Founding of Rome (753 BC): Romulus, Remus and the Evidence

The founding of Rome is traditionally dated to 21 April 753 BC, when, according to legend, Romulus marked out the boundary of a new city on the Palatine Hill beside the river Tiber. The story of the twins Romulus and Remus, nursed by a she-wolf, became Rome’s national myth. Archaeology tells a different and slower story, of hilltop villages that merged into a city over several centuries.

The legend of Romulus and Remus

The Romans told their origin story in several versions, but the best-known is that of the historian Livy, written in the late 1st century BC. It begins with the Trojan hero Aeneas, who fled the fall of Troy and settled in Latium. His son Ascanius founded the city of Alba Longa in the Alban Hills, and a line of kings ruled there for generations.

One of those kings, Numitor, was deposed by his younger brother Amulius. To prevent any challenge from Numitor’s line, Amulius forced Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia to become a Vestal Virgin, a priestess sworn to chastity. She nonetheless gave birth to twins and claimed that the war god Mars was their father.

Amulius ordered the babies drowned in the Tiber. The river was in flood, and the basket carrying them came to rest at the foot of the Palatine, near a fig tree later known as the Ficus Ruminalis. There a she-wolf suckled them in a cave called the Lupercal, until the royal herdsman Faustulus found them and raised them with his wife, Acca Larentia.

As young men, the twins discovered their identity, killed Amulius and restored their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba Longa. They then decided to found a city of their own at the place where they had been rescued.

The quarrel and the founding

The brothers could not agree who should rule the new city or where it should stand. They agreed to settle the matter by augury, reading the will of the gods from the flight of birds. Romulus watched from the Palatine and Remus from the Aventine. Remus saw six vultures first, but Romulus then saw twelve, and both sides claimed victory.

In Livy’s most famous version, Romulus began building a wall around the Palatine, and Remus mockingly jumped over it. Romulus killed him in anger. Livy also records a gentler variant in which Remus fell in a brawl between their supporters. Either way, the city took its founder’s name: Roma.

Romulus is then said to have filled his city by opening an asylum, a place of refuge for fugitives and outcasts. Because the settlers lacked wives, the Romans seized young women from the neighbouring Sabines during a festival, an episode known as the Rape of the Sabine Women. The war that followed ended with the Sabine women intervening between their fathers and husbands, and Romulus shared power with the Sabine king Titus Tatius. After a long reign, Romulus vanished in a sudden storm and was worshipped as the god Quirinus.

Where the date 753 BC comes from

Ancient writers disagreed about when Rome was founded. The Greek historian Timaeus placed it in 814/813 BC, the same year as Carthage. The first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, writing around 200 BC, preferred 748/747 BC, and Cincius Alimentus suggested 729/728 BC.

The date that became standard, 753 BC, was worked out in the 1st century BC by the scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, building on calculations by his friend Atticus. It rested on lists of magistrates and on estimates of the length of the reigns of Rome’s seven kings, which add up to an improbably long 244 years. Romans later counted years “ab urbe condita”, from the founding of the city, using this reckoning.

The day, 21 April, coincided with the Parilia, an old festival of shepherds and flocks. Linking the founding to the festival gave Rome’s birthday a fixed place in the religious calendar, and the anniversary is still celebrated in Rome as the Natale di Roma.

What archaeology shows

Rome stands at a natural meeting point: a group of low hills beside the lowest easy crossing of the Tiber, about 25 kilometres from the sea, on routes that carried salt inland and goods along the coast. People lived there long before 753 BC. Pottery from the Capitoline Hill and the area of Sant’Omobono shows activity in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, broadly the 17th to 11th centuries BC.

In the early Iron Age, from about the 10th century BC, small villages of huts stood on hills such as the Palatine, Capitoline and Esquiline. Their dead were buried in cemeteries, including one in the marshy valley that later became the Roman Forum. Archaeologists call this local culture the Latial culture, part of the wider world of the Latin-speaking peoples.

