These are almost always absurdly simplistic, when they're not simply projections of how modern peoples think and what motivates them. It's really not useful to speculate about motives because you feel events resemble patterns of myth.
> Further, the fact that his story is a mishmash of common tropes and that his very name is a derivative of Rome is a pretty strong indicator that he was simply a product of myth making.
You could make precisely the same argument about Alexander founding Alexandria.
> There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.
Very, very few, precious few. There are zero comprehensive timelines or histories of notable events of cities in the region at that time. Indeed this is transparently not true, because obviously if there were written records contradicting the early history of Rome we have, then we would be talking about those. Indeed most of what we do have we cannot understand, because it's in Etruscan, which we have a very limited understanding of...because a very limited amount of text survived. [Ed - in fact from a brief survey, and given what we can read of Etruscan, it appears there are no surviving Etruscan references to Rome at all. Maybe Rome didn't exist!]
> There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.
Cities were seldom founded in desert wastes. They were almost always founded on prior settlements where people were already living. There were settlements in the general area of Rome for many, many thousands of years, not just going back to 1600 BC.
> The fact that the first records of Romulus trace the lineage of the rule of the city directly back to him is a very good indicator that the author was myth making.
So who was the first king of Rome?
> That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.
Egypt famously has some of the best records and archeological evidence in the ancient world. (And there are nevertheless huge gaps and mysteries in ancient Egyptian history!) The amount of records and archeological evidence for this time period in southern Europe is comparatively scanty.
> And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.
I see no reason to believe Romulus and Remus would have been "very influential" outside of central Italy, and even then, the phrase is probably a stretch.
> The historian placed the foundation WAY later than it actually was and wrote a fantasy story about Romulus where the only thing that could possibly be true is his name
And somehow magically convinced everyone else all the history they knew was wrong. And convinced all the people in the cities around them. Interesting hypothesis. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation to say that there really was a Romulus that ruled Rome and founded or refounded the city, and that's why all the Romans thought there was. It also conveniently explains why there is an ancient temple under the Forum with an empty sarcophagus dated to the 500s BC that appears to be dedicated to Romulus.
https://apnews.com/general-news-8996e6a7d9983ce25290408d2146...
Bad article.
Here's a better one [1]. What the archeologists found was a shrine to a "holy king". Because of it's location and time, the title of "Romulus" was given to it by the modern archeologists.
> So who was the first king of Rome?
Who knows. That could easily be lost to history. After all, Rome started small before it grew to it's historical peek size. But if a figure like Romulus existed, there would be additional documentation that didn't show up 1000 years later.
> And somehow magically convinced everyone else all the history they knew was wrong. And convinced all the people in the cities around them. Interesting hypothesis.
Not really magic or hard to believe. It's not as if the entire population was literate. And a founding myth is quite useful for current politics. For example, using the founding myth of Romulus allowed for the ancient Romans to claim the Senate was created by him and thus divinely inspired.
The parallel to this is the Bible, where the creation of Abraham and Moses served the original authors in endowing their king with supernatural power and origin. Much like the Egyptians did with their Pharaoh. It was a common practice in the region and at the time.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/possible-shrine-ro...
The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time after time AND everyone else bought into it - is clearly absurd. Just pointless cynicism with no basis in actual human psychology.
Not on purpose, it's just that without written history it's very easy for stories to drift very far from the historical facts. There might haven been a Roman king Romulus who did something important (then again he might have been created over time by merging several figures - i.e. it's more likely that he was named after the city and not the other way around).
We actually have real documented historical cases of this process occurring, the whole genre of Germanic heroic legends. They include various historical figures like Theodoric, Attila the Hun and others but the actual facts were mostly corrupted beyond recognition. Also this process took 500-800 years and developed in environment in which existing historical written sources on the same events did exist (even if they weren't directly accessible to most).
It's really not. It's exactly how Romans changed from their Roman worship to christianity. It's how they converted the pagans. It's how Muslims were able to rewrite Christianity into their own religion. It's how Mormons did the same.
This is such a fundamental part of humanity, it happens all over the place.
