Welcome to KNIR Fellow Dr Raphael Hunsucker

During his fellowship at KNIR, Dr Raphael Hunsucker will work on a project entitled Ktistic connectivity: Rome's first engagements with Greek discourses of colonial city-founding. It explores a hitherto understudied aspect of cultural contacts between Rome and the Greek cities of southern Italy in the early third century BCE: the way Greek discourses of city foundation shaped the Romans' conception of their own origins.

In 273 BCE, the Romans conquered Poseidonia, thereafter renamed Paestum. Roman engagement with this city and its religious and historical traditions was intense, as evidenced by elaborate Roman construction in the city center and the remodeling of the existing civic space of the Greek agora. Modern archaeology has brought to light one of Poseidonia's religious buildings on the agora, spectacularly well preserved: the original Greek shrine, probably dedicated to the (unknown) founder of the city, the heroon (see photo). The Romans remodeled this building. Whether their efforts were aimed at hiding the original Greek founder from view or rather to honor his memory by monumentalizing the shrine with an enclosing wall remains a matter of debate. The conquest of Poseidonia closely coincides with the earliest securely datable attestations of the Roman commemoration of Romulus and Remus as the founders of Rome: a statue erected by the Ogulnii brothers in the Comitium (Livy, X.23.12) and the appearance of the twins on the first Roman silver coinage (RRC 20.1, 39.3, 183.1-6, 235.1). Taking the Roman restructuring of Poseidonia's heroon as its starting point, this project asks to what extent Greek discourses of city foundation influenced Roman representations of Romulus and Remus as founders of the city.