The Tale of Titus Tatius

At a Glance

• Central figures: Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines at Cures; Romulus, first king of Rome; Tarpeia, the Roman maiden who opened the gates of the Capitoline; Hersilia, a Sabine woman married to Romulus.
• Setting: Rome and the Sabine town of Cures, in the years immediately following the city’s founding in 753 BCE; drawn primarily from Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and Plutarch’s Life of Romulus.
• The turn: After Romulus’s men seized the Sabine women at the festival games, Titus Tatius marched on Rome to recover them, and the traitor Tarpeia opened the Capitoline citadel to his army.
• The outcome: The Sabine women themselves intervened on the battlefield, standing between their fathers and their husbands, and Tatius and Romulus agreed to rule Rome jointly - a co-kingship that lasted until Tatius was murdered at Lavinium.
• The legacy: The merging of the two peoples gave Rome its dual civic identity - the Romans of the Palatine and the Sabines of the Quirinal - and the name Quirites, the formal legal term for Roman citizens, passed into use from the Sabine hill.

Titus Tatius had a specific grievance and a large army. His daughters, his nieces, the unmarried women of Cures and the surrounding Sabine towns - all seized at Romulus’s fraudulent games, the Consualia, dragged off by Roman men who had no wives and no prospects of getting them honestly. The Sabine delegations sent to Rome demanding the women’s return came back empty-handed. Romulus offered alliance instead. Tatius wanted blood.

He gathered the Sabine forces at Cures, northeast of Rome in the hill country, and marched south. Other Sabine communities joined him. The Latin towns that bordered Rome watched and waited, unwilling to commit to either side. By the time Tatius reached the outskirts of the new city, he commanded the largest force Rome had yet faced - and Rome was barely a city at all, a collection of huts on the Palatine with a ditch and a wall that Remus had died for mocking.

Tarpeia and the Capitoline Gate

The Capitoline hill was Rome’s citadel, its high ground, fortified and garrisoned. Tatius could not take it by assault. But Spurius Tarpeius commanded the garrison, and Spurius Tarpeius had a daughter.

Tarpeia went out to draw water. Sabine soldiers intercepted her. What Tatius offered, or what she demanded, the sources disagree on. Livy says she asked for what the Sabines wore on their left arms - meaning their gold bracelets. Plutarch preserves an alternative: that she was acting under secret orders from Romulus, intending to betray Tatius by asking for their shields. The version that survived in Roman memory was simpler and uglier. She wanted the gold.

She opened the gate at night. The Sabines poured through. And when Tarpeia came to collect her payment, Tatius ordered his men to give her what they wore on their left arms. They threw their shields on top of her, crushing her beneath the weight of wood and bronze. The cliff on the Capitoline’s southern face was named the Tarpeian Rock after her, and for centuries Rome executed traitors by hurling them from it.

Tatius held the Capitoline. Romulus held the Palatine. Between them lay the marshy valley that would become the Forum.

The Battle in the Valley

The fighting began in that low ground. Romulus attacked uphill toward the Capitoline; the Sabines pushed downhill toward the Palatine. The marshy terrain between the two hills swallowed men and horses. A Roman commander named Hostus Hostilius fell early, and the Roman line buckled.

Romulus, retreating, is said to have vowed a temple to Jupiter Stator - Jupiter who stops the rout, who holds the line. Whether the god answered or the men simply rallied, the retreat halted. The Romans re-formed and pushed back into the valley. The fighting turned close and ugly, hand to hand in the mud, neither side able to break the other.

Livy records no decisive blow. The armies ground against each other, fathers on one side, sons-in-law on the other, and neither could win because neither could afford to lose what victory would cost.

The Women Between the Lines

Then the Sabine women came down from the Palatine. They had been watching from the walls - their fathers’ army on one side, their husbands’ army on the other, their children in their arms or growing inside them. Hersilia, who had married Romulus himself, is named by Plutarch as among the first to move.

They ran into the space between the two armies. Some carried infants. Some had loosened their hair in the gesture of mourning. They did not beg. They demanded.

Do not make us widows and orphans on the same day, they said - or words to that effect. If you hate the marriage, kill us first. We are the cause of this war.

The fighting stopped. Not because the men were moved by abstract pity, but because the women had made the geometry of the situation visible. Every spear thrown now would land in a space occupied by someone’s daughter or someone’s wife. There was no angle of attack that did not pass through them.

Tatius and Romulus met in that valley. They negotiated.

The Joint Kingship

The terms were specific. The two peoples would merge into one state. The Sabines would settle the Quirinal and Capitoline hills; the Romans kept the Palatine. Tatius and Romulus would rule together, each holding imperium, each conducting sacrifices, each presiding over the assembly. The citizens of the combined city would be called Quirites after Cures, Tatius’s own town - a name that would outlast both kings, both peoples, and the kingship itself.

The senate doubled in size. Sabine families entered the patrician class. The curiae - the voting divisions of Roman citizens - were said by some antiquarians to take their names from the Sabine women who had brokered the peace, thirty women for thirty curiae, though Livy himself was skeptical.

For a time, it worked. Two kings, two peoples, one city. Tatius conducted his sacrifices; Romulus conducted his. They administered justice from the same Forum that had been a battlefield.

Murder at Lavinium

The co-kingship lasted roughly five years. Then Tatius’s kinsmen committed an outrage - they robbed and murdered ambassadors from Lavinium, the old Latin settlement Aeneas had founded. Lavinium demanded justice. Tatius shielded his relatives, refusing to surrender them.

When Tatius traveled to Lavinium to perform an annual sacrifice, the relatives of the murdered ambassadors were waiting. They killed him at the altar. Livy says Romulus did not pursue the murderers with any great energy. Plutarch is blunter: Romulus considered the killing just, or at least convenient. He buried Tatius on the Aventine with proper honors, then ruled alone.

The Sabine merger held. The dual identity endured long after the man who had forced it was dead. On formal occasions, Roman magistrates still addressed the assembly as Quirites - the name Tatius had brought with him from Cures, carried into the city on the backs of the women who stopped the war.