Romulus: Founder of Rome, Son of Mars, and the City’s First King

Romulus is the most important figure in Roman mythology after Aeneas, and in some ways more important — Aeneas founded the lineage that would produce Rome, but Romulus founded the city itself. He gave it its name, its walls, its first laws, its senate, its religious institutions, and the particular character of violent, practical, determined ambition that the Romans recognized as their own. He was also, by any reasonable assessment, a difficult man, capable of fratricide, mass abduction, and the kind of ruthless political calculation that founded states rather than merely governing them.

The Romans did not smooth these edges out. They preserved them, studied them, argued about them, and ultimately decided that a city founded in blood and survived through cunning had no reason to pretend otherwise. Romulus was what Rome was, and Rome knew it.

Birth and Survival

The circumstances of Romulus’s birth were politically dangerous from the start. His mother was Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin — the daughter of Numitor, the legitimate king of Alba Longa who had been deposed by his brother Amulius. Amulius had forced Rhea Silvia into the Vestal priesthood specifically to prevent her from having children who might one day challenge his usurpation. The Vestals were required to maintain strict chastity; a pregnant Vestal was not only disgraced but a direct threat to Amulius’s position.

She became pregnant anyway. The father, she said, was Mars. Whether Amulius believed this is not recorded. What he did is: he imprisoned Rhea Silvia and ordered the twins she bore to be drowned in the Tiber.

The servants sent to drown them — either through pity, or because the Tiber was flooded and they could not reach the main current, or both — set the basket containing the infants at the river’s edge and left. The river carried it downstream and deposited it at the foot of the Palatine Hill, under a fig tree called the Ficus Ruminalis. A she-wolf found the basket and nursed the twins. A woodpecker — both the wolf and the woodpecker being sacred to Mars — brought food. Eventually a shepherd named Faustulus found them and brought them home to his wife Acca Larentia, who raised them.

Livy, who tells this story with characteristic care, notes that some people explained the she-wolf differently: lupa in Latin meant both a female wolf and a prostitute, and perhaps Acca Larentia had been called a lupa by the shepherds, and the story of the wolf nursing the twins was a later mythologization of a rougher truth. He records this alternative without fully endorsing it, which is characteristic of how serious Roman historians handled their founding mythology — they neither discarded it nor demanded it be taken literally.

The Recovery of the Throne

The twins grew up among the shepherds of the Palatine, becoming leaders of the young men of the area, engaged in cattle raids and disputes with neighboring shepherds in the manner of frontier youth in early Italy. Remus was captured in one such dispute and brought before Numitor, the deposed king of Alba Longa, whose shepherds had been the other party in the conflict. Numitor looked at Remus and saw something familiar.

Faustulus, who had been waiting for the right moment, told Romulus the truth about their origins. Romulus went to Numitor. Between the grandfather and the twin grandsons, the situation at Alba Longa was resolved with surprising efficiency: Amulius was killed, Numitor was restored to the throne, and Romulus and Remus were free to do what they had apparently always intended — found a city of their own.

The Founding

They returned to the Palatine, to the place where they had been found and raised, because that was the obvious and appropriate location. The disagreement between them was about which of the seven hills should be the center of the new city. Romulus favored the Palatine. Remus favored the Aventine.

They resolved it by augury — by watching the skies for omens in the form of birds. Remus saw six vultures over the Aventine. Romulus then claimed to have seen twelve over the Palatine. The dispute was about interpretation as much as observation: did the earlier sighting (Remus’s) take precedence, or did the larger number (Romulus’s)? The question was not resolved diplomatically.

What happened next depends on which ancient source you read. In one version, Remus jumped over the low wall Romulus was building around the Palatine, mockingly demonstrating that it was no real barrier — and Romulus killed him on the spot. In another version, Remus was killed by Romulus’s companion Celer. In still another, Romulus killed him in the general fight that followed the augury dispute. The accounts agree on the outcome: Remus was dead, Romulus founded the city alone, and the city took his name.

Romulus said, or is said to have said, that this would be the fate of anyone who crossed Rome’s walls. This was both a statement about the seriousness of the city’s sacred boundary — the pomerium — and an acknowledgment that the city had begun in fratricide. The Romans did not flinch from this. Their city was founded in blood. That was not something they needed to hide.

The Rape of the Sabine Women

The new city had a problem. Its population was predominantly male — exiles, fugitives, runaway slaves, adventurers, men who for various reasons had left other communities. A city of men cannot reproduce, and the neighboring peoples, recognizing what kind of city Rome was starting to look like, were not eager to give their daughters to it.

