INTRODUCTION

Early Rome is notoriously hard to approach. The main access-route is through the annalistic tradition, which is full of fiction. The food crises of the regal period, specifically of the reigns of Romulus and Tarquin the Proud, cannot be given credence, plausible though they may appear to be. I take those recorded for the early period of the Republic rather more seriously. In this I am influenced by a passage from the Origines of the elder Cato, indicating that there was a tradition of systematically recording food shortages or their symptoms (among other things) in the annales maximi:

A critic might argue that Cato's statement is evidence only for the early second century BC, that later writers did not consult any original tabulae or an edition of them, and in general that there is nothing in the accounts of the early shortages which could not have been invented by a Roman (or Greek) writer of the second or first century BC. My position, to which I cannot hope to convert a determined sceptic, is that the basic fact of food crisis where it is mentioned in the annalistic record can be accepted as authentic, and that the historian in confronting the ‘famine narratives’ can legitimately concern himself with the problem of identifying contamination by later writers and separating it off from the ‘naked’ annalistic accounts.