Romulus

Summary

Romulus is the founder of Rome and its first king in the Romans' own accounts, the son of Mars and twin of Remus. Livy tells how Amulius seized the kingship of Alba from his elder brother Numitor, killed Numitor's sons, and made his daughter Rhea Silvia a priestess of Vesta to deny her children. She bore twins and named Mars as their father; she was imprisoned, and the babies were ordered thrown into the Tiber. The river had overflowed its channel, so the servants left the basket in the standing flood beside a fig tree later called the Ruminal fig, and before that the Romular fig. When the water fell, a she-wolf came down from the hills to drink, heard the children crying and suckled them, and Faustulus, keeper of the king's flocks, found her licking them with her tongue. He carried them to his hut and gave them to his wife Larentia to raise. Ovid adds that the woodpecker, Mars's bird, brought them food. The brothers grew up among the herdsmen, hunting, raiding robbers and sharing the spoil, until they learned their birth; Romulus killed Amulius and restored the kingdom to his grandfather.

The brothers then wanted to build a city where they had been exposed. Being twins, neither had the right of age, so they put it to the birds: Romulus stood on the Palatine and Remus on the Aventine. Remus saw six vultures first, then Romulus saw twelve; each party hailed its own man as king, the quarrel turned to blows, and Remus was killed. The commoner story in Livy is that Remus leapt over the new wall to mock his brother, and Romulus killed him, saying: so perish whoever else leaps over my walls. Ovid tells the founding day at the Parilia, the festival of Pales, goddess of herdsmen, on 21 April: a trench was dug down to the rock, fruits of the earth and soil fetched from the neighbouring land were thrown in, the trench was filled and an altar set on it, and Romulus drew the line of the wall with a plough pulled by a white cow and a white bull. He ordered a man named Celer to kill anyone who crossed the wall or the trench; Remus leapt, Celer struck him with a shovel, and he fell covered in blood. Romulus held back his tears in public, then kissed his brother on the bier and said: farewell, my brother.

The new city had few people, so Romulus opened a sanctuary on the hill between two groves where any fugitive from the neighbouring peoples, slave or free, could take refuge, and he chose a hundred elders whom he called the Fathers. The city had no women, and its neighbours refused to give their daughters to its men, so Romulus held games, invited them, and his young men carried off the Sabine girls. War followed until the women rushed between the battle lines and told their fathers and husbands that they would rather die than live on as widows or orphans. The two sides made peace and joined the two peoples into one, ruled by Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius together, and its people were called Quirites after the Sabine town of Cures.

Romulus reigned thirty-seven years. Then, while he was reviewing the army on the Field of Mars by the Goat's Marsh, a storm broke with loud thunder and wrapped him in a cloud so thick that he vanished from sight, and he was never seen on earth again. The senators beside him said the wind had carried him up to the sky; others whispered that they had torn him apart with their own hands. Then Proculus Julius swore that Romulus had come down from the sky to him at dawn and told him to announce that his city would be the head of the world. The people's grief was calmed, and Romulus came to be worshipped as Quirinus. Livy 1.15–16 and 1.21, Ovid, Fasti 2.475–512.

The idea his story turns on is that Romulus makes a people out of those who had none: two babies thrown away by their family and raised by a wolf and herdsmen, fugitives from every town, women taken by force, and then two warring peoples joined by a peace. All of it rests on a line cut in the earth: inside the wall is a city with a law, and whoever crosses it without leave is killed, even a brother. Then the man who gathered them is taken from among them, leaving neither body nor garment, and returns to them as a god bearing the name of the joined people.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Take the Latin ending -us off Rōmulus and Rōmul- remains, with the consonants r, m and l, the letters of Arabic raml in order. The Roman essay in this project reads it so and makes Romulus "the son of the earth"; Lane gives raml as "a kind of dust or earth, well known". Beside it the essay sets ramasa, which the dictionary gives as burying the dead and heaping earth on a thing until it is level with the ground: ramasnāhu bi-l-turb, "we filled it up with earth". The two readings meet in what Romulus does on the founding day: he digs the pit, each of his men throws in a handful of earth from his own land, the pit is filled, then he cuts with the plough the ground where the wall will stand, and then he buries the brother who was killed at that wall. Livy himself says that founders of cities gathered strangers and humble folk and claimed that the earth had raised up sons for them.

Linguistic Root

Livy says the city was named after its founder. Plutarch says the brothers were called Romulus and Romus from ruma, "teat", because they were seen sucking the wolf, and that the fig tree was called Ruminal from the same word or from the name of Romulus. Latin has a diminutive suffix -ulus; if the l belongs to it, the name is Rōm- plus a suffix, "the one of Rome" or "the little Roman", and the l is a letter of the word's form rather than of its root. That is the one limit of the raml reading.

