by Melvyn Bragg
PETER WISEMAN: I don’t think that the story of Romulus and Remus goes much back beyond 300 BC; the story that Tim was telling, the Sabine women’s story, the outcome of that is a joint community of Romans and Sabines and that is actually what happened in the early third century when the Romans conquered the Sabines in the 290s and they incorporated the whole area into the Roman stage, and they called the joint Roman state ‘Quirites’.
The Romans were still the dominant force under that state but, in theory, it was a joint enterprise. Peter Wiseman observed that this idea was put forward by the great historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), and has never been refuted, and this context suggested that the story was created at some point after 320 BC. That did not satisfy Tim Cornell, for whom the foundation myth was not the kind of story that was created to fit with political circumstances.
TIM CORNELL: It strikes me that if you were going to invent a nice patriotic story about your city’s origins, you wouldn’t invent one that involved fratricide and rape and so on. These are things that are rooted in the sort of folklore character of it. It seems to me it is much more likely to be an older story. I would like it to be fifth/sixth century. I think that is perfectly reasonable.
MELVYN BRAGG: Mary, you are wanting to get in?
MARY BEARD: Yes, because I think this is not just a disagreement about evidence, and about whether the twins are Romulus and Remus, and what on earth Mercury is doing there. What underlies this kind of disagreement is really a bigger question about what we think these Roman stories were for.
In defence of the early third century BC as the origin of the legend, Peter Wiseman argued that every story was once told for the first time and that it was perfectly reasonable to ask when, why, in what circumstances and for what purpose the story was created. He added that stories don’t simply appear out of nowhere – they are created, they are told to an audience.
MELVYN BRAGG: I have to point out to listeners that there is deeply puzzled disagreement on behalf of the others; not puzzled, but agitated.
Tim Cornell preferred an explanation more like the Grimm fairy tales, where the Brothers Grimm went around collecting stories that were already being told, which were much older folk tales. For this, he had some support in the studio.
MARY BEARD: I don’t buy [the] idea that myth is like a piston engine and somebody has invented it, and here we are: one day we don’t have the story of Romulus and Remus and this clever old sausage invents it and now we have got it. I think myth is a conversation that people are having, an imaginary conversation, and it is a dynamic way of thinking about yourself in relation to the world.
Romulus and Remus depicted on a Roman silver coin.
Unpersuaded, Peter Wiseman distinguished between myth as an abstract noun, which he said fitted with Mary Beard’s perspective, and myths that were separate stories.
PETER WISEMAN: I may be wrong about when it was created, why it was created, but it was created, somebody dreamt up the story of the twins and the she-wolf at some point in history, pre-history, God knows when. My suggestions are about 300, Tim’s is maybe 600 or something before that. There could be a million other ways of doing it, but, at some point, somebody created the story.
Tim Cornell countered that stories are not as convenient as that, and that the Romans were always extremely embarrassed by their origin myth. The Romans tried to get around the fratricide, or the role of the she-wolf, since wolves were notorious predators and the enemies of Rome later were able to say, ‘Well, these Romans are beastly imperialists, [they are] children of wolves.’
TIM CORNELL: Roman historians are terribly upset about this, and they found ways around this, and they said: ‘Well, actually it didn’t happen like that, what happened was that the shepherd Faustulus who was supposed to expose the children and so on, didn’t do so, he took them home to his wife to bring up, and it so turned out that his wife was actually a prostitute for which the Latin word is lupa, a slang word meaning prostitute.’
According to this later rationalisation, it was preferable to say that Romulus and Remus weren’t really the sons of a wolf (lupus), they were the sons of a prostitute. To Mary Beard, that kind of shift is what makes it so complicated to analyse these stories.
MARY BEARD: Roman writers are as puzzled as we are by them, and so what we are reading is both some kind of oral primitive folk tale, or whatever, and somebody’s attempt to make sense of it, and the Roman writers are as busy making sense of this the whole time as we are.
The fratricide was as troubling to Roman writers as whether the suckling was by a wolf or a prostitute. What was particularly puzzling, for Tim Cornell, was why there were twins at all. Usually, stories with twins explain something, as was the case in Sparta, where it was said there were two kings on account of their twin ancestors. In this vein, there are ways in which it could be said that Rome was a double community, with both Romans and Sabines, and with the two consuls, chief magistrates who succeeded the kings from the late sixth century, and either of these aspects of their story could be presaged by the twins. The trouble with that approach is that, very early in the foundation story, one of the twins is eliminated.
For Mary Beard, it is almost impossible to say why the Romans had the fratricide story, but it is quite easy to see what the Romans did with the story they had.
MARY BEARD: It becomes absolutely central in Roman political thought about themselves that they are a community that is destined to fratricide and civil war. You know that Romans …
MELVYN BRAGG: We have a shaking of the head on my left …
MARY BEARD: He is nodding his head, of course he is, he always does when I say this. The point about Rome is it was absolutely destined to tear itself apart, brother versus brother.
