Romulus and Remus

Capitoline Wolf, traditionally believed to be Etruscan, 5th century BC, with figures of Romulus and Remus added in the 15th century. Recent studies suggest that it may be medieval, dating from the 13th century.^[1]

Romulus and Remus (traditionally c. 771 BC^[2]–c. 717 BC and c. 771 BC–c. 753 BC respectively) are the traditional founders of Rome, appearing in Roman mythology as the twin sons of the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, fathered by the god of war, Mars. According to the tradition recorded as history by Plutarch and Livy, Romulus served as the first King of Rome.

Romulus slew Remus with a shovel over a dispute about which one of the two brothers had the support of the local deities to rule the new city and give it his name.^{[citation needed]} The name they gave the city was Rome. Supposedly, Romulus had stood on one hill and Remus another, and a circle of birds flew over Romulus, signifying that he should be king.^{[citation needed]} After founding Rome, Romulus not only created the Roman Legions and the Roman Senate, but also added citizens to his new city by abducting the women of the neighboring Sabine tribes, which resulted in the mixture of the Sabines and Romans into one people. Romulus would become one of ancient Rome's greatest conquerors, adding large amounts of territory and people to the dominion of Rome.

After his death, Romulus was deified as the god Quirinus, the divine persona of the Roman people. As a mythological figure, his historical basis is disputed, and it is supposed that his name is a back-formation from the name Rome. Some scholars, notably Andrea Carandini, believe in the historicity of Romulus, in part because of the 1988 discovery of the Murus Romuli on the north slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome.^[3]

Romulus and Remus are pre-eminent among the famous feral children in mythology and fiction.

The Mythos

Modern scholarship approaches the various known stories of Romulus and Remus as cumulative elaborations and later interpretations of Roman foundation-myth. Particular versions and collations were presented by Roman historians as authoritative, an official history trimmed of contradictions and untidy variants to justify contemporary developments, genealogies and actions in relation to Roman morality. Other narratives appear to represent popular or folkloric tradition; some of these remain inscrutable in purpose and meaning. Wiseman sums the whole as the mythography of an unusually problematic foundation and early history.^[4][5] Cornell and others describe particular elements of the mythos as "shameful".^[6]

The earliest known history of Rome is attributed to Diocles of Peparethus, whose work was acknowledged as a reliable source by the patrician senator Quintus Fabius Pictor. Fabius wrote his own history of Rome around the time of Rome's war with Hannibal; a particularly fraught backdrop for a contemporary Roman historian and a milestone in its ascendancy as a major power. He wrote in Greek, and may have intended a propagation of Roman identity to readers and potential allies already familiar with Greek models of founding-myth. His work survives only as a brief library-catalogue summary but it describes Romulus and Remus as founders of Rome and Romulus as its first king.^[7]

Fabius's work provided a basis for the early books of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita and several Greek-language histories of Rome, including the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, written during the late 1st century BC, and Plutarch's early 2nd century Life of Romulus.^[8] These accounts provide the broad literary basis for studies of Rome's founding mythography. They have much in common, but each is selective to its purpose. Livy's is a dignified handbook, justifying the purpose and morality of Roman traditions for his own times. He uses at least one source shared by Dionysius and Plutarch but the latter are ethnically Greek; they approach the same Roman subjects as interested outsiders, and include founder-traditions untraceable to a common source, and probably specific to particular regions, social classes or oral tradition.^[9]

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Ancestry and parentage

In Plutarch, the grandfather of Romulus and Remus is Numitor, a descendant of Aeneas, fugitive from Troy after its destruction by the Greeks. Numitor inherits the kingship of Alba Longa. His brother Amulius inherits its treasury, including the gold brought by Aeneas from Troy. Amulius uses his control of the treasury to dethrone Numitor, but fears that Numitor's daughter, Rhea Silvia will bear children who could overthrow him. He forces her to perpetual virginity as a Vestal priestess. In one variant, Mars, god of war, seduces her (another version names Amulius). The king sees his niece's pregnancy and confines her. She gives birth to twin boys of remarkable beauty; her uncle orders her death and theirs.

