Rome: The Book of Foundations - Michel Serres

Returning to the possibility that history and myth are less differentiated than we might assume, Michel Serres examines upon what foundations our own history is built. The singularities that get chosen among the vast potential multiplicities that could be brought into an historical narrative, are, for Serres, built on corpses and deaths, for the prizing of any point of view is the simultaneous ignoring of other possibilities. History is, for Serres, at its heart a continual tension between the single and the multiple. It is the recurrence between the two, and the violence of each upon the other that has made the event differentiated from that which precedes it.

To make clear this passage between the single and the multiple, Serres revisits the founding of Rome and the tangled uncertainty surrounding how the greatest of cities arose from the swamps and the River Tiber. Using Livy as his primary source, Serres traces the birth of Rome through the travels of Aeneas and back to the Trojan War. He brings along Romulus and Remus and the latter's death at the hands of the former. We also see Hercules investigating stolen cattle, the sack of Alba and regicide of Romulus. All of these together, and none of them in isolation, are the stories of the origin of Rome. Serres tells us that foundations are built upon destruction, the destruction of rulers or mobs, what we would call progress and the ordering of confused multitudes. The tension between harmony and noise, amalgam and melange, and singularities and multiplicities are what Serres hopes to uncover. In his trademark way, he is successful.

Unreconciled history is for Serres a wobble, a series of fits and starts. This is why Rome deserves many myths/histories of its foundations. These wobbles of difference and movements in differing, often contradictory directions, are replaced by the stability of history. Yet, when the wobbles are ignored in favor of relatability of a singular history then certainly something is lost; this is as familiar as the dictum "history is written by the winners." Michel Serres has written elsewhere and echoes the belief here that the violence of reason (two terms he would say are synonymous) straight-jackets and destroys the multiple; this is the first, and recurrent, tragedy. He answers this tragedy with an attempt to understand the ebb and flow of multitudes; how whatever arises does so only when the possibility of the multiple is allowed. Indeed, without the multiple there could never be a singular arising. An awareness that such is the case is crucial if we are to not only situate ourselves within history, but if we are to move forward in a manner that favors the potentiality of the multiple - not always sacrificing it to the logic of the singular.

"Behind history, behind tragedy is the distribution of multiplicities. Sandbanks, turbulences, a mob, a crowd, a harvest we have lost account of." p. 246