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, fratricidal 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’.