{"id":19168,"date":"2023-11-14T16:22:26","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T15:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19168"},"modified":"2025-10-19T16:56:02","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T15:56:02","slug":"elizabeth-vandiver-roman-founders-roman-fables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19168","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Vandiver &#8211; Roman Founders, Roman Fables"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>22 &#8211; <strong>Roman Founders, Roman Fables &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 23) by Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Run time: 30:14 \/ 2011-01-04<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 640px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-19168-1\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"video\/mp4\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume23\/22.RomanFoundersRomanFables_512kb.mp4?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume23\/22.RomanFoundersRomanFables_512kb.mp4\">https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume23\/22.RomanFoundersRomanFables_512kb.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong> &#8211; Hello and welcome back to lecture 22. In the previous lecture we talked about myths dealing with anomalous females such as the Amazons, Medea and many different monsters and discussed how those myths reflect Greek society and helped also to construct the understanding of Greek society. In this lecture, we&#8217;re going to turn from Greek culture to Roman culture and look at the uses that the Romans made of the myths they inherited or borrowed from the Greeks.<\/p>\n<p>Now as i said in the very first lecture classical mythology is so called because the myths in question appear in both greek and roman literature and art mythology was not the only borrowing that the romans made from greek culture rome took over and adapted to its own uses all sorts of greek categories of culture philosophy rhetoric history epic tragedy, their forms of art, their method of making statuary. <\/p>\n<p>In all of these areas, Rome borrowed from Greece and modified Greek originals to its own purposes. Now, the reason for this, the reason that Rome borrowed so much and so directly from Greece has a great deal to do, among other things, with the chronology of the two cultures. Again, I mentioned this briefly in the very first lecture that Greece was the first culture, Rome was the second. <\/p>\n<p>Greece preceded Rome as a culture of note and importance in the Mediterranean. Rome was founded, the city of Rome, which became the center of Roman power, was founded in 753 BC, in the 8th century BC.<\/p>\n<p>At that point, most Greek city-states were already ancient. Just to put it in context, this is about the same time that Hesiod was probably writing Theogony and Works in Days, about the same time, give or take 50 years in either direction, that the Homeric epics were probably being written down. That is the time when Rome was actually founded. Athens Zenith, the high point of Athenian culture, as we&#8217;ve mentioned before, was during the 5th century BC.<\/p>\n<p>About 300 years after the founding of Rome. This means that as Rome was gaining in importance, as Rome was coming into ascendancy in the Mediterranean culture, Athenian power was waning. So Greek culture becomes less important politically and economically speaking as Roman culture becomes more important.<\/p>\n<p>In the fourth century BC, after the high point of the fifth century, Athens and Greece both came under the domination of Philip, king of Macedon, and later of Philip&#8217;s son, Alexander, whom we know as Alexander the Great.<\/p>\n<p>Alexander the Great&#8217;s death in 323 BC is the date that historians normally point to as the end of the classical age in Greece. Now, that&#8217;s purely a convention to make historical periodization easier for historians. It&#8217;s not a matter of everyone waking up one day in 323 BC and saying, oh, I guess the classical age is over now. But that is the date that we fix upon to delineate the difference between classical and post-classical Greece.<\/p>\n<p>From 323 BC with the death of Alexander the Great up to 31 BC we refer to the Hellenistic age or the Hellenistic period of Greek culture. And during this period of about 300 years, again 323 to 31 BC are the conventional limits of the Hellenistic age, Greece is less important politically and economically than it had been in the classical age, has less political control and domination. But Hellenistic Greece was still remarkably fruitful culturally.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>A great deal of literature and especially a great deal of art was produced by Greece during the Hellenistic period. So as Rome&#8217;s political power was growing, especially in the fourth, third, second, and on into the first centuries BC, the Romans would have come into contact with the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, would have interacted with them, seen their artwork, read their literature, and so forth, another point of contact between rome and greece or between roman culture and greek culture was the numerous colonies of southern well central and southern Italy colonies that had been founded by greek settlers from the 8th to the 5th centuries B.C. many greek cities sent out colonists to this area of Italy, the area around and south of Naples. <\/p>\n<p>In fact, there were so many Greek cities, colonies of Greek cities back in Greece that were founded in Italy, so many colonies, that this area of Italy around and south of Naples came to be called Magna Graecia, which in Latin simply means great or large Greece. So the Romans, as they were developing in the the part of Italy where Rome is located, north of Naples, would have had constant and undoubtedly very important contacts with the cities of Magna Graecia. <\/p>\n<p>Rome itself was never a Greek colony. That city was not founded by Greek colonists. But as Roman power spread in Italy, particularly in the fourth century, the Romans would have interacted a great deal with the ethnically Greek, Greek-speaking, culturally Greek people of Magna Graecia.