One account holds that he has Rhea buried alive – the standard punishment for Vestal Virgins who violated their vow of celibacy – and orders the death of the twins by exposure; both means would avoid his direct blood-guilt. Another has him orders Rhea and her twins thrown into the River Tiber. In each case, a servant is charged with the deed.

The servant cannot bring himself to harm the twins; he places them in a basket and leaves it on the banks of the Tiber. The river rises in flood and carries the twins downstream, unharmed.^[10]

Altar from Ostia showing the discovery of Romulus and Remus (now at the Palazzo Massimo)

The river deity Tiberinus makes the basket catch in the roots of a fig tree that grows in the Velabrum swamp at the base of the Palatine Hill. The twins are found and suckled by a she-wolf (Lupa) and fed by a woodpecker (Picus). A shepherd of Amulius named Faustulus discovers them and takes them to his hut, where he and his wife Acca Larentia raise them as their own.

Faustulus (to the right of picture) discovers Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf and woodpecker. Their mother Rhea Silvia and the river-god Tiberinus witness the moment. Painting by Peter Paul Rubens, ca 1616 (Capitoline Museums)

In another variant, Hercules impregnates Acca Larentia and marries her off to Acca Larentia. She has twelve sons; when one of them dies, Romulus takes his place to found the priestly college of Arval brothers Fratres Arvales. Acca Larentia is therefore identified with the Arval goddess Dea Dia. , who is served by the Arvals. In later Republican religious tradition, a Quirinal priest (flamen) impersonated Romulus (by then deified as Quirinus) to perform funerary rites for his foster mother (identified as Dia).

Another and probably late tradition has Larentia as a sacred prostitute (one of many Roman slangs for prostitute was lupa (she-wolf).(Livy i. 4; Ovid, Fasti, iii. 55).

Yet another tradition relates that Romulus and Remus are nursed by the Wolf-Goddess Lupa or Luperca in her cave-lair (lupercal). Luperca was given cult for her protection of sheep from wolves and her spouse was the Wolf-and-Shepherd-God Lupercus, who brought fertility to the flocks. She has been identified with Acca Larentia.

The Founding of Rome

In all versions of the founding myth, the twins grow up as shepherds. They come into conflict with the shepherds of Amulius, leading to battles in which Remus is captured and taken to Amulius. Their identity is discovered. Romulus raises a band of shepherds to liberate his brother; Amulius is killed and Romulus and Remus are conjointly offered the crown. They refuse it while their grandfather, and refuse to live in the city as his subjects; they restore Numitor as king, pay due honours to their mother Rhea and leave to found their own city. They are accompanied by a motley band of fugitives, runaway slaves, and any who want a second chance in a new city with new rulers.

The brothers argue over the best site for the new city. Romulus favours the Palatine Hill; Remus wants the Aventine Hill. They agree to select the site by divine augury, take up position on their respective hills and prepare a sacred space; signs are sent to each in the form of vultures, or eagles. Remus sees six; Romulus sees twelve, and claims superior augury as the basis of his right to decide.

Remus makes a counterclaim; he saw his six vultures first, and should take priority. Romulus sets to work with his supporters, digging a trench (or building a wall, according to Dionysius) around the Palatine to define his city boundary. Remus criticizes some parts of the work and obstructs others. At last, Remus leaps across the boundary, as an insult to the city's defenses and their creator. For this, he is killed.

The death of Remus

Livy's gives two versions of Remus' death. In the one "more generally received", "Remus, in derision of his brother, leaped over the new wall, and Romulus, enraged thereat, slew him, uttering at the same time this imprecation: 'So perish every one that shall hereafter leap over my wall'". In the other he simply states that Remus was dead; no murder is alleged. Two other, lesser known accounts have Remus killed by a blow to the head with a spade, wielded either by Romulus' commander Fabius (source is St. Jerome) or by a man named Celer. Romulus buries Remus with honour and regret.

