alt Hacker News> This is a totally unfruitful line of inquiry
It's really not. This is the line of inquiry that leads you to understand the founding myth of Rome and what the motivations might have been to create such a myth. It also helps to place in time when the myth was concocted.
> Is there any negative evidence?
Is there any negative evidence against unicorns?
Things that don't exist don't leave evidence.
But yes, there is evidence. The lack of corroboration and the fact that the earliest mention of Romulus was ~300BCE is a pretty strong indicator that he didn't actually exist. 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. There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.
But further, we also have evidence that Rome itself is a lot older than Romulus is supposed to be. There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.
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.
> Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have?
Yes. People write about their leaders. It's quite common. And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.
That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.
> Did ancient historians with better sources believe it?
You'd expect passing references to Romulus if they did. That doesn't exist.
> Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?
Yes, we have evidence Rome is a lot older than the Romulus myth. Seems pretty unlikely that Romulus founded Rome in 753BCE unless he was some sort of time traveler.
> ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it
Ancient historians who wrote over 1000 years after the actual founding of Rome.
Imagine if I dubbed myself a historian and started writing about how China was founded by Jackie Chinamus in 1000AD, who also just so happen to have an army of pandas and consumed only bamboo. That is the problem with the Romulus founding myth. 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 (Unless you want to claim it's possible Mars was his father).
> what the motivations might have been to create such a myth.
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...