I wanted to write about motherhood.
I set pen to white paper and brainstormed around the circled word “MOTHER.” What were my word associations and allusions? The Queen of Coins. Marmee March and Cersei Lannister. Josephine Rabbit. The Capitoline wolf.
A she-wolf nursing infant twins is an unforgettable image. Strange, certainly. Unnatural, perhaps. It is the emblem of Rome itself, found on coins and football club jerseys, and has traversed the world as its empire once did—to Parisian parks and U.S. city squares. The mother wolf has become an established part of our communal iconography.
“Retelling is a trendy word, but these stories are more than a reimagining, they are also a resurrection.”
This trope persists in other mythologies, too. Atalanta raised by bear cubs. Enkidu. Mowgli and Tarzan. These feral children prevail as symbols of hope and survival. Of life, against all odds, finding a way. And yet, while our oral tradition and literature may love the babies, we think and talk and write much less about their mothers.
Most people with a grasp of European history know Romulus and Remus, but before there was a wolf, there was a woman, breaking herself in birth. Who was she? Why was she separated from her children? The answer is Rhea Silvia, princess turned pregnant priestess, who lost her babies because she lived in a time when nefarious powers governed what she could and couldn’t do with her body.
I scoured the primary sources for Rhea, finding the clearest narrative in book one of the Roman Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. I thought I knew Rome because I was raised on sword and sandal epics, Ben-Hur and Spartacus. But Latium is something else entirely. It’s a confederation, a league of small cities under the loose rule of Alba Longa—a site that no longer exists. It may have been where the pope’s summer residence, Castel del Gandolfo, is located, but there are no remaining pillars or foundations to visit. Rhea and her sons are one of the old myths, occurring outside the cultural assumptions of Roman Empire, the stock images of Coliseum and Caesar.
I read of the kings that descended from Aeneas, a lineage almost Shakespearean in nature, so reminiscent of the Bard’s best tragedies, so rife with rivalry and revenge. King Numitor’s daughter, a Vestal Virgin, is impregnated by the god of war, and delivers Romulus and Remus in an almost biblical narrative: babes sent down the river to escape death, fulfilling a prophecy. Afterward, however, Rhea Silvia fades from the record like the brightest colors in an ancient fresco. She’s not even in the background; she’s gone.
Read our starred review of ‘Mother of Rome’ by Lauren J.A. Bear.
In SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard raises the question: What does Rome’s founding myth reveal about its values and character?
A redundant brother. A divine birth. Patriarchal values. Male protagonists.
Retelling is a trendy word, but these stories are more than a reimagining, they are also a resurrection. In Mother of Rome, Rhea gets restored to the scene—rising out from under the classical author’s omission or neglect and into the game of thrones. In the novel, I write: “’This is the first lesson, Rhea. Men think they create the empires, but both are born of women.”
Mother of Rome is my ode to Rhea Silvia, to a mother’s life-giving love, but it is also a reminder: There is always a before. Before the city. Before the kings. This is that origin story, and it’s hers.
Photo of Lauren J.A. Bear by Heidi Leonard.