This is the History of the World Podcast with me Chris Hasler

And you're listening to volume three, the classical world

episode 25

The Roman Kingdom. Oh, When we look at ancient cultures, whether it be the Greeks, the Jews, the Sumerians, or the Chinese,

then it can be hard to distinguish truth from reality. Did the Trojan War really happen? Did Moses lead

the Israelites from persecution. Was there really a king called Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia? Did the Sia

dynasty of China really exist.

How much about the origin of ancient societies is true or not is difficult to be sure about, but this is because the stories are so fantastic.

They often seem to give us an abstract version of events with great spiritual occurrences that sound quite unbelievable.

Should a leader want to install some national pride into his people such as when he's rallying them into battle or incentivizing

them into working hard for the city's economy, he might pick one of these fantastic stories and educate his people into believing that story.

The story may be true or it may be fantasy and if it is fantasy then it may be based on something

that really happened and simply glorified in order to inspire the minds of the people believing themselves to be descendants

of the characters involved. Some leaders may claim that they are direct descendants of the heroes of these stories in order to entice their people to look at them with the same idolization.

When talking about these stories we are talking about a culture's mythology and the

Romans had their own mythology.

In fact the Romans would keep reinventing their mythology such was the power and significance of Imperial Rome.

We shouldn't be surprised to hear this when you consider that Rome's leadership was competitive and relied upon the loyalty of its subjects, especially as the empire of Rome grew to almost unimaginable proportions.

Such were the efforts made in establishing Rome as the most powerful entity that the world had ever seen, that its existence resonated hugely in Europe

and beyond for many centuries to come, especially when you look at the power of the Byzantine Empire

and the Holy Roman Empire whose cultural foundations find themselves traceable back to

imperial Rome. However, there was one early mythology

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