Romulus Founds Rome According to Tradition

Context

In the early centuries of the first millennium BCE, the central Italian peninsula was occupied by various Italic groups, among them the Latins, whose settlements clustered near the Tiber River. Kingdoms such as Alba Longa exercised authority in the surrounding hills, their ruling families linked in later myth to the Trojan exile Aeneas and his descendants. This landscape of small polities and pastoral communities formed the setting in which Roman writers would later place their city’s origins.

What Happened

The tradition, most fully recorded by the historian Livy, describes how the infant twins Romulus and Remus, sons of the Vestal Rhea Silvia and the god Mars, survived exposure on the Tiber, were suckled by a she-wolf, and were raised by the shepherd Faustulus. As young men they overthrew the usurping king Amulius, restored their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba Longa, and then resolved to found a new settlement of their own.

Aftermath

Disagreement over the site and the interpretation of omens led to conflict; Remus was slain, leaving Romulus to mark the boundaries of the future city by plowing a furrow around the Palatine Hill on the day of the Parilia festival. He invited settlers from neighboring Latin communities, organized a rudimentary senate, and established the religious and military institutions that would define early Roman kingship.

Legacy

The date 753 BCE, calculated centuries later by the scholar Varro, became the fixed point from which Romans reckoned time ab urbe condita. The founding myth supplied a shared origin story that helped unify diverse populations under Roman rule and continued to shape historical writing, public festivals, and political ideology long after the monarchy gave way to republic and empire. Modern historians regard the narrative as legendary rather than factual, yet it remains central to understandings of how Romans conceived their past.