by Mary Beard
7. Whatever the exact date of the wolf herself, the baby twins are certainly later additions, made in the fifteenth century explicitly to capture the founding myth. Copies are found all over the world, partly thanks to Benito Mussolini, who distributed them far and wide as a symbol of Romanità.
These unsavoury aspects have so struck some modern historians that they have suggested that the whole story must have been concocted as a form of anti-propaganda by Rome’s enemies and victims, threatened by aggressive Roman expansion. That is an over-ingenious, not to say desperate, attempt to explain the oddities of the tale, and it misses the most important point. Wherever and whenever it originated, Roman writers never stopped telling, retelling and intensely debating the story of Romulus and Remus. There was more at stake in this than just the question of how the city first took shape. As they crammed into Romulus’ old temple to listen to the new ‘Romulus of Arpinum’, those senators would have been well aware that the foundation story raised even bigger questions, of what it was to be Roman, of what special characteristics defined the Roman people – and, no less pressing, of what flaws and failings they had inherited from their ancestors.
To understand the ancient Romans, it is necessary to understand where they believed they came from and to think through the significance of the story of Romulus and Remus and of the main themes, subtleties and ambiguities in other foundation stories. For the twins were not the only candidates for being the first Romans. Throughout most of Roman history, the figure of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who fled to Italy to establish Rome as the new Troy, bulked large too. And no less important is to try to see what might lie behind these stories. ‘Where did Rome begin?’ is a question that has proved almost as seductive, and teasing, for modern scholars as for their ancient predecessors. Archaeology offers a sketch of earliest Rome very different from that of the Roman myths. It is a surprising one, often puzzling and controversial. Even the famous bronze wolf is keenly debated. Is it, as has usually been thought, one of the earliest works of Roman art to survive? Or is it, as a recent scientific analysis has suggested, really a masterpiece of the Middle Ages? In any case, excavations under the modern city over the past hundred years or so have uncovered a few traces from maybe as far back as 1000 BCE of the tiny village on the river Tiber that eventually became Cicero’s Rome.
Murder
There is no single story of Romulus. There are scores of different, sometimes incompatible, versions of the tale. Cicero, a decade after his clash with Catiline, gave one account in his treatise On the State. Like many politicians since, he took refuge in political theory (and some rather pompous pontificating) when his own power was fading. Here, in the context of a much longer philosophical discussion on the nature of good government, he dealt with the history of the Roman ‘constitution’ from its beginning. But after a succinct start to the story – in which he awkwardly evaded the issue of whether Romulus really was the son of the god Mars while casting doubt on other fabulous elements of the tale – he got down to a serious discussion of the geographical advantages of the site that Romulus chose for his new settlement.
‘How could Romulus,’ Cicero writes, ‘have exploited more brilliantly the advantages of being close to the sea while avoiding its disadvantages than by placing the town on the banks of a never-failing river that flows consistently into the sea, in a broad stream?’ The Tiber, he explains, made it easy to import supplies from abroad and to export any local surplus; and the hills on which the city was built provided not only an ideal defence against enemy attack but also a healthy living environment in the midst of a ‘pestilential region’. It was as if Romulus had known that his foundation would one day be the centre of a great empire. Cicero displays some good geographical sense here, and many others since have pointed to the strategic position of the site, which gave it an advantage over local rivals. But he patriotically draws a veil over the fact that throughout antiquity the ‘never-failing river’ also made Rome the regular victim of devastating floods and that, despite the hills, ‘pestilence’ (or malaria) was one of the biggest killers of the ancient city’s inhabitants (it remained so until the end of the nineteenth century).
Cicero’s is not the best-known version of the foundation story. The one that underlies most modern accounts goes back in its essentials to Livy. For a writer whose work is still so important to our understanding of early Rome, surprisingly little is known about ‘Livy the man’: he came from Patavium (Padua), in the north of Italy, began writing his compendium of Roman history in the 20s BCE and was on close enough terms with the Roman imperial family to have encouraged the future emperor Claudius to take up history writing. Inevitably, the story of Romulus and Remus features prominently in his first book, with rather less geography and rather more colourful narrative than Cicero gives it. Livy starts with the twins, then briskly follows the tale through to the later achievements of Romulus alone, as Rome’s founder and first king.
The little boys, Livy explains, were born to a virgin priestess by the name of Rhea Silvia in the Italian town of Alba Longa, in the Alban Hills, just south of the later site of Rome. She had not taken this virginal office of her own free will but had been forced into it after an internecine struggle for power that saw her uncle Amulius take over as king of Alba Longa after ousting his brother, Numitor, her father. Amulius had then used the cover of the priesthood – an ostensible honour – to prevent the awkward appearance of any heirs and rivals from his brother’s line. As it turned out, this precaution failed, for Rhea Silvia was soon pregnant. According to Livy, she claimed that she had been raped by the god Mars. Livy appears to be as doubtful about this as Cicero; Mars, he suggests, might have been a convenient pretence to cover an entirely human affair. But others wrote confidently about a disembodied phallus coming from the flames of the sacred fire that Rhea Silvia was supposed to be tending.
