Les Premieres Guerres de Rome

What do we know about the earliest Roman wars? What was the outcome of Roman defeats within these military conflicts, which were all rewritten later as indubitable Roman victories? Undoubtedly, the history of the most ancient Roman wars is known only through accounts written several centuries after they took place. Despite the major gaps in documentary evidence that they faced, their authors did not give up on reconstructing the history of the wars that allowed Romans to gradually assert themselves as a hegemonic power in Italy. These historians even composed highly detailed, and often coherent, accounts of these military conflicts, relying on family and public archives, inscriptions, as well as oral testimonies. Consequently, such sources frequently differed so greatly that the preserved stories present different versions of the same events. Moreover, each work reflects their author's choices, as well as their unique reinterpretation of the Roman past, which evolved according to their works' orientation, and the era in which they were writing (from that of Augustus up to early Christian times). In an archaic history process that fostered intrigue, such historians have sometimes exaggerated the number and scope of Roman victories, denied the occurrence of defeats that other authors had nonetheless acknowledged, rewritten entire episodes by drawing inspiration from Greek history and, more broadly, viewed the earliest Roman wars as the start of a process of conquest that predestined the city to govern the known world. Relying on an exhaustive catalog of the battles reported by the texts between 753 and 290 BC (747 entries), this study proposes to examine the rationale behind the rewriting of the earliest Roman wars, and, in particular, the complex challenges presented by the narrative of defeats and victories, their alternation, and the intrigue constructed around these events. Mathieu Engerbeaud is a senior lecturer at Aix-Marseille Universite. He is the author of Rome devant la defaite (753-264 BC), published by Les Belles Lettres in 2017, which was recently translated into Italian (Vae victis Roma davanti alla sconfitta, LEG, 2019). Les Premieres guerres de Rome completes the publication of his doctoral thesis approved in 2015 at Universite de Poitiers, and which received the Prix SoPHAU 2016 (Societe des professeurs d'histoire ancienne de l'Universite) and the Prix d'histoire militaire 2016 (Ministere des Armees).