Desiccation and Fake Grief: The Strange Case of the Lacus Curtius

Abstract

The story of the Sabine knight Curtius, whose death appeased the angry gods who had flooded the Forum Romanum, is the shadow double of the more popular foundation tale of Romulus’s fratricidal construction of city walls. Combined, the two accounts show how cities of the living began as cities of the dead, burial sites serving scattered and uncommunicating “cyclopian” tribes. In the case of Rome, the cemetery site was the marshland central to seven tribes settled on nearby hills. Curtius’s heroism is a coded protocol of desiccation for transforming the wet cemetery into a dry forum, where the hearth-based religions of the seven tribes were consolidated into a single flame. To unlock this spatial contronym we require a more complex view of “fake grief” required to maintain good — and, especially, dry — relations between the living and the dead.