"As the found­ing myth has it, the city of Rome was estab­lished by a man named Romu­lus, one of two orphaned twin broth­ers raised by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber riv­er. The leg­end of Romu­lus and Remus, which involves the for­mer's frat­ri­ci­dal slay­ing of the lat­ter, lends itself to strik­ing imagery, though it also gives forth more ques­tions than answers. "The Latin for wolf, lupa, also means pros­ti­tute," for exam­ple, "so was it actu­al­ly a pros­ti­tute who came to the res­cue?" So asks his­to­ri­an Mary Beard in Rome: Empire With­out Lim­it, a four-part series you can watch in its entire­ty above."
"In a sense, the sto­ry works either way: the mor­tal clash of broth­er against broth­er makes for a recur­ring metaphor­i­cal theme in the long his­to­ry of Rome, but so does the irre­press­ible pow­er of com­merce. Criss­cross­ing the Euro­pean con­ti­nent, Great Britain, the Mediter­ranean, and Africa by car, boat, bicy­cle, sub­way train, and above all on foot, Beard uses the traces of the might­i­est ancient empire to explain how the whole oper­a­tion actu­al­ly worked, and what its day-to-day expe­ri­ence was like for its sub­jects. When it orig­i­nal­ly aired in 2016, Empire With­out Lim­it fol­lowed up her acclaimed book SPQR: A His­to­ry of Ancient Rome, which cov­ers some of the same themes."
The founding myth of Romulus and Remus embodies both fratricide and ambiguous rescue origins, illustrating recurring themes of brotherly violence and commerce. The Latin word 'lupa' ambiguously means 'wolf' and 'prostitute', raising questions about the twins' upbringing. Traveling across Europe, Britain, the Mediterranean, and Africa by various means, the series uses archaeological and physical traces to explain how the empire functioned and daily life for subjects. The work follows themes from SPQR, avoiding a simple catalog of emperors and campaigns and instead emphasizing social, economic, and operational aspects of Roman power.
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