Founding of Rome

• 1. Introduction

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  The Founding of Rome is one of the most contested origin stories in Western history, pitting myth against mud, wolf against archaeology, and legend against stratified soil. Rome's most famous foundation myth places two abandoned infants at the Lupercal cave, nursed by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd, before one brother kills the other and ploughs the sacred boundary of a new city into the earth on the Palatine Hill. Ancient historians could not agree on when any of this supposedly happened. Their calculations ranged across centuries, from as early as around 1100 BC to as late as 729 BC. The date that eventually became official, 753 BC, still anchors modern calculations of the AUC calendar era, even though the scholar who established it, Varro, was known in antiquity to have made errors. So what does the ground actually say? And how did the Romans weave together dozens of competing myths, Greek heroes, Trojan exiles, and a fratricidal shepherd-king into a single national story? The answers require a journey through Bronze Age river crossings, the politics of classical historiography, and the discovery that Rome did not begin with a moment at all.

• 2. What the Ground Reveals

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  Core samples taken from the terrain of Bronze Age Rome show a landscape almost unrecognisable today. The area of the Forum Boarium, north of the Aventine Hill, was in the Bronze Age a seasonally dry plain. It offered a safe inland harbour for seafaring ships, a watering ground for livestock, and a fordable crossing of the Tiber even before Tiber Island had formed. Rising sharply from the river's eastern bank, the Capitoline Hill sat directly beside this crossing and gave early inhabitants a natural citadel from which they could control salt production along the river and at its mouth.

  Thick deposits of manure and pottery shards found in the Forum Boarium suggest human activity there from the middle of the Bronze Age onward. Current evidence points to at least three separate bronze-using settlements on the Capitoline during the period 1700-1350 BC, followed by occupation of the neighbouring valley that later became the Roman Forum from 1350 to 1120 BC. Structures from the 13th century BC show the Capitoline was already being terraced to manage its slope.

  By the Final Bronze Age, the period running roughly 1200-975 BC, evidence of occupation spreads to the Capitoline, the Forum area, and the adjacent Palatine. Excavations near the modern Capitoline Museums have uncovered signs of fortification construction. By 1000 BC, a necropolis for cremation graves existed in the Forum. By around 900 BC, inhumation burials began to appear in the ground instead. Cemeteries on the Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal Hills by the 9th century contain pottery, imported Greek wares, fibulae, and bronze objects. Remains of huts on the Palatine date to the 9th or 8th centuries BC, with settlement accelerating through the early to middle 8th century BC. Whether these Capitoline settlements were independent communities, colonies of a single parent site, or villages already merged into one polity remains a live debate.

• 3. The City Takes Shape

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  By the 8th century BC, four major settlement nuclei had emerged across what would become Rome: one on the Palatine, one on the Capitoline, one on the Quirinal and Viminal together, and one grouping the Caelian, Oppian, and Velia. Ancient sources claimed the Quirinal settlement was connected to the Sabine people, but no archaeological evidence supports that claim.

  The Forum area underwent a decisive transformation in this period. Burials there ceased, and portions of the space were paved over. Votive offerings appear in the comitium during the 8th century, suggesting a shared religious cult at the civic centre. One structure from this phase, believed to be the domus publica, the official residence of the pontifex maximus, is now dated to somewhere between 750 and 700 BC. Religious activity on the Capitoline Hill in the same period points to an early cult of Jupiter Feretrius. Imported Greek pottery from Euboea and Corinth found at the site signals that Rome already had connections beyond Latium.

  The first wall appears on the Palatine in the middle or late 8th century, dated between 730 and 720 BC, and may have traced the original pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city. Gates and streets connected to it, along with hut remains, prompted later scholars to describe archaic Rome as having acquired a defined boundary and a more sophisticated level of social and political organisation. The development of city-states was, as one analysis puts it, likely a Greek innovation that spread through the Mediterranean from 850 to 750 BC. By 600 BC, a process known as synoikismos, the gradual unification of separate villages into a single polity, was complete. A unified Rome, reflected in a central forum area, public monumental architecture, and civic structures, had by then been formed.