As soon as she gave birth, to twins, Amulius ordered his servants to throw the babies into the nearby river Tiber to drown. But they survived. For, as often happens in stories like this in many cultures, the men who had been given this unpleasant task did not (or could not bring themselves to) follow the instructions to the letter. Instead, they left the twins in a basket not directly in the river but – as it was in flood – next to the water that had burst its banks. Before the babies were washed away to their death, the famous nurturing wolf came to their rescue. Livy was one of those Roman sceptics who tried to rationalise this particularly implausible aspect of the tale. The Latin word for ‘wolf’ (lupa) was also used as a colloquial term for ‘prostitute’ (lupanare was one standard term for ‘brothel’). Could it be that a local whore rather than a local wild beast had found and tended the twins?
Whatever the identity of the lupa, a kindly herdsman or shepherd soon found the boys and took them in. Was his wife the prostitute? Livy wondered. Romulus and Remus lived as part of his country family, unrecognised until years later, when – now young men – they were accidentally reunited with their grandfather, the deposed king Numitor. Once they had reinstated him as king of Alba Longa, they set out to establish their own city. But they soon quarrelled, with disastrous results. Livy suggests that the same rivalry and ambition that had marred the relationship of Numitor and Amulius trickled down the generations to Romulus and Remus.
The twins disagreed about where exactly to site their new foundation – in particular, which one of the several hills that later made up the city (there are, in fact, more than the famous seven) should form the centre of the first settlement. Romulus chose the hill known as the Palatine, where the emperors’ grand residence later stood and which has given us our word ‘palace’. In the quarrel that ensued, Remus, who had opted for the Aventine, insultingly jumped over the defences that Romulus was constructing around his preferred spot. There were various versions of what happened next. But the commonest (according to Livy) was that Romulus responded by killing his brother and so became the sole ruler of the place that took his name. As he struck the terrible, frat
ricidal blow, he shouted (in Livy’s words): ‘So perish anyone else who shall leap over my walls.’ It was an appropriate slogan for a city which went on to portray itself as a belligerent state, but one whose wars were always responses to the aggression of others, always ‘just’.
Rape
Remus was dead. And the city that he had helped to found consisted of just a handful of Romulus’ friends and companions. It needed more citizens. So Romulus declared Rome an ‘asylum’ and encouraged the rabble and dispossessed of the rest of Italy to join him: runaway slaves, convicted criminals, exiles and refugees. This produced plenty of men. But in order to get women, so Livy’s story goes, Romulus had to resort to a ruse – and to rape. He invited the neighbouring peoples, the Sabines and the Latins, from the area around Rome known as Latium, to come and enjoy a religious festival plus entertainments, families and all. In the middle of the proceedings, he gave a signal for his men to abduct the young women among the visitors and to carry them off as their wives.
Nicolas Poussin, famous for his re-creations of ancient Rome, captured the scene in the seventeenth century: Romulus stands on a dais calmly overseeing the violence that is going on below, against a background of monumental architecture still under construction. It is one image of the early city that the Romans of the first century BCE would have recognised. Though they sometimes pictured Romulus’ Rome as one of sheep, mud huts and bog, they often also aggrandised the place as a splendid, preformed classical city. It is also a scene that has been reimagined in all kinds of different ways, and media, throughout history. The 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers parodies it (in this case, the wives are abducted at an American barn raising). In 1962, as a direct response to the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pablo Picasso reworked Poussin’s version in one of a series of paintings on the theme with a yet harsher violent edge (see plate 3).
Roman writers were forever debating this part of the story. One dramatist wrote a whole tragedy on the theme, which sadly does not survive beyond a single quotation. They puzzled over its details, wondering, for example, how many young women were taken. Livy does not commit himself, but estimates varied from just thirty to the spuriously precise and implausibly large figure of 683 – apparently the view of the African prince Juba, who was brought to Rome by Julius Caesar and spent many of his early years there studying all kinds of learned topics, from Roman history to Latin grammar. More than anything else, though, it was the apparent criminality and violence of the incident that preoccupied them. This occasion was, after all, the very first Roman marriage, and it was where Roman scholars looked when they wanted to explain puzzling features or phrases in traditional wedding ceremonies; the celebratory shout ‘O Talassio’, for example, was said to come from the name of one of the young Romans at the event. Was the inevitable implication that their institution of marriage originated in rape? Where did the dividing line fall between abduction and rape? What did the occasion say, more generally, about the belligerence of Rome?
8. This Roman silver coin, of 89 BCE, shows two of Rome’s first citizens carrying off two of the Sabine women. The name of the man responsible for minting the coin, almost legible underneath the scene, was Lucius Titurius Sabinus – which presumably accounts for his choice of design. On the other side is the head of the Sabine king, Titus Tatius.
Livy defends the early Romans. He insists that they seized only unmarried women; this was the origin of marriage, not of adultery. And by stressing the idea that the Romans did not choose the women but took them at random, he argues that they were resorting to a necessary expedient for the future of their community, which was followed by loving talk and promises of affection from the men to their new brides. He also presents the Roman action as a response to the unreasonable behaviour of the city’s neighbours. The Romans, he explains, had first done the correct thing, by asking the surrounding peoples for a treaty which would have given them the right to marry each other’s daughters. Livy explicitly – and wildly anachronistically – refers here to the legal right of conubium, or ‘intermarriage’, which much later was a regular part of Rome’s alliances with other states. The Romans turned to violence only when that request was unreasonably rebuffed. That is to say, this was another case of a ‘just war’.
