The Greeks exhibited an amazing aptitude for fashioning myths about gods and heroes. Not so the Romans, who failed to produce an independent mythological tradition. But what the Romans did excel at was in shaping legends about the men and women who were instrumental in giving their city its distinctive character in the first centuries of its existence. Many scholars eschew the word ‘legend’ altogether and prefer to classify as ‘myth’ any story told over the course of several generations that has significance for the community as a whole. By this definition, whereas a myth is a story set in the remote past, in an imaginary era when the world was still in its infancy and when gods and humans
