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Abstract.
In his history Livy highlights Numa's religious reforms and his role as a bringer of peace, but he also draws attention to Numa's use of subterfuge in his reform program. Later he has the praetor Petillius using a religious pretext to justify destroying the contents of Numa's tomb. Livy constructs both these episodes to invite comparison with Augustus' reform program and his manipulation of history for ideological and political ends.
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Under Augustus Rome reinvented itself.1 The regime oversaw and fostered a resurgence of interest in the legendary origins and history of Rome as it sought to establish itself not as a radical break with the mos maiorum but as its true instantiation.2 It was the time to rewrite Rome, the principal rewriter being Augustus himself. He rewrote the Roman constitution, despite assiduous denials in the Res Gestae of doing any such thing,3 and radically redefined the concept of princeps.4 He changed the face of the city,5 via a massive building program sententiously itemised at Res Gestae 19-21 and encapsulated in the intendedly memorable bon mot ? found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble' (marmoream se relinquere, quant latericiam accepisset, Suet. Aug. 28.3). And by a systematic use of patronage he created a literary milieu which saw a rewriting of Roman history and the creation of a new national epic embodying a new mythology,6 the work of a 'real' new Roman Homer who was to complete the demolition work begun by Lucretius on the previous claimant to this title.7 Ennius' was a poem without end; as Roman history kept unfolding, he would add another book.8 But now there was an identifiable culminating point: Vulcan's propagandistic rewriting of Rome's history described in the last 100 lines of Aeneid 8 begins with the traditional Roman icon of Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf and closes with the new one, Caesar Augustus enthroned above a subject world. The wheel had now come full circle; Rome had a new founder, one who had at one stage contemplated taking the name of the first (Suet. Aug. 7.2; Dio 53.16.7) but rewrote himself instead as the emblem of Roman imperial expansion.9 Romulus, 'little Rome', was too...