Others presented it differently. Some detected right at the origin of the city all the telltale signs of later Roman belligerence. The conflict, they argued, was unprovoked, and the fact that the Romans took only thirty women (if thirty it was) demonstrates that war, not marriage, was uppermost in their minds. Sallust gives a hint of this view. At one point in his History of Rome (a more general treatment than his War against Catiline, surviving only in scattered quotations in other authors), he imagines a letter – and it is only imagined – supposedly written by one of Rome’s fiercest enemies. It complains about the predatory behaviour of the Romans throughout their history: ‘From the very beginning they have possessed nothing except what they have stolen: their home, their wives, their lands, their empire.’ Perhaps the only way out was to blame it all on the gods. What else could you expect, another Roman writer suggested, when Romulus’ father was Mars, the god of war?
The poet ‘Ovid’ – Publius Ovidius Naso, to give him his Roman name – took a different line again. Roughly Livy’s contemporary, he was as subversive as Livy was conventional – ending up banished in 8 CE, partly for the offence caused by his witty poem, Love Lessons, about how to pick up a partner. In this he turns Livy’s story of the abduction on its head and presents the incident as a primitive model of flirtation: erotic, not expedient. Ovid’s Romans start by trying to ‘spot the girl they each fancy most’ and go for her with ‘lustful hands’ once the signal is given. Soon they are whispering sweet nothings in the ears of their prey, whose obvious terror only enhances their sex appeal. Festivals and entertainments, as the poet wickedly reflects, have always been good places to find a girl, from the earliest days of Rome. Or to put it another way, what a great idea Romulus had for rewarding his loyal soldiers. ‘I’ll sign up,’ Ovid jokes, ‘if you give me that kind of pay.’
The girls’ parents, so the usual story has it, certainly did not find the abduction either funny or flirtatious. They went to war with the Romans for the return of their daughters. The Romans easily defeated the Latins but not the Sabines, and the conflict dragged on. It was at this point that Romulus’ men came under heavy attack in their new city and he was forced to call on Jupiter Stator to stop the Romans from simply running for their lives, as Cicero reminded his audience – without reminding them that the whole war was over stolen women. The hostilities were only halted in the end thanks to the women themselves, who were now content with their lot as Roman wives and mothers. They bravely entered the field of battle and begged their husbands on one side and fathers on the other to stop the fighting. ‘We’ll better die ourselves,’ they explained, ‘than live without either of you, as widows or as orphans.’
Their intervention worked. Not only was peace brought about, but Rome was said to have become a joint Roman–Sabine town, a single community, under the shared rule of Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius. Shared, that is, until a few years later, when, in the kind of violent death that became one of the trademarks of Roman power politics, Tatius was murdered in a nearby town during a riot that was partly of his own making. Romulus became the sole ruler again, the first king of Rome, with a reign of more than thirty years.
Brother versus brother, outsiders versus insiders
Not far under the surface of these stories lie some of the most important themes of later Roman history, as well as some of the deepest Roman cultural anxieties. They have a lot to tell us about Roman values and preoccupations, or at least about the preoccupations of those Romans with time, money and freedom to spare; cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich. One theme, as we have just seen, was the nature of Roman marriage. Just how brutal was it destined to be, given its origins? Another, glimpsed already in the words of the Sabine women
who were trying to reconcile their warring fathers and husbands, was civil war.
One of the big puzzles about this foundation legend is its claim that two founders were involved, Romulus and Remus. Modern historians have floated all kinds of solutions to explain the apparently redundant twin. Perhaps it points to some basic duality in Roman culture, between different classes of citizen or different ethnic groups. Or maybe it reflects the fact that later there were always two consuls in Rome. Or perhaps deeper mythic structures are involved, and Romulus and Remus are some version of the divine twins that are found in various corners of world mythology, from Germany to Vedic India, including in the biblical story of Cain and Abel. But whatever solution we choose (and most modern speculation has not been very convincing), an even bigger puzzle is that fact that one of the founding twins really was redundant – since Remus was killed by Romulus, or in other versions by one of his henchmen, on the very first day of the city.
For many Romans, who did not sanitise the story under the label of ‘myth’ or ‘legend’, this was the most unpalatable aspect of the foundation. It seems to have made Cicero so uncomfortable that, in his own account of Rome’s origin in On the State, he does not mention it: Remus appears at the start, to be exposed with Romulus, but then just fades out of the tale. Another writer – the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a resident of Rome in the first century BCE but usually called after his home town on the coast of modern Turkey – chose to depict Romulus as inconsolable at the death of Remus (‘he lost the will to live’). Yet another, known to us only as Egnatius, had a bolder way of getting round the problem. The only thing recorded about this Egnatius is that he overturned the story of the murder entirely and asserted that Remus survived to a ripe old age, actually outliving his twin.