• 4. Romulus, Remus, and the Founding Myth

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  Rhea Silvia, a Vestal virgin and fallen princess of Alba Longa, is the starting point of Rome's most-known foundation myth. Allegedly raped by the war god Mars, she delivered twin boys, Romulus and Remus, who were then ordered by the usurper Amulius to be left to die on the slopes of the Palatine or in the Tiber. They were suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal cave, discovered by the shepherd Faustulus, and raised by him and his wife Acca Larentia. Livy, notably, hedged on the she-wolf detail, suggesting the figure was more likely a lupa in the Latin slang sense, that is, a prostitute.

  Once Faustulus revealed their origins, the brothers deposed Amulius and restored their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba Longa. They then set out to found a new city at the location of their rescue. The quarrel that followed has been told in several ways: it was variously about the city's name, the interpretation of bird auguries, whether to build on the Palatine or the Aventine Hill, or Remus's deliberate disrespect of the ritual furrow that marked the new city's boundary. Some accounts say Romulus killed his brother with his own hand; others place both Remus and Faustulus in a general melee. Scholars T. P. Wiseman and others have proposed that the fratricide element was grafted onto the myth during the 4th-century BC Conflict of the Orders, when Rome's plebeian class began pushing back against patrician dominance.

  After killing Remus and founding the city on the Palatine, Romulus declared it an asylum for exiles, criminals, and runaway slaves. When diplomatic efforts to secure women from neighbouring peoples failed, he used the religious festival of Consualia to abduct the women of the Sabines. According to Livy, the Sabine women eventually intervened to force peace between the two groups, resulting in the Sabine king Titus Tatius becoming co-monarch with Romulus. The image of the Capitoline Wolf, likely dating to the 6th century BC, and the appearance of Romulus and Remus on Rome's first silver coins in 269 BC, show how deeply this story had embedded itself in Roman identity long before the empire began.

• 5. Counting the Years

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  Ancient historians could not settle on when Rome was founded, and the range of their answers spans roughly four centuries. The earliest dates, around 1100 BC, came from a belief that Romulus was Aeneas's grandson and that Troy had fallen, by Eratosthenes's reckoning, in 1184-83 BC. These early dates appear in sources as far back as the 4th century BC. Once scholars started inserting a long line of Alban kings between Aeneas and Romulus, a practice modern researchers consider entirely fabricated, the founding date shifted forward by centuries.

  Timaeus of Tauromenium, born around 350 BC, may have been the first to move the city's founding away from the Trojan War era entirely, placing it at 814 BC. A later intervention, possibly by Fabius Pictor, born around 270 BC, or his source Diocles of Peparethus, shifted the date into the era of the Olympiads, what ancient historians treated as verifiable historical time, eventually settling on approximately 750 BC. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, born around 60 BC, placed it in the first year of the 7th Olympiad, giving 752-51 BC.

  Two dates were used for official Roman celebrations. From Claudius's Secular Games in AD 47 through Hadrian's Romaea in AD 121, the Varronian chronology of 753 BC served as the working official date. Augustus's Fasti, running to AD 13, and the Secular Games marking Rome's 900th and 1000th anniversaries under Antoninus Pius and Philip I, used instead a date of 752 BC. Despite Varro's acknowledged errors, the 753 BC figure is the one modernity adopted and still uses as the basis for AUC era calculations.

• 6. Aeneas and the Trojan Thread

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  The Trojan strand of Rome's origin story has roots in the Iliad's prophecy that Aeneas's descendants would one day rule over a great people. By around 550 BC, Greek writers had begun to speculate, given the absence of any clear Aenean dynasty in the Greek world, that the Trojan hero must have established a line somewhere outside Greece. The first to tentatively suggest a Roman connection were the Greek historians Hellanicus of Lesbos and Damastes of Sigeum at the end of the 5th century BC. A firmer link only appeared at the end of the 4th century BC, when Rome began formal dealings with the Greek world.

  In Livy's telling, Aeneas leaves Troy after its destruction, bringing his son Ascanius and a group of companions westward across the Mediterranean. He allies with a local ruler named Latinus, marries his daughter Lavinia, and founds the city of Lavinium. After wars against the Rutuli and Caere, Ascanius founds Alba Longa, whose royal lineage eventually produces Romulus and Remus. Archaeology has found evidence of Aeneas worship at Lavinium by the 6th century BC, and a cult to Hercules at the Ara Maxima in Rome also dates to the archaic period.

