Livy’s first pentad of Ab Urbe Condita begins and ends with the founding and refounding of the city. Both are achieved first through violence and then through the establishment and re-establishment of religious authority and the restoration of Rome’s relationship with its gods. This article examines the connection Livy makes between Numa and Camillus and the place of religion within the refoundation narratives. The religious topography of Rome is essential to Camillus’ argument for the Romans to remain in the city (...) following the Gallic sack. By citing particular priesthoods, the flamen Dialis and the Vestal Virgins in particular, both of which were established or developed by Numa, Livy not only constructs Camillus as a new Numa but also promotes these priesthoods as monumenta. Camillus’ speech forges direct connections between Rome’s conditores, the topography of the city, the devotion to its gods, and the city’s continued glory. (shrink)

The magnificence of Augustan Rome is the indispensable setting for Ovid the urbane love poet, rusticitas is the one unforgivable sin. Yet in Ovid's perpetuum carmen cities are for the most part invisible, at best incidental backdrops; the countryside, present in many vividly drawn landscapes, constantly thrusts itself on our attention, a place where mysterious powers menace the individual's identity. This neglect of the city makes a striking, and deliberate, contrast with the Aeneid, a ktistic epic whose meaning is governed (...) by constant reference forward to the ‘altae moenia Romae’. Ovid, whose main epic time-scale does include the foundation of Rome, devotes five words to the making of those walls. The one major exception to this indifference to the central theme of Virgilian epic is the Theban episode in Metamorphoses 3.1–4.603. The story of Cadmus and his family forms a self-contained unit within the flux of Ovid's epic of transformation. It tells of a ktisis that goes wrong: Cadmus obeys Apollo's injunction to found a city , but in the end the exile who had founded a new home is driven into a second exile: ‘exit | conditor urbe sua’. (shrink)