Founding of Rome

The “founding of Rome” refers to two different things. The first is the story that the Romans told about themselves: that the city was founded on a single day by a single man, Romulus, who ploughed a sacred boundary around the Palatine Hill and became Rome’s first king. The second is what historians and archaeologists can actually reconstruct: a long process in which several small communities on the hills beside the Tiber grew, merged and organised themselves into a city.

The traditional date, 21 April 753 BCE, was calculated centuries later by Roman antiquarians. It became the starting point of a Roman way of counting years, ab urbe condita (AUC), “from the founding of the city”. Modern historians do not treat 753 BCE as the date of a real event, but it is striking that archaeology places important changes on the Palatine in roughly the same period.

This page looks at both sides: the legend, which shaped Roman identity for more than a thousand years, and the evidence, which shows how a city really came into being in early Italy.

The Roman story begins far away, at Troy. After the Greeks destroyed Troy, the Trojan hero Aeneas escaped with his father and son and, after long wanderings, reached Italy. His son founded the city of Alba Longa in the Alban Hills south-east of the future Rome, and a line of kings ruled there for generations.

One of these kings, Numitor, was driven from the throne by his younger brother Amulius. To make sure Numitor would have no heirs, Amulius forced Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a Vestal Virgin, a priestess who had to remain unmarried. But Rhea Silvia gave birth to twins, Romulus and Remus, and said their father was the god Mars. Amulius ordered the babies to be drowned in the Tiber.

The servants left the twins at the edge of the flooded river. When the water went down, a she-wolf found them and nursed them in a cave at the foot of the Palatine Hill, later called the Lupercal. A woodpecker, a bird sacred to Mars, was said to have helped feed them. The shepherd Faustulus found the boys and raised them with his wife, Acca Larentia.

Grown up, the twins learned who they were, killed Amulius and gave the throne of Alba Longa back to their grandfather. Then they set out to found a new city where they had been saved. Romulus chose the Palatine, Remus the Aventine. To let the gods decide, each watched the sky for birds. Remus saw six vultures first; Romulus then saw twelve. Each side claimed victory. In the most famous version, Remus mockingly jumped over the new wall Romulus was building and was killed, by Romulus himself or by one of his followers. Romulus gave the city his name.

According to the legend, the new city had few people, so Romulus opened a place of refuge where anyone—runaways, exiles, the poor—could become a Roman. Because there were few women, he invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and the Roman men seized their daughters. This story, the “Rape (abduction) of the Sabine Women”, was told by Romans as a founding episode, but it is a story of kidnapping and forced marriage, and modern readers rightly see the women as victims of violence.

The legend continues that the Sabines went to war to get their daughters back. In the middle of the battle, the women themselves ran between the armies and begged their fathers and husbands to stop. Peace was made, and the Sabine king Titus Tatius ruled jointly with Romulus. Romans later used this story to explain why their city mixed several peoples.

Romulus was said to have organised the first Senate of one hundred elders, divided the people into groups, and created the first army. After a long reign he disappeared in a sudden storm; Romans said he had been taken up to the gods and worshipped him as the god Quirinus. Six more kings followed him, the last three of them linked with the Etruscans, until the monarchy was overthrown and the Republic began, traditionally in 509 BCE.

The site of Rome had clear advantages. It lay about 25 km from the sea, where an island made the Tiber easy to cross, and it had several steep hills—the Palatine, Capitoline, Esquiline, Quirinal and others—that were easy to defend. The crossing linked the Etruscan cities to the north with Latium and Campania to the south, and the route inland from the salt beds at the river mouth ran through the area.

Archaeologists place the earliest permanent settlements in the Latial Iron Age culture of the early first millennium BCE. Graves in the area later occupied by the Forum go back to around the 10th century BCE, and traces of huts on the Palatine date to the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. Post-holes cut into the rock show oval huts with wooden frames and thatched roofs—very close to the “Hut of Romulus” that later Romans carefully preserved on the Palatine as a relic.

During the 8th and 7th centuries BCE these communities began to act together. The marshy valley between the hills was drained and filled, and by around 600 BCE the Forum had been paved and was being used as a public space. Excavations led by the archaeologist Andrea Carandini on the lower slopes of the Palatine uncovered remains of a wall that he dated to about 730–720 BCE, which he interpreted as the sacred boundary (pomerium) of an early city. Many other scholars accept that the wall is early but reject the idea that it proves a single act of foundation.

