Romans and Italians 441Ancient Italic Identities
Attempts to discern the identities of most Italic people before Rome are now almost
impossible. Most of our literary sources know that these places become a part of Rome,
and in any case interpret them with the Greek and Roman world in mind. Later writ-
ers were also often very bad about differentiating one group from another, particularly
when such groups had become totally assimilated into Roman culture. The Faliscans and
Umbrians, for example, were often confused with the Etruscans (e.g., Livy 5.8.5; for
Umbrians, see Bradley 2000). Many writers did not know how to parse the various peo-
ple of the south Apennines either. Even the poet Horace, from Venusia (a south Italian
town with a pre-Roman, Oscan-speaking settlement, later “re-colonized”), was uncer-
tain whether to identify himself as “a Lucanian or an Apulian, since the Venusian colonist
plows his field close to both lands” (Sermones, 2.1.34–35). Even with this in mind, some
expressions of Italic identity from the later Republic and early Empire can be recovered
from the literary and material sources. Since I cannot hope to do justice here even to
one individual group, much less the full number of those that were in Roman Italy, I will
focus on the identities of the larger ones as they relate to Rome.
Rome was, properly speaking, a Latin city. It is therefore not so surprising that the
Latins possess no colorful stereotype in our literary sources. However, most, if not all,
Latin towns did have fanciful legends for their origins. Some have local heroes or deities,
analogues to Romulus, such as Caeculus, son of Vulcan, demigod founder of Praen-
este; the very aristocratic Caecilii, probably from Praeneste, celebrated this demigod as
eponymous hero of their clan (Wiseman 1974). However, most legends involved a Greek
hero. Tusculum was founded by Telegonus, son of Circe and Odysseus/Ulysses, a fact
boasted of by at least one Roman family from the town, the Mamilii (Farney 2008; see
Figure 29.1). Orestes, Diomedes, Jason, and Aeneas appear as other Latin town-founders
(a) (b)Figure 29.1 Obverse and Reverse of 362/1: C. Mamilius Limetanus. Obverse shows Mercury/
Hermes, and the reverse Odysseus/Ulysses being greeted by his dog Argus. Courtesy of Rutgers
University Libraries, Special Collections, Badian Coin Collection.