The Story of Acca Larentia

At a Glance

Central figures: Acca Larentia, a woman of disputed origins - either the wife of the shepherd Faustulus who nursed Romulus and Remus, or a courtesan who won a night with Hercules through a dice game at his temple and later married the wealthy Etruscan Carutius.
Setting: Rome in its earliest years, from the reign of King Ancus Marcius back to the age of Romulus; the Velabrum near the Tiber, the Palatine Hill, and the temple of Hercules at the Ara Maxima in the Forum Boarium.
The turn: In one tradition, Acca Larentia shelters the abandoned twins and raises them as her own; in the other, she inherits vast tracts of land from Carutius and bequeaths them to the Roman people upon her death.
The outcome: Rome received enormous territorial wealth from Acca Larentia’s bequest, and her name became bound to the city’s identity as both nurse-mother and benefactress.
The legacy: The Larentalia, a festival held on December 23rd at which the pontifex maximus and the flamines performed rites at her grave in the Velabrum, honoring her as a kind of civic ancestor.

The keeper of Hercules’s temple had time on his hands. He was alone one evening - the sacrifices done, the altar at the Ara Maxima still warm with fat and ash - and he decided to play dice. Not against another man. Against the god himself. He set out two cups of wine, two plates of food, and threw for both sides, his own and Hercules’s, calling the results aloud in the empty hall. The stakes were simple: if Hercules won, the keeper would provide the god a dinner and a woman for the night, both at public expense. If the keeper won, he expected nothing in particular. Hercules won.

The keeper, bound now by the terms he had set in the god’s own precinct, went looking for a woman willing to spend the night locked inside the temple. He found Acca Larentia.

The Night in the Temple

She was a lupa - the word meant both she-wolf and prostitute, and Romans never lost their taste for that ambiguity. Beautiful, known in the streets near the Velabrum, Acca Larentia agreed to the arrangement. The keeper let her into the temple at dusk, bolted the doors, and left her alone with the offerings and the smell of burnt cattle.

What happened inside, no source describes. Macrobius and Plutarch both record the story but stop at the threshold. What they do say is that in the morning, when the doors were opened, Acca Larentia walked out changed. She carried instructions - whether whispered by the god or arrived at by her own wits. Hercules had told her, she said, to accept the first man she met upon leaving the temple. That man would bring her fortune.

The first man she met was Carutius. He was Etruscan, old, very rich, and he had no heirs. He married her. They lived together for some years on his estates in the countryside around Rome - lands so extensive that their boundaries touched several of the territories that would later become Rome’s earliest rural tribes. When Carutius died, Acca Larentia inherited everything.

The Bequest

She did not keep it. Or rather, she kept it for a while and then, having no children of her own by Carutius, left the entire estate to the Roman people. This was not a casual gift. The lands she bequeathed formed a significant portion of the ager Romanus - the public territory of Rome - at a time when Rome was still a cluster of hilltop villages trying to control the river crossing. Varro recorded that the fields she left were so productive and so well situated that the state honored her memory formally, by decree of the pontifices.

Some later writers, uncomfortable with the idea that Rome owed prime farmland to a prostitute’s luck at the temple of Hercules, preferred the other version of her story.

The She-Wolf’s Other Name

In this telling, Acca Larentia was no courtesan but the wife of Faustulus, the royal shepherd who found Romulus and Remus on the bank of the Tiber after the she-wolf had nursed them. Faustulus brought the infants home. His wife raised them. The twins called her mother.

The connection between the two traditions hangs on that word lupa. The story of the she-wolf suckling the twins was already old by the time Livy wrote it down, and Livy himself notes, carefully, that some authorities explained the wolf away: Acca Larentia was called lupa because of her profession, and the tale of the literal wolf was a later embellishment, a way to dignify the founding with a miracle instead of a brothel. The twins were nursed by a woman, not a beast. The lupa was human.

Whether this is true or a rationalist’s correction of a perfectly good miracle, Romans kept both versions alive without apparent embarrassment. The two Acca Larentias - the foster-mother and the courtesan - coexisted in the calendars and the rituals, sometimes merging, sometimes separate, never fully reconciled.

The Twelve Sons

A third strand of the tradition gave Acca Larentia twelve sons. Eleven were mortal. They formed a priestly college, the fratres Arvales - the Arval Brothers - who performed annual rites in May to ensure the fertility of Rome’s fields. When one of the twelve died, Romulus himself stepped into the vacancy, taking the dead brother’s place in the college. This detail bound Acca Larentia to Romulus yet again, whether or not she was his foster-mother, and it linked her name to the agricultural prosperity of the state.

The fratres Arvales endured for centuries. Their hymn, the Carmen Arvale, is one of the oldest surviving pieces of Latin, so archaic that by the late Republic even the priests who sang it no longer fully understood the words. They sang it anyway. The rite was the point, not comprehension.

The Grave in the Velabrum

Acca Larentia was buried - or her cenotaph stood - in the Velabrum, the low ground between the Palatine and the Capitoline where the old cattle market sprawled and where the Tiber had once flooded freely before the Cloaca Maxima drained the marsh. The spot was public, visible, central. Every year on the eleventh day before the Calends of January - December 23rd by modern reckoning - the pontifex maximus came to her grave and performed a parentatio, a rite for the dead. The flamines attended. Offerings were made.

This was the Larentalia. It fell just before the Saturnalia ended, tucked into that stretch of late December when Rome’s ordinary hierarchies loosened and the dead pressed close. The rite was old enough that by Varro’s time its origins were already disputed. He recorded it. He did not resolve it.

What mattered was that the state performed it. A woman of uncertain name and doubled story - wolf-mother, courtesan, landowner, mother of priests - received honors from the highest religious authority in Rome, year after year, at a fixed point in the calendar. The pontifices did not explain why. They came to the Velabrum, made the offerings, and left. The grave stayed where it was, between the hills, near the river, at the center of everything Rome claimed to be.