A Compendium of the Ancient Gods
Romulus, plate

Romulus was the founder of Rome, traditionally on April 21, 753 BCE — the date being the calculated reconstruction of the Roman antiquarian Varro, on the basis of which the Roman calendar of years ab urbe condita ("from the city's founding") was reckoned. He was the son of Mars (the war-god of Rome) by the priestess Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor, the rightful king of Alba Longa, who had been deposed by his brother Amulius. Amulius, having seized the throne, had killed Numitor's sons and forced his daughter Rhea Silvia into the priesthood of Vesta, where her vow of chastity would prevent her from producing rival heirs. But Mars came to her in her sleep (or, in some versions, in a sacred grove during a ritual procession), and she conceived twins by him: Romulus and Remus.

Amulius, on discovering her pregnancy, had her imprisoned and ordered the twins exposed in the Tiber, expecting them to drown. The basket in which they were placed was carried by the flooding river to the foot of the Palatine hill, where it lodged against the roots of a fig-tree (the Ficus Ruminalis, still pointed out as a sacred tree in classical Rome). There the twins were found and suckled by a she-wolf — the famous Lupercal episode whose iconic representation (the bronze statue of the wolf with the twins beneath) became Rome's defining emblem — and afterward by the bird sacred to their father Mars, the woodpecker. They were eventually discovered by the shepherd Faustulus and his wife Acca Larentia (who in some traditions was the she-wolf, lupa being also slang for a prostitute, and the elevated tale of a literal wolf being a euphemism for a more prosaic origin); by them they were raised as shepherds among the rural folk of the Palatine.

When the twins came of age and learned their parentage, they led a successful uprising against Amulius, killed him, restored their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba Longa, and resolved to found a new city of their own. They returned to the place where they had been suckled and consulted the auspices to determine which of them should be the founder. Romulus took his stand on the Palatine, Remus on the Aventine; Remus saw six vultures first, but Romulus saw twelve — and the dispute over which omen prevailed (the priority of the first sighting versus the greater number of birds) was not resolved by the twins. Romulus began to mark out the wall of his new city; Remus, in mockery, leapt over the half-built wall; Romulus killed his brother on the spot, declaring "So shall it be for any other who leaps over my walls." The killing was the founding sacrifice; the city was Rome.

Romulus's reign as first king of Rome was long and elaborately narrated: the asylum he opened on the Capitoline (where any man fleeing his enemies might take refuge and become a citizen of the new city, providing the population for the foundation); the Rape of the Sabine Women (when the new city's surplus of men was given wives by the abduction of the daughters of the neighboring Sabines, leading to war and at last to a treaty by which the two peoples merged into one); the long peace with King Titus Tatius of the Sabines, ruling jointly with Romulus until his assassination; the establishment of the Roman political and religious institutions (the Senate, the patriciate, the centuries, the auspices, the various priesthoods); the wars with the neighboring peoples that gradually expanded Roman territory.

Romulus's death was preternatural. As he was reviewing his army in the Campus Martius, a sudden storm darkened the sky; when it cleared, Romulus had vanished. The Senate gave it out that he had been carried up to heaven — an account whose obvious convenience led to suspicion among the people that the senators had themselves murdered the king and concealed the body; but a respectable Roman named Julius Proculus (whose name, of course, would not seem accidental to the Julian family centuries later) came forward to say that Romulus had appeared to him on the road from Alba, in radiant form, and had announced that he had been received among the gods, and bade Rome cultivate the arts of war and governance, and that he himself would watch over the city as a god. The Romans accordingly worshipped Romulus thereafter under the divine name Quirinus (treated in Book I above), making him the third member of the archaic triad alongside Jupiter and Mars; though the historical priority is probably the other way around, with the older god Quirinus being secondarily identified with the founder. Whether the apotheosis-story preserves a memory of an older indigenous deification-tradition or whether it was a senatorial invention to cover an embarrassing political event, the figure of Romulus thereafter served Rome as both legendary founder and divine patron.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The principal sources for Romulus are Livy 1.4–16; Plutarch's Romulus (one of his Lives, paired with Theseus); Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.76–2.56; Ovid, Fasti 2.381–512, 4.807–862; Cicero, De Republica 2.4–10. The Varronian date of April 21, 753 BCE (= 1 ab urbe condita in the Roman reckoning) is given by Varro (preserved by Censorinus, De Die Natali 21) and was the standard ancient chronology, though other ancient calculations gave somewhat different dates (Cato's reckoning was 751 BCE). The bronze Capitoline Wolf — long thought to be Etruscan of the late 6th century BCE, but now (since carbon-dating in 2007) reidentified as a medieval work of perhaps the 13th century — is the most famous icon of the legend; the twins beneath the wolf are Renaissance additions. The historicity of Romulus is variously assessed; archaeology has confirmed an early Iron Age settlement on the Palatine of approximately the right date for some kind of unification of village communities, but a single founder-figure is not recoverable. Plutarch's apotheosis-narrative (Romulus 27) is the principal source for the Quirinus identification and the Julius Proculus episode.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

The same god in other rooms

The ancient sources themselves name these as one god under different names. See Quirinus and Romulus hung together

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Founders. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1000–750 BCE
Iron Age communities of Latium and neighboring peoples develop the cult landscapes later absorbed into Roman tradition.
traditional 753 BCE
Roman foundation chronology places Romulus and the first civic institutions at the beginning of the city’s sacred history.
traditional 7th–6th centuries BCE
The regal period is credited with priesthoods, calendars, temples, and the organization of public rites.
509–264 BCE
Republican expansion incorporates Latin, Sabine, Etruscan, and Italian cults through treaty, migration, and evocatio.
264–146 BCE
Mediterranean conquest accelerates Greek interpretation and the importation or redefinition of foreign gods.
204 BCE
The Magna Mater is formally brought from Pessinus during the Second Punic War.
1st century BCE
Varro, Cicero, and other antiquarians document rites and divine names amid civil war and institutional change.
27 BCE–14 CE
Augustan restoration monumentalizes selected ancestral cults and rewrites Roman sacred history.

Floor plan

The rooms follow one another in the order their peoples first appear in the written record.

  1. The Cradle of Citiesc. 3400 BCE to 395 CE. 115 works
  2. The Gift of the Nilec. 4000 BCE to 395 CE. 73 works
  3. The Olympian Orderc. 1600 BCE to 750 CE. 152 works
  4. The Persian Worldc. 2000 BCE to 1010 CE. 30 works
  5. The Levantine Borderlandsc. 1200 BCE to 500 CE. 20 works
  6. The Edges of Empirec. 2000 BCE to 1500 CE. 33 works
  7. The Etruscan Worldc. 900 BCE to 750 CE. 22 works
  8. The Roman Inheritancec. 1200 BCE to 500 CE. 58 works
  9. The Northern Inheritancec. 2000 BCE to 1600 CE. 131 works