Plutarch, in the life of Romulus, lists several different
stories about the founding of Rome. Each of the stories is a variant on the
strangeness of birth itself.
1. The first story is that Rome was founded in the wake of
the exhaustion of a woman named Roma. Roma was a Trojan noblewoman who became
tired of the strategies of the men leading the Trojans into exile. They never
stopped anywhere long. Roma got the women to burn the boats. “When this was done, the men were angry at
first, but afterwards, when they had settled of necessity on the Palatine,
seeing themselves in a little while more prosperous than they had hoped, since
they found the country good and the neighbours made them welcome, they paid
high honours to Roma, and actually named the city after her, since she had been
the occasion of their founding it. And from that time on, they say, it has
been customary for the women to salute
their kinsmen and husbands with a kiss; for those women, after they had burned
the ships, made use of such tender salutation as they supplicated their
husbands and sought to appease their wrath.” This is a founding worthy of
Fellini – or Lisa Wertmuller.
2. The second story is that Romanus, the son of Odyseus and
Circe, colonized the city.
3. Others say it was Romus, sent by Diomedes from Troy, or
Romis, tyrant of the Latins.
4. Plutarch writes that the most authentic tradition is that
it was founded by Romulus. But writers “don’t agree about his lineage.” Some
say he was the son of Aeneas and Dexithea.
Others say Roma was wedded to Latinus, the son of Telemachus, who gave
birth to Romulus.
5. But another account, which is “altogether fabulous”, goes
like this. Tarchetus was a cruel king of the Albans. Whether it was due to his
cruelty or for another reason, a strange phantom haunted his house: a penis
rose out of his hearth and remained there for several days. A king with a penis
in his chimney is bound to lose face, sooner or later. So Tarchetus sent to the
oracle of Tethys, who responded that a virgin must have intercourse with the
penis. As Chekhov observed, if there is a pistol in the first act, it must go
off in the fifth. Similarly, if a phantom penis haunts your hearth, a virgin
must copulate with it. Because the oracle promised that the fruit of the virgin
and the phantom dick would be an illustrious son, Tarchetius told one of his daughters
to do the deed. But she felt that Tarchetius was abusing his patriarchal powers
here, so she secretly sent a handmaid in her place. When Tarchetius learned who
fucked the phantom phallus, he seized both maidens, and was going to put them
to death when the goddess Hestia appeared to him in a dream and told him no. So
he locked them up and told them to weave a web. When they finished the web, he
would give them in marriage. By day they weaved the web. At night, though,
other maidens, under the King’s orders, unwove it. The handmaid soon showed
that she was pregnant – pregnant with twins. Tarchetius had been forbidden by
the Goddess to kill both of them, but when the handmaiden had the twins,
Tarchetius revisited the divine dream and decided that at least he could kill
the twins, who he entrusted to a certain Teratius. As in James Bond movies, so
in myth: just as the baddie never kills James outright, but always gives orders
to have him killed in some unusual and outrageous
way, so too these oracle-ridden kings have threatening boy-childs taken care of
by henchman, which never tricks the gods and demons.
6. Teratius sounds like a name born out of the name
Tarchetius.
7. This is the part of the story everyone remembers. “This
man, however, carried them to the river-side and laid them down there. Then a
she-wolf visited the babes and gave them suck, while all sorts of birds brought
morsels of food and put them into their mouths, until a cow-herd spied them,
conquered his amazement, ventured to come to them, and took the children home
with him. Thus they were saved, and when they were grown up, they set upon
Tarchetius and overcame him. At any
rate, this is what a certain Promathion says, who compiled a history of Italy.”
8. But Plutarch gives a longer variant, which he likes
better. The material here is slightly transformed – it has the malleability of
dreams, such dreams as Freud interpreted: the compromise between the fear of
castration and male marvel at his unlikely equipment produces another
quasi-virgin birth, this one happening to a Vestal virgin who evidently
disobeyed the rules. The twins born to this virgin were to be killed, again, by
a servant, who through a bunch of incidences lost the little basket they were in.
“They floated down the river a fairly smooth spot which is now called
Kermalus”. And once again, in this
scrambled egg of a story, body parts get mixed with philology: “Now there was a
wild fig-tree hard by, which they called Ruminalis, either from Romulus, as is
generally thought, or because cud-chewing, or ruminating, animals spent the
noon-tide there for the sake of the shade, or best of all, from the suckling of
the babes there; for the ancient Romans called the teat "ruma," and a
certain goddess, who is thought to preside over the rearing of young children,
is still called Rumilia, in sacrificing to whom no wine is used, and libations
of milk are poured over her victims. 2 Here, then, the babes lay, and the
she-wolf of story here gave them suck..”
