Rome’s Birthday

As an Augustan period writer, Titus Livius tells it, it all started back in the 8th century BC, when a virgin priestess named Rhea Silvia got pregnant by a man she claimed was the god Mars.  Two mistakes there:  getting pregnant when chastity is a major part of your job, and then blaming one of the gods for your being “with child.”  Needless to say, the gods punished Rhea Silvia: when she gave birth to not one but two babies, the famous twins Romulus and Remus, the gods took them away from her and placed them in a basket on the Tiber river.  As luck would have it, the boys were saved by a miraculous rise in the water level, and their bucket was floated up to the banks of the Palatine Hill.  Fortune continued to smile on the infant twins when an oddly benevolent she-wolf came along and, instead of carrying the defenseless flesh home to the hungry wolf-pack, offered to nurse the babies with her teats.  And so, Romulus and Remus spent their early days with this philanthropic wolfess, in a cave on the Palatine Hill (map: 2).

A local shepherd named Faustulus, however, had been keeping an eye on all this all along, and he had suspected from the get-go that these boys were special, even descended from royal blood.  Faustulus decided to adopt Romulus and Remus so that they could get a proper human upbringing and realize their possibilities.  When they came of age, in about, oh, 753 BC, Romulus and Remus were starting to feel stifled by the simple life in the shepherd’s hut.  It was time to establish a real settlement over the area where their lives had been saved, but it was the question of exactly where the city should be positioned that provoked a fatal rivalry.  Romulus maintained that the city should be on the Palatine Hill, where he had already begun to lay out some rudimentary walls.  Just to be contrary, Remus insisted that the settlement should be on the Aventine Hill.  With this stalemate, the twins left it in the hands of the gods and asked them to declare by augury which of the hills they favored.  Remus immediately reported having seen six vultures fly over the Aventine Hill, and interpreting this as a sign of victory, began to celebrate.  But he broke out the champagne too soon, for just moments later twelve vultures appearted in the sky over the Palatine Hill.  Twelve beats six, so Romulus would have his way.  A brawl then broke out between the brothers and their relative factions, Remus jumped over the wall his brother had partially built, Romulus lost his temper and slayed his twin right on the spot.  And this, dear readers, is how the city of Roma, not Rema, was founded, on April 21, 753 BC.

Romulus was declared the first king of Rome, but this kingdom was going to have some longevity problems if they didn’t make some changes in its demographics.  All the inhabitants of the city were male.  The Roman men began to organize visits to nearby villages and tribes, proposing themselves as husbands to the local women.  From town to town they went, like some Iron Age Willy Loman, receiving the same humiliating response over and over, “No, thank you.”  So, when the peaceful strategy proved a failure, the Romans decided to employ ruse and violence to win their women.  They invited the local Sabine tribe over for a big feast one night, and in the midst of the drunken festivities, raped all the Sabine women, while the men, confused and outraged by their barbaric hosts, ran back to Sabine country.  The Romans eventually convinced their conquests that they would make good husbands, and the Roman birth rate began to grow.

But the Sabine men had not forgotten that humiliating night at the banquet, and they resolved to make the Romans pay.  As it happened, one day a young girl, a daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, the Roman garrison commander, encountered some Sabine soldiers outside the walls of Rome.  They began flirting with her and offered her the gold on their shields if she let them inside the city walls.  Tempted by this reward, the girl in fact assisted the Sabines in their breach of the citadel.  The Sabines, happy to be inside Rome but disgusted by the girl’s treachery, crushed her, beneath the gold on their shields, an appropriate “reward” for a traitor.  The Sabines then advanced on the Romans, a battle ensued, but everything came to a halt when the raped Sabine women stood between the two factions, dresses torn, chests heaving, and asked for peace between their Roman husbands and Sabine fathers and brothers.  The appeal worked, peace was declared, and a unification agreement was forged between the two armies.

As the years passed Rome conquered more tribes and the population grew.  Through it all, Romulus was king, until one day he disappeared in a cloud while supervising some military exercises in the Campus Martius (near modern day Piazza Navona).

Well, that whole story, with the wolf, the shepherd, the vultures, and the Sabines is just as murky as the cloud that supposedly enveloped Romulus.  But as Goethe would say, if the Romans were great enough to invent such legends, we, at least, should be great enough to believe them.

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