ROME: The Mythological City

Augustus’ use of the mythical founders of Rome in the establishment of his principate.  Whilst researching and filming the Romulus and Remus video I made for my last posting I began to find a lot of research relating to Augustus' use of the foundation myths in his principate. Thanks to prior knowledge and the research I did on the Prima Porta statue for the first post I wrote, I knew that Augustus often linked himself to Aeneas. However, I didn't realise to what extent he also used the myth of Romulus and Remus. Throughout the lectures so far we have looked extensively at what myths mean/do with a particular focus on  Morales' definition that myth is something done rather than 'something'. This idea coupled with my curiosity about how Augustus used the founding myths of Rome led me to writing this post. The idea of Augustus linking himself to a founder of Rome is by no means a new one (not even for this blog), however I wanted to take a look at the ancient...

Myth and children - Romulus and Remus https://youtu.be/0j1pnJTwL4I For this blog entry I originally wanted to look at Augustus’ use of the founding myth in the establishment of his principate. However after the lecture on Myth and children and how children see myth today I thought it would be fun as well as an educationally strong idea to try and create an animated version of the Romulus and Remus myth for children. This turned out to be much harder than I anticipated and hence why this blog post is a little later than I had originally planed. Eventually though I did manage to create a video I am quite happy with, having never done this kind of thing before and being no artist I tried to keep it as simple as possible, which I think also makes it accessible to children. Obviously, some of the themes are not appropriate for very young children, but I didn’t want to stray too far from the ancient versions of the myth so kept most of the myth as authentic 1  as possibl...