Romulus Becomes a God in the Storm

He has reigned for thirty-seven years.

The city he founded on a murder has grown into something that surprises even its founder — or so the Roman historians imagine when they try to reconstruct the mood of the final year. Romulus is old now, or aging. His wars are won. His walls are real walls. The population that began as runaway slaves and desperate men has become a recognizable people with recognizable habits and a Senate of 100 men who call themselves Patres — Fathers — and who increasingly feel that the king’s continued breathing is an inconvenience.

The ancient sources know that Romulus may have been murdered. They say so directly, in the way Roman historians say difficult things — by reporting the suspicion and then providing the official account. Livy writes that some said the senators had torn Romulus apart with their hands during the storm and hidden the pieces under their togas. This is the version for people who trust what their eyes tell them. Then he provides the other version, for everyone who needs Rome to be what Rome says it is.

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On a day in early summer, Romulus holds a military review on the Campus Martius — the Field of Mars, the flat ground beside the Tiber where the army musters. The army is assembled. The people are watching. The sky is clear.

Then it is not.

A storm arrives with unusual speed — darkness, wind, thunder. The accounts say it is terrifying in a way that ordinary storms are not. The crowd scatters, or presses together, or simply loses coherence in the darkness and noise. When the storm passes and the sky returns to ordinary blue, Romulus is gone.

Not fallen. Not lying wounded. Gone. His throne is empty. His sandals are not on the ground. There is no body, no blood, no physical residue of a king who has just ceased to exist.

The crowd is frightened. The senators look at one another. Livy records, without comment, that the soldiers were afraid to ask the senators too directly where the king had gone.

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What Rome requires in this moment is a witness.

Julius Proculus — a Roman noble, a man of unimpeachable standing — comes forward. He tells the crowd that he was traveling on the road at dawn when Romulus appeared to him in divine light, taller than human and blazing with divine fire. Proculus asked: why have you left us? Romulus answered.

His answer, as Livy gives it, is the founding creed of Roman imperial religion: It was the will of the gods, Proculus, that we should live so long among human beings and found the city that is now the greatest on earth. When I had done this, I went back to heaven, the home from which I came. Farewell. Tell the Romans to cultivate self-restraint and valor, and let them know that Roman power will become the greatest on earth. I will be the favorable god Quirinus.

Quirinus. The name was already there — the ancient Sabine god of the civic community, the divine double of Mars who governs peace while Mars governs war. The Romans absorb him into Romulus without difficulty. The Quirinal Hill, where the Sabines had their settlement before the merger, carries his name. He becomes one of the three great gods of Rome’s earliest triad alongside Jupiter and Mars.

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The senators confirm the apotheosis and declare a cult.

There is considerable political utility in this. A king who ascends to heaven rather than dying in the Senate cannot be said to have been killed there. The gods have taken him, which means the gods are done with monarchy for Rome, which means the Senate can now govern freely with the divine precedent established and the king conveniently elsewhere.

Romulus receives a shrine on the Quirinal Hill. His feast day is February 17. Priests called the flamines tend his cult alongside the cults of Jupiter and Mars. The Roman citizen, walking through the city that Romulus founded and named for himself, can go to the Quirinal and make offerings to the man who killed his brother, stole the Sabine women, and then — by the grace of a storm or the efficiency of the Senate — became the god who watches over the city.

The Romans understand, in the way they understand most things about themselves, that both versions of the disappearance are true. Romulus was taken by heaven. Romulus was taken by the Senate. These are not incompatible. In Rome, the things that disappear into storms and the things that disappear into politics are often the same things.