Agostino e l'apoteosi di Romolo

The legend of the disappearance and apotheosis of the first king of Rome is a problematic case for the ancient historians, some of which do not hesitate to present doubts about the contents of tradition and attempt a rationalistic interpretation of the fact. In civ. 3,15 Augustine treats the episode with a discussion similar to a scholastic quaestio: he refers the opinion of Cicero on re p. 2,17-20, the first to separate historical reality and celebratory superstructures, praises objectivity but with new arguments affirms his own point of view to define also in this way the distance between pagan orientation and the Christian vision of history. Moreover, the comparison between the Augustinian text and Livy 1,16, also known in ancient times in scholastic practice, shows that Augustine, in relation to Romulus, does not want to reconstruct events as a historiographer, but to evaluate them from a cultural point of view; the corresponding synthetic version of Florus (1,1), from which some isolated elements of style seem to pass to Augustinian prose, offers other elements for evaluating the readings of the Bishop of Hippo and his method of selecting sources.