Centuries before ruling over the entire Mediterranean region, Rome was just a small village located on a group of hills along the Tiber river in Lazio, Central Italy. The Romans had a series of myths surrounding the founding of the city, and traditionally dated the event on April 21, 753 BCE, although different dates were sometimes reported. Modern historians have found no evidence of most of the stories told by the ancient Romans, and now believe that the founding of Rome was not a single event but that the city developed from the union of some Bronze Age settlements over a long period of time.
First of all, let’s see what was the ancient Roman myth of the founding of Rome. According to the most famous legend, the story begins with Aeneas and the Trojan War. Aeneas was the son of Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Venus (equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite), and fled Troy after the city was taken by the Greeks. In the Iliad, Aeneas is a minor character, but a prophecy in the poem says that his descendants will one day rule over Troy.
The Roman myth of Aeneas developed over the course of various centuries, and it is most famously told by the poet Virgil in the Aeneid. The Aeneid explains that Aeneas traveled around the Mediterranean after leaving Troy and, after a series of adventures, he landed on the coast of Lazio. There, he met Latinus, king of the Latins, and married his daughter Lavinia. Their son, Ascanius, founded the city of Alba Longa.
Centuries later, the king of Alba Longa, Numitor, was overthrown by his brother Amulius. Amulius killed the sons of Numitor and made Rhea Silvia, daughter of the previous king, a Vestal Virgin, in order to prevent her from having children. However, Rhea Silvia was forcibly impregnated by the god of war Mars, and had the twins Romulus and Remus. Amulius ordered the twins to be killed, and they were abandoned along the Tiber river to die.
The twins were found by a she-wolf, who suckled them in a nearby cave known as the Lupercal. Romulus and Remus were then adopted and raised by a shepherd named Faustulus, and when they grew up they eventually discovered their past. The twins overthrew Amulius and reinstated their grandfather Numitor as king of Alba Longa. Romulus and Remus then decided to establish a new city on the place where they were found, but the two disagreed on the hill upon which the town was to be built. Because of the dispute, Romulus (or one of his followers) ended up killing Remus, and then founded Rome on the Palatine Hill, ruling as its king for decades. According to Roman tradition, Romulus established many of the instutions of Rome, including the Senate. Actually, a council of elders was common among Indo-European tribal communities.
Sculpture of Capitoline Wolf in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. One of the most popular symbols of Rome, its origin is still debated. Traditionally believed to be an Etruscan statue from around the fifth century BCE, some academics have argued that it was actually made in the Middle Ages (Rosemania, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0).
There are also many other myths about the founding of Rome, often involving an eponymous founder. One story told how Rome was founded by Rhomos, son of Ulysses and Circe, but some historians have argued that this Greek origin was abandoned in favor of the Trojan Aeneas when tensions between Rome and the Greeks grew. In other stories, Rome was founded by either a follower of Aeneas, a woman called Rhome, or Romus, a son of Zeus.
Nevertheless, the myth of Aeneas, Romulus, and Remus developed during the time of the Roman Republic, and its details changed several times. The prophecy in the Iliad about of the descendants of Aeneas ruling over Troy was discussed by the Greeks for a long time, as there was no clear indication that this was about to happen. Some speculated that a descendant of Aeneas had founded a dynasty outside the Greek world, and Rome was a potential candidate. Roman historians tried to link the story of Aeneas with Rome, but the Trojan War was dated around 1200 BCE, while the founding of Rome was believed to have happened centuries later. So, they came up with the story of the son of Aeneas founding Alba Longa, the city that eventually produced Romulus and Remus.
This was part of a common trend of Hellenization among Italic peoples. Greek historians argued that the Italians were actually descendants of Greeks who migrated there many centuries earlier, and Italic peoples were seeking links with Greek mythology and history because it would give them more legitimacy and prestige. So, the myth of Aeneas as told by the Romans was easily accepted by both Italic peoples and Greeks, and his role in the founding of Rome was already entrenched in Roman historiography by the fifth century BCE.
The story of Romulus and Remus has many different versions, and might derive from a set of Italic legends with Hellenic influences, but its origin is still unclear. The earliest evidence of the story comes from the third century BCE, but the myth is probably much older. The legend became an iconic representation of the city, and the she-wolf is a symbol of Rome to this day. Romulus and Remus are now widely believed to be just mythological figures that never actually existed, and even the name Romulus is likely to have been invented from the name of the city, instead of the opposite.
The date of the founding of Rome was argued by ancient historians for centuries. In the fourth and third century BCE, the founding of the city was placed around 1100 BCE, soon after the fall of Troy, in order to link Aeneas with Rome. However, this was in disagreement with the length of the Roman Republic, based on the number of consuls, so some placed the founding of Rome around the ninth or eight century BCE. The gap was filled thanks to the story of Alba Longa and its kings, which are believed to have been completely invented by Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first century BCE. This placed the founding of Rome in the mid eight century BCE.
Roman historian Marcus Terentius Varro calculated that Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and his chronology was accepted as official, although sometimes the date of 752 BCE was used. Varro’s chronology is now known to include various errors, and his calculations are wrong by at least a few years, but nevertheless the date of 753 BCE stuck and it forms the basis for the ab urbe condita calendar, which counts the years from the founding of Rome.
The specific date of April 21 instead comes from the traditional Parilia festival. This was a celebration of farming which honored the deity Pales, patron of shepherds and sheep, and it probably predates the founding of Rome. According to a myth described by Roman poet Ovid, Romulus set the boundaries of Rome on this date, and over time the Parilia evolved from a rural festival into the birthday of Rome. In the year 121, emperor Hadrian changed the name of the festival to Romaea, fully transforming it into a celebration of the city.
Map of Rome around 753 BCE (PaddyFH, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).
However, there is no archaeological evidence of all these ancient legends, so what is the real history of the founding of Rome? The area around Rome has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, and the place where the city now stands was surely occupied during the Bronze Age, with the earliest settlement dating around 1700 BCE or 1600 BCE. The Capitoline hill features the oldest structures, while the area of the Forum was settled around the 13th century BCE. Over the following centuries, fortifications and settlements existed on the other nearby hills, but it is unclear if these were independent villages or colonies of the town on the Capitoline hill.
By the 8th century BCE, four settlements existed in the area of Rome, and the first set of walls around the Palatine hill was built between 730 BCE and 720 BCE. Around this time, the settlements probably unified as a single entity, following a trend of city-state formation that emerged in ancient Greece and spread around the Mediterranean. The ruins of some huts dating from the 8th century BCE have been found on the Palatine hill, including what was said to be the residence of Romulus. While the Romans mantained for centuries that the structure indeed belonged to Romulus, there is no evidence of this. By 600 BCE, Rome was undoubtably a single entity, with public monumental architecture and civil structures. The institutions of Rome, which according to tradition were mostly established by Romulus, likely evolved over the course of several centuries.