Remus

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Half-divine son of Mars, suckled by a she-wolf, and co-founder of the site that would become Rome.
Role in Mythos: Twin brother of Romulus whose death at the city’s first wall marks the founding moment of Rome itself.
Relation to Humans: Remus is a human-scaled figure in the founding story rather than a god to be worshipped, a hero whose mortality is the point of the tale. Romans encountered him through civic memory and the rituals attached to the Lupercal cave of his infancy.

The basket caught on a snag of roots beneath a wild fig tree, and the river kept moving. Inside, two infants squalled into the cold morning air, mud-streaked and half-soaked. One of them would be remembered as a god. The other would die before the city he had helped imagine had walls high enough to keep him out.

Remus was the doomed half of Rome’s founding. His brother Romulus would seal his name into the city, the army, and the calendar. Remus left a different kind of mark, the kind a culture leaves when it looks hard at the moment of its own beginning and notices the blood there.

The bones of his story stay stable across the ancient sources. Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin and daughter of the deposed king Numitor of Alba Longa, was forced into her priesthood by her usurping uncle Amulius. The vow was meant to ensure she would bear no heirs who might one day reclaim the throne. The god Mars came to her anyway. She bore twin sons. Amulius ordered them drowned, and the servants charged with the killing settled for the next-worst thing, laying the infants in a basket and setting them adrift on the flooded Tiber. The basket grounded near the Palatine, beneath that fig tree the Romans would later call the Ficus Ruminalis and tend as something sacred.

What happened next is the image every Roman knew. A she-wolf came down to the river to drink, found the babies, and nursed them in a cave at the foot of the Palatine. The cave was the Lupercal, and the rite of the Lupercalia would haunt that spot for centuries afterward. A woodpecker is sometimes added to the scene, dropping scraps of food. Both animals were sacred to Mars, and the picture is doing theological work as much as narrative work. The war god kept his sons alive through his own wild creatures, against the orders of a human king. A shepherd named Faustulus eventually found them and carried the boys home to his wife, Acca Larentia, who raised them as her own.

There is a smaller picture buried under the larger one. The twins walking the hill paths above the river, a staff each, sheep ahead of them, the brown water a flat band in the distance. The years before they knew. They grew into shepherd-warriors, decisive and rough, leading their foster-brothers in raids against bandits in a country where shepherds doubled as the only law worth the name. The stories rarely distinguish them in this stretch. They are mentioned together, two interchangeable young men with thick arms and Mars in their blood, until a quarrel dragged the truth of their birth into the open. They killed Amulius, restored Numitor to his throne in Alba Longa, and refused to stay there. They wanted a city of their own, on the hills where the wolf had nursed them.

This is where Remus separates from his brother and becomes himself. Romulus favoured the Palatine. Remus favoured the Aventine, the lower hill across a narrow valley. To settle the choice they took the augury, the priestly Roman method of reading the will of the gods in the flight of birds. Remus stood on his hill and watched the sky first. Six vultures crossed it. He sent word to Romulus and claimed the victory. Romulus, on his own hill, saw twelve. The brothers and their followers argued through the rest of the day about whether priority or quantity counted more in divination, and the gods, in their habit, declined to clarify.

Romulus began to dig a foundation furrow on the Palatine. He drove the plough in a sacred line, lifted it across the place where the gates would stand, and let his men build the wall course by course. Remus watched the wall rise, low at first, and could not let it pass without comment. He mocked it, and then he jumped it. The wall was a religious boundary as much as a defensive one, sanctified by the augury Romulus claimed to have won. Crossing it like that was a theological insult and a physical taunt at once. Romulus killed him on the spot, or his man Celer did. The sources disagree on the hand. They agree on the sentence Romulus spoke as Remus fell. So perish anyone who crosses my walls.

He was buried, and the surviving brother went on. He named the city after himself, set its laws, gathered its first citizens, and ruled until his own apotheosis as the god Quirinus. The new city carried a body inside its walls from the beginning. Later writers were uneasy about that. Ovid, the gentlest of Rome’s mythographers, gave Remus a ghost-scene. His shade comes to Faustulus and Acca in the small hours, pale and bloodied, blames the soldier Celer for the killing, absolves Romulus of malice, and asks only that his brother remember him at the Lemuria, the festival of restless dead. It is the kind of revision a culture makes when it cannot quite stomach the foundation it has chosen.

No surviving source describes Remus’s face. He is drawn, in coins and gems and bronzes, as the mirror of his twin, armored or bare-chested, young, indistinguishable except where context names which is which. Whatever powers his divine parentage gave him were the ones any son of Mars might be expected to have. Strength. A temper. A battlefield instinct that read a charge before it broke. The survival of impossible things, from the river to the wolf. Whatever weakness ended him was the ordinary kind. He could not tolerate the loss of the augury. He could not let his brother have the wall. He had time to laugh at it. He had time to step over it. He had no time to step back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Remus in Roman mythology?

Remus was the twin brother of Romulus and a co-founder of the site that became Rome. Born to the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia and the god Mars, Remus was abandoned as an infant on the Tiber, suckled by a she-wolf in the Lupercal cave, and raised by a shepherd named Faustulus. He shared every step of Romulus’s story until the founding of the city itself.

How did Remus die?

Remus was killed by his brother Romulus, or by one of Romulus’s men, after mocking and then jumping over the half-built wall of the new city. Romulus had claimed the right to found Rome on the Palatine Hill after winning an augury contest, and the wall was a sacred boundary as well as a defensive one. As Remus fell, Romulus is said to have declared, “So perish anyone who crosses my walls.”

Who were Remus’s parents?

Remus’s mother was Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin and the daughter of Numitor, the deposed king of Alba Longa. His father was the war god Mars, who came to Rhea Silvia despite her vow of chastity. Through his maternal line Remus also descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas and from Latinus, the king of Latium.

Why did Romulus and Remus argue?

Romulus and Remus argued over which hill should be the site of their new city and which of them should rule it. Romulus preferred the Palatine, Remus preferred the Aventine, and they agreed to settle the matter by augury. Remus saw six vultures first; Romulus then saw twelve, and both brothers claimed victory by different rules. The unresolved quarrel led directly to the fatal confrontation at the wall.

What is the Lupercal and how is it connected to Remus?

The Lupercal was a cave at the foot of the Palatine Hill where the she-wolf was said to have nursed the infant Remus and his twin Romulus. Romans treated the site as sacred and held the Lupercalia festival each February near the spot. The cave anchored the entire founding myth to a real place inside the city Romans could visit.