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It is often observed that the familiar story of the origins of Rome appears to combine two distinct and incompatible legends: that of Aeneas, and that of Romulus and Remus. The first of these was in origin a development of a Greek story, with its roots in the epic tradition. Aeneas, the son of Venus and Anchises, escaped from Troy with his family and friends and after a series of adventures arrived in Italy where he founded Rome. The other story, that of Romulus and Remus, was localised in Latium. Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of the god Mars and Rea Silvia, daughter of a king of Alba Longa. On the orders of their grandfather they were cast into the Tiber. The river happened to be in flood, and when the waters receded the boat containing the infants was left high and dry at the foot of the Palatine, under a fig tree later known as the ficus Ruminalis. There they were suckled by a she-wolf, whose den was the near-by cave of the Lupercal. Rescued by shepherds, the boys grew up and after the death of Remus in suspicious circumstances Romulus founded a city on the Palatine, where his original dwelling, the casa Romuli, was preserved in later times.

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SOURCESThe effects of the Second Punic War on Italy were unquestionably profound and far-reaching. There are difficulties in the assessment and analysis of these effects, however, because of the absence of reliable data. These dficulties are caused by two features of the evidence as we have it. In the first place, the Hannibalic War represents a decisive moment because it is the first event of Roman history to be narrated at length in surviving literary accounts. This is partly an accident, arising from the loss of the second decade (i.e. books 11-20) of Livy. However, it is also because Polybius deliberately chose the year 221 BC as the starting point for his full-scale narrative. It is certain moreover that the experience of the Second Punic War was itself the stimulus that led to the development of national historiography at Rome.' The prose history of Fabius Pictor, and the historical epics of Naevius and Ennius, were among the most selfconscious products of the earliest Roman literaturethat remarkable effort to create for Rome an intellectual culture comparable to that of the Greekswhich was itself an indirect result of the Hannibalic War. ' The consequence is that the literary evidence available from the beginning of the Second Punic War is far superior in quantity and quality to anything we possess on earlier periods of Roman history. This is especially true of the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Hannibalic War. For the military and diplomatic history of the First Punic War and the inter-war period, we can at least draw upon the excellent summary in the first book of Polybius; but as far as the domestic history of Rome and Italy is concerned, the third century BC (more specifically, the period fiom 293 BC, when Livy's first decade ends, down to the outbreak of the Hannibalic War, when his third decade begins) is almost a complete blank.3This gap in our knowledgewhat we might conveniently call the 'third-century gap'needs to be borne constantly in mind, and indeed deserves more emphasis than it usually receives in modern books. It extends even to the most basic level of historical narrative. We have information about only the most important political and military events, but even these are barely K. Hanell in Histoire et historiens duns 1 'antiquite', Fondation Hardt: Entretiens IV (Geneva 1956) 149-84; E. Badian in Latin Historians, ed. T. A. Dorey (London 1966) 2 ff.; A. Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley 1990) 80 ff. P. Grimal, Le sibcle des Scipions, 2nd edn (Paris 1975); A. J. Toynbee, Hannibal's Legacy (London 1965) 11,416 ff. Sources for the period 292-65 BC are collected in M. R. Torelli, Rerum Romanarum Fontes ab anno ccxcii ad annum c c h a.Ch.n. (Pisa 1978). There is nothing comparable for the period 241-18, but it would no doubt be just as meagre. A useful guide to the whole period is T. R. S . Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic (New York 1951). 98 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR -A REAPPRAISAL known to us and are inadequately docume...