Alba Longa, histoire d'une légende: recherches sur l'archéologie, la religion, les traditions de l'ancien Latium (review)

These two volumes, amounting to a total of nearly one thousand pages, deal with a city that, on the author's own admission, never existed. But Grandazzi is fully aware of the apparent absurdity of the enterprise and is not above the occasional moment of self-mockery. Towards the end of the first volume (445), he quotes Sir William Gell, writing in 1834: "It having appeared to many, that the whole history of the place is a romance, more attention has been bestowed upon Alba than it may perhaps seem to require." The irony is deliberate, and comes easily to an author who is in full control of his material and knows exactly what he is doing; and it may be said at once that his confidence in the value of the project is fully justified. This huge book is a huge achievement.

At first sight the contention that Alba Longa never existed (it is described as "une ville phantôme") may seem surprising from a scholar who is known to be a traditionalist—that is, one who believes that much of the traditional narrative of the origins of Rome, including aspects of the story of Romulus, can be interpreted historically (see, for example, his La fondation de Rome [Paris, 1991], translated as The Foundation of Rome [Ithaca, 1997], and Les Origines de Rome [Paris, 2003], in the "Que sais-je?" series). But the argument, first published in outline nearly a quarter of a century ago (MEFRA 98 [1986]:47-90), is paradoxical: in saying that Alba Longa never existed, Grandazzi offers a gambit which allows him to vindicate the historicity of the legend in a wider sense.

The whole of the first volume is devoted to the historical geography of the region of the Alban hills down to the archaic period, starting with an extended description of the physical environment: volcanoes, earthquakes, lakes, watercourses, forests, and climate. It is worth stressing that these pages do more than set the scene, and allow Grandazzi to explore a series of historical themes: the date and function of the emissaria of lakes Albano and Nemi (both placed by Grandazzi in the sixth century B.C.E.); the prodigy of the Alban lake in 398 b.c.e., which he regards as a historical event (a similar volcanic phenomenon recently occurred in West Africa, as Grandazzi noted in an article in BAGB [2003]:96-106); and the identification of major religious sites, including the caput aquae Ferentinae (here resuming a study first published in CRAI [1996]:273-94) and the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi (with a discussion of the most recent archaeological finds).

There follows a long and detailed account of the archaeological material from sites in the Alban hills, partly summarizing the researches of P. G. Gierow in the 1960s (The Iron Age Culture of Latium 2 [Lund, 1964]), and partly updating it with a description of subsequent discoveries, which have substantially increased and to some extent modified our knowledge, even though the finds continue to be sporadic and casual, rather than the product of systematic excavations. The results are historically important because they show that the pattern of dispersed settlement that characterized the region at the beginning of the Iron Age continued to flourish throughout the period of the Cultura Laziale (tenth-sixth centuries B.C.E.) and conceivably beyond; on the other hand, these scattered settlements failed to develop in the same way as the proto-urban communities in the plain and were eventually eclipsed. Viewed in this light, the archaeological evidence cannot be taken as verification of the legendary history of Alba Longa recounted in literary sources.

Modern scholars, as Grandazzi clearly shows, are engaged in a search...