Note 1289 — Chapter VIII · Rome

Petersen, Klio, 1908, pp. 440 f.; 1909, pp. 29 f.; cp. Michaelis, Cent. Arch. Discov. p. 250. Experts have differed to the extent of eighteen centuries in the dating of this fine animal. Early scholars attributed it to a dedication of 296 B.C. recorded by Livy X. 23, when the consuls “simulacria infantium conditorum urbis sub uberibus lupae posuerunt.” But 296 B.C. is no time for so archaic a work. This led certain German scholars, including Bode, to regard it as a work of the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D., and the cast of it at Berlin was expelled from the Classical collections. Already, however, in 1867 Bachofen in the Annali dell’ Inst. pp. 184–8 had incidentally suggested (as possible though not likely) a date at the end of the sixth century B.C. A reasoned argument for this dating was first put forward by Rayet, Mon. de l’Art Ant. I. vii. Rayet shows that the wolf was in existence in the ninth century A.D., that the animals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D. are stylistically different, and that the Capitoline wolf has close affinities with other representations of animals that are unquestionably archaic Greek. The children are of course much later.