Having a charismatic and/or politically powerful person say "This is how things are, believe it or die" does wonders to spread belief.
The conversion of the Romans to Christianity happened because of real events, even if elements of the stories became mythologized. Or are you saying there was never any man named Jesus who was crucified? I guess you may as well argue that - both him and Paul could have been invented.
> It's how Muslims were able to rewrite Christianity into their own religion.
I think Mohammed was almost certain real, although I guess according to your standards of corroborating evidence, maybe he wasn't. The core of his story is not "rewriting Christianity", it's that he claimed to receive direct revelation and he used incorporated what he knew of what he believed to be true history.
> It's how Mormons did the same.
I think Joseph Smith is rather too well attested to claim he did not exist.
Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. After the Church become more established scholars spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine which ones were "accurate" or not and suppressing the other narratives. It's not like anyone can verify it they got it right or not, though.
Usually the arguments are not about whether a major historical figure like Christ or Mohamed etc. existed but the exact context and accounts of their lives, beliefs and actions. Also both of these men live in literate societies yet just a few hundred years after the deaths the facts already were very blurry and uncertain. Hypothetical Moses on the other hand lived in an illiterate society and history wasn't written down for 500+ (if not quite a bit more) years, even if there is a grain of truth in them (i.e. some sort of migration or interaction between Canaan and Egypt - which is not at all far fetched) the actual details might have become 99% fictional after being passed down orally through dozens of generations.
Yeah, and in the process of converting to Christianity, Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now. You claimed "The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time after time AND everyone else bought into it - is clearly absurd." And I'm giving you clear historic examples where exactly that happened. But now you want to make it about whether or not the people that did that existed or not.
> Or are you saying there was never any man named Jesus who was crucified?
Likely a man named Jesus existed because we have non-biblical documents from the time period (Josephus and the Sanhedrin) recording that he existed. Further, there are parts of the biblical narrative that are indicative that he was a real person. The census story in Luke, for example, is a convoluted story that you'd only tell if there was a real problem with Jesus, that he was well known to be from Nazareth and not Bethlehem. Were Jesus a complete myth there's no reason the gospel author wouldn't just say "And he was born in Bethlehem as prophesied"
> I guess you may as well argue that - both him and Paul could have been invented.
Again, nope, because we actually have a fair bit of contemporary documents about the existence of both. Something we don't have for Romulus.
> used incorporated what he knew of what he believed to be true history.
Right, I'm not arguing about Mohamed existing, I'm arguing that he made up history which people believed. Or more precisely, his followers did. Mohammad was illiterate and the Quran was written some 50 years after he died.
> I think Joseph Smith is rather too well attested to claim he did not exist.
Joseph claimed to be a historian who documented the events of the ancient americas. He claimed to have found records of those events and "transcribed" a book.
Quite similar to Romulus. And as it turns out, yeah, an entire religion of people believe him that Mormon and Moroni, Nephi and Lehi are all real people that really existed.
I mean, almost uncannily, the events he wrote about were 1000 years in the past from him.
I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to copy them faithfully. Of course we are talking about a highly literate society with a strong tradition of analytical history (which was very unique by pre-medieval standards at least).
> Quite similar to Romulus
The claim that some specific historian might have invented him out of thin air is far fetched and not really substantiated. Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down. Based on other similar cases it's highly likely that there were many competing traditions by Livy's time. So yes, he did very likely tried to reconcile them and picked how to synthesize the narrative but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.
Egypt exists even though the Exodus never happened. The mere existence of factual elements doesn't mean a foundational myth is real. Myths are normally interwoven with real elements.
Moses is almost entirely distinguished as a personage by elements we know are nonsense. If you found a Jewish leader named Moses who lived in a different year who experienced an entirely different history you wouldn't have found the real Moses so much insofar as the symbol Moses is a reference to the myth not the hypothetical actuality. Likewise finding an early leader wouldn't mean Remus was real
I don't see anything particularly counterfactual or unlikely about a group of Egyptian or Caananite-descended Egyptians leaving Egypt and returning to Caanaan, where they fused with an existing population. Can you explain this?