What happened before the city was founded or during its foundation is more suited to poetic fables than passed on as the uncorrupted memory of history, and I intend neither to confirm or refute such tales.

We give licence to antiquity to render the origins of cities more august by mixing the human and the divine. If it should be allowed to any people to consecrate their origins and refer to gods as their founders, such is the Roman people's glory in war that when they say the father of their founder or of themselves was above all Mars, then the nations of the earth may bear this claim with as much equanimity as they bear imperial rule.

(Livy 1 pr. 6-8)

Life is not a tender business.

(Seneca, Moral Epistles 107.2)

The Roman storehouse of memories was a blood-spattered place. War and violence and bloodshed were everywhere on display, beginning with the stories Romans told each other about their origins and rise to greatness. The father of the Roman people, Aeneas, fled burning Troy to sail the seas until he reached Italy, and there carved out with his sword a place for himself and his rag-tag band of refugees. Aeneas' descendant and the founder of the city, Romulus, was born of the war-god Mars, killed his own brother in a quarrel, and (in one version of the tale) was himself murdered as an incipient tyrant. As Romulus enlarged his city, he arranged for women to be snatched from a neighbouring people by force - the infamous ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’ - and engaged in almost unbroken wars with nearby communities.^[1071] Eventually Rome grew into the imperial colossus that bestrode the known world of the ancient Mediterranean basin. All of this was achieved by the massive application of violence, which was openly acknowledged, indeed celebrated as a cardinal Roman virtue (as the epigraph from Livy illustrates).

In this chapter I focus on the centrality of violence to the Roman sense of self and survey some of the main ways in which it was made manifest in their culture and daily experience.