Remus

Summary

Remus is the twin of Romulus and a son of Mars by Rhea Silvia, priestess of Vesta. He was thrown into the Tiber with his brother, suckled by the she-wolf, raised by the herdsman Faustulus and his wife Larentia, and grew up among the herdsmen raiding robbers.

In most of the stories Remus gets ahead of his brother and then loses. Ovid tells how the brothers were exercising naked on the day a she-goat was sacrificed to Faunus, with the sacrificial meat on willow spits, when a herdsman shouted that robbers were driving off the bullocks. The brothers ran off in two directions; Remus caught the robbers and brought the booty back, then took the meat from the spits and said: none but the victor shall eat this. He ate it with the Fabii, and Romulus came after them to find only bones. Livy tells how robbers lay in wait for the brothers at the Lupercalia; Romulus got away and Remus was captured. They handed him to King Amulius, accused of raiding Numitor's lands, and he was given over to Numitor for punishment, where his grandfather came close to recognising him, which began the road back to the throne. When the brothers put the city to the birds, Remus stood on the Aventine and saw six vultures before his brother, then Romulus saw twelve; Remus's men claimed priority, Romulus's men the number.

Then Remus died at the wall. In the commoner story he leapt over the new wall to mock how low it was, and Romulus killed him. In Ovid a man named Celer had been ordered to kill anyone who crossed the wall; he struck Remus with a shovel, and he fell covered in blood; his brother wept for him and buried him. After the burial Faustulus and Acca Larentia went home in grief, and the bloodied ghost of Remus stood by their bed and said: look at me, who had half of your care; I was close to being first among my people, had the birds given me the throne, and now I am an empty shade escaped from the flames of the pyre; the wolf saved me and a citizen's hand undid me; my brother did not want this, so ask him to give me a day of honour. They told Romulus, and he named the day of offerings to the dead the Remuria; in time the name became Lemuria, and the silent souls of the dead came to be called Lemures.

On the nights of the Lemuria in May the master of the house rises at midnight barefoot, washes his hands in spring water, then takes black beans and throws them behind him without looking back, saying nine times: with these beans I redeem myself and mine; the ghost is thought to gather them and follow. Then he clashes bronze and says nine times: ghosts of my fathers, go out.

The idea his story turns on is that Remus is the one who comes first and does not win: first to the birds, first to the meat, first to the booty, and yet the city and its name went to his brother. His death at the wall is what made the wall a boundary whose crossing means death. And he does not vanish entirely: he comes back at night to ask for his due honour, and his feast becomes the night on which the household ransoms itself from its dead and sends them out of the house.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Take the Latin ending -us off Remus and Rem- remains, which the Roman essay in this project reads as Arabic raḥim and calls "the merciful brother". In Lane, raḥim is the womb, where the child grows, and then kinship and its ties: one waṣala raḥimahu, kept up his kinship, or qaṭaʿa raḥimahu, severed it. On this reading Remus is the womb that held the twins together, the very tie his brother cut at the wall, which is what the ghost recalls when he says he had half of the care his foster parents gave the twins. Latin has no ḥ, so it drops, as the throat letters drop on the way into Latin, leaving r and m.

Linguistic Root

The r and m of Remus are the r and m of raḥim, and the ḥ between them is a throat letter. The Latin table in the Juthoor sound laws gives Arabic ḥ and kh as Latin h or nothing, and h itself was barely sounded in classical Latin, so Rem- remains. The i of raḥim answers the long e of the name.

Elsewhere the essay gives another reading, raʿama, which it explains as tying and binding. The dictionaries give raʿama al-shayʾ as to watch over a thing and tend it, and raʿama al-shams as to watch the sun until it sets, as Ibn Sīda has it in the Muḥkam. This sense meets Remus standing on the Aventine watching the sky until he saw the birds before his brother, and meets him as a herdsman bringing back the bullocks. The ʿayn of raʿama is the throat letter that drops most often in the Juthoor laws, so the two readings are equal in sound and differ in what they see in the story: raḥim is the kinship that was cut, raʿama the watcher who saw the birds first.

The one limit is that the Greeks wrote his name Ῥῶμος, with a long o, like the name of the city, and that Plutarch derives both twins' names from ruma, "teat", so Remus may be another form of the name of Rome itself.

Key Mythic Narratives

The birds and the lie

Plutarch says Remus built a stronghold on the Aventine called after him, Remonium, and that some say Romulus lied about his twelve vultures and only saw them truly when Remus came to him. When Remus learned of the trick he was angry, mocked his brother's trench and spoiled some of the work, then leapt over it and was struck dead, by Romulus himself in one story and by Celer in another. Romulus buried him, together with Faustulus, who had fallen in the fighting, at the Remonium.

The battle in Dionysius

Dionysius of Halicarnassus thinks it most likely that the quarrel over the birds became a battle between the brothers' followers in which Remus was killed; his brother buried him at Remoria, because Remus had held to it as the site of the city. Only then does Dionysius give the story of the leap over the wall.

Remus as the Romans' ancestor

In poetry Remus sometimes takes Romulus's place as the Romans' forefather: Catullus speaks of "the grandsons of Remus", Juvenal of "the crowd of Remus".

Symbolic Reading

The other Roman essay in this project reads Remus's death as a law before it is a tale: there is no room in the city for two parallel powers, unity of command is the first Roman principle, and killing is the price every state pays to unify power. Whoever crosses the plough line without leave is killed, as Remus was when he leapt the wall, so the sacred boundary is, for the essay, "a law, not a myth".

The Semitic essay makes the twins "earth and mercy", elsewhere makes Remus the twin who did not complete the building, mentions ancient twin sacrifices, and reads the story through Cain and Abel. The text puts Remus at both ends: he is the blood shed at the city's first boundary, and he is the dead man who returns every year, is given his due, and is then sent out of the house.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Cain kills his brother Abel in the field and then builds a city; this is the comparison the Semitic essay draws. In Egypt Set kills his brother Osiris to take his kingship, and Osiris becomes king of the dead; Remus too was killed in a dispute over the rule of the city, and then received a day on which the dead are honoured. In the North Höðr kills his brother Baldr, and the two brothers return together after the end of the world.

The return of Remus's ghost, and the day of his death becoming a recurring feast, bring him near the motif of death and return, in which the dead man returns or his festival does. The difference is that Remus's return brings no rain or growth; it calls for black beans and clashing bronze to send him out of the house.