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, in 146 BC, Rome conquered Greece and Greece then became a Roman province. That means that Greece then came under direct governmental control by Rome. So throughout this period of several centuries, as Greece is waning in political power and Rome is rising, Roman and Greek culture intermeshes, they interact with one another, they talk back and forth with each other and the Romans are exposed over and over again to Greek cultural forms and artifacts such as their literature, their drama, their art and so on. <\/p>\n<p>Now all of this that I&#8217;ve said so far explains how the Romans could come into contact with Greek culture, but it doesn&#8217;t explain why they borrowed so much of that culture wholesale, why they simply lifted forms of literature and content of things such as mythology from Greece and adapted it into their own culture. Trying to describe why that happened, we&#8217;re on uncertain ground. All I can do is offer a few possible explanations. <\/p>\n<p>First off, the Romans had an image of themselves as practical, down-to-earth people. Remember Ovid&#8217;s description of his own people, the Romans, as descendants of the stones that Eucalion and Pyrrha threw over their shoulders. And we talked before about how that implied that they were a hardy race, that people who were descended from those stones were hardy. It also probably reflects the idea that they&#8217;re plain, down-to-earth matter-of-fact, earthy in that sense.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps this practicality on which the Romans prided themselves expressed itself in simply adapting Greek models rather than reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Why figure out how to write epic? Greece has already done it. Let&#8217;s just borrow the idea. Why develop our own native dramatic tradition? Greece has already done that too. <\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s just borrow the idea and so on. Another possibility is that it simply may not have occurred to the Romans not to mimic Greek cultural ideas. In this regard, the influence of Greece on Rome has often been compared to the influence of England on the United States, that Greece was seen sort of as a parent culture or a mother country in some regard, from which the Romans simply naturally took over cultural forms and cultural means of expression. <\/p>\n<p>Well maybe, but that is a somewhat flawed analogy because of course when the United States began, now I&#8217;m not talking here about Native American cultures, but when the United States itself began, the people in power, the government and those writing literature, weren&#8217;t just borrowing from England, they were English. And so naturally, the earliest English settlers in New England continued to use their own cultural forms rather than inventing new ones. <\/p>\n<p>But the relationship between Greece and Rome is not quite that simple or straightforward. We don&#8217;t really know. It is an odd thing for one culture to take over most of its cultural means of expression wholesale from another one. And we don&#8217;t really know why exactly the Romans decided to do this.<\/p>\n<p>One of the strangest or perhaps most surprising cultural borrowings is that Rome took over a great deal of its religion and especially of its mythology directly from Greece. Now, there were without doubt native Italian and Roman gods and native stories about them. As far as anthropologists and historians can tell, there has never yet been a human culture that did not develop some stories about some kinds of gods or divinities, and the Romans were no exception. <\/p>\n<p>We know that there were native Roman and Italian gods and that they did have stories attached to them and some of those gods survived and were recorded in literature and some of them we know about. An example would be the god Janus, god of doors and of beginnings, a god with two faces, one on either side of his head because he looks both backwards and forwards as a door looks. And, of course, it&#8217;s Janus who gives us the name of the first month of our year. January comes from his name, a month that looks both backwards and forwards. <\/p>\n<p>Most of the native Roman gods that we know about, however, tended to be minor local deities. By that, I mean that if people who lived in a particular little town outside Rome had a particular god of a hill or a grove or a lake or a stream, they probably continued to refer to that god by his native Italian name and did not assimilate him to a Greek god. And furthermore, the Romans also kept their belief throughout their culture as far as we know in their specific household and family gods.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, in two different types of gods called the Leres and Panates, who were seen as being protective spirits of individual families and individual households. And in some excavated Roman houses, particularly in Pompeii and in Ostia, an area near Rome, you can still see shrines set in the walls where offerings were given to the Leres and Panates.<\/p>\n<p>But when it comes to the major deities, the Olympians, the really main and very important gods, there the Romans assimilated their native gods to the Greek ones. By that I mean that the Romans already had, as part of their native tradition, a main god named Jupiter.