The Palatine
Hill was the center of the Roman world. Home to the wealthiest and most eminent
families of the late Republic, it came to be dominated by the palace of the emperors,
which would cover almost the entire summit. But at the hill’s southwest
corner, until the end of Roman history, a wooden hut stood beneath the palace walls.
The hut was more or less oval, about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide. Its walls were dried mud
and sticks, stiffened with a few posts; the roof was thatch. But for a thousand years, whenever
this humble structure burned or fell down – as it seems to have done with some frequency – it
was rebuilt on the same site and with the same materials. This was the House of Romulus, regarded
as the oldest building in the city and revered as the dwelling of Rome’s founder and first king.
Our literary sources preserve several myths about the foundation of Rome. One of the less familiar
versions claimed that Romulus and Remus had been sired by a gigantic phantom phallus that appeared
in the fireplace of an Alban king. In the standard story, most famously told by Livy, Romulus
and Remus are the grandsons of Numitor, the rightful king of a small city named Alba Longa.
Numitor had been deposed and exiled by his brother Amulius,
who forced Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a priestess of Vesta. Vesta,
the goddess of hearth and home, was a virgin, and her priestesses were supposed to follow suit.
Rhea Silvia, however, became pregnant. She claimed the father was Mars, the god of war.
Her uncle was skeptical; but just in case a god really was involved, he decided not to bury Rhea
alive – which was the usual penalty for Vestals who broke their vows – but simply to imprison her.
After she gave birth to twins, Amulius ordered a servant to drown the babies in the Tiber.
The servant, however, decided that infanticide was a bit above his paygrade,
and simply left the twins in a basket by the river.
There, they were discovered by a she-wolf, who nursed the babies in her den. Since the
Latin for she-wolf – lupa – was also slang for a prostitute, a few ancient authors speculated
that it was actually a lady of the night who rescued and nursed the future founders of Rome.
The Romans preferred the wolf story, and pointed to a small cave at the
base of the Palatine – the Lupercal – as the site of the she-wolf’s den.
The twins were discovered and raised by the shepherd Faustulus, who named them Romulus and
Remus. When they had grown into strapping young demigods, they learned the secret of their birth.
A few days of heroic derring-do ensued, in which their wicked great-uncle Amulius
was killed, and their grandfather restored to his rightful throne.
Then, jubilant from this success, they decided to found a city of their own.
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Back to Romulus and Remus.
The site the brothers chose for their new city was the place where the she-wolf had nursed them:
the future site of Rome. The brothers disagreed, however, over the exact location.
Romulus pulled for the Palatine; Remus preferred the Aventine Hill. To resolve their dispute,
they turned to the most reasonable solution they could think of: competitive bird-watching.
The Romans believed that the will of the gods could be divined through augury,
the art and science of interpreting birds in flight.
An augur took up his curved wand and traced out a portion of the sky.
Any bird that passed through that sector of the heavens was assumed to be significant.
Romulus and Remus took up their stations on opposite sides of a hill.
Remus saw the first birds: six vultures flying in a line.
Romulus, however, saw twelve vultures – or so he claimed. Remus thought that his brother
was lying. Harsh words were exchanged. Remus mocked the low wall that Romulus
had begun to build around the Palatine. In the ensuing scuffle, Romulus murdered his brother.
And so Rome was founded. Over the next forty years, Romulus conquered a modest but fertile
territory in the Tiber Valley, established the Senate, and enrolled the first legion.
One day, he was drilling his legion just outside the city when a sudden storm arose.
When the skies cleared a few minutes later, Romulus was nowhere to be seen.
Although some suspected that the senators – who had never liked Romulus – had used the
cover of the storm to kill the king, cut him into manageable pieces, and toss the
chunks into the Tiber, it was declared that Romulus had been translated to the heavens by
Jupiter’s thunderbolt. The late lamented king came to be worshipped as the war god Quirinus.
His hut was preserved as a shrine.
So much for the Roman foundation myth. Modern scholarship tells a very different story about the
city’s origins, pointing above all to geography. Rome grew up at the first ford of the Tiber River,
a natural crossing of trade routes. The famous seven hills, rising from the riverside marshes,
were easily fortified, and attracted settlers from the surrounding countryside.
The largest of these hilltop villages, with perhaps three or four hundred inhabitants,
arose on the Palatine. Around 700 BC, the village began to grow rapidly, perhaps after a chieftain
or king brokered some sort of alliance with the other villages on nearby hills.
There are clear correspondences between the Romulus story and the archaeological evidence.
Both agree that the Palatine Hill was pivotal to Rome’s beginnings,
and the hypothetical chieftain who arranged the alliance between the Palatine village
and the others could have provided the historical kernel of the Romulus myth.
Our earliest sources for the foundation of Rome date to the end of the third century BC,
more than four hundred years after Romulus was thought to have reigned.
Even in this early period, the Romans were well aware of how little they knew about their origins.
They continued, however, to make Romulus the protagonist of their prehistory.
Although Romulus was far from an ideal founding father, he seemed to represent
a real connection with an already obscure past. The Romans tended to ascribe their
early success to the virtues of their ancestors and the favor of the gods.
Romulus, for all his faults, could be presented as the first in a long line
of exemplary leaders; and as the son of a god, he was clearly favored by Heaven.
The replica House of Romulus, continually rebuilt on the site of that first village,
was a place for the Romans to reflect on their past. Rome may not have been
founded at the House of Romulus; but, in a sense, Roman history was founded on it.
For more on Rome’s early history, check out my interview with professor Paolo Carafa,
an archaeologist who works on the Palatine Hill.
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enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants. Thanks for watching.