Romulus

Also Known As: deified as Quirinus; twin of Remus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Half-divine founder-king whose gift is command, able to forge scattered fugitives into a single ordered people and, at the end, to pass out of mortal life into godhood.
Role in Mythos: Romulus is the founder and first king of Rome, the fixed origin point from which the city and its institutions are traced.
Relation to Humans: He is not a distant power but the model Roman, a mortal-born leader whom later generations claimed as their common ancestor and first ruler. Romans worshipped his deified form, Quirinus, as one of their protecting gods.

The flood that was meant to drown them saved them instead. The Tiber had broken its banks, and the basket carrying two infants ran aground in the shallows against the roots of a wild fig tree at the foot of the Palatine. A she-wolf came down to the water to drink, heard them crying, and gave them her teat instead of her teeth. A woodpecker, the bird sacred to their father, carried them scraps of food. When a herdsman named Faustulus found the pair, they were fat and thriving in the river mud, guarded by an animal that had every reason to eat them.

Their mother was Rhea Silvia, a Vestal and a daughter of Numitor, the rightful king of Alba Longa, and their father was Mars, who had come to her in a sacred grove. Numitor’s brother Amulius had seized the throne and wanted no rival heirs, so he made the girl a priestess sworn to chastity and, when she bore twins anyway, ordered the babies drowned. The man sent to do it lost his nerve and set the basket in the rising river rather than hold it under. The boys grew up as shepherds on the hills, strong and quick to anger and easy to follow, knowing nothing of the crown that had tried to erase them.

Romulus led before he ruled. When cattle thieves drove off stock belonging to Numitor, it was Romulus who called up the other young herdsmen, ran the raiders down, and shared out the recovered animals among the men who had followed him. He gave orders the way other men drew breath. He had a warband long before he had a city, and it was that habit of command, not his divine blood, that people noticed first.

The truth came out through violence. Remus was caught during one of these feuds and hauled before Numitor, who looked at the young man’s age and bearing and began to suspect. Faustulus confirmed it. The twins raised their followers, killed Amulius, and put their grandfather back on his throne. Then, restless in another man’s kingdom, they went to build one of their own on the hills where they had been left to die.

They could not agree. Not on which hill to build on, not on whose name the city would carry. They put it to the gods and watched the sky for birds. Remus, on the Aventine, saw six vultures. Romulus, on the Palatine, saw twelve, and each brother claimed the omen was his. Romulus began to mark his walls, driving a bronze ploughshare through the earth to cut the sacred boundary, lifting the blade clear where the gates would stand. Remus jeered and jumped across the low furrow. Romulus struck him dead. The stories cannot agree on whether Romulus swung the blow himself or a follower named Celer did it for him, but the words that come down to us are Romulus’s: so die anyone else who leaps my walls. He buried his brother and kept building.

The traditional date is the twenty-first of April, 753 BCE. The new city had walls and a name and almost no one to live in it, and far too few women. Romulus opened a refuge in the dip between two groves on the Capitoline and offered sanctuary to anyone who came: runaway slaves, exiles, debtors, killers, the landless and the desperate of every neighbouring town. Rome filled quickly with hard men who had nothing and no wives to give them sons.

He fixed the shortage by fraud. He proclaimed games in honour of the god Consus and invited the Sabines and their families to attend as guests. At a given signal the young Romans fell on the crowd and carried off the unmarried women. War followed, as it had to. The Sabine king Titus Tatius took the citadel through the treachery of a Roman girl named Tarpeia, and the two armies met in the marshy ground below. What stopped the fighting was the women themselves. Already wives, some already mothers, they ran into the space between the lines with their hair loose and their children held up, and begged the fathers on one side and the husbands on the other to choose anything but this. The Sabines and Romans laid down their arms and became one people. Romulus ruled jointly with Titus Tatius until Tatius was murdered.

What Romulus did best was build a state out of a mob. He split the citizens into three tribes and thirty curiae, chose a hundred elders to sit as a Senate, and raised a fast-moving bodyguard sworn to him. He fought in the front rank. In single combat he killed Acron, king of the Caeninenses, stripped the dead king’s armour with his own hands, and carried it to the god as the first of the spoils that Rome would call the spolia opima. Under his hand a huddle of fugitives on seven hills turned into something with laws, priesthoods, festivals, and an army, a machine that would outlast him by more than a thousand years.

The sources are oddly silent about his face. They give you his manner instead of his features: a large, commanding presence, a bearing that made older men defer and younger men enlist, the look of someone born to stand at the head of a column. No writer bothers to fix his colouring or his height, nothing that would let you pick him out of a crowd. He survives as a force of personality rather than a portrait, which suits a man remembered chiefly for what he made others do.

The same will that founded the city eventually turned on it. As he aged, Romulus governed more and more alone, leaning on his soldiers and setting the Senate aside, and the elders he had created came to resent him. Then, one day, he was simply gone. He was reviewing the army at the Goat’s Marsh on the Campus Martius when a violent storm blackened the sky, a thick cloud came down over him, and when the air cleared his throne stood empty. Two stories went round at once. In one, the gods had carried him bodily into heaven and he was now Quirinus, a new deity for Rome to worship. In the other, whispered rather than told, the senators had used the darkness to tear him apart and smuggle the pieces out beneath their robes. A nobleman named Proculus Julius swore a public oath that Romulus had met him on the road at dawn, taller and brighter than any living man, and had told him Rome was fated to rule the world and that they should honour him under the name Quirinus. The city chose the god over the body, and kept the wolf.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Romulus?

Romulus was the legendary founder and first king of Rome, the son of the god Mars and the mortal princess Rhea Silvia. With his twin brother Remus he was abandoned as an infant, suckled by a she-wolf, and later founded the city of Rome, traditionally in 753 BCE. After his death he was worshipped as the god Quirinus.

Why did Romulus kill Remus?

Romulus killed Remus during a quarrel at the founding of Rome. After an omen contest failed to settle which brother should rule, Romulus began marking the city’s sacred boundary, and Remus mocked him by leaping over the unfinished wall. Some accounts blame a follower named Celer, but tradition holds Romulus responsible and records his warning that anyone who crossed his walls would die the same way.

Who were the parents of Romulus and Remus?

Their mother was Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin and daughter of Numitor, the deposed king of Alba Longa, and their father was the war god Mars. Because Rhea Silvia’s uncle Amulius had usurped the throne and feared rival heirs, he ordered the twins drowned in the Tiber, which set the whole legend in motion.

How did Romulus die?

According to Roman tradition Romulus did not die an ordinary death but vanished during a sudden storm while reviewing his army on the Campus Martius. Many Romans believed he had been taken up to heaven and become the god Quirinus, while others quietly suspected the senators had murdered him and hidden his body. A noble named Proculus Julius later swore that Romulus had appeared to him and asked to be worshipped as Quirinus.

What is the story of the Sabine women?

Because early Rome had too few women, Romulus invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and had his men abduct their unmarried daughters. This triggered a war with the Sabine king Titus Tatius, but the captured women, now married to Romans, threw themselves between the two armies to stop the fighting. The Sabines and Romans then merged into one people ruled jointly by Romulus and Titus Tatius.