Most historians therefore see Rome’s origin as synoecism: the gradual joining together of separate villages into one political community. By the 6th century BCE Rome was a substantial city with temples, public buildings and strong Etruscan cultural influence, fitting the tradition that its last kings were Etruscan.

Rome did not begin in isolation. Central Italy in the 8th century BCE was a lively world of competing communities. To the north, the Etruscans were building powerful cities rich in metals. In Latium, dozens of Latin communities shared a language, festivals and sanctuaries. In the hills lived Sabines and other Italic peoples.

At the same time Greeks and Phoenicians were sailing west. The Greek settlement at Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia was founded in the first half of the 8th century BCE, followed by Cumae on the mainland; the Phoenicians founded Carthage in North Africa (by tradition in 814 BCE). Contact with these traders brought new goods, ideas and, eventually, the alphabet, which reached the Etruscans and Latins from Greek sources.

This context helps explain why the Roman legend links Rome to Troy. By the time the story took shape, Greek myths were known all over Italy, and connecting one’s city to the heroes of the Trojan War was a way of claiming a place in the wider Mediterranean world. The Romans eventually combined two founding stories—Aeneas from Troy and Romulus from Alba Longa—by inventing a line of Alban kings to fill the gap of several centuries between the fall of Troy and 753 BCE.

Ancient writers did not agree on when Rome was founded. The Greek historian Timaeus placed the foundation in 814 BCE, the same year he gave for Carthage. The Roman poet Ennius seems to have placed it much earlier. Quintus Fabius Pictor, the first Roman to write a history of Rome (in Greek, in the late 3rd century BCE), gave a date equivalent to 748/747 BCE; his contemporary Lucius Cincius Alimentus gave 729/728 BCE.

The date that became standard, 753 BCE, is linked with the great scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in the 1st century BCE. It was reached by adding up the traditional reigns of the seven kings and connecting them with the dates of the early Republic. According to Plutarch, Varro’s friend Lucius Tarutius even calculated a horoscope for Romulus to fix the day.

The day, 21 April, was the date of the Parilia, an old shepherds’ festival in honour of the deity Pales, in which people leapt over bonfires to purify themselves and their flocks. Linking Rome’s birthday to a festival of shepherds fitted the story of the twins raised among herdsmen. The Emperor Hadrian later dedicated a great temple to Venus and Roma, and 21 April continued to be celebrated as the city’s birthday.

For the Romans the foundation story was not simply entertainment. It explained sacred places they could still visit: the Lupercal cave, the fig tree where the twins’ basket had come to rest, the Hut of Romulus on the Palatine. It was acted out in rituals such as the Lupercalia, a February festival in which young men ran around the Palatine.

The story also carried a moral and political message. Romulus stood for courage, piety toward the gods and the strength to build a state from nothing. His asylum explained why Rome was open to newcomers, and the Sabine story explained how enemies could become fellow citizens—themes Romans saw as the secret of their success.

But the story also had a dark side: Rome began with fratricide. Roman writers returned to this during the civil wars of the 1st century BCE. The poet Horace suggested that Romans were still paying for the blood of Remus. When Octavian took power, he considered the name “Romulus” as a title for himself before choosing “Augustus”; the founder was both a model and a warning.

The image of the she-wolf nursing the twins became one of the most recognisable symbols in the world. In 296 BCE, according to Livy, the magistrates Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius set up a statue of the wolf and twins near the Ficus Ruminalis, the fig tree of the legend. The image appeared on Roman coins and later spread through the empire.

The most famous version, the bronze Capitoline Wolf in Rome, was long believed to be an Etruscan or early Roman work of the 5th century BCE. The figures of the twins were added in the Renaissance, probably in the late 15th century. Scientific studies in the 2000s suggested that the wolf itself may have been cast in the Middle Ages; its date is still debated.

