438 Gary D. Farney
Rome. Just as Cicero attended his family’ssacraat Arpinum, so too did patrician
Romans perform familial rites at locations in the environs of the city, some on the
sites of defunct Latin villages thought to have coalesced into Rome itself. For example,
Julius Caesar’s family maintained some religious connections with Bovillae, a town
that had received some of the cult of Alba Longa after Alba’s destruction by Rome
(Weinstock 1971: 6–7). Aulus Postumius Albinus, a patrician whose clan supposedly
existed before the Republic itself, also felt it worthy to note his own dual origin: in the
beginning of hisHistories, he introduces himself to his audience as not just a Roman,
but as “a Roman born in Latium” (FRH4F1b). Obviously, Caesar’s and Albinus’
attachments to Latium are different from those of Cicero: they emphasize their ancient
and highly aristocratic origins and are not just elements of a greater devotion to the
Roman commonwealth.
Outside the senatorial class, the situation appears similar. Quintus Ennius, a south Ital-
ian poet who acquired Roman citizenship in 184BCE, was fond of saying that he had
“three hearts” (tria cordia)—one Greek, one Oscan, and one Latin. This was interpreted
by the Imperial writer Aulus Gellius (17.17) to mean that Ennius spoke three languages.
In light of the “nested” nature of Roman identity, however, perhaps we should see his
self-description as both literaryandcultural/ethnic, not dissimilar to Cicero’s (Dench
2005: 167ff.). To explicate this tripartite self-identification, one would note that Ennius
was a Roman citizen from a locally powerful family of Messapian Rudiae that possessed
a Hellenic legendary genealogy and Greek tastes (Farney 2007: 7–8, 212–13).
The idea that the Romans were a people of plural identity is firmly built into the stories
and history of the city. Romulus and his Latins “took” Sabine wives and shared the new
state with their Sabine kinsmen, and Rome even had a dynasty with connections to Greek
Corinth and Etruria ruling over it until the foundation of the Republic. Parts of the city
of Rome could be called to witness the multi-cultural nature of this “original” Roman
state—Varro claims that various neighborhoods were thought to have been ethnic quar-
ters originally: thevicus Tuscusand Caelian Hill for the Etruscans, and the Quirinal Hill
for the Sabines (De Lingua Latina5.46, 51). Latin, Sabine, and a few Etruscan fami-
lies made up the Republican aristocracy (the tradition continued), but the new plebeian
nobilesof the fourth and later centuries included more Latin families in the Senate than
just those in and right around Rome, such as the Fulvii and Mamilii from Tusculum.
“Real” Sabines (since there is now considerable modern doubt about earlier Sabines in
the Roman tradition: Ampolo 1996; Farney 2007: 80) came into the state with the full
enfranchisement of Sabinum proper in the third century. Sabines show electoral success
almost immediately: thus came the families of Varro, the powerful Aurelii, and possibly
the ancestors of Cato the Elder. At nearly the same time, the rest of Latium, and then the
“Latinized” inhabitants of Cicero’s Farther Latium, began to take up thecivitas Romana
and the attendant right to run for political office in the capital. Following the Social War,
completed in the 80sBCE, men from all parts of Italy would start to close the political gap
between them and these Romans, starting with full citizenship. Roman magistrates with
origins from other Italian places begin to appear in historical record, until every quarter
of Italy could boast of a senatorial favorite-son by the end of the first centuryBCE.The
Marrucine Asinii, the Lucanian Statilii, and the Praetuttian Poppaei were the captains of