Variant Voices in Roman Foundation Narratives

James (2016) has noted a disturbing pattern in Rome’s foundation narratives whereby political change occurs over women’s dead and/or violated bodies--for instance, Ovid’s Lucretia, Ilia, or Lara, mother of the Lares, all passive victims. Women’s active role in foundational narratives, however, generally receives little attention. In his commentary on Book 1 of the Fasti, Green (2004) refers to Evander’s foundation of Rome.

This paper examines two myths invoked in Book 2 of Ovid’s Fasti to explain the nakedness of the Luperci during the Lupercalia: the story of Hercules’ cross-dressed servitude to the Lydian queen Omphale (2.303–58), and the account of Romulus and Remus’ driving off of cattle thieves (2.359–80).

This paper submits that Ovid rewrites Livy’s narrative of the “Rape of the Sabine Women” (AUC 1.9-10 and 1.13) in Ars Amatoria 1 and Fasti 3 to grant greater—if still imperfect—agency to the abducted women (raptae).

Ovid gives the foundation of Rome notoriously short shrift in the Metamorphoses (a mere five words, across 14.774-775). In some ways, his persistent refusal to engage overtly (and in prolonged fashion) with foundation myth is a narrative frustration that provides marked contrast to the relentless teleological drive of the Aeneid, where the fabled city of Rome looms large over the epic, an unavoidable presence of destined futurity; its most persistent ‘absent presence,’ to borrow a motivating concept assigned by Hardie to Ovidian poetics.