In 296 b.c. the curule aediles Cn. Ogulnius and Q. Ogulnius set up at the Ficus Ruminalis ‘images of the city's infant founders under the she-wolf's teats’ (Livy 10.23.11–12); a ‘bronze group of old-fashioned workmanship’ showing the wolf suckling the twins was still to be seen in the Augustan age, in a precinct close to the Lupercal ‘on the street leading to the Circus Maximus’ (Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 1.79.8). The reverse of an early didrachm issue (RRC 20.1), often dated to Q. Ogulnius' consulship in 269 b.c., presumably reproduces the form of the statue-group, and other coin issues from the late third and second centuries b.c. (RRC 39.3, 183.1–6, 235.1, 287.1) show the same iconography: the wolf is standing, but turning her head back and down to attend to the twins.

There was another such statue-group on the Capitol, which in 65 b.c. was struck by lightning and thrown down from its pedestal in a portentous storm (Cic., Cat. 3.19; Div. 1.19–20; 2.45 and 47; Dio 37.9.1; Obsequens 61). Since Cicero says the wolf ‘left her torn-off footprints’ (De consulatu suo 46 Courtney), we may infer that there too she was represented standing. Virgil (Aen. 8.631), however, offers the more realistic scene of the she-wolf lying down to feed the twins, and that is how we see her in the earliest visual evidence, a fourth-century b.c. bronze mirror, probably from Praeneste, showing twin sucklings who may or may not be Romulus and Remus (illustrated and discussed in T. P. Wiseman, Remus (1995), 65–71).

The denarius issue of P. Satrienus in 77 b.c. (RRC 388.1) shows a she-wolf standing and looking forward, with one foreleg raised and no suckling infants beneath her. She is a fierce maternal beast, but what does she represent? Given that the turned head (‘tereti ceruice reflexa’, Virg., Aen. 8.633) and the act of licking the twins (Livy 1.4.6; Virg., Aen. 8.634; Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 1.79.6; Ovid, Fasti 2.418; Origo gentis Romanae 20.3) seem to be essential to the suckling scene, one might even doubt whether Satrienus' she-wolf refers to the founders' myth at all.

There is a reason why these details matter, and for more than five centuries it has been on display at the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Campidoglio in Rome. The wonderful bronze lupa Capitolina was a gift to the city from Pope Sixtus IV in 1471; the twins beneath her are a fifteenth-century addition, attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo (c. 1426–1496). She is first attested in a chronicler of about a.d. 995, reporting a ninth-century verdict at the pontifical judgement-seat at the Lateran, which was called ad lupam after ‘the mother of the Romans’ (MGH Scriptores 3.712); at some point she was placed high on the wall of the Torre degli Annibaldi on the north side of the Lateran piazza, as illustrated in the drawing of a lost fresco of 1438–40 that was in the right transept of the Lateran basilica. Standing, with her head only half turned and not looking down, she has much more in common with the she-wolf of the Satrienus denarii than with what we know of the Ogulnian suckling-twins group.

All this, and more, can be found in an excellent book by the Director of the Capitoline Museums (Claudio Parisi Presicce, La lupa Capitolina (2000)), written for a Millennium exhibition welcoming the she-wolf back to public view after a detailed restoration programme. That work revealed that the clay of the original model, some of which survives inside, came from the Tiber valley between Orvieto and Rome, while the metal itself contained lead mined in Sardinia. That is consistent with the scholarly communis opinio, that the lupa is an archaic Etruscan masterpiece. But the opportunity was also taken to apply radiocarbon testing to the surviving material inside, and though Presicce is evasive about the results, the technical director of the programme insists that they suggest the piece was cast in the eighth century a.d. (Anna Maria Carruba, La lupa Capitolina: un bronzo medioevale (2006)). So who is right, the scientists or the connoisseurs?

This, surely, is a moment for ‘cultural studies’. The talisman of Rome, a symbol universally recognized, is being fought over by two apparently irreconcilable intellectual traditions. What is at stake in this contest? What difference will the outcome make?

It has to be said that Cristina Mazzoni's new book does not rise to the occasion: for her, the dating dispute is just a dinner-party discussion topic (38–9). The book itself is intelligent, well written, very wide-ranging, and fashionably reluctant to privilege the significant over the banal (Presicce gets less attention than The Lonely Planet Guide to Rome). Readers who are taken aback to find ancient texts referred to by the page numbers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations must be content with the author's declaration that ‘the eclectic style of my criticism comes from training in comparative literature’ (xiii). But what strikes one most is the absence of an identifiable argument: ‘Although scholars eventually may agree on one detail or another of the she-wolf's significance, the beast's full meaning is and will likely remain inscrutable. One would do well to suspect at this point in our interpretive journey that there may be no single, complete, and ultimate meaning to be discovered’ (172). Well, of course — but in that case, is the purpose of the book merely to show what we already knew, that the she-wolf symbolizes Rome, and Rome means different things to different people?