The city of Romulus

Romulus completes his city and names it Roma after himself. Then he divides his fighting men into regiments of 3000 infantry and 300 cavalry, which he calls "legions". From the rest of the populace he selects 100 of the most noble and wealthy fathers to serve as his council. He calls these men Patricians: they are fathers of Rome, not only because they care for their own legitimate citizen-sons but because they have a fatherly care for Rome and all its people. They are its elders, known as Senators. Romulus thereby inaugurates a system of government and social hierarchy focused on the patron-client relationship.

Rome's population is quickly swelled; it draws in exiles, refugees, the dispossessed, criminals and runaway slaves. The city expands its boundaries to accommodate them; five of the seven hills of Rome are settled: the Capitoline Hill, the Aventine Hill, the Caelian Hill, the Quirinal Hill, and the Palatine Hill. As most of these immigrants are men, Rome finds itself with a shortage of marriageable women.

Romulus invents a festival and invites the neighboring Sabines to attend; they arrive en masse, along with their daughters. The Sabine women – some 700 according to Livy – are brought back to Rome. The Sabine men are allowed to escape.

War with the Sabines

The Sabine men demand the return of their daughters. Romulus refuses and both sides prepare for war. The Romans and their allies are quicker to organise their forces; the defeated Sabines surrender their cities and territories to Rome. They expect enslavement but Romulus is magnanimous in victory – none are enslaved. Though most Sabine land is divided among Rome's citizens, the Sabine fathers whose daughters were taken are allowed to keep theirs as reparation.

The Sabine leader Titus Tatius marches his army on Rome to assault its Capitoline citadel. The citadel commander's daughter Tarpeia opens the gates for them, in refurn for "what they wear on thier left arms". She expects their golden bracelets. Once inside, the Sabines crush her to death under a pile of their shields.

Romulus, Victor over Acron, hauls the rich booty to the temple of Jupiter, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

The Sabines leave the citadel to meet the Romans in open battle in the space later known as the Roman Forum. The outcome hangs in the balance; the Romans retreat to the Capitoline, where Romulus calls on Jupiter for help – traditionally where a temple to Jupiter Stator ("the stayer") was built. The Romans drive the Sabines back to the point where the Temple of Vesta later stands.

The Sabine Women, by Jacques-Louis David

The Sabine women themselves now intervene; they beg for unity between Sabines and Romans. A truce is made, then peace. The Romans base themselves on the Palatine and the Sabines on the Quirinal, with Romulus and Tatius as joint kings and the Capitoline as the common centre of government and culture. 100 Sabine elders and clan leaders join the Patrician Senate. The Sabines adopt the Roman calendar, and the Romans adopt the armour and oblong shield of the Sabines. The legions are doubled in size.

Organisation and growth

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After five years of joint rule, Tatius is assassinated by foreign ambassadors and Romulus becomes sole king. He therefore holds supremacy over Rome's armies and judiciary. He organises Rome's administration according to tribe; one of Latins (Ramnes), one of Sabines (Titites), and one of Luceres.^[11] Each elects a tribune to represented their civil, religious, and military interests. The tribunes are magistrates of their tribes, perform sacrifices on their behalf, and command their tribal levies in times of war.

Romulus divides each tribe into ten curiae to form the Comitia Curiata. The thirty curiae derive their individual names from thirty of the kidnapped Sabine women.

The individual curiae are further divided into ten gentes, held to form the basis for the nomen in the Roman naming convention. Proposals made by Romulus or the Senate are offered to the Curiate assembly for ratification; the ten gentes within each curia cast a vote. Votes are carried by whichever gentes has a majority.

