2 In the Beginning
Cicero convened the Senate in the Temple of Jupiter. This was the site where Romulus prayed to Jupiter that the Romans would not flee, but hold fast in their battle against the Sabines. They held fast and the temple was built, according to legend. What existed in Cicero’s day must have been a newer building than Romulus had built, but the legend was well known. Cicero was in fact, using the legend as a symbol of his own rallying cry to protect Rome from the day’s enemy- Catiline. It was a classic appeal to the founding fathers.

The legend of twins being raised by a she-wolf has some unsavory aspects to it. But Romans referred to it constantly and the story said something about what it was to be a Roman, their special characteristics, and the flaws and failings they had inherited from their ancestors.

Cicero notes Rome’s geographical good points: on a river close enough to import and export, and built on a hill that provided good natural defense. Livy recounts the usual legend of the twins being born to a virgin priestess, Rhea Silvia, who claims she was raped by the God Mars. The twins were ordered to be drowned in the Tiber, but the men ordered to do this, left them on the bank of the flooded river. Here a she-wolf saved them. Livy notes that prostitutes were often referred to as lupae, and rationalized that maybe the twins were raised by a prostitute. The twins grew up and were eventually reunited with their grandfather, the deposed king Numitor.  

The twins at one point got into a fight over where to establish the city, Romulus choosing the palatine hill and Remus the aventine, and when Remus jumped the barrier to Romulus’ hill, Romulus killed him. Romulus then uttered the phrase: so perish anyone else who shall leap over my walls!

Rome needed more citizens, so Romulus declared it an asylum city, so all kinds of unsavory types united. They got lots of men, but they needed women. So he invited the neighboring Sabines and Latins to a party, and then abducted the women in the middle of the festivities. Livy defends this as the Romans taking only unmarried girls, so it wasn’t adultery, but necessary for the continuation of the city. Livy claimed the Roman response was necessary since the surrounding tribes had not consented to intermarriage. This was a “just war”. This perhaps hints at Rome’s belligerence. It consistently saw itself as merely responding to provocation, even when it went out of its way to push the others to the brink.

Ovid wrote that the tribes of the girls went to war over the offense. The Latins were defeated easily, the Sabines were not. It was in this context that Romulus prayed to Jupiter on the site of the Temple. The hostilities were halted only when the abducted women came to the defense of their abductors.

These stories relate something of the later Roman character. For one, fratricide seemed hard-wired into Roman politics. Another was the willingness to offer asylum to all kinds of comers. Even in conquered territories, residents there were eventually given Roman citizenship. Even understanding the founding story as a legend, we recognize that the story was developed in order to explain some basic characteristics of Rome.