Romulus Kills His Brother at the Wall

The day that Rome is born begins with two brothers on two hills, watching birds.

Remus stands on the Aventine. Romulus stands on the Palatine. They have agreed to let the gods decide which of them will found the city and give it his name, and the gods’ preferred instrument in such matters is augury — the reading of divine intention through the behavior of birds. They wait. The morning sky is clear.

Six vultures pass over the Aventine. Remus sees them first and his followers erupt: six vultures, a clear sign, Remus wins.

Then twelve vultures pass over the Palatine. Romulus sees them and his followers erupt: twelve vultures, double, Romulus wins.

Both counts are correct. Both interpretations are defensible. Earlier vision or larger number: the Romans will argue about this question of precedent for centuries, applying it to magistracies and elections and military commands. Here, on the founding day, there is no Senate to arbitrate, no tradition to consult. There is only the weight of what both brothers want and the certainty that a city cannot have two founders.

Romulus wins, or takes, or insists. The accounts differ. The outcome does not.

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He begins to build.

The pomerium — the sacred boundary of the new city — is plowed with a bronze-tipped plow drawn by a white bull and cow, Romulus himself gripping the handles. Where the boundary runs, the furrow marks it; at the gates, he lifts the plow so the ground is not broken, because the gates must allow passage. Everything else is inviolable. The furrow is not just a mark in the earth. It is a legal boundary, a religious boundary, a declaration: inside this line, the law of Rome applies. Outside it, you are outside Rome. Crossing it without the proper passage is, in religious terms, an act of desecration.

Remus watches.

He has spent his whole short life as the equal of his brother. They were born together. They were exposed together. They were nursed by the same wolf, found by the same shepherd, raised in the same house. They killed the same tyrant and restored the same grandfather. If one of them sees six birds and the other sees twelve, the difference between them is thinner than the shadow of a plow.

Remus jumps over the new wall.

It is not much of a wall yet. The sources say this directly. Remus’s jump is easy, which is the point: he is mocking the smallness of what Romulus has dared to call a city. The gesture is contempt. It is also, by the law Romulus has just declared in the furrow he plowed, a capital crime.

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The sources hedge on what happens next.

Some say it was Celer, one of Romulus’s lieutenants, who struck Remus dead with a spade in a moment of uncontrolled rage — and that Romulus, when he heard, expressed grief but affirmed the principle. Some say Romulus did it himself and spoke the sentence afterward: So perish anyone who crosses my walls. Plutarch, characteristically, offers both versions and declines to adjudicate.

What the sources do not dispute: Remus died. Romulus buried him. The city continued.

Livy gives Romulus one sentence of mourning, then moves on. This is Rome’s historiographical style applied to its own founding violence: acknowledge, record, continue. The Roman writers who tell this story are not comfortable with it exactly, but they are not haunted by it either. They treat it as evidence of something true about the nature of law: that a law without enforcement is not a law, and that the first enforcement is always the hardest and the most instructive.

The fratricide becomes proverbial. Later Romans, when they want to understand why the laws of the city carry such absolute force, return to the image of Romulus standing over his brother’s body with the city barely begun behind him, the wall still low enough to step over, and going back to work. The walls eventually grow tall enough that no one can jump them. By then the lesson has been learned.

Romulus weeps once, if he weeps at all. Then he rules.

His city fills with the displaced and the ambitious of central Italy — men who have nothing to lose and everything to prove. They look at the foundation story and do not find it disqualifying. They find it explanatory. This is a city that means what it says. It said the boundary was absolute, and when its own king’s brother crossed it, the boundary held. If the boundary held for Remus, it holds for everyone.

That is the promise of Rome. It is also the price of Rome. Every Roman learns it from the first story.