An Interim Report on the Origins of Rome

Abstract

With three volumes of E. Gjerstad's Early Rome still outstanding we are exactly in the middle of the new phase of the research on the origins of Rome. Other works due to appear very soon (perhaps they will already have appeared by the time these pages are published) include A. Alföldi's T. S. Jerome Lectures on Early Rome and the Latins, R. Werner's Der Beginn der römischen Republik and a new volume by H. Müller-Karpe, the author of Vom Anfang Roms (Heidelberg, 1959). Furthermore, historians and archaeologists most actively engaged in this field of research, such as M. Pallottino, R. Bloch, R. Peroni and P. Romanelli, have still much to contribute. In these circumstances any attempt to draw conclusions is clearly premature. But Gjerstad, Alföldi and Bloch have already presented their theories in outline with the explicit or implicit purpose of having them discussed before they are given their final shape. The present paper, which represents two of the three J. H. Gray lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge in March, 1963, is intended as a contribution to this preliminary discussion.