It would be negligible. There would be few enough of them that when they arrived in Italy, they would have been subsumed both culturally and genetically into the native Italian peoples who were there. To say that the Romans of the second and first centuries BC were descendants of the Trojans is wonderful psychological myth, but it’s completely impossible historically speaking.
But it was a very strong article of faith is hardly too strong a term to use for it, for the Romans. It was a very important part of their self-construction of their identity. However, side by side with the Greek story of the Trojan War, the Romans also had legends about the founding of the city of Rome itself by Romulus. This was one area in which native Roman tradition remained very strong, never was overcome by Greek tradition, and never went away. And built into this idea that Romulus founded Rome in 753 BC, there’s quite a strong chronological problem.
The Iliad says that Aeneas goes west and founds another city. Greek writers as early as the 5th century BC said the city Aeneas founded was Rome. But Troy fell, remember, in 1184 BC. Roman tradition says Romulus founded Rome in 753 BC. We’ve got a minor matter of some 400 years there to bridge, quite aside from the fact that if Romulus founded Rome, Aeneas can’t also have founded Rome.
Roman adaptation of the Trojan War myth accounted for this too, and we see this most clearly again in Virgil’s Aeneid. Aeneas does indeed make his way to Italy, and he becomes the ancestor of the Roman race, but he doesn’t actually found the city of Rome. Romulus, the myth decides, is a descendant of Aeneas, is Aeneas’s great, great, great, great, great, however many greats it takes, grandson, and therefore the Romans are able to have it both ways. They are the descendants of the Trojans, their city was founded by Aeneas, but Romulus, I’m sorry, their race was founded by Aeneas, but Romulus founded their actual city.
One other thing about saying that they were the descendants of Aeneas, as I mentioned briefly in passing, by linking themselves to the Trojan War heroes, the Greek families who made this connection were able to say, we are descended from heroes, and since heroes often are children of one god and one human, that means we are descended from gods, by picking Aeneas specifically as an ancestor, the Romans can say precisely the same thing because Aeneas of course is the child of Aphrodite’s affair with the human Anchises. So the Romans too are descended from one of the primary Olympian deities through Aeneas. And this seems to have been taken, as far as we can tell, pretty seriously.
Julius Caesar and his entire family traced their descent back directly to Aeneas. They thought that their name, Julius, and that was the family name in Latin, by the way, not the Caesar was an additional name, but the family name was Julius.
They thought that that name came from the name of Aeneas’ son, Iulus, and that therefore they were direct descendants of Aeneas and therefore direct descendants of Venus. And Ovid uses this in Metamorphoses in a scene where he has Venus talking to Jupiter, asking Jupiter to save her son from his assassins. And the son she’s talking about is Julius Caesar, who’s about to be assassinated in 44 BC.
Venus calls him in Ovid’s Metamorphoses her son. So the idea that the Julius family was descended from Aeneas and thus from Venus, Aphrodite in Greek, seems to have been at least accepted as a metaphor if not taken absolutely literally all the way up to the first century BC. Now
What about Romulus? So much for the Roman borrowing of the Trojan War myth. How does Romulus fit in? Romulus is in many ways a typical hero of the type we’ve seen before. His story contains many of those same folk tale-like elements, including the difficulty of birth, the recognition later in life after he’s grown up elsewhere away from his original home, and so forth. Romulus and his twin brother Remus were sons of a princess, Rhea Silvia, a descendant of Aeneas, and the god Mars.
And they were at birth set adrift in a basket on the Tiber River by their wicked usurping uncle. They were washed ashore, found and rescued by a she-wolf, a female wolf who suckled them as though they were cubs. They were then adopted by a shepherd who brought them up as his own sons.
And when they reached adulthood, their true lineage was discovered through a series of complicated coincidences.
They reinstated their grandfather on the throne of Alba Longa, that was a city founded by Aeneas’ descendants, and decided to found their own city to rule over on their own. The city they founded, of course, was Rome, and it took its name from Romulus after a quarrel between the two brothers over which of them should have the right to name the city and which of them should therefore have the right to rule the city. The two brothers quarreled over this. Romulus killed Remus so that Rome originates in fratricide and Romulus gave his own name to the city.
After founding his city, Romulus gathered around him a group of young men, ne’er-do-wells and refugees basically from other cities, and said they would now be his citizen body. But the same problem that plagued Greek men, you can’t have a city without children and new generations, you can’t have new generations without women.
So the new Roman men needed wives and here Romulus is far from an admirable figure in this story just as he’s far from an admirable figure when he kills his brother Remus because the way the Romans got their first wives was to invite a neighboring tribe called the Sabines to a religious festival and at a pre-arranged signal the young Roman men abducted all the Sabine women whom they then married and made their wives.
So Romulus begins his rule over Rome by murdering his brother and consolidates it by violating a religious festival through a mass abduction, reiterating once again the idea we’ve talked about before that heroes even heroes who found a city need not necessarily be good men in classical myth it would be a stretch to call romulus a good man now romulus’s ambiguous nature the founder of rome but violent and treacherous may be reflected in the story of his death of which the roman historian livy gives us two different versions
The Romulus story is told in its most complete form by Livy, by a historian writing in the first century BC. And Livy says that there are two different versions about how Romulus died. The first version Livy gives us is that on a certain day when Romulus had been talking to the senators,
government body that he had founded, suddenly the gods lifted Romulus up bodily in a cloud and carried him up to Mount Olympus to make him a god. That’s version one. Version two, Livy says, is that the senators, at a prearranged signal, tore Romulus to shreds and hid the body.
Two very, very different versions. And I mention that because that gives us a good way to look at the problems that are even more pressing in studying Roman myth than in studying Greek myth of trying to figure out what the myths actually said in their pristine form through the literature that recounts them for us.
Livy writes in the late first century BC. By this time, there is a strong rationalizing tendency in Greek and Roman authors both in their treatment of myth. And in Rome, unfortunately, unlike in Greece, we don’t ever have anyone equivalent to Hesiod or Homer writing near the beginning of literacy and perhaps preserving some fairly uncontaminated versions of the myths for us.
Unlike Greece, Rome was a literate society from its very earliest days. And to make the problem even worse for us, the earliest Roman writers who have survived did not write about myth. That means by the time we get our earliest Roman accounts of myth, the myth has been reworked, thought about, rationalized, played with, disbelieved, shook up, turned around, and is in no way recognizable as a pristine, living, working myth, or at least it’s difficult to recognize it as such.
So the problems of reconstructing myth through literature are even more pressing when we look at roman literature than they were when we look at greek literature it’s even more difficult to reconstruct roman myth from roman literature than it was to reconstruct greek myth and this problem comes to a head when we turn to talking about ovid the author of metamorphoses and is exacerbated by the fact that ovid is our main source for some of the most important and famous classical myths that survive. So in the next lecture, we’ll continue our examination of the Roman use of Greek myth by looking at Ovid’s metamorphoses and what he does with myth in them.
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)