456 Parshia Lee-Stecum
More than a demonstration of the constant innovation that the Roman constitution
had undergone, and more than an indulgence of the emperor’s own antiquarian
interests, the brief survey of rulers emphasizes the ethnic multiplicity of early Rome’s
kings and prepares the way for Claudius’ later valorization of the ethnic multiplicity
of his Senatorial audience (Dench 2005: 118; Farney 2007: 229–33). The Roman
discourse of ethnicity that survives to us is almost entirely conducted by and for an
elite, circulated through literary texts, monuments, and iconography. A consequence of
this dominant, elite perspective is that the discourse of Roman ethnicity was imbricated
in political debate and competition. It contributed to familial and personal identities,
but it was also intimately intertwined with the ideology of imperium in its dual
sense of supreme political authority and empire. As Claudius reminded his audience,
from the earliest point in its history, Rome’s rulers had come from a wide range of
ethnic backgrounds.
This brief sketch would have evoked, for its senatorial audience, an even richer dis-
course of ethnic multiplicity elaborated in Roman myth and literature since at least the
Middle Republic. From its advent, Roman historiography was aristocratic in its themes,
audience, and ideology, and it had a close interest in the ethnic origins of the Roman
people. Around the year 200BCE, Quintus Fabius Pictor composed a history of Rome’s
foundation. Fabius Pictor was one of several aristocratic historians writing around the
time of the second Punic War or in the decades immediately following. This was also
the period when the poets Naevius and Ennius were writing the first recorded works
of Roman epic poetry to detail the origins and early history of Rome (Goldberg 1995:
58–110). Both poets worked within a developing culture of aristocratic patronage
and drew support from powerful aristocratic families of the time: Ennius from the
Fulvii Nobiliores, and Naevius (probably) from the Claudii Marcelli. The late third
and early second centuriesBCEform a critical period in Rome’s development from a
powerful city-state to a Mediterranean empire. The mythographic activity focused on
narratives of Roman origins and growth reflected the changing role of the elite, now
rulers of an expanding empire, and their attempts to redefine themselves in this context
(Habinek 1998). These accounts of Rome’s history consolidated a version of Rome’s
development that provided a framework for the aristocratic discourse of ethnicity in
later generations.
The Aristocratic Origins of Roman Ethnicity
Romulus and his first proto-senatorial council (the originalpatres, “fathers,” of Rome)
were already of complex ethnicity. The dominant etiology of the Senate that survives
in texts from the first centuriesBCEandCE(Livy 1.8.7, Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.8,
Plutarch,Romulus13.1–2) probably reflects the versions circulated by Fabius Pictor and
others 175 years earlier. The original Romanpatresare drawn from those citizens of Alba
Longa who followed Romulus and Remus to the new settlement. As a foundation of
the descendants of Aeneas, Alba Longa represents a fusion of Trojan immigrants and the
indigenous population of Latium that looms large in narratives of Roman ethnic origins