Rome
Day One
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Rome's most important and controversial archaeologist shows why the myth of the city's founding isn't all myth
Andrea Carandini's archaeological discoveries and controversial theories about ancient Rome have made international headlines over the past few decades. In this book, he presents his most important findings and ideas, including the argument that there really was a Romulus--a first king of Rome--who founded the city in the mid-eighth century BC, making it the world's first city-state, as well as its most influential. Rome: Day One makes a powerful and provocative case that Rome was established in a one-day ceremony, and that Rome's first day was also Western civilization's.
Historians tell us that there is no more reason to believe that Rome was actually established by Romulus than there is to believe that he was suckled by a she-wolf. But Carandini, drawing on his own excavations as well as historical and literary sources, argues that the core of Rome's founding myth is not purely mythical. In this illustrated account, he makes the case that a king whose name might have been Romulus founded Rome one April 21st in the mid-eighth century BC, most likely in a ceremony in which a white bull and cow pulled a plow to trace the position of a wall marking the blessed soil of the new city. This ceremony establishing the Palatine Wall, which Carandini discovered, inaugurated the political life of a city that, through its later empire, would influence much of the world.
Uncovering the birth of a city that gave birth to a world, Rome: Day One reveals as never before a truly epochal event.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The founding of Rome by the twins Romulus and Remus has long been seen as myth. Now, the University of Rome's eminent archeologist, Carandini, produces a compelling narrative of the city's establishment around 775 to 750 B.C.E. confirming that Romulus (he killed his twin, Remus) indeed was present on Rome's first day. Drawing on new archeological evidence, Carandini demonstrates that Rome's founding involved a series of ceremonial acts that instilled into the soil and the people a "will to power" expressed in juridical, political, governmental, and constitutional forms. Thus, the Palantine became the Roma Quadrata, the royal citadel and the symbolic heart of the settlement. The Forum and the Capitolium/Arx were where the sacred and political ceremonies would be held. Finally, the urban territory was divided into three parts and governed by the constitutio Romuli, which established the sovereignty of the king as well as a royal council that governed various divisions of the city-state. Unfortunately, Sartarelli's wooden translation saps the life and energy from Carandini's otherwise provocative exploration of the founding of ancient Rome. 62 illus.; maps.