Romulus forms a personal guard called the Celeres; these are three hundred of Rome's finest horsemen. They are commanded by a tribune of the Ramnes; in one version of the founding tale, Celer killed Remus and helped Romulus found the city of Rome. The provision of a personal guard for Romulus helps justify the Augustan development of a Praetorian Guard, responsible for internal security and the personal safety of the emperor. The relationship between Romulus and his Tribune resembles the later relation between the Roman Dictator and his Magister Equitum. Celer, as the Celerum Tribune, occupies the second place in the state, and in Romulus' absence has the rights of convoking the Comitia and commanding the armies.

Romulus wages wars and expands Rome's territory for over two decades. He conquers Etruscan cities, and gains control of Latium, Tuscany, Umbria, and Abruzzo. His battles and wars invariably succeed. When Romulus' grandfather Numitor dies, the people of Alba Longa offer him the crown as rightful heir; Romulus adapts the government of the city to a Roman model. Henceforth, the citizens hold annual elections and choose one of their own as Roman governor.

In Rome, Romulus begins to show signs of autocratic rule. The Senate becomes less influential in administration and lawmaking; Romulus rules by edict. He divides his conquered territories among his soldiers, without Patrician consultation or consent. Senatorial resentment grows to hatred.

The death of Romulus

Several traditions provide accounts of the death of Romulus. According to this legend, Romulus's life ends in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, with a supernatural disappearance, if he was not slain by the Senate.^[12]

One day, when Romulus and all the people had gone to the Campus Martius, a sudden storm arose. The darkness became so great that the people fled in terror. When the storm was over, the Romans returned. To their surprise, however, Romulus had disappeared. The people sent for him, but none could find him. The people were amazed, and were all talking about his sudden disappearance, and wondering what could have become of their king, when one of the Senators stood up and called for silence.

After the Senator calmed the mass of people, he told the assembled Romans that he had seen Romulus being carried up into the heavens. Romulus, the Senator said, had called out that he was going to live with the deities, and wished his people to worship him as the god Quirinus. In response, the Romans built a temple on the hill where the Senator said that Romulus had risen to heaven. This hill was called the Quirinal Hill in Romulus' honor, and for many years the Romans worshiped Romulus, the founder of their city, and their first king from that very spot.

Plutarch (Life of Numa Pompilius) tells the legend with a note of skepticism:

It was the 37th year, counted from the foundation of Rome, when Romulus, then reigning, did, on the fifth day of the month of July, called the Caprotine Nones, offer a public sacrifice at the Goat's Marsh, in presence of the senate and people of Rome. Suddenly the sky was darkened, a thick cloud of storm and rain settled on the earth; the common people fled in affright, and were dispersed; and in this whirlwind Romulus disappeared, his body being never found either living or dead. A foul suspicion presently attached to the patricians, and rumors were current among the people as if that they, weary of kingly government, and exasperated of late by the imperious deportment of Romulus toward them, had plotted against his life and made him away, so that they might assume the authority and government into their own hands. This suspicion they sought to turn aside by decreeing divine honors to Romulus, as to one not dead, but translated to a higher condition. And Proculus, a man of note, took oath that he saw Romulus caught up into heaven in his arms and vestments, and heard him, as he ascended, cry out that they should hereafter style him by the name of Quirinus.

Livy also reports on this event:

Then a few voices began to proclaim Romulus's divinity; the cry was taken up, and at last every man present hailed him as a god and son of a god, and prayed to him to be forever gracious and to protect his children. However, even on this great occasion there were, I believe, a few dissenters who secretly maintained that the king had been torn to pieces by the senators. At all events the story got about, though in veiled terms; but it was not important, as awe, and admiration for Romulus's greatness, set the seal upon the other version of his end, which was, moreover, given further credit by the timely action of a certain Julius Proculus, a man, we are told, honored for his wise counsel on weighty matters. The loss of the king had left the people in an uneasy mood and suspicious of the senators, and Proculus, aware of the prevalent temper, conceived the shrewd idea of addressing the Assembly. Romulus, he declared, the father of our city descended from heaven at dawn this morning and appeared to me. In awe and reverence I stood before him, praying for permission to look upon his face without sin. "Go", he said, "and tell the Romans that by heaven's will my Rome shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms". Having spoken these words, he was taken up again into the sky^[13].