On the Germalus, the western summit of the Palatine, excavations have revealed post holes and drainage channels cut into the rock for oval and rectangular huts of wood, wattle and thatch, dated to the 8th century BC. The Romans themselves preserved a hut on the Palatine, the “Casa Romuli”, which they repaired for centuries as a relic of their founder.

From the mid-1980s the archaeologist Andrea Carandini excavated at the northern foot of the Palatine and found remains of a wall which he dated to around the third quarter of the 8th century BC. He argued that it matched the legendary wall of Romulus and that a formal founding really took place around that time. Many scholars accept that the wall is early but reject the leap from a wall to a historical Romulus.

From villages to a city

Most historians now see Rome’s origins as a gradual process of growth and fusion, sometimes called synoecism, rather than a single act of founding. Over the 8th and 7th centuries BC the hilltop communities drew together, shared religious festivals such as the Septimontium, and began to use the valleys between them as common ground.

A decisive change came in the 7th century BC. The low-lying Forum valley was drained, raised with fill and given its first paved surface around the middle or second half of that century, which allowed it to become a public meeting place. The great drain later known as the Cloaca Maxima grew out of this effort to tame the marshy ground.

By the 6th century BC Rome was a substantial city with temples, public buildings and stone foundations, strongly influenced by its Etruscan neighbours to the north. Roman tradition places the last three of its seven kings in this period, two of them of Etruscan origin, before the monarchy ended with the founding of the Roman Republic, traditionally in 509 BC.

Key people of the legend

• Romulus: legendary founder and first king of Rome, said to have reigned for 37 years and to have created the Senate of 100 elders and the first military organisation.
• Remus: Romulus’s twin brother, killed during or soon after the founding. Some scholars think he was a later addition to the story.
• Rhea Silvia: the twins’ mother, a Vestal Virgin of the royal house of Alba Longa.
• Numitor and Amulius: rival brothers and kings of Alba Longa, the twins’ grandfather and great-uncle.
• Faustulus and Acca Larentia: the herdsman and his wife who raised the twins.

Myths and facts

Myth: Rome was founded in a single year. The date 753 BC is a scholarly calculation made some 700 years later. Archaeology shows continuous settlement and slow urban growth, not a sudden founding.

Myth: the Capitoline Wolf dates from the founding era. The famous bronze she-wolf in the Capitoline Museums was long thought to be Etruscan work of around 500–480 BC. The twins beneath her were added in the late 15th century. Scientific tests reported from 2006 onwards suggested the wolf itself was cast in the Middle Ages, around the 11th to 13th centuries AD, though the dating remains disputed.

Fact: the cave of the Lupercal was a real sacred site. The Romans honoured a cave at the foot of the Palatine as the place where the wolf fed the twins, and held the Lupercalia festival there every February. A decorated underground chamber found beneath the Palatine in 2007 was announced as the Lupercal, but many archaeologists believe it is part of a later Roman building.

Fact: the legend was shaped for later needs. Stories about Romulus were retold and adjusted by Greek and Roman writers, and the emperor Augustus made a point of living on the Palatine near the hut of Romulus, presenting himself as a second founder of Rome.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 1700–1000 BC: Bronze Age activity on the Capitoline and near the Tiber crossing.
• c. 1000–900 BC: Iron Age villages and cemeteries appear on Rome’s hills and in the Forum valley.
• 8th century BC: Huts on the Palatine; a wall at the foot of the hill is built, dated by Carandini to c. 730–720 BC.
• 753 BC, 21 April: Traditional date of Romulus’s founding of Rome.
• 7th century BC: The Forum valley is drained and receives its first paved surface.
• 6th century BC: Rome grows into a major city under kings with strong Etruscan ties.
• 509 BC: Traditional end of the monarchy and start of the Republic.
• c. 200 BC: Fabius Pictor writes the first Roman history, dating the founding to 748/747 BC.
• 1st century BC: Varro fixes the standard date of 753 BC; Livy writes his account of Romulus.

Why it matters

The founding legend gave Romans a shared identity, explaining their city’s divine favour, its warlike character and its openness to newcomers. Read alongside archaeology, it also shows how a powerful national myth can grow from a real but far less dramatic process. The image of the she-wolf and the twins remains the emblem of Rome to this day.