The Founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus

At a Glance

• Central figures: Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars and the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia; their grandfather Numitor, deposed king of Alba Longa; and their great-uncle Amulius, the usurper who ordered them killed.
• Setting: Alba Longa and the hills along the Tiber, in the region of Latium; drawn from Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, with elements from Ovid’s Fasti.
• The turn: After restoring Numitor to his throne, the twins quarreled over which hill should hold the new city; each took augury from the flight of birds, and neither would yield to the other’s claim.
• The outcome: Romulus killed Remus on the Palatine and founded the city of Roma, tracing its first boundary with a plough on the twenty-first day of April, 753 BCE by later Roman reckoning.
• The legacy: The festival of the Parilia - later called the Natalis Urbis - celebrated each year on April 21 as the birthday of Rome, and the sacred boundary of the pomerium that no armed man could cross.

Numitor was king of Alba Longa, and his brother Amulius wanted the throne. He took it. He killed Numitor’s sons and forced Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a Vestal Virgin - sworn to the hearth, sworn to chastity, sworn to produce no heirs who might contest Amulius’s rule. The oath bound her to thirty years of tending Vesta’s flame. Mars came to her anyway. She bore twins.

Amulius ordered the infants drowned in the Tiber. A servant carried them to the riverbank in a wooden trough and set them on the floodwater. The river was swollen that spring. It lifted the trough, carried it downstream, and deposited it in the mud beneath a fig tree at the foot of the Palatine Hill. The Romans later called this tree the Ficus Ruminalis, and it was still pointed out to visitors centuries after.

The She-Wolf at the Lupercal

A she-wolf found the twins in the mud. She had come down from the hills to drink, and the sound of crying drew her to the trough. She nursed them in a cave on the Palatine’s western slope - the Lupercal, sacred to Faunus, where the priests called Luperci would later run their February rite. A woodpecker, Mars’s bird, brought scraps of food to the cave mouth. These are the details Livy reports without comment, as though the strangeness of a wolf nursing human children required no explanation when the father was a god.

Faustulus, one of the king’s herdsmen, discovered them. He brought the boys home to his wife, Acca Larentia, and they raised the twins as their own among the flocks on the Palatine. Romulus and Remus grew up as shepherds - quarrelsome, physical, quick to lead. They gathered other young men around them. They raided cattle. They fought with the herdsmen of the Aventine. They were not gentle boys.

The Return to Alba Longa

During one of these skirmishes, Remus was captured and dragged before Amulius. Romulus gathered his men and went after his brother. Faustulus, fearing the worst, told Romulus the truth - or what he knew of it: the trough, the river, the royal blood. Romulus did not hesitate. He marched on Alba Longa with a band of shepherds and herdsmen. He killed Amulius. He pulled Remus from the prison. He set their grandfather Numitor back on the throne.

Numitor confirmed their parentage. Rhea Silvia’s fate varies in the telling - some say she had already been killed, others that she was imprisoned, others that the Tiber itself had taken her as a bride. What mattered to the twins was the confirmation: they were grandsons of the king, sons of Mars, and Alba Longa was too small for them.

They decided to found a new city at the place where they had been exposed and saved - along the Tiber, among the hills. They agreed on the location. They did not agree on which hill.

The Augury on the Hills

Romulus chose the Palatine. Remus chose the Aventine. Neither would concede, and neither had the authority to overrule the other. They were twins; there was no firstborn. So they turned to augury - the reading of bird-flight, the oldest form of Roman divination, the method by which Jupiter communicated his will to men.

Each brother climbed his hill at dawn and sat watching the sky. Remus saw his sign first: six vultures wheeling above the Aventine. His supporters shouted that he had won. Then Romulus reported twelve vultures over the Palatine. His supporters shouted louder. The dispute was immediate and bitter. Remus claimed priority - he had seen his birds first. Romulus claimed magnitude - he had seen twice as many. There was no arbiter. No pontifex yet existed to interpret the signs. No senate to deliberate. Just two brothers and their armed followers, standing on two hills, each certain the gods had chosen him.

Livy says the quarrel turned to blows. Plutarch offers several versions of what happened next and does not choose between them.

The Death of Remus

In one account, Remus jumped over the half-built wall of Romulus’s new city in mockery - a low furrow scratched in the dirt with a bronze-tipped plough, barely ankle-high, but sacred because Romulus had consecrated it. To leap the boundary was to say it meant nothing. Romulus struck him dead. Some say Romulus did it with his own hand. Others say one of Romulus’s men, a figure named Celer, swung the blow while Romulus stood watching.

Romulus is reported to have said: Sic deinde quicumque alius transiliet moenia mea - “So perish whoever else leaps over my walls.”

Whether this was grief dressed as law, or law that left no room for grief, the sources do not say. Romulus buried his brother. Then he finished building the wall.

The Plough and the Pomerium

On April 21, Romulus yoked a white bull and a white cow to a plough and drove the blade in a circle around the Palatine, cutting the furrow that marked the city’s sacred boundary - the pomerium. Where he intended a gate, he lifted the plough from the earth and carried it, so the ground beneath the gates would remain unconsecrated and open to traffic, commerce, and armed men returning from war. Within the pomerium, no one could bear weapons. No one could bury the dead. The space inside was the city - urbs - and everything outside was ager, the field.

He named the city Roma. After himself, everyone assumed, though some later antiquarians tried to find other origins for the word. He opened an asylum - a sanctuary between the two summits of the Capitoline - and invited exiles, runaway slaves, and men with nothing to lose. They came. Rome filled with the restless and the desperate. It had a wall, a king, a sacred boundary, and no women at all. That problem would require its own solution.

The shepherds’ fires burned on the Palatine that first night. Each April 21 afterward, the Romans lit fires again and drove cattle through the smoke, and called the festival the Parilia, and later the Natalis Urbis - the birthday of the city. The furrow Romulus cut became the legal fiction that outlasted the republic and the empire both: that Rome had a border between sacred and profane, and that the border mattered, because a man had killed his brother to prove it did.