Romulus and Remus

Two Grandsons of a Deposed King

Romulus and Remus begin as loose ends someone tried to tie off. A usurper deposes his brother as king of Alba Longa and forces the rightful heir's daughter, the Vestal Rhea Silvia, into a priesthood meant to end the bloodline; she bears twins anyway and names Mars as their father, whether or not anyone believed her ¹. The king orders the infants exposed in the flooding Tiber, and the basket carrying them washes up at the foot of the Palatine hill, where a she-wolf finds and nurses them until the shepherd Faustulus takes them in — a rescue told in full, along with the debate over how literally to take it, in Lupa's own entry ^1,3. The twins grow up as shepherds, discover the truth of their birth, kill the usurper, and restore their grandfather to his throne — at which point, with nothing left to inherit at Alba Longa, they set out to found a city of their own ¹.

The Augury Dispute

Choosing where to build it is the twins' first real disagreement, and ancient sources treat it as a serious constitutional problem rather than a squabble. Remus favours the Aventine hill, Romulus the Palatine, and both take up positions to watch for birds, the traditional Roman method of reading the gods' will ². Remus sees six vultures first; Romulus then sees twelve. Livy reports both counts without settling which brother actually had the stronger claim — Remus's priority in time against Romulus's larger number — and treats the dispute itself as the origin of a method Romans would use for centuries afterward to argue about the validity of an augury — taking the auspices before any major public act remained a live, unironic part of Roman civic life for as long as the Republic and the Empire lasted ^1,2,8.

The Murder of Remus

What happens next is the part Roman writers were least comfortable with, and it shows in how carefully they hedge it. Livy gives two versions in the same breath: in the first, Remus is simply killed in the fighting that breaks out between the brothers' supporters; in what he calls the more common story, Remus leaps mockingly over the half-built wall of Romulus's new city to show how easily it could be taken, and Romulus kills him for it, adding the line "so perish anyone else who crosses my walls" ¹. Plutarch preserves a third option, in which a lieutenant named Celer strikes the fatal blow and Romulus only afterward claims responsibility, and notes that even in his own day writers still could not agree which version was true ². A city that told a foundational story about killing your own brother over a wall was, at minimum, not trying very hard to flatter itself.

Romulus Alone

Rome dated its own birthday to this moment: the city's founding was fixed to 21 April, the date of the old shepherds' festival of the Parilia, and Ovid describes Romans of his own day still marking the day with bonfires and purification rites for their flocks, the calendar quietly preserving the story's origin as a shepherd's settlement before it was anything grander ⁴. Sole king now, Romulus is credited with the practical business of turning a walled hilltop into an actual city: he opens an asylum for refugees, exiles and runaway slaves to build up a population with nowhere else to go, then solves the resulting shortage of women by inviting the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and abducting their daughters, precipitating a war that ends only when the Sabine women themselves intervene between their fathers and their new husbands ^1,2. Later in his reign, Romulus kills the enemy king Acron of Caenina in single combat and dedicates the captured armor to Jupiter Feretrius, founding the rare and prestigious honor of the spolia opima, "the rich spoils" — an episode still commemorated within the Palatine account of the reign as the clearest example of Romulus acting alone as a warrior-king rather than as half of a pair ².

The King's End

Romulus's own death is left deliberately uncertain. Reviewing his troops at the Goat's Marsh, he vanishes in a sudden storm; the Senate, widely suspected by the common people of having murdered him themselves and cut up the body, instead promotes the story that he was taken up into the sky and become a god, worshipped afterward as Quirinus ^1,2. Livy and Plutarch both record the same reinforcing detail: a respected citizen named Proculus Julius swears that Romulus appeared to him on the road, confirmed his own divinity, and promised Rome future greatness — an account both historians report with visible skepticism about how conveniently it solved the Senate's problem ^1,2.

How Old Is This Story, and Whose Bronze Is It?

Wiseman's study of Remus argues that the core claim, Rome founded by a son of Mars, is old, but that Remus himself was folded into the legend comparatively late, probably in the fourth or early third century BCE, as a way of giving the city's two orders, patrician and plebeian, a shared founding pair rather than a single ancestor ⁵. The material record agrees with the general shape of that timeline: the earliest securely dated image of the wolf and twins together is a Roman coin of about 269 BCE ⁶. It does not, however, agree with the popular assumption about the most famous depiction of the scene. The bronze Lupa Capitolina, long treated as an Etruscan original of the fifth century BCE, was shown by the restorer Anna Maria Carruba's 2006 technical study to have been cast using a method characteristic of medieval rather than ancient bronzework, a conclusion since supported by radiocarbon dating of its casting cores to the eleventh or twelfth century CE — meaning Rome's most iconic image of its own founders is, on the best current evidence, itself a medieval act of devotion to a much older story ⁷.