations of the iconography, we can read the surface meaning clearly enough as an illustration of Ovid’s text. From right to left: Zephyrus, Chloris the nymph (her name means ‘pale’) and Flora the goddess; then Venus, whose month is April, and on the far left Mercurius, whose month is May (he named it after his mother ); between them, where the games of Flora belong, dance the three Graces, whose names are Mirth and Splendour and Delight. In the Elysian Fields, there are flowers underfoot and fruit in the trees; and above it all the blind god of desire has his burning arrow on the string. As Flora tells her poet, the flowering of human sexuality is also part of her realm: A an emblem of young years is seen, With all its leaves around it fresh and green; Ovid Fasti So youth appears, when health the body sways, 5.273–274 And gladness in the mind luxuriant plays. So ends her first response. The poet has been enjoying looking at her, but when she gently reminds him to get on with the interview, he asks about the origin of the games. To this my question Flora quick replies: Before that men in luxury were drowned, In corn and cattle all their wealth was found; Sheep were their money, and their riches land, But lawless power had then the sole command. The common rights unjustly some invade, And on offenders long no mulct was laid; The people joining shared one public stock, He was a drone, who kept a private flock. At length the Aediles by their power restrained The usurpation that so long had reigned; Upon the guilty members fines were raised, And the defenders of the laws were praised. Ovid Fasti Part of the fines the state to me dispensed, 5.278–292 And by the victors were my games commenced.

8 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 9

THE TRIUMPH OF FLORA

Here is a new dimension to the goddess. Her games are the result of an ideo- logical démarche: wealthy landowners encroach on public land, the plebeian aediles defend the rights of the people with punitive fines. Ovid (though not his translator) reveals their significant name: they were called Publicius. We know from other sources when this happened, in 241 or 238 BC, and that the fines also paid for a splendid new temple to Flora. We know too that the reason for the aediles’ drastic act was a crop failure (sterilitas frugum): in a famine year, the people’s protectors must take appropriate action. But the Senate refused to recognise the games. Flora was slighted, and she took revenge:

The task would be too long to mention all Who to celestial anger owe their fall. The Roman fathers me neglected long; What way had I to vindicate my wrong? With grief I laid my wonted cares aside, For fields and gardens, which had been my pride. . . From off the trees the olive-buds were torn By raging winds, and hail destroyed the corn; And if the vines the hopeful blossoms crowned, The rains impetuous dashed them to the ground. No cruelty does with my anger dwell, Yet these disasters how could I repel? The fathers met; and vowed that if the year Should plenteous prove, my feasts should be their care, Ovid Fasti And annual made; their pious vows I heard; 5.311–316, My flowery games the consuls then prepared. 321–330 Ovid (but not his translator) gives the consuls’ names, and thus dates the event to the year of Lucius Postumius Albinus and Marcus Popillius Laenas, 173 BC. So now at last we know why Flora triumphs. Now we can see why Tiepolo painted her coming, as it were, out of the shadows. And now we can under- stand her haughty look and her brazen nakedness. The people’s goddess is offended, but she has prevailed. Despite the moralists, the games go on—and there they are in the right foreground, as the girl with the golden garter tosses her skirt up for us.

Let none now from soft merriment refrain; Flora’s a goddess of the jovial train. Nor is it hard to say, why these her games Are celebrated by young wanton dames; No prudery she feigns, no rigid air, Ovid Fasti And thus she’s honoured by the common fair. . . 5.347–352 ‘By a plebeian chorus’ is what Ovid actually says, and he must be referring to

9 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 10

THE MYTHS OF ROME

the showgirls. Botticelli presents them demurely as the Graces; but perhaps Tiepolo has caught more of Ovid’s tone.

1.4 ROMAN MYTHS

The purpose of this chapter is not just to explain Tiepolo’s painting. The point is this, that the triumph of Flora offers an entry into the Romans’ story-world which by-passes nineteenth- and twentieth-century preconceptions. A variety of influences—the New Testament, Edward Gibbon, Hollywood— have conspired to make us see Rome only as an empire, a paradigm of power. The fasces, symbols of the Roman magistrate’s authority, have given us the icons of fascism; the standards of Roman legions have been parodied and paraded in Nazi rallies; the architecture of triumphal arches and honorific columns speaks its message of victory and conquest as clearly for us as it did for the Romans and their subject peoples. And during the same two centuries, a Romantic conception of ‘Greece’ (which means the Athens of Pericles and the Elgin marbles) has frozen our perception of the ancient world into a schematic polarity. The Greeks gave us democracy, philosophy, tragedy, art and ; the Romans made roads and bridges, aqueducts and sewers, law and order. The clichés of television define it in visual shorthand: white marble against the blue Aegean, or legionaries’ boots tramping a paved road in the rain (for the archaeology of Roman Britain is a powerful influence too). Of course the Romans were proud of their empire, ‘the immense majesty of the Roman peace’, as Pliny put it in the first century AD, calling it a gift from the gods to the human race. But they also knew the cost of it. ‘To robbery, butchery and plunder they give the lying name of empire; they create a desola- tion and they call it peace.’ It was a Roman, the historian Cornelius Tacitus, who wrote that famous indictment, and put it in the mouth of a Celtic chieftain vainly defending the last outpost of liberty. The Romans had their own story of liberty, how it was gained and how it was lost; and they knew that their power had grown from small beginnings, thanks to the civic virtue of men who put the common good before their own ambition. Behind the emperors’ pomp and pageantry lay a long and rich tradition every bit as ideological as that of the Athenian democracy. Kings and consuls, tribunes and tyrannicides, secessions and civil wars produced a world of stories that were both historical and mythic. For myth and history do not exclude each other. Mythos (Greek) and fabula () mean literally ‘that which is said’, and thus ‘story’. To forestall tedious terminological argument, let us define a myth as a story that matters to a community, one that is told and retold because it

