The Rape of the Sabine Women

At a Glance

• Central figures: Romulus, founder and first king of Rome; the Sabine women, taken as brides by force; Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines; Hersilia, a Sabine woman who became Romulus’s wife.
• Setting: Rome in its earliest months as a city, roughly 753 BCE, and the surrounding hill country of Latium; the primary sources are Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (Book I) and Plutarch’s Life of Romulus.
• The turn: After neighboring peoples refused to give their daughters in marriage to Rome’s settlers, Romulus staged a festival honoring Neptune Equester and, at a signal, his men seized the Sabine women from among the crowd.
• The outcome: The Sabines marched on Rome under Titus Tatius; the two armies met in the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, and the Sabine women themselves ran onto the field to stop the fighting, brokering a peace that merged both peoples into a single city.
• The legacy: The Consualia, the festival of Consus at which the abduction occurred, continued to be celebrated in Rome; the union of Romans and Sabines established the model of Rome’s expansion through absorption rather than mere conquest.

Rome had men and no women. That was the problem Romulus faced in the months after the city’s founding. He had drawn settlers from across Latium - shepherds, exiles, runaway slaves, men with nothing to lose - and they had built walls on the Palatine and dug a ditch around them. But walls do not make a city. A city needs children. A city needs marriages, and marriages require brides, and no father in the neighboring towns would give his daughter to a Roman.

Romulus sent envoys to the Sabines, to the people of Caenina, to Crustumerium, to Antemnae. The answer came back the same from each: no. Some laughed openly. Had Romulus opened an asylum for women as well, they asked, so his men might find their match? The refusal was deliberate, a calculation that Rome would die in a single generation if left without wives. Romulus understood the calculation perfectly.

The Festival of Consus

He announced a festival. Games in honor of Consus - Consualia - the god whose altar lay buried underground in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine, uncovered only on his feast days. Consus was a god of stored grain, of the harvest hidden in the earth, and his festival drew crowds. Romulus sent word across the countryside, and the invitation was generous: all were welcome.

They came. Families from the Sabine hills arrived first, curious about the new city, wanting to see the walls and the huts and the ditch. People came from Caenina and Crustumerium and Antemnae. They brought their wives and their daughters. The Romans had prepared well. The settlement was swept, fires were lit, there was food and wine and the promise of horse races in the valley. Livy says the Sabines came with their entire households.

Romulus gave the signal. Accounts differ on what it was - Livy says he stood and gathered his cloak around him; others say he raised it above his head. At that sign, the young Roman men moved. Each had been assigned a target beforehand, or so the later historians claimed, to impose some order on what was about to happen. They seized the young unmarried women from among the crowd and carried them into the city. The fathers and mothers fled in terror, shouting that hospitality had been violated, that the gods of guest-right would punish this.

Romulus Speaks to the Taken Women

Romulus went among the women himself. They were weeping, many of them, and furious, and Livy records that Romulus spoke to them directly. He told them the fault lay with their own fathers, who had refused lawful marriage. He told them they would have the full rights of Roman wives - property, children, citizenship. He told them they would share in all the fortunes of Rome, and that nothing bound people together more tightly than children. He asked them to turn their anger into affection.

Whether the speech persuaded anyone that first night is another question. But the marriages went forward. Hersilia, who may have been the only married woman taken by accident - or, in some versions, who came willingly - became the wife of Romulus himself. The others were distributed among the men. The Romans, Livy insists, did not assault them beyond the seizure itself; they courted them with promises and with tenderness, each man telling his bride that it was passion and love that had driven him to act. The distinction mattered to later Romans, who wanted the founding act to carry some trace of pietas even in its violence.

The March of Titus Tatius

The Sabines did not forgive. Titus Tatius, king of the Sabine town of Cures, gathered an army. The smaller towns moved first - Caenina’s king marched on Rome alone and was killed by Romulus in single combat, his armor stripped and carried to the Capitoline as spolia opima, the richest spoils, dedicated to Jupiter Feretrius. Crustumerium and Antemnae fell quickly after. But Tatius was a larger threat.

The Sabine army reached Rome and nearly took the Capitoline through treachery. Tarpeia, daughter of the Roman commander of the citadel, opened the gates to the Sabines. She had asked for what they wore on their left arms, meaning their gold bracelets. They gave her what they wore on their left arms - their shields. They crushed her under them. The rock from which traitors were later thrown bore her name ever after: the Tarpeian Rock.

With the Capitoline in Sabine hands, the two armies faced each other in the marshy valley between the hills - the ground that would one day become the Forum. The fighting was close and bitter. Mettius Curtius, a Sabine champion, drove the Romans back until Romulus rallied them with a vow to Jupiter Stator, Jupiter who holds the line, promising a temple on that spot if the retreat was stopped. The Romans turned and fought again.

The Women on the Field

Then the Sabine women came. They ran between the lines with their hair loose and their infants in their arms, screaming at both sides to stop. Livy gives them a speech, and even if the words are his invention, the logic is Roman to its core: they told their fathers that if the kinship now binding the two peoples was hateful, the fathers should turn their anger on the women themselves, since the women were the cause of the war. Better to die, they said, than to live as widows or orphans, having lost husbands on one side and fathers on the other.

The fighting stopped. Romulus and Titus Tatius met between the armies and made a treaty. The two peoples would merge. Tatius would rule alongside Romulus as co-king. The Sabines would settle on the Capitoline and Quirinal hills; the Romans held the Palatine. The combined people took a new name from Tatius’s hometown: Quirites, the formal title by which Roman citizens addressed each other in assembly for centuries after.

Tatius ruled beside Romulus until he was murdered at Lavinium some years later during a sacrifice - killed by men from Laurentum in a private quarrel. Romulus ruled alone after that, and when he vanished from the earth in a storm on the Campus Martius, the Sabine-born Hersilia mourned him. The merged city endured. Rome had gotten its women, and in getting them, had absorbed an entire people - the first of many such absorptions, the pattern by which the city would grow from a ditch on the Palatine to the capital of the known world.