Romulus murders his brother and founds an empire
According to enduring legend, blood is shed at the birth of the city of Rome
For the citizens of imperial Rome, the festival of the Parilia, which took place every year on 21 April, was always a jolly occasion, complete with all sorts of sacrificing and feasting. For, as everybody knew, this was the city’s birthday, the anniversary of Rome’s establishment by Romulus in the year 753 BC.
Even at the time, there were several different versions of the story of Rome’s foundation. In the most common, Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of the princess Rhea Silvia and the god Mars, who were abandoned by the river Tiber and suckled by a she-wolf. Later, as adults, they returned to the riverbank to found a city of their own. According to legend, the two brothers could not agree on the precise spot on which to start work. In one version, Romulus went ahead and ploughed a furrow around the Palatine Hill to show where the walls should be. When Remus mockingly leaped over the walls to demonstrate their inadequacy, his brother angrily struck him down. “So perish anyone else,” he supposedly said, “who shall leap over my walls.” So that was the end of Remus, leaving the solitary Romulus as the undisputed first king of the new city on the Palatine.
Was it true? “Pure myth,” writes classicist Mary Beard, who argues that “there was almost certainly no such thing as a founding moment of the city of Rome.” Even Romulus probably never existed; he was an invention, projected backwards in time, while the story of his feud with Remus probably reflected Rome’s history of bloody civil war. But the Romans themselves undoubtedly took it seriously. After all, who can resist a birthday party?