<br \/>\nAs they came into contact with Greek culture, the Romans began to say to themselves something along the lines of, oh, what we call Jupiter, the Greeks call Zeus. They have all these stories about Zeus. <\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s now take those stories and tell them about Jupiter. Idea is that instead of maintaining their own native original stories about their major gods and goddesses and saying maybe these are the same deities the Greeks worship, maybe they&#8217;re not, as Greece did with, say, Egypt, the Romans assumed that their gods were the same ones Greece worshipped, but then they took over the Greek stories wholesale. And this means for our purposes that very frequently a particular account of a Greek God, we will know through the writings of a Roman author. <\/p>\n<p>And this is also why if you look in a modern handbook of classical mythology, you&#8217;ll find listings that say things like Zeus, parentheses, Jupiter, or Jupiter, see under Zeus. We say in handbooks of mythology that Zeus and Jupiter are the same God, Hera and Juno are the same goddess, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Originally they weren&#8217;t. Originally they came from these two very separate cultures, but the Romans decided that their gods were the same as the Greek gods and used the same stories about them. Now, despite the extent of their cultural borrowings from Greece, the Romans had, pretty much throughout their history, a strongly ambivalent attitude towards Greece and Greek culture. On the one hand, the Romans saw the Greeks as better artists, poets, rhetoricians, so on and so forth than they themselves were. <\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>They saw the Greeks as being culturally superior in a great many ways. But at one and the same time, along with that view of the Greeks as culturally superior, the Romans tended to view the Greeks as soft, a little bit effeminate, tricky, deceitful, and untrustworthy. So there&#8217;s a real ambivalence in the Roman view of Greece and the Greeks. And the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC only confirmed this ambivalent attitude and made this double view all the more noticeable.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, having conquered Greece in 146 BC, the Romans had easier and greater access to all forms of Greek culture. And at this point, we see an influx of highly educated Greek slaves into Rome, where they work as tutors for the children of well-born Roman families. There&#8217;s a real cachet in having a Greek philosopher tutor your sons, for instance.<\/p>\n<p>But while the Romans are getting more exposure to Greek culture than ever before, at the same time, they had just conquered the Greeks, which seems to prove the Greeks inferiority. They lost. They must be inferior. So the ambivalent attitude of Rome towards Greece runs pretty much throughout Roman culture. <\/p>\n<p>And it means, among other things, that the Roman appropriation of Greek myth is bound to contain some unresolved tensions. If we return to the definition I gave back at the beginning of the course, that myths are stories that a society tells itself about itself, encoding its worldview, its beliefs, its aspirations, its fears and so on, then we&#8217;ll see that Roman culture would have to adopt or adapt Greek myths to reflect its own values.<br \/>\nEven if it takes the stories over part and parcel, it&#8217;s still going to have to somehow manipulate them or mold them to reflect specifically Roman values. And of course, this is in fact what we see happening, the adaptation of Greek myth to reflect Roman views and Roman values can be seen most clearly in the Roman accounts of the Trojan War and particularly in Virgil&#8217;s treatment of the Trojan War story in his epic the Aeneid.<br \/>\nNow the Roman tradition out of which the Aeneid grew was that Aeneas was the ancestor of the Roman people and this tradition had its beginnings, had its origins in the Iliad, where in a rather enigmatic passage, the god Poseidon says that Aeneas cannot be killed in battle at a particular time because he, Aeneas, is fated to survive the war, go west, and found another city somewhere else.<\/p>\n<p>As early as the fifth century BC, Greek writers had identified Aeneas&#8217; new city as Rome, which makes some kind of sense. The Greeks, as we&#8217;ve talked about before, assumed that their myths reflected the way things actually had been in the time period which the myths recounted.<br \/>\nPoseidon says Aeneas is going to go west and found a new city somewhere, then he must have done so. <\/p>\n<p>What new city could it be? Rome was a primary candidate. So as early as the 5th century BC, Greek writers had said Rome must be the city that Aeneas was prophesied to found. Virgil&#8217;s treatment of this story in the Aeneid is both the most influential and the most complete version to survive. There are many different versions about exactly how Aeneas got to Italy, what he did on the way there, how he founded his city and so forth.