Reflections of a stormy petrel

Not from my point of view, no. Georges Dumezil had argued from the sixties if not earlier that the complex social arrangements of the Roman aristocracy, priesthood and monarchy must be very ancient indeed, and that they basically paralleled the ideas and institutions of other Indo-European peoples - in other words, they dated to earlier than the settlement of the Italics in Italy. This just demonstrates that he was right, and that the evolutionary view that has Roman institutions develop, in a few centuries, from extremely simple origins, is plain wrong. For that matter, we already knew that it must be wrong, from evidence such as the ancient sacred law written on the Lapis Niger (now on display at the new National Roman Museum near Termini) which corresponds in detail with a sacred regulation described by Cicero, but is nothing short of half a millennium earlier. However, this does not prove that there ever was a Romulus; that is legend. The only pre-Etruscan king of Rome who may have been historical must be Ancus Marcius, since there was a clan of Marcii Reges in Rome in historical times. The others are blatantly legendary. The history of Rome as told by the Roman aristocracy to the likes of Polybius, Livy and Dionysios of Halikarnassos, is, for everything before 385BC, sheer invention, though placed in a historical framework.