From this point on, Roman mythology and religious practice began to be con-
sidered as a historical resource. Let us take an example which has been well studied
recently: the story of Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who founded Rome.
Niebuhr excavated from this account a story about two cities, Rome and Remuria,
the latter defeated by the former (this is universally discounted now). Schwegler thought
that the twins were derived by ancient thinkers from the very early twin Lares Praestites,
the protective deities of the city. Mommsen, who wrote a great account of the
constitutional history of Rome, found in the story of the twins an explanation of
the shared power of the consulship. More recent accounts have emphasized broad
folktale motifs, but there is still the possibility that there is a political interpretation
which can explain the myth (Wiseman 1995a).
All this depends on how we read the available sources. At this stage it is at least
worth stating that a gulf has opened up between different traditions in the study of
Roman religion. Anglo-American scholarship has tended to be skeptical about every-
thing to do with early Rome, whereas French and Italian scholarship has sought
to uncover the deepest and earliest religious history of Rome through the study of
etymology and ritual, without placing much faith or interest in the validity of the
historical accounts of the period (compare for instance Forsythe 2005 with
Carandini 1997). As more scholars in the Anglo-American tradition adopt various
strategies legitimately to recover a historical understanding of early Rome, a degree
of rapprochement with the long European tradition becomes appropriate.
At the same time, we should not overlook the importance of the recovery of Roman
religious activity through archaeology. In the context of Rome and its hinterland,
Latium, and the fascinating yet mysterious civilization of the Etruscans across the
Tiber, some elements of the material correlates of religious action have been long
known, either as standing ruined temples, or as scattered finds. For the earlier phases,
however, only careful excavation could reveal issues of context and sequence.
Equally, for archaeologists of the late Bronze and early Iron Age across Europe, the
scope and definition of what might be called religious, or more usually ritual, mater-
ial, was developing. Archaeologists of this period usually have no texts on which to
base their arguments, and therefore rely upon theories of human activity, and chief
amongst those is the identification of recurrent and repeated activity which is
invested with meaning. One recent and important definition (Bell 1992: 74) speaks
of “ritualized” action, defined as the way in which certain ritual actions strategically
distinguish themselves in relation to other actions, and this same account empha-
sizes issues such as power relations, knowledge, and knowledge as power, and the
relationship between ritual and the human body, all of which are significant features
in archaeological accounts. So archaeology brings to this period in particular a degree
of theoretical sophistication, and we shall see how this has begun to draw out inter-
esting and challenging interpretations of Latin religious behavior. At the same time
we should acknowledge that as the historians of religion focused on behavior that
was identifiable from literary texts, and as archaeologists sought behavior which they
could identify as ritualized, the two approaches did not necessarily converge. To give
a single example, the ritual of the Parentalia, which was intended to appease the
spirits of the dead, is archaeologically invisible, but the ritualized activity relating to
32 Christopher Smith