🐺Romulus
Latin nameRomulus
Founder of Rome who killed his brother (legend)
Born to the Purple · Kings & Emperors
Founding legendThe she-wolfThe age of kings
Who they are
In legend, Romulus and his twin Remus, sons of the war god Mars, were thrown into the Tiber and suckled and raised by a she-wolf. The brothers decided to found a city, quarreled over its site and its name, and settled it by augury of birds — and in the dispute Romulus killed Remus and raised on the Palatine Hill a city named for himself: Rome. The traditional date is 21 April 753 BC, from which Romans reckoned their years. He set up the Senate, carried off the Sabine women to give the city a new generation, and finally vanished mysteriously in a storm, to be worshipped as a god. It is all legend — but the Romans themselves believed it utterly, and read from it a parable of their state: this city was born of brothers at each other’s throats, and all the civil wars that followed seem like echoes of that first drop of blood.
Primary sourcesLivy, History of Rome, Book IPlutarch, Life of RomulusVirgil, Aeneid
Key stories
The she-wolf and the twins
A daughter of the king of Alba, taken by the war god Mars, bore twins; the great-uncle who had usurped the throne ordered the babies thrown into the Tiber. The basket ran aground at the foot of the Palatine Hill, a she-wolf heard them and suckled them, a woodpecker brought food, and a shepherd carried them home to raise. The bronze she-wolf in the Capitoline Museums became Rome’s eternal symbol — a city that saw itself as starting from castaways and a wild beast, and never hid the wildness of its origins.
The rape of the Sabine women
The new city was full of desperate men and no woman would marry them. Romulus contrived to invite the neighboring Sabines to come with their whole families to watch the games, and at a single signal each young Roman carried off a woman for a wife. The Sabines took up arms in revenge, and at the height of the fighting the Sabine women, now wives and mothers, rushed between the two armies with their babies in their arms: "Either make peace, or kill us first." The two peoples merged. From this Rome learned its other founding lesson: turn the enemy into a citizen — an art of absorption that would extend the empire further than any legion.
Version differences
Romulus and the founding of Rome are entirely legend; 753 BC is a traditional date, not a historical fact. The she-wolf story even has an ancient rationalizing explanation — that the "she-wolf" was really a nickname for a shepherd’s wife (the Latin lupa means both she-wolf and prostitute).
Echoes today
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
The Capitoline She-WolfThe image of the she-wolf suckling the twins appears on both Rome’s civic emblem and its football club’s crest — the oldest visual symbol of "Rome."