REWRITING ROME: TOPOGRAPHY, ETYMOLOGY AND HISTORY IN VARRODE LINGVA LATINA5 AND PROPERTIUSELEGIES4

Abstract

sunt…ista, Varro; nam nos in nostra urbe peregrinantis errantisque tamquam hospites tui libri quasi domum reduxerunt, ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agnoscere.(Cic. Acad. 1.3.9)What you say is true, Varro; for we were wandering and straying about, like foreigners in our own city, and your books, as it were, led us back home, so that we could see at last who and where we were. With its memorable image of the Antiquitates guiding home a Roman populace estranged from Rome, Cicero's compliment to Varro epitomises the Roman tendency to intertwine historical knowledge and the urban landscape. In the profusion of scholarship on Roman topography and memory, this tendency has become something of a topos in its own right. In her seminal monograph Writing Rome, for example, Catharine Edwards proposes that, ‘topography, for Romans, perhaps played a greater role than chronology for making sense of the past…places became vehicles for a kind of non-sequential history’. Straying about like foreigners in their own city, however, Cicero's lost Romans remind us that the city's history was not immanent in its hills and valleys, monuments and marketplaces. On the contrary, like any other, Rome's mnemonic topography was a work in process, constituted in ‘the persistent return to history, the systematic unearthing of ruins, the conscientious recovery of traditions, and…the reactivation of an inherited past’.

Tarpeia the Vestal

“…5.41: ‘The area now called “Rome” was once called “Septimontium” [i.e. “Seven Hills”] from the number of the hills which the city embraced within its walls’ (‘ubi nunc est Roma, Septimontium nominatum ab tot montibus quos postea urbs muris comprehendit’); see, for example, Palombi 2006: 22–9; Vout 2012; de Souza 2017 on the concept of Roman hills; Hinds 2006: 38–48; Spencer 2011: 73; 2019: 135–7; MacDonald 2016: 209–10 on this passage. Varro will continue to discuss the various Roman hills (there are in fact more than seven) until §56, providing names that are explicitly historicised to (usually) the era of Romulus.…”

“… 114 See Tucci 2005: 21–5, 27–8; 2006: 66–7; 2018: 44–7 for recent discoveries in the Aracoeli garden; MacDonald 2016: 195–7. The movement of Tarpeia's Capitoline shrine is retrojected into the regal period by Plut., Rom.…”