<\/p>\n<p>What I want to focus on more here than Aeneas&#8217; story, than how Aeneas happened to make his way to Italy, taking his father Anchises and his son Ascanius with him. What I want to focus on more is the Roman view of what the Trojan War itself meant and how they manipulated the Greek myth of the Trojan War to fit their own cultural needs. <\/p>\n<p>Now, as I said, the Romans were ambivalent about the Greeks and particularly about their own cultural relationship to Greece. Greece is better than Rome. Greece is inferior to Rome. Part of this ambivalence undoubtedly sprang from Rome&#8217;s knowledge that it was in actual fact a much younger culture than Greece. Greece had myths that stretched all the way back to the origins of time itself. The Greeks took it for granted. No one ever questioned that they had been around since the very beginning. <\/p>\n<p>All of the myths we&#8217;ve looked at, all of the stories that the Greeks told, stretched back from human time into the heroic age back before that so the Greeks are a very very ancient culture but the Romans knew their own native Roman tradition said that their city had been founded in 753 BC so while the Greeks have this vast pedigree stretching way back into the beginnings of time and incidentally connecting the families of modern Greece with the heroes and gods of antiquity, the Romans know that their own culture only stretches back to 753 BC. <\/p>\n<p>When the Romans appropriated the Greek myth of the Trojan War, by identifying themselves with the Trojans, by saying we Romans are the descendants of Trojans, think about the implications of that. Suddenly they&#8217;ve given themselves a pedigree that stretches every bit as far back in time as the Greek pedigree. Suddenly they&#8217;ve said, well, we were there all along too.<\/p>\n<p>We are as ancient as you are. We are as admirable and as venerable as you are. We&#8217;re just the Trojans, not the Greeks. So it&#8217;s a remarkably neat way of overcoming the problem, the psychological difficulty of being the new kid on the block, so to speak, and of getting rid of the inferiority that the Romans felt towards the Greeks.<\/p>\n<p>It also meant that the Romans had a way of getting around the embarrassing fact that if they were the Trojans, they lost the Trojan War. That&#8217;s one problem with deciding that they were descended from the Trojans. The Greeks won that war, so that makes the Romans descended from losers. But remember, the Romans had just conquered Greece in 146 BC. And so once that happened, once Roman culture gets to that point, then that can be seen almost as a second episode in the Trojan War. <\/p>\n<p>The Greeks won the first round, but we came back and beat them soundly in 146 BC. We defeated them. Now, all of this Roman reconstruction of and Roman adaptation of the Trojan War myth is almost undoubtedly completely a historical. By that I mean there is no good reason to think that any Trojan survivors actually made their way to Italy. <\/p>\n<p>Even if we assume that the Trojan War itself was a historical event, as I think it probably was, there probably really was some kind of war between the peoples of Greece, of my Greece and people who lived at what we call Troy, though I would imagine it was probably over shipping rights in the Dardanelles rather than over Helen. If we assume that there was actually a war, there is still no reason to think and absolutely no evidence that survivors from that war ever made their way west to Italy. Furthermore, even if they did. So what? <\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s completely impossible historically speaking.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s quite a strong chronological problem.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve got a minor matter of some 400 years there to bridge, quite aside from the fact that if Romulus founded Rome, Aeneas can&#8217;t also have founded Rome.<\/p>\n<p>Roman adaptation of the Trojan War myth accounted for this too, and we see this most clearly again in Virgil&#8217;s Aeneid. Aeneas does indeed make his way to Italy, and he becomes the ancestor of the Roman race, but he doesn&#8217;t actually found the city of Rome. Romulus, the myth decides, is a descendant of Aeneas, is Aeneas&#8217;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&#8217;m sorry, their race was founded by Aeneas, but Romulus founded their actual city. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>They thought that that name came from the name of Aeneas&#8217; 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&#8217;s talking about is Julius Caesar, who&#8217;s about to be assassinated in 44 BC.<br \/>\nVenus calls him in Ovid&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<br \/>\nAnd when they reached adulthood, their true lineage was discovered through a series of complicated coincidences. <\/p>\n<p>They reinstated their grandfather on the throne of Alba Longa, that was a city founded by Aeneas&#8217; 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.<\/p>\n<p>After founding his city, Romulus gathered around him a group of young men, ne&#8217;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&#8217;t have a city without children and new generations, you can&#8217;t have new generations without women.<\/p>\n<p>So the new Roman men needed wives and here Romulus is far from an admirable figure in this story just as he&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>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,<br \/>\ngovernment 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&#8217;s version one. Version two, Livy says, is that the senators, at a prearranged signal, tore Romulus to shreds and hid the body.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s difficult to recognize it as such. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;ll continue our examination of the Roman use of Greek myth by looking at Ovid&#8217;s metamorphoses and what he does with myth in them.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>22 &#8211; Roman Founders, Roman Fables &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 23) by Elizabeth Vandiver Run time: 30:14 \/ 2011-01-04 https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume23\/22.RomanFoundersRomanFables_512kb.mp4 &nbsp; (Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023) Elizabeth&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19168\" class=\"more-link\">Lexo <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-extracted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}