Livy infers Romulus' murder as no more than a dim, doubtful and whisper from the past; in the circumstances, Proculus' declaration is wise and practical because it has the desired effect. Cicero's seeming familiarity with the story of Romulus' murder and divinity must have been shared by his target audience and readership.^[14] Dio's version, though fragmentary, is unequivocal; Romulus is surrounded by hostile, resentful senators and "rent limb from limb" in the senate-house itself. An eclipse and sudden storm, "the same sort of phenomenon that had attended his birth", conceal the deed from the soldiers and the people, who are anxiously seeking their king. Julius Proclus fakes a personal vision of Romulus' spontaneous ascent to heaven as Quirinius and announces the message of Romulus-Quirinius; a new king must be chosen at once. A dispute arises: should this king be Sabine or Roman? The debate goes on for a year. During this time, the most distinguished senators rule for five days at a times as interreges.^[15]

Romulus-Quirinius

Ennius (c. 180's BC) refers to Romulus as a divinity but there is no evidence for the conflated Romulus-Quirinus before the first century BC.^[16][17] Images of Quirinus showed him as a bearded warrior wielding a spear as a god of war, the embodiment of Roman strength and a deified likeness of the city of Rome. Quirinus received a Flamen Maior called the Flamen Quirinalis, who oversaw his worship and rituals.

Remus in the underworld

This section requires expansion with: examples and citations.

Iconography

Romulus and Remus. Silver didrachm (6.44 g). Ca 269-266 BC

Ancient pictures of the Roman twins usually follow certain symbolic traditions, depending on the legend they follow: they either show a shepherd, the she-wolf, the twins under a fig tree, and one or two birds (Livy, Plutarch); or they depict two shepherds, the she-wolf, the twins in a cave, seldom a fig tree, and never any birds (Dionysius of Halicarnassus).

Also there are coins with Lupa and the tiny twins placed beneath her.

Shepherd kings, as some mythographers would classify Romulus, were torn to pieces in a secret religious ceremony at the end of their "reign" and the beginning of the reign of the next "king". That mythological identity, reflecting ancient religious practices, might be supported in the notation by Livy that some stated that this was his fate. Religious mysteries and rites had to be kept secret, hence the rumor is implied for only the initiates to interpret.

The Franks Casket, an Anglo-Saxon hoard-box (early seventh century) shows Romulus and Remus in an unusual setting, two wolves instead of one, a grove instead of one tree or a cave, four kneeling warriors instead of one or two gesticulating shepherds. As the runic inscription ("far from home") indicates, the twins are cited here as the Dioscuri, helpers at voyages such as Castor and Polydeuces. Their descent from the Roman god of war predestines them as helpers on the way to war. So the carver transfers them into the Germanic holy grove and has Woden’s second wolf join them. Thus the picture serves—along with five other ones—to influence "wyrd", the fortune and fate of a warrior king.

Alleged dates

Plutarch says that Romulus was 53 ("in the fifty-fourth year of his age") at his death (Plutarch says that he vanished) in 717 BC.^{[citation needed]} If true, then Romulus and Remus would have been born in the year 771 BC, and have begun the founding of Rome at the age of 18.^[18]

Notes

References and further reading

• Albertoni, Margherita, et al. The Capitoline Museums: Guide. Milan: Electa, 2006. For information on the Capitoline She-Wolf.
• Beard, M., North, J., Price, S., Religions of Rome, vol. 1, illustrated, reprint, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521316820
• Cornell, T., The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c.1000–264 BC), Routledge, 1995. ISBN 9780415015967
• Wiseman, T. P., Remus: a Roman myth, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780521483667

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Romulus and Remus

External links

• Plutarch (Lives of Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Camillus)
• Romulus and Remus (Romwalus and Reumwalus) and two wolves on the Franks Casket: Franks Casket, Helpers on the way to war

See also

• Asena, a similar legend concerning origin of Turks

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