Romulus and Remus

• 1. Introduction

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  Romulus and Remus are twin brothers at the heart of Rome's foundation myth, a story whose earliest known written form dates to the late 3rd century BC, yet whose central image, a she-wolf nursing two infants, had already become a symbol of the city by that same century. That image is striking enough on its own. What makes it stranger is what comes next: the twins grow to manhood, overthrow a king, choose a site for a new city, disagree about which hill to build it on, hold a contest to let the gods decide, and then one of them kills the other. The city that would one day dominate the ancient world was, by its own mythology, born from fratricide. How did a story with that kind of violence at its core become the official founding legend of Rome? Who told it, who shaped it, and what did the Romans themselves make of the fact that their founder was a brother's killer?

• 2. A Family in Danger

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  Rhea Silvia, also known as Ilia, was a Vestal Virgin and the daughter of the rightful king of Alba Longa, Numitor, who had been overthrown by his own brother Amulius. That detail matters: the twins were born into a dynasty in exile, their mother kept in religious service where she could produce no heirs to threaten Amulius's grip on power. According to some sources, the god Mars visited Rhea Silvia in a sacred grove dedicated to him, and she conceived the twins there. Amulius, seeing the boys as a threat, ordered them killed. Instead, they were left on the bank of the Tiber to die.

  The god Tiberinus, Father of the River, is said to have saved them. They survived in the wild, most famously in the cave now known as the Lupercal, where a she-wolf suckled them. A shepherd named Faustulus eventually adopted them. The twins grew up tending flocks, unaware of who they really were. In one variant recorded in the Origo Gentis Romanae, a woodpecker also brought the boys food during the period of their abandonment, adding a second animal to the story's cast of divine protectors.

  Faustulus becomes the thread between their hidden origins and their eventual rise. It was he who eventually revealed the truth of their birth, setting in motion the chain of events that would return their grandfather to his throne.

• 3. Overthrowing Amulius

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  When the twins were young adults, a dispute between the factions of Numitor and Amulius drew them into open conflict. Remus was captured and brought to Alba Longa, where both his grandfather Numitor and King Amulius began to suspect who he really was. Romulus, still outside the city, organized a rescue. In the version told by Cassius Dio, an oracle had already predicted that a son of Numitor would be the death of Amulius, which explains why the Alban king had worked so hard to prevent any such son from existing.

  The alternate account in the Origo Gentis Romanae strips the rescue mission of its dramatic symmetry. In that version, there is no captured Remus at all. Romulus, on learning his true identity and the crimes done to his family, simply marched his supporters to the city and killed Amulius directly. The grandfather was restored to the throne without the twins needing to stage an elaborate jailbreak.

  Across the canonical accounts of Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch, the most space is devoted to this conflict. Plutarch dedicates nearly half of his entire Life of Romulus to the overthrow of their uncle. The fratricide that follows, which might seem like the story's emotional peak, receives comparatively little attention. What the sources dwell on is the restoration of legitimate rule, not the founding murder.

• 4. The Augury and the Killing

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  Back near the seven hills, the brothers could not agree on where to build their city. Romulus wanted the Palatine Hill, directly above the Lupercal. Remus favored the Aventine Hill. Unable to settle the dispute between themselves, they turned to augury, a contest in which the gods would signal their preference through the appearance of birds. Remus saw six auspicious birds first. Romulus saw twelve, and claimed that the larger number made him the winner.

  They disputed the result. What followed is among the most debated moments in all of Roman myth. Remus was killed, either by Romulus himself or by one of his supporters. In the version recorded by Diodorus Siculus, Remus sees no birds at all, and it is a man named Celer, one of Romulus's workers, who kills him. Ovid's Fasti adds a further detail: the ghost of Remus later appears to Faustulus and his wife, whom Ovid calls Acca, and expresses his anger at Celer for acting on his own initiative. In this telling, the ghost affirms that Romulus still loved his brother.