10 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 11

THE TRIUMPH OF FLORA

has a significance for one generation after another. Such a story may be (in our terms) historical, pseudo-historical or totally fictitious, but if it matters enough to be retold, it can count as a myth. The rape of Lucretia may have been a historical event; the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra certainly was. As for Flora, immortal though she is, she operates as easily in the historical world of men (241 and 173 BC) as in the timelessness of the Elysian Fields. Gods and goddesses are particularly affected by another misleading modern preconception. Here is Georg Wissowa, in what for most of the twentieth century was the standard work on Roman religion, written in 1902:

These [Roman] gods are attached to places and things, and naturally lack all personal qualities and individual characteristics; they have no relationship with each other beyond the proximity and similarity of their sphere of activity. Above all, Roman religion has no notion of gods marrying or having offspring, no belief in a world of heroes mediating genealogically between gods and men. Later Georg Wissowa narratives of such things are without exception the result of free poetic invention Religion und or learned inference from Greek models. Kultus . . . 23 Of course (it was assumed), the Romans could have no real mythology because they weren’t like the Greeks. As Kurt Latte, another great authority on Roman religion, put it in 1926, they were an ‘unspeculative and unimaginative people’, among whom ‘no myth-making imagination winds its tendrils round the gods’. So much for Ovid and Flora. Absurd though it may seem to define mythology by excluding ‘poetic invention’ (what did Wissowa think Homer and the Attic tragedians were doing?), this view of Rome as a world without myths has been extraordinarily persistent. It would have been unintelligible to Botticelli, Titian, and Tiepolo. They knew, and exploited, a world of ancient stories in which the difference between Greeks and Romans was of little significance. Since then, historical sophistication has taught us how far the world of Homer was from the world of Ovid, but that has not been an unmixed blessing. One of its consequences has been the unthinking assumption that the Greeks were somehow ‘before’ the Romans, more original and more authentic. In fact, the city-states of Athens and Rome were formed about the same time, and in some ways were remark- ably similar in their development. Both expelled their autocratic ruling dynasties at the end of the sixth century BC, and if we distinguish them there- after as Athenian democrats and Roman republicans, the difference is due only to our modern paradigms. The Romans were not a people without myths. They too had stories to tell about their gods, their forefathers and the achievements of their city. They were indeed profoundly influenced by Greek ideas, but not just in the artificial, anti- quarian sense that Wissowa had in mind. We now know, as he could not, that Latin-speakers were familiar with Greek (the language, and therefore also the concepts it expressed) in the early Iron Age, before either Roman or Athenian

11 Myths of Rome 01 repaged 23/9/04 1:53 PM Page 12

THE MYTHS OF ROME

history begins. This book is an attempt to reinterpret the Roman story-world in the light of that knowledge—and perhaps also to rediscover, on the way, some of the glamour and vividness that inspired the artists. The order of argument is roughly chronological. Remembering that every story was once told for the first time (and resisting, therefore, the lazy idea that all myths necessarily belong to an unfathomable antiquity), I have tried to arrange the material according to its probable age. In Chapters 2 and 3 the idea is to imagine which of the stories the Romans knew may go back to the archaic world of the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries BC. Chapters 4 to 6 do the same for the fifth and fourth centuries BC, from the expulsion of the Roman kings to the conquest of Italy, and Chapter 7 for the third, down to the defeat of Hannibal. After that we come into the world of texts, of story-telling as liter- ature, whether epic poetry or historical prose. It became also a world of empire, and imperial conquest had a profound effect on the way the Romans thought about themselves. So Chapters 8 and 9, on the second and first centuries BC and the first century AD, look at a new mythic history of power and tyranny, as republican rule collapses and autocracy returns. My end-point is the reign of Nerva (AD 96–98). That was where Gibbon began, in the first paragraph of The History of the Decline and Fall of the :

In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than four-score years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of [Gibbon’s first three chapters] to describe the pros- Edward Gibbon perous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Decline and Fall [Aurelius], to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revo- .. .book 1, ch. 1 lution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt, by the nations of the earth. Our story, unlike Gibbon’s, is about a city-state. Once the transition to an imperial monarchy was finally, and painfully, completed, the story-world of Rome was completed too. But it continued to reverberate, centuries and even millennia after the conditions that brought it into being had gone for ever. My final chapter tries to sketch that process, and to show how, even in our own day, the myths of Rome still have the power to move us.

12