Romulus invited the neighboring Sabines and Latins to a religious festival — a festival to Neptune, in most accounts — and during the festival, on a signal, the Romans seized the unmarried women and drove off the men. This was not a minor incident. It was a deliberate state policy, carried out in large numbers, designed to solve Rome’s demographic problem through violence and coercion.

The women wept. Their fathers and brothers went home furious and began preparing for war. Romulus visited the women individually and told them they had not been taken as slaves but as future wives, that they would be treated with respect, that their children would be free Romans. This was not comfort in any immediate sense, but it was a statement about the terms of what had happened.

War followed. The Sabines under their king Titus Tatius attacked Rome. They reached the Capitoline Hill through the treachery of a Roman woman named Tarpeia, who opened the gates for them. The two sides were fighting in the valley between the hills — the future site of the Roman Forum — when the Sabine women intervened. They ran into the middle of the battle, holding their children, and begged both sides to stop: their fathers were fighting their husbands, and whichever side won, they lost someone. The two armies stopped. The Romans and Sabines made peace and merged into a single people, with Romulus and Titus Tatius ruling jointly until Tatius was killed in a different dispute several years later.

The story of the Sabine women was not told by the Romans with embarrassment. It was told as a founding event, one that explained how Rome became a mixed people, how Roman women had a particular kind of moral authority derived from their position as links between former enemies, and how the city had turned an act of violence into the basis for its first major political integration.

The Reign

Romulus ruled for thirty-seven years. The basic institutions of Roman governance that would persist through the Republic — the Senate, the distinction between patricians and plebeians, the major priestly offices, the division of citizens into voting groups — were attributed to his reign or its immediate aftermath. The Senate he created had one hundred members, chosen from the leading families, called patres — fathers. Their descendants were the patricians, the Roman aristocracy.

He built up the army, organized the city’s religious observances, conducted wars against neighboring peoples, and expanded Rome’s territory across what had been a cluster of hills above the Tiber into something recognizable as a city-state. He was not a peaceful ruler — he was a warrior king in the tradition of the heroic age — but he was an effective one.

The Disappearance

Romulus vanished. The details differ between sources, and the Romans knew they differed and preserved both versions.

In one version, he was reviewing his army near the Palus Caprae — the Goat’s Swamp — when a sudden violent storm descended. Thunder, lightning, darkness. When the storm cleared, Romulus was gone. The soldiers who had been present said he had been taken up to heaven by his father Mars.

In the other version, the senators had wanted him gone. He had been growing more autocratic. Several senators had been killed or exiled on his orders. During the storm, with visibility near zero, the senators surrounded him and killed him, tearing his body apart and carrying pieces away hidden under their togas.

The Romans told both versions. Livy records them both and does not adjudicate between them. The deification story was the official version, the one that explained why Romulus was worshipped as the god Quirinus after his death — the god who presided over the Roman people in their civic capacity, distinct from Mars who presided over them in their military capacity. The murder story was the one that made sense given what was known about Roman senatorial politics.

A nobleman named Proculus Julius claimed that Romulus had appeared to him in a vision after the disappearance, radiant and divine, and had instructed him to tell the Romans that he had been taken to join the gods and would be worshipped as Quirinus. This vision served the political purpose of transforming a mysterious disappearance into a divine translation. The Romans accepted it. Whether they believed it is a different question.

Romulus in the Roman World

The Romans had a complicated relationship with Romulus. They revered him as the founder, the first king, the man from whom the city took its name and its character. They worshipped him as Quirinus. They told stories about him with unmistakable admiration for his strength, his cunning, and his practical effectiveness.

They also could not quite overlook what he had done. He killed his brother. He abducted women on a massive scale. He grew autocratic and was possibly murdered by the men who were supposed to be his closest advisors. He was, in other words, a Roman — capable of both the greatness and the violence that Roman history repeatedly demonstrated were aspects of the same character.

Augustus, who rebuilt Rome so extensively that he claimed to have found a city of brick and left one of marble, was compared to Romulus repeatedly and courted the comparison. He considered naming himself Romulus when he needed a new title after the assassination of Julius Caesar, before settling on Augustus instead. Romulus was too raw — the fratricide, the abductions, the violent founding were all there in the name, inseparable from the glory. Augustus chose the word that meant the consecrated, the approved, the one the gods had blessed. Romulus remained the archetype — the man who actually did it, before the machinery of Roman civilization smoothed the edges of what doing it required.

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