  The City of God by Saint Augustine records yet another tradition: that Remus was actually alive after the city's founding, and that both brothers together established the Roman Asylum. Modern scholars have found the manner of Remus's death to be among the most difficult and contested elements of the entire myth.

• 5. Who Wrote the Story

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  Quintus Fabius Pictor wrote the earliest known history of Rome in the 3rd century BC. He wrote it in Greek, not Latin, and his account became a touchstone for every major later historian. Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch all cite him. His work is now lost, surviving only in the quotations and summaries preserved by those later writers.

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus built his twenty-volume Roman Antiquities around sources including not only Pictor but also Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Cato the Elder, and Lucius Cincius Alimentus. His first book does not even mention Remus until chapter 71, spending the preceding chapters establishing the broader historical and genealogical context. He dedicates just nine chapters to the core twins' tale, chapters 79 through 87, with the bulk of that space given to the conflict with Amulius.

  Livy's account is compressed by comparison, spread across chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the first book of his Ab Urbe Condita. Plutarch, writing as an interested outsider, includes founder-traditions that Livy does not mention, details traceable to particular regions, social classes, or oral traditions rather than any common source. Plutarch also reckoned the twins' birth year as 771 BC, while Roman historians generally dated the city's founding itself to somewhere between 758 and 728 BC.

• 6. Myth as Political Tool

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  Roman historians credited Romulus with founding not just the city but essentially everything that made Rome Roman: its armies, its system of rights and laws, its state religion, its government, and the system of patronage that underpinned social, political, and military life. Modern scholarship notes the obvious problem with this picture. Such institutions would have developed over a long span of time, some predating any legendary Romulus and others coming far later.

  The myth settled into something resembling an official, chronological version during the Late Republican and early Imperial eras. A tradition connecting Romulus to the semi-divine Trojan prince Aeneas was elaborated until Romulus became the direct ancestor of Rome's first Imperial dynasty. The three main accounts by Livy, Dionysius, and Plutarch each selected and shaped the material differently. Livy's version reads as a dignified handbook, justifying the purpose and morality of Roman traditions of his own day. Dionysius and Plutarch brought the perspective of outsiders who were willing to include variants that did not fit the tidy official line.

  One late Imperial text, the Origo Gentis Romanae, deliberately gathered the "more or less bizarre" and often contradictory variants, including one in which Remus does not die at all but founds his own city named Remuria, five miles from Rome, and outlives his brother. The scholar Wiseman described the whole body of material as the mythography of an unusually problematic foundation.

• 7. Image and Artifact

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  The she-wolf and the twins appeared on what may be the earliest silver coins ever minted in Rome. Ancient images of the pair generally followed one of two visual traditions, each corresponding to a different literary source. In the tradition drawn from Livy and Plutarch, the scene includes a shepherd, the she-wolf, the twins beneath a fig tree, and one or two birds. In the tradition following Dionysius of Halicarnassus, there are two shepherds, the she-wolf, the twins inside a cave, and no birds at all.

  The Franks Casket, an Anglo-Saxon ivory box from the early 7th century AD, breaks both those conventions entirely. It shows two wolves rather than one, a grove instead of a tree or cave, and four kneeling warriors in place of one or two gesticulating shepherds. A runic inscription on the box reads "far from home." One interpretation holds that the twins are depicted here as the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces, patrons of those at sea or at war. The craftsman transferred them into a Germanic sacred grove and added one of Odin's wolves to their company. The image was apparently intended to influence wyrd, the Germanic concept of fortune and fate, on behalf of a warrior king.

  In the late 16th century, the wealthy Magnani family of Bologna commissioned an elaborate cycle of artworks on the foundation myth, including frescoes by the Brothers Carracci, Ludovico, Annibale, and Agostino, collectively titled the Histories of the Foundation of Rome. The commission also included a sculpture by Gabriele Fiorini depicting Hercules with the infant twins, with the patron's own face carved onto the figure of Hercules.