Following this up, Peter Wiseman referred to a poem by Horace (65–8 BC) in which the writer imagined himself asking the Romans why they were at war with themselves again, and answered his own question by saying it was because of the killing of Remus. The foundation story was flexible, though.
PETER WISEMAN: Rome was ruled by two consuls. Why? Because there was a historic compromise between so-called Patricians and the so-called Plebeians in the fourth century BC, which is a very good context for the creation of twin founders, in order to illustrate a double community. What mattered to that community varied enormously from the fourth century BC, when twins mattered most to the first century BC, when fratricide mattered most.
TIM CORNELL: Well, that would be all right if the Patricians had killed all the Plebeians, that would be a good reason to have a brother killing a brother, but the civil war is rather interesting because, on your view, Peter, the origin of the fratricide story ought to be the civil wars – that was the time when they had to invent this – but we actually know that the fratricide was in much earlier historians, writing in 200 BC.
Peter Wiseman countered that there were the alternative foundation stories already alluded to, such as those in which Remus accepted Romulus’s victory in the augury contest with the vultures and the twins ruled together. He cited Virgil’s account of the founding of Rome in the Aeneid, written in first century BC, only for Tim Cornell to suggest that this was very, very tenuous support.
MARY BEARD: I think we perhaps ought to explain to listeners that there is no primary contemporary evidence for that whatsoever, it is all in your head.
PETER WISEMAN: It is a hypothesis, a historical hypothesis, which depends on evidence and argument, and the evidence, as you rightly say, is utterly inadequate.
ALL: {laughter}
Whatever its origin, the foundation story of the wolf-suckled twins was used for the emblem of Rome from early times. Tim Cornell mentioned the first set of silver coins that the city of Rome produced, which are said to date from 270 or 269 BC and have the wolf, the twins and Romano on the reverse. Looking at the myth again, though, he was particularly interested in another ideological aspect of it: the part where Romulus created an asylum for all those who wanted to settl
e there.
TIM CORNELL: Rome is a community that is open to outsiders, that accepts people, even if they are criminals and runaways and so on, because Rome was, throughout its history, a society that expanded and incorporated – first of all, its neighbours through conquest and through intermarriage and then through the institution of slavery, where they brought outsiders into Rome as slaves, and then freed them, and then freed slaves in Rome automatically obtained the Roman citizenship, which is a very remarkable fact.
By the first century BC, when many versions of the foundation stories were being written, the population of Rome very largely consisted of people who were either outsiders themselves and had become citizens or who were descended one or two generations back from non-Romans, from outsiders. To Mary Beard, too, that was probably the most important thing about the myth, as Rome had constantly been saying that its people originated elsewhere, with migrants, and that it was an asylum, which was very different from any known foundation stories of other cities. Conversely, the Athenians and Spartans thought of themselves as autochthonous, springing from their own ground. In the same vein, Tim Cornell said there was nothing that was intrinsically Roman, it was all borrowed. That idea of the asylum was described admiringly by some authors, but not all.
PETER WISEMAN: Many authors refer to the asylum in a shocked tone. Not only do you have the community proud of being welcoming to incomers, you also have forces within that community who resist it and are furious about it.
Finally, Mary Beard noted the gender aspect of the foundation story, where the rape of the Sabines was later seen as the first Roman marriage, an institution that was conceived in terms of abduction, rape, seizure and was then buried deep inside Roman views of domestic life, the family and the role of women.
Thinking about the discussion later, for the newsletter he dictated in those years, Melvyn was frustrated by the fact that written history was introduced so late in civilisation. One of the things he most enjoyed about the Romulus and Remus discussion was that there were serious disagreements between the three academics and that they were developed in a seriously polite and courteous way. That’s one of the things he likes about the programme, he said. ‘These people have put their entire lives to the service of scholarship and very often to a theory, or a few theories, about the field to which they have dedicated themselves. When challenged head on, they don’t scream and shout – like politicians – or bicker and squeal – like crypto-politicians – they slightly raise the temperature of their tone but bat it back with great courtesy. It’s terrific.’
1816, THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER
In April 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa in what we now call Indonesia. It was one of the largest eruptions in the past 80,000 years, killing more people than any other volcano and releasing millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. The effect on the immediate area was clear and devastating. What was less well known, until now, is the effect Tambora had on global weather and arguably global events. The following year, 1816, became known as ‘the year without a summer’ across Europe and eastern America. June and July storms and frosts inspired creative imaginations but devastated crops and brought more hunger to a Europe short of food and work as it struggled to recover from the Napoleonic Wars.
With Melvyn to discuss Tambora and the year without a summer were: Clive Oppenheimer, professor of volcanology at the University of Cambridge; Jane Stabler, professor in Romantic literature at the University of St Andrews; and Lawrence Goldman, professor of history at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a senior research fellow of St Peter’s College. Oxford.
CLIVE OPPENHEIMER: Volcanologists have a technical term for eruptions of this scale and size. It’s ‘colossal’. It was a huge, huge event, larger than anything we’ve seen in the modern period.
