HOW MUCH DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT EARLY ROME?
Since the monarchy period ended, many Greeks historians have devoted their entire life to write Roman history. Such a literary history is extremely important for us today because it is our single one with the archaeology. However, we must not take for granted that all literary history is trustworthy. It is essential to look at each source very carefully and compare each of them. For instance, Livy was at the same time our best and worst source. Livy almost copied other historians' works, but at the same time, all of their works did not survive, so we are not sure if their works were similar to Livy's in the first place. Thus, Livy's work is more fiction than facts. Moreover, the time between when an event occurs and when its historiography is written, there is at least two or three hundred years.
Representation of the lupercal: Romulus and Remus ...
Romulus and Remus nursed by the She-wolf by Peter ...
Anonymous (Rome). Circa 269-266 BC. Silver didrach...So, the integrity of the telling of an event continually changes and the source can be unknown, erroneous and the literary content could have been falsified which made a bigger task to our modern historians.[2: Ogilvie, R.M (1989), "The Sources for Early Roman History", in F.W Walbank et al. (eds), Cambridge Ancient History, second edn, vol. 7.2 Cambridge: (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.9.]
Despite that, we have access to certain archaeological sites in Rome that are really useful for historians' enquiries. Since at least one hundred years old, excavations have taken place in the Comitium, and on the foot of the Palatine hill in order to find proofs of an ancient civilization. Also, they calculated the pottery and votive's age. They unearth the objects from a few earth layers that been there since a very long period of time. According to Gjerstad, who has reopened Boni's unpublished...