Five Roman myths — part I

I was taught about these five stories when I was a kid. I’m revisiting them over half a century later to see what I can still learn from them.

The Author’s class back in elementary schools. The teacher is Mrs. Darmond, he is in the front row (seated), third from the left. Photo by who knows who.

When I was in elementary school, between the ages of six and ten (I skipped first grade, so I was there only four years), I had an absolutely wonderful teacher, Mrs. Darmond (of French origins). She was initially skeptical about my joining her classroom in second grade, worried about taking a chance on an unknown quantity and how I would fit with the rest of my classmates. But in fact things went very smoothly, and Mrs. Darmond eventually told my grandfather (with whom I grew up) that she had made a splendid decision in accepting me.

One of the subjects Mrs. Darmond was teaching us was history, which of course included the ancient Roman period. It was taught at a level appropriate to our age, characterized by a main body of facts sprinkled all over with a bit of mythology, aimed at instilling in us not just historical truths but also moral lessons. Teaching, as they say, consists in lying by different degrees, and at any rate the notion that moral lessons are more important than naked facts has a long tradition in Greco-Roman culture (think of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, for instance). I’ll get back to this way of framing things, as well as…