The early history of Rome has long been subjected to various forms of criticism. I am told that public-school boys in the United Kingdom used to read whole books of Livy’s history, which they (in turn) were told was the work of his imagination, and this view has become a communicative memory still propagated by many historians. This unstable construct began to shake under the weight of Ogilvie’s voluminous commentary (and its continuation by Oakley).1 A serious modern reconsideration began with Tim Cornell’s monograph The Beginnings of Rome in which he argued for the internal consistency of the traditions on early Rome.2 Cornell made the case that the main body of narrative is likely to go back a long way and shows a structure that could not simply be invented by historians of the late Republic and early Principate. Given that Roman historiography started only in the second half of the third century BC, there is a gap of several centuries between this and the regal period (traditionally dated 753–509 BC).3 Accordingly, if there was any earlier material, it must have been transmitted by means other than formal historiography, and oral tradition seems like the obvious candidate.

In his description of the coverlet in poem 64 Catullus describes Ariadne on the shore with her clothes falling off, a scene not required by the story but explicable if the text was the libretto for a danced performance, as suggested in Chapter 4. This chapter collects the evidence for erotic entertainment on the Roman stage, occasions when actresses and dancers (mimae) might perform naked. The sources make it clear that the modern distinction between poetry and performance did not apply in the Roman world: poetry was categorized as ‘dramatic’, ‘narrative’ or a ‘common or mixed type’ in which ‘the poet himself speaks and speaking characters are introduced’. Just as epic was an example of ‘the common or mixed type’, so too was Catullus 64, too short to be an epic in the Homeric sense but still a mythological narrative to be performed, whether in speech, song, dance or any combination of the three. As was normal in the ancient world, the written text on papyrus was a secondary phenomenon.

The story of the final months of Caesar’s life has been dominated by the question whether he wanted to be "king." That is to focus the question in a way that privileges the perspective of his assassins. Caesar himself was preoccupied at this time with massive preparations for a war of vengeance against the Parthians on a truly extraordinary scale. The knock-on effects of the mobilization effort were themselves extremely disruptive, causing an explosive intensification of the political game at a time when the Dictator was about to absent himself from the capital for several years. He had gravely alienated the urban plebs, encouraging the conspirators’ expectations (falsified in the event) that they would have popular support. The Caesarian coalition was coming apart, as shown by the remarkable clash between Mark Antony and Dolabella on the eve of Caesar’s scheduled departure. Caesar made little to no effort to create a new political system out of the ruins of civil war during the short period that he spent in Rome before his intended departure on an expedition that would keep him abroad for several years, much less to oversee a transition to a whole new kind of politics.

Although there appears to be a lot in common between Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses in terms of how they connect the present to the past through aetiology, the chapter argues that in fact there are profound differences in the role of aetiology in each poem. The Fasti is full of examples of past actions that have become fixed in a form that endures in current ritual, but there are vanishingly few examples of ritual aetiology in the Metamorphoses. The Fasti is really about religion while the Metamorphoses is really about mythology. Even though scholars of religion in both the ancient and modern worlds have seen a tight connection between myth and ritual, the chapter argues that we should follow Ovid in disavowing the myth/ritual nexus.