  The claim of Trojan descent gave Rome a politically useful narrative. It simultaneously justified common heritage with the Greek world and provided a rationale for ancestral enmity. Dionysius of Halicarnassus further layered onto the story migrations of Arcadians into southern Italy in the 18th century BC, Greek settlers from Thessaly into Umbria, and a settlement on the Palatine Hill by Evander from Arcadia, along with Hercules himself. The historian Coelius used Greek-style sacrifices maintained by the Romans as evidence that Rome had Greek origins. Strabo also recorded the tradition linking Rome to Arcadia through Evander, whose mother Nicostrata, later worshipped by Romans as the nymph Carmentis, allegedly prophesied Hercules's future divine status.

• 7. A Market of Myths

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  Rome never had a single founding story. By the time of the Pyrrhic War, which ran from 280 to 275 BC, roughly sixty different foundation myths circulated in the Greek world. Most of them attributed the city to an eponymous figure named Rhomos or Rhome rather than Romulus. One account made the founder a son of Odysseus and the sorceress Circe. Martin P. Nilsson speculated that this older Greek-descent story grew politically awkward as Rome's power increased and tensions with Greece mounted. Claiming Greek ancestry was no longer advantageous, and so the Trojan myth, which gave Rome both a connection to and a rivalry with the Greek world, took precedence.

  Nilsson further speculated that the name Romos was Latinised by some into Romulus, but that the name Romos, later rendered as Remus, was remembered by enough people that both names survived and eventually became the twin founders. Another tradition, attributed to Hellanicus of Lesbos by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, credited a woman named Rhome, one of Aeneas's followers, who founded the city after landing in Italy and burning the fleet. Early third-century myths diverged widely on the founder's genealogy: one account made a figure named Romus a son of Zeus; Callias claimed Romulus descended from Latinus and a woman named Roma, daughter of Aeneas; other authors had Romulus and Remus found not only Rome but also Capua. Polybius, himself from Arcadia, naturally gave Rome an Arcadian rather than a Trojan origin.

  The classicist Mary Beard glossed Romulus as essentially meaning Mr Rome, a name retrojected from the city rather than attached to a historical person. Tim Cornell, in his 1995 study Beginnings of Rome, argued that the Romulus and Remus story reflects universal mythological patterns found across Eurasia and into the Americas, including virgin birth, rescue by animals, humble foster parents, and the triumphant return to overthrow a usurper, rather than a borrowing from Greek or Mesopotamian sources specifically.

• 8. Archaeology Over Legend

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  Cicero himself criticised the historical record, writing that ancient orations had left Roman history full of lies. Modern scholars take that admission seriously. Most dismiss the traditional accounts of a single divine-lineage founder establishing the city at one precise moment as fiction. Even the minority position, associated particularly with archaeologist Andrea Carandini, that foundation myths might reflect real historical events in some form, remains highly controversial. The broader scholarly assessment is that Carandini's arguments rest on tendentious interpretations of excavation evidence.

  What archaeological and geotechnical work in Rome's Central Archaeological Area does show is that subsurface analyses of the Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum reveal a site inhabited and built up gradually, with settlements dating to the 9th-7th centuries BC. Studies document multiple urban changes across centuries. There is no single founding layer beneath the city, no stratigraphic horizon that marks a beginning. Traces of human occupation in the general region, including Lavinium and the coast near Ardea, go back to the 15th century BC, and the broader Italian peninsula saw prehistoric habitation by 48,000 years ago.

  The area of Rome itself shows settlement from around 1600 BC, with some evidence on the Capitoline Hill possibly reaching as far back as around 1700 BC. The Romans themselves, for all their mythologising, maintained on the Palatine what they called the Hut of Romulus, a primitive dwelling attributed to their founder, though they had no firm basis for associating it with any specific historical person. That structure points to something true even within the legend: a memory of genuinely ancient habitation on that hill, going back at least to the hut remains dated to the 9th and 8th centuries BC that excavations have since confirmed.