Read this way, the essay's reading still stands on the nucleus of the root: r and m are shared by raml and ramasa, and both words concern earth. The long o in Rōm- is a vowel and leaves the two consonants unchanged. Lane's entry r-m-l also gives rammalahu bi-l-dam, "he smeared him with blood", and rummila fulān bi-l-dam, "so-and-so was smeared with blood"; this is a reading proposed on the method, and it meets the brother who fell covered in blood at the wall in Ovid's telling.

The essay offers other readings. One is rammāl, the one who reads sand; Lane counts the science of sand among the arts of divination, though Romulus won the kingship by reading birds in the sky, not lines in the sand. Another is ramma with Il, "the one who gathers by the god's leave", and the story does gather strangers into the sanctuary, but ramma in the dictionary means repairing a building after part of it has fallen into disrepair, and the name shows no trace of Il. For the city itself the essay reads rummah or al-Rūm, and al-Rūm is a name Arabic came to use for the people of the empire at a later time, as the essay itself says.

Key Mythic Narratives

His mother's dream

Ovid tells how Rhea Silvia went out one morning with her pitcher to fetch water for washing the sacred objects, sat on the riverbank and fell asleep, and Mars saw her and took her. When she woke she told a dream: two palm trees grew from the fillet that had slipped from her hair before the hearth, the taller of them shading the whole world; her uncle raised an axe against them, and the woodpecker and the she-wolf defended them until both were saved.

The death of Remus in Dionysius

Dionysius of Halicarnassus says the quarrel over the birds became a battle in which many died; Faustulus threw himself unarmed between the two sides to stop it and was killed, and Remus was killed. Romulus buried him at the place where Remus had wanted to build his city, then lost all wish to live for grief, until Larentia, who had raised them, comforted him, and he rose and built the city on the Palatine. Dionysius then gives the other story, of Celer striking Remus on the head with a mattock.

Larentia and the Arval Brothers

Gellius gives two stories of Acca Larentia. In one she was a woman who had gathered great wealth and left it to Romulus, so the priest of Quirinus offered her a public sacrifice and a day in the calendar was set aside for her. In the other she was Romulus's nurse, with twelve sons, one of whom died; Romulus put himself in his place as her son and called himself and his brothers the Arval Brothers, the origin of the twelve priests of the fields.

The first spoils and Jupiter

Romulus killed the king of Caenina with his own hand, carried his armour up to the Capitol, and marked out there the bounds of the first temple in Rome, for Jupiter Feretrius. Later, when his men broke before the Sabines, he vowed Jupiter a temple, and they stood their ground.

Another account of his death

Plutarch says Romulus vanished on the Nones of July, leaving neither body nor garment, and that some supposed the senators had killed him in the temple of Vulcan, cut his body in pieces, and each carried away a piece in the folds of his robe.

Symbolic Reading

The other Roman essay in this project reads the founding story as the city's history written in symbols. Mars's fatherhood means Rome was born of armed force; Rhea Silvia is "river and forest", the wooded banks of the Tiber; and the twins thrown into the river are the Tiber floods that threatened the settlements. The she-wolf is either the tribe's totem, or the wild country that sheltered the founders, or a woman of the margins, since Latin lupa means both she-wolf and prostitute. Livy himself gives this last version: some said the herdsmen called Larentia "the she-wolf" because she gave herself freely. The killing of Remus is, for the essay, Rome's first law: no two powers in one city; and the plough line is the sacred boundary, whose crossing without leave is death.

The Semitic essay reads the twins as "earth and mercy", the she-wolf as the nursing lioness of Astarte, and Romulus killing his brother as the story of Cain and Abel, in which the killer builds the city. The text itself shows something of this: the city stands on earth that each man carried from another land and on strangers taken in by the sanctuary, and this mixture becomes one people when the in-laws make peace.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Genesis, Cain kills his brother Abel in the field, then builds a city and names it after his son Enoch. This is the comparison the Semitic essay draws. The two stories agree that the first city is built by a man who killed his brother, and part in that Cain is cursed and wanders the earth, while Romulus rules and is taken up to the sky.

The Semitic essay compares Romulus with Gilgamesh as a founding king: what remains of Gilgamesh is the wall of Uruk that the people built with him, and what remains of Romulus is a wall at which his brother was killed for leaping over it. The Trojan Paris resembles Romulus in his childhood: he was exposed as a baby on Mount Ida, suckled by a bear for five days, raised by the herdsman Agelaus, called Alexandros because he drove robbers from the flocks, and later recognised by his family.

Romulus's disappearance in the storm resembles the end of Heracles, when a cloud passed under him on the pyre and carried him up to the sky with a peal of thunder. And like Melqart, whom the people of Tyre saw as the founder and king of their city who dies and is honoured, Romulus after his disappearance became the god of the city he founded.

His gathering of people into one city by law, as Livy puts it, places him among the culture heroes who gave people an order to live by, and his disappearance and later appearance to Proculus bring him near the motif of death and return, though he came back to the living only once, as a messenger.