It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast

I'm delighted to say that we have got ancient history royalty on the show. We got Professor

Greg Wolfe leading ancient history scholar. He has recently written a book about the life

and death of ancient cities and in this podcast we are focusing on one of those cities,

the Eternal City Rome. Without further ado, here is the brilliant Greg.

Greg, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me.

Now ancient Rome, the city, first of all, let's sort the fact from fiction, was

Rome founded by Romulus on 21st April 753BC. Absolutely. No, of course we can't possibly know,

but Romans believed it was, which is almost as good. As far as you go back, almost in prehistory,

you can find settlements in the area, but that's not unusual for Europe. Most areas of Europe

you'll find settlements back to the origins of farming and we can go back at the

beginning of the Iron Age and find settlements and cement trees in the general area. But

there's this huge problem with excavating under any great city, which is you just look through

keyholes and it's just like all this amazing archaeology done in London on Crossrail and they've

excavated nearly 100 sites now and most of them would fit into an ordinary living room and then

you're trying to pick up the whole picture. So no one's ever going to know what the whole landscape

look like in the late Iron Age, but it's pretty clear there are settlements that they're on the hills,

that the cement trees are separated out probably. They pair with each other so we're looking at a

sort of group of villages perched up in touch with each other doing what? Probably cult together

because that's what seems to happen around the Mediterranean general and then in between patches

of fields, gardens, rough scrub and in Rome particularly because you've got all these fingers

of land coming in around the tibet. You've got the marshes, the marshes that what was later the forum,

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