All Roads, Eventually, Lead to Rome
WHEN ROME’S LEGENDARY cofounder Romulus invited the chieftains and families of an Italic people known as the Sabines to a religious festival, he also invited a group of Latins. The Sabines lived in the central Apennine region of Italy, while the band of Latins were from the hilly farmland south of Rome. Once everyone was comfortable, Romulus ordered his men to abduct the Sabine women. The so-called Rape of the Sabine Women, as described by the ancient Roman historian Livy, sparked years of warfare between Rome and the Latins and Sabines. While modern historians cannot be certain of the accuracy of this tale of a dinner party gone wrong, the story captures the contentious state of relations among the various groups vying for power on the Italian peninsula in the first millennium B.C. These earliest inhabitants of Rome came to realize, as Rome began to swell with immigrants and territorial ambitions, that central Italy was not large enough to accommodate more than one dominant people. It was a time, however, also defined by shared cultural and artistic influences, all of which ultimately set the stage for the growth of Rome from a farming town of a few thousand people on the Tiber River to the largest empire of the western world.
Archaeologists working near Rome have found that early Italian states ebbed and expanded at each other’s expense for centuries. Sometimes Rome won, sometimes it lost. “Roman expansion wasn’t a cultural zerosum game. There were winners and losers on both sides,” says Anthony Tuck, an early Roman
