But she doesn’t so much debunk legend as try to glean from it a plausible history for which the legend is a metaphor and popular image of the truth. Much of early Roman history is, of course, largely myth and invention, as Beard is not the first to point out. In the story of Catiline’s uprising, Beard defines the constant that runs throughout Roman history: a tradition of fratricide and civil strife that dates back to the mythic murder of Remus by the founding brother, Romulus. Division and violence would soon bring the 500-year-old Roman republic to an end, through civil war, assassination and, finally, the emergence of single-man rule by one emperor - who maintained the fiction that the empire remained still a republic, ruled by its senate and its people.
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