(Re)enactment and (Re)foundation: Plutarch, Thucydides and the Founding of Rome

Jason L. Banta (University of Notre Dame)

In Book 1 of his history, Thucydides presents his famous description of the discrepancy between the physicality of Sparta as a polis and her power. He states that despite that fact that “they occupy two fifths of the Peloponnesus and stand at the head not only of the whole place but many allies,” if the city was deserted, it would not testify to the power and influence of its former inhabitants. Instead it “is not regularly planned and contained no temples or monuments of great magnificence, but is simply a collection of villages” (1.10.2). This is of course in opposition to the city of Athens, where visitors from later ages would over-estimate her power and influence due to the impressive architecture.

In this paper, I will argue that Plutarch is capitalizing on this tension in his retelling of the Roman foundation story in the Life of Romulus. Plutarch, in the opening to his Life of Theseus, explains his rational for pairing the legendary Athenian hero with the founder of Rome: “It seems to me that I should make the founder of lovely and famous Athens a counterpart and a parallel to the father of invincible and glorious Rome” (Thes. 1.3). Following this, the biographer provides a list of their similarities, including “of the world’s two most famous cities, one (Romulus) founded Rome and the other (Theseus) united Athens” (Thes. 2.1). The pairing of these two figures is based upon their relationships with their respective cities, cities which are associated in Plutarch’s narrative in the Romulus. Mirroring Thucydides on Athens, Plutarch’s Rome stands out as unique in Archaic Italy for its architecture. Romulus’s city contained a number of topographically significant features, most importantly walls (Rom. 11.2-3).

The first challenge to Roman hegemony in Plutarch’s narrative comes from a group that will be play an integral part in the enlargement of the early settlement: the Sabines. Driven to war against the Romans by Romulus’ aggressive dating service, the Sabines are traditionally described as Spartan colonists who have intermingled with the local populace (Dion. Hal. 2.49.4). Plutarch adds to this description, tell us that like their forbearers, the Sabines live in “un-walled villages” (Rom. 16.1). In addition, Plutarch in the same passage describes the Sabines as “war-like”, another inherited trait from their Spartan progenitors.

By reading the conflict of the Romans and Sabines in light of the traditional opposition of Athens and Sparta, I argue that Plutarch is dramatizing this conflict that was so integral to the formation of Rome. Notable as well is the fact that Rome as a city and a social entity does not reach any sense of completion until Romulus’s successor, the Sabine Numa, further imprinting the image of Sparta in the fledgling city, as the biography of the second king of Rome is paired with that of the Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus.

Plutarch then has interposed images of both Athens and Sparta upon his narrative of Archaic Rome. It is not my argument that Plutarch is attempting to re-write Rome as a new Athens or Sparta, or even as a new synthesis of these paradigmatic Greek cities. Athens and Sparta, especially their topographical associations as enumerated in Thucydides, provide something of a connective framework for Plutarch’s Rome, a reference that allows relatively foreign Roman material to take on relevance for him as a narrator.