Murus Romuli

• 1. Introduction

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  Murus Romuli, Latin for "the Wall of Romulus", is the name given to a wall built to protect the Palatine Hill in Rome. The Palatine is the centermost of the Seven Hills, and this wall stands at one of the oldest parts of the city. Ancient tradition credits Romulus himself, Rome's founding culture hero, with ordering its construction. That attribution raises a question the ancient world debated and modern archaeology is still working through: was this wall a myth, a memory, or a monument that a real person actually built?

• 2. The Furrow and the Founding

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  Tacitus is the historian most often quoted when scholars discuss the Murus Romuli, and the passage he left behind is remarkably specific. According to Tacitus, Romulus ploughed a sacred furrow, the sulcus primigenius, beginning at a point in the Forum Boarium. That spot was later marked by the bronze Bull of Myron. The furrow then traced the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine Hill as far as the altar of Consus, then continued through the valley between the Palatine and the Caelian Hill as far as the Curiae Veteres, and finally ran up the east slope to the Sacellum Larum. Tacitus also noted that the Ara Maxima of Hercules fell inside the furrow's line. The historian Dionysius added that Vesta's temple stood outside it. The furrow's path was marked with stone cippi, upright stone posts set into the ground to show where the boundary ran.

• 3. Roma Quadrata and Its Problems

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  Some ancient writers insisted the city of Romulus was square, using the Greek term tetragononos, and called it Roma Quadrata. The archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani examined this claim closely and found it did not hold up. A line drawn from beyond the Ara Maxima to the Ara Consi does not run along the foot of the Palatine cliffs as the ancient sources claim it should. The actual shape of the Palatine walls was trapezoid, not square, closer in form to a terramara of the Po valley than to an Etruscan templum. Lanciani also pointed out that in Romulus's day the valleys surrounding the Palatine were covered with water deep enough to be navigated by canoes. No furrow could have been ploughed through standing water, and no stone cippi could have been set upright in marsh ground. The swampy land on the southeast extended as far as the Curiae Veteres; on the northwest it reached to the Temple of Vesta. The name Roma Quadrata, Lanciani concluded, did not belong to the hilltop city at all. It belonged instead to the altar described in the work Pagan and Christian Rome, which stood in front of the Temple of Apollo.

• 4. Romulus Between Myth and History

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  For most of recorded scholarship, Romulus has been treated as a figure of pure myth. A minority view argues otherwise. Scholars such as Andrea Carandini have put forward the case that Romulus was an actual historical figure rather than a symbolic invention. Carandini's position remains contested, but it informs how some researchers interpret the physical remains found on the Palatine. If Romulus existed, then the wall that carries his name might record something genuine rather than something symbolic.

• 5. What the Excavations Found

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  In 1988, remains of an early defensive wall turned up on the north slope of the Palatine Hill. The archaeologists who worked the site argued that this wall, together with other nearby finds, pointed to Rome becoming a complex, organized society by at least the 7th and 6th centuries BC. That date was significantly earlier than earlier estimates had placed Rome's emergence as a dynamic community. By the 2010s, the picture had become more detailed. The earliest evidence for any settlement in the area at all dates to around 1000 BC. Large-scale social organization appears later, signaled by two markers: the establishment of a necropolis on the Esquiline Hill, and a clay and timber wall at the base of the Palatine dating to the mid-8th century BC. The swampy territories around the hill were not drained until the mid-7th century BC, a timeline that fits Lanciani's earlier observation about the waterlogged valleys and adds a concrete date to what had previously been a geographic argument.