COLLECTION
Explore the stories, beliefs, and extraordinary beings of this tradition.
The Gauls had taken Rome and were climbing its last hill in the dark when Juno's sacred geese woke the defenders. Livy tells the story in full, but Polybius, the oldest historian whose account survives, says only that the Gauls made a treaty and went home.
Read story 12 min readOn the night before Epiphany an old woman comes down Italian chimneys to fill children's stockings with sweets, or with coal. She is often called a Roman goddess in disguise, but her name is the name of the Christian feast, and the oldest texts we found that make a figure of it are Tuscan poems of the 15th and 16th centuries.
Read story 10 min readFarmers prayed to Father Mars to keep sickness off their land, his shield fell from the sky in the reign of Numa, and Augustus built him a temple as the Avenger. The Romans told only a few stories of their own about him; most of the rest they borrowed from the Greek Ares.
Read story 12 min readAn Etruscan army reached Rome's wooden bridge, and Horatius Cocles held it while the Romans cut it down behind him. In Livy he swims home to a statue and a gift of land. In Polybius, the oldest account, he leaps into the river and gives up his life.
Read story 10 min readShe sang Apollo's answers from a cave above the Bay of Naples, led Aeneas down to the dead, and in Ovid asked for as many years as grains of dust in her hand but forgot to ask for youth. Rome guarded the books said to be hers for centuries; the Sibylline Oracles read today are not those books.
Read story 13 min readIn a small round temple in the Forum, with no statue of the goddess in it, six priestesses kept the fire on which Rome's safety was thought to depend. They were chosen as little girls, bound for thirty years, and kept the flame until the end of the 4th century CE.
Read story 14 min readAeneas carried his father out of burning Troy, left Dido in Carthage and won a bride in Latium by war. Virgil made him the ancestor of the Romans, but Greek writers had brought him west centuries earlier, and in the Roman story he never founds Rome.
Read story 14 min readJanus kept the doors of Rome and of heaven, looked both ways at once and gave his name to January. Ovid tells him that Greece has no god to match him. Yet the Roman year did not always begin in his month.
Read story 18 min readRome's second king was said to take his laws from a goddess who met him by a spring at night, to bargain with Jupiter over the cure for lightning, and to be buried with his own sacred books. The books were dug up and burned in 181 BCE, and the Romans themselves doubted the story that he had studied with Pythagoras.
Read story 13 min readTwin boys were left to drown in the Tiber, a she-wolf gave them suck, and one of them died when the walls of Rome went up. The Romans told the story in several versions side by side, and the famous bronze wolf may be medieval.
Read story 15 min read