9. But Plutarch is not satisfied yet with this account,
because, frankly, it seems fantastic, and not in that good way that has been
authorized by ancient Greek writers. “But some say that the name of the
children's nurse, by its ambiguity, deflected the story into the fabulous. For
the Latins not only called she-wolves "lupae," but also women of
loose character, and such a woman was the wife of Faustulus, the foster-father
of the infants…”
10. The founding of Rome, then, involves every kind of
Oedipal confabulation. Perhaps this is appropriate for the violently predatory
state that grew out of phantom penises, handmaidens and Vestal virgins. The imperial question is not:
is the state legitimate? Rather, it is: who is my mother?
4 comments:
And in the times of Varro the philosopher, a Roman who was most deeply versed in history, there lived Tarutius, a companion of his, who, besides being a philosopher and a mathematician, had applied himself to the art of casting nativities, in order to indulge a speculative turn of mind, and was thought to excel in it. 4 To this man Varro gave the problem of fixing the day and hour of the birth of Romulus, making his deductions from the conjunctions of events reported in the man's life, just as the solutions of p123 geometrical problems are derived; for the same science, he said, must be capable not only of foretelling a man's life when the time of his birth is known, but also, from the given facts of his life, of hunting out the time of his birth. 5 This task, then, Tarutius performed, and when he had taken a survey of the man's experiences and achievements, and had brought together the time of his life, the manner of his death, and all such details, he very courageously and bravely declared that Romulus was conceived in his mother's womb in the first year of the second Olympiad,18 in the month Choeac of the Egyptian calendar, on the twenty-third day, and in the third hour, when the sun was totally eclipsed; and that he was born in the month Thoth, on the twenty-first day, at sun-rise; 6 and that Rome was founded by him on the ninth day of the month Pharmuthi, between the second and third hour: for it is thought that a city's fortune, as well as that of a man, has a decisive time, which may be known by the position of the stars at its very origin. These and similar speculations will perhaps attract readers by their novelty and extravagance, rather than offend them by their fabulous character.
-Plutarch
Thoth - Womb - Eclipse - Birth - Sunrise.
Naturally!
-Sophie
Damn, I thought I had deleted the above comment rather than sent it, sorry! The long passage from Plutarch had me going in several directions which could hardly fit in a comment and besides I've the feeling I'm overstepping my comment allowance. One of the paths:
Freud and the murder of the father by the sons is rather well trodden, with Oedipus limping along. What of the mother? Well, she's there in Freud's Moses. And there's the very strange Three Caskets which starts with "an occassion for posing and solving a small problem" and ends with a tour de force interpretation of King Lear, while leaving aside that King Lear is a play, theater. Here's the conclusion of his text. 'three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life - the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.'
In Plutarch's life of Romulus:
To mix heaven with earth is foolish. Let us therefore take the safe course and grant, with Pindar, that
"Our bodies all must follow death's supreme behest,
But something living still survives, an image of life, for this alone
Comes from the gods."
-Sophie
Sophie, never be sorry for sending comments. I enjoy them! A note about the Plutarch - my son is in College, in first year, and is learning about the founding of Rome. So his test is going to be about Romulous and Remus. But the account they learn in school has no phantom phallus in it. He very much enjoyed the idea that a phantom penis was popping up in the house of an evil king. Boys. My wife doesn't understand this part of boydom. I do, I remember, and I've been thinking I should write a bestseller entitled: For Mothers without Brothers, about boy culture for mothers of boys who don't know about it.
I'm all for your upcoming bestseller, For Mothers without Brothers. Our family has had no brothers for a few generations, so be good to get a grip on phantom penises.
And your new post had me thinking that you could also try a Zombie book, screenplay, etc. Admittedly, I don't know much about the 'genre', and the zombies I have trouble with are not the decaying bodies, biting kind. These zombies have fine bodies, cars, wives and mistresses, fine food, expansive houses in several locations, and everything else they have to have as advertised to stage the spectacle of happiness and success. Along the way they lost their heart and soul. They're dead. This would be a 'realist' screenplay, we've all seen them, we all are them to varying degrees. So the question you raised about going from death to ultradeath and come out - to live the sweetness of life, passion and the infinity of an instant. Who am I to know how, or rather don't we all know - precisely in our hearts and souls. The person I am channeling - if not exactly quoting - would call it the path of passion, of poetry, of song, of fire. The risk is that it all goes up in flames and all that remains is ashes. But maybe there's a chance a kindred spirit will come along and breathe on the ashes, make them glow again. Denn keiner tragt das Leben allein.
Your could start with the story in Haiti and the African experience - and hey you'd have quite the music for a soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMcilBWgo3w&list=RDMMcilBWgo3w&index=1
- Sophie
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