The size of the eruption was hard to imagine, but Clive Oppenheimer was doing his best to help us with that. We heard that volcanologists have a scale similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, which measures the thermal energy released by eruptions by estimating the mass of pumice, lava and ash that are ejected. The eruption of Tambora in 1815 measured 7, which reflects the assessment that it produced something like 150 cubic km of volcanic debris, which is enough to cover the whole of Great Britain knee-deep.
CLIVE OPPENHEIMER: It’s something like 100 times larger than the eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980, it’s more than ten times greater than the Pinatubo eruption in 1991, it’s 1,000 times bigger than the eruption in Iceland in 2010 of Eyjafjallajökull, which caused so much disruption to aviation.
There was some unrest at Tambora from about 1812, though no one recognised what was in store. Then, in April 1815, the explosions were so loud that they were heard for 1,000km across Indonesia and wherever people heard them they thought they were coming from nearby, from somewhere they could not yet see, perhaps from cannons being fired out at sea. Soon there were huge quantities of ash and pumice climbing into the atmosphere, up to 20 or 30km in the air, two or three times higher than commercial aviation today. Then, at around 7 p.m. on 10 April, the eruption was so violent and there was so much material coming out that it did not really become airborne but devastated all the settlements within a radius of 20km or so. This was the deadliest known eruption in human history.
That human and environmental catastrophe happened in the tropics, in the southern hemisphere, where the destruction was clearly and directly linked to the eruption. As Melvyn’s guests went on to explore, there were unexpected, damaging events on the other side of the world, in Europe and North America, which are only now being linked to Tambora.
Lawrence Goldman explained how vulnerable Europe was to sudden shocks. There had been more than twenty years of war, first the French Revolutionary Wars and then the Napoleonic Wars, which were about to end with Waterloo in June 1815. The continent was depleted. Systems had long been set up to support the fighting rather than the domestic world; trade had broken down and there was high unemployment. There were political tensions within countries and, as new alliances formed, between countries, too. Then, while there was a relatively good harvest in 1815, there was cold and rain throughout the spring of 1816, the growing season was much reduced, there were very late frosts and there was snow.
LAWRENCE GOLDMAN: Through June and July and August there is snow in the middle of summer … when you find snow falling in central Europe in June of 1816 coloured sort of orange and brown, we can extrapolate that this is the ash from some remarkable volcanic event and there’s every reason to believe that it’s Tambora spreading its gases and ash through the global wind system.
In Britain, lower harvests meant that, from 1817 to 1818, the price of bread more or less doubled over the course of twelve months. There was not only urban political unrest but also riots in the towns and the countryside. To Lawrence Goldman, these shortages help explain why the years from Waterloo to Peterloo, the famous massacre at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, are unified by unrest and government repression. With the poorer harvests, food was in even shorter supply in central Europe where there was a subsistence crisis. With its sea trade, Britain was at least able to import some of what it lacked and, in that year of price rises, it imported more foodstuffs than in any other year up to that point in its history. But in central Europe, away from the coasts, particularly in Germany, the transport was much more rudimentary, food was harder to distribute and the impact of the poor harvest was much worse.
Meanwhile, there were other witnesses to the unusual weather who have left us literary reminders of that time. In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, his personal physician John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont had all gathered on the shores of Lake Geneva to get away from what they saw as London and winter. When the Shelley party had crossed France, they were told that the spring had been much delayed and that there was much more snow than normal, and they had to hire ten men and f
our horses to get their carriage over the mountains to Geneva. Percy Shelley noticed that, when they visited the Arve ravine, the cornfields were under water.
When they first arrived in Geneva the weather was fine and sunny, but, soon afterwards, the weather changed and they were confined indoors.
JANE STABLER: And the causality here is quite clear. Mary Shelley states that, because they’re confined indoors, they have to fall back on telling ghost stories and then eventually writing their own stories, and that’s the genesis of Frankenstein.
She had been thinking of the story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created for a while, and the storms were what prompted her to develop them in Geneva. The book was published in 1818.
Lawrence Goldman had mentioned the discoloured snow and suggested a correlation with the eruption that had happened a year before, on the other side of the world. Melvyn asked Clive Oppenheimer what evidence there was to link Tambora and Europe’s weather. He said it used to be thought that the ash, spread across the atmosphere, was what altered the climate but, more recently, it has been realised that sulphur was the key agent.
CLIVE OPPENHEIMER: The sulphur gas makes its way up into the stratosphere and it oxidises to generate tiny particles of sulphuric acid, and they’re above the weather systems, they don’t get washed out rapidly. And, in an eruption in the tropics, the way the atmosphere works, this sulphurous dust can be dispersed into both hemispheres and form a veil over the whole planet.
Once the sulphurous dust is above the weather system, it takes five or six years for the levels to drop back to their previous state. These particles intercept some of the incoming sunlight and the net effect is a cooling at the surface of the planet. Since the eruption in 1991 of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, we have a fairly clear picture of what happens when a lot of sulphur is released, especially if it is in the tropics.