In modern times, the founding story has been used for many purposes. The Fascist regime in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s celebrated the Natale di Roma (Birthday of Rome) on 21 April as a public holiday and presented itself as the heir of ancient Rome. After the war, the date continued to be marked in Rome with festivals and historical re-enactments. Copies of the Capitoline Wolf were given by Italy to cities around the world, and the wolf appears on the badge of the football club AS Roma.

Outside Italy the legend belongs to a broader world tradition of founding myths—stories of abandoned infants rescued by animals or shepherds appear in accounts of Sargon of Akkad, Cyrus of Persia and others. Comparing them helps us see how communities everywhere have used stories of origins to explain who they are.

Our main accounts are late. Livy wrote the first book of his history of Rome (Ab urbe condita) around the 20s BCE; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, published his Roman Antiquities soon afterwards; Plutarch wrote his Life of Romulus around 100 CE. All of them depend on earlier historians—Fabius Pictor, Cincius Alimentus, Cato the Elder and others—whose works survive only in fragments, and none of whom wrote before about 200 BCE, more than five centuries after the traditional date.

The earliest Roman historians themselves had very limited documents. Rome’s early records were said to have been largely destroyed when the Gauls sacked the city around 390 BCE (387 BCE in some modern reckonings). What survived were priestly lists, family traditions of the aristocracy, place names, cult practices and oral stories. Some Greek writers had already told versions of Rome’s origins earlier, naming founders such as a Trojan woman called Rhome; the Romulus story may have been shaped in dialogue with such Greek accounts.

Livy himself was frank about the problem. In his preface he says that the traditions about the time before the city was founded are better suited to poetry than to reliable history, and that antiquity may be allowed to mix the human and the divine to make the beginnings of cities more venerable. Modern historians therefore read the legend as evidence for what later Romans believed and valued, not as a record of events.

How much history is hidden in the legend? At one end, a minority of scholars, most prominently Andrea Carandini, argue that the archaeological discoveries on the Palatine—especially the wall of about 730–720 BCE—confirm a real act of foundation in the 8th century, which later memory personalised as “Romulus”. At the other end, sceptical historians stress that the name Romulus looks like an invented eponym formed from Roma (“the Roman”), that the story is full of folk-tale motifs, and that archaeology shows gradual growth rather than a single moment.

Many historians take a middle position. Tim Cornell, for example, argues that the traditional narrative of the regal period preserves some genuine memory of institutions and broad developments—such as the importance of the Etruscan kings in the 6th century—even though the individual stories are not historical. Timothy Peter Wiseman, in his book Remus: A Roman Myth, analysed how the figure of Remus may have entered the story relatively late and been reshaped over time.

The meaning of the name Roma itself is uncertain. Proposals include a link with an old name of the Tiber (Rumon), with an Etruscan family name, or with a word for “teat” (ruma) connected with the fig tree Ficus Ruminalis. None is proven.

New finds regularly reopen the debate. In 2007 archaeologists announced the discovery of a decorated underground chamber beneath the Palatine that they suggested might be the Lupercal; other specialists argued it was more likely a later nymphaeum (a decorated fountain room). The case shows how strongly the legend still shapes the way discoveries in Rome are interpreted.

Archaeology of early Rome is difficult because the ancient city lies beneath a modern one, and later Roman building levelled or covered earlier layers. Much of what is known comes from excavations in the Forum and on the Palatine since the late 19th century, from cemeteries such as those on the Esquiline, and from comparison with better-preserved Latin sites nearby. Dating relies on pottery sequences and, where possible, scientific methods; the absolute dates of Iron Age phases in Latium have been revised in recent decades, which affects how early settlements are dated.

Epigraphy adds a little. The Lapis Niger (“Black Stone”) in the Forum covers an inscription of the 6th century BCE, one of the oldest known Latin texts, which mentions a “rex” (king), supporting the tradition that Rome was once ruled by kings. Religious practices preserved into historical times, such as the Septimontium (a festival of the “seven hills”) and the Lupercalia, may also preserve traces of early community organisation.

The central methodological lesson is to keep two kinds of evidence separate before combining them. The legend tells us about Roman self-understanding from the 3rd century BCE onward; the material remains tell us about settlement, economy and society in the Iron Age. Where they appear to match, as with the Palatine huts and the date around 750 BCE, historians must ask whether this reflects genuine memory or later writers building their story around visible ancient remains.