Spheres of Control: The Origins of Government in Early Rome

The origins and development of early Rome had already faded into legend by the time its people began writing down the history of their city. Rome's first historians relied heavily on cultural memory when reconstructing the past, but memory constantly reinterprets and reshapes the information it preserves to keep it relevant and meaningful to successive generations. The stories familiar to those first historians had already gone through many generations of reworking and adaption, a process that disguised change and caused the historians to present the government of early Rome as being anachronistically similar to the government of the later Republic. This gradual recontextualization resulted in the surviving narrative tradition, which minimizes and even conceals developments and presents the Roman government as remaining largely unchanged over five centuries.

In Spheres of Control, Fred K. Drogula argues first that understanding Roman historiography makes it possible to identify and remove many of the most common errors, anachronisms, and fictions that appear in these narratives. He also argues that—once any erroneous material is removed from traditional accounts—the remaining information not only maps easily onto the new historical framework, but doing so creates a more logical and cohesive reconstruction of Rome's early development and resolves many problems that scholars have identified with the existing narrative tradition. Drogula shows that a new reconstruction of the development of government in early Rome can be found by removing material from the traditional narratives that is likely to be erroneous and by recontextualizing the material that remains into a framework based on archaeological discoveries and new readings of ancient texts.