Murder Most Mythic

W.V. Harris

  • Remus: A Roman Myth by T.P. Wiseman
    Cambridge, 243 pp, £35.00, September 1995, ISBN 0 521 41981 6
  • The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c.1000-246 BC) by T.J. Cornell
    Routledge, 507 pp, £50.00, September 1995, ISBN 0 415 01595 2

How do myths evolve? The question has received less attention than one might think, there being a tendency among myth-scholars to treat the stories they deal with as given and fixed, even though everyone knows in theory that stories told in pre-literate and semi-literate societies are, to say the least, liable to change. What one needs are cases in which successive stages of a myth can be documented, and that – if T.P. Wiseman’s enthralling new book is right – is exactly what the foundation myth of Rome has to offer.

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