The She-Wolf and the Twin Kings

The river is meant to kill them.

Amulius, who has stolen the throne of Alba Longa from his brother Numitor, has made one error: Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia. She is a Vestal Virgin — her virginity is Amulius’s insurance policy, the mechanism by which Numitor’s line will simply end, childlessly, in the custody of the goddess. But the god Mars does not consult insurance policies. He finds Rhea Silvia asleep in the sacred grove and she conceives twins.

Amulius is furious. He imprisons Rhea Silvia. When the twins are born — two boys, enormous and healthy in the way that the sons of gods are always enormous and healthy — he orders them taken to the Tiber and drowned.

The servant charged with the drowning lacks the courage for direct infanticide. He places the boys in a basket or a trough — Livy says alveus, a hollowed vessel — and sets them on the water at the edge of the flood. The Tiber, in flood, has spread far from its banks. The servant expects the current to do his work. The basket catches on the roots of a fig tree at the bottom of the Palatine Hill, in a marshy thicket called the Lupercal.

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Here the story pivots on an animal.

A she-wolf, coming down to drink from the receding flood, hears the crying. She does not eat the infants. She nurses them. This is the image that Rome will put on its coins, its statues, its monumental bronzes — the Lupa, the wolf-mother, crouching over two small human boys who reach up for her with infant hands. The image is impossible, biologically. That is precisely why it matters. The city that will dominate the known world announces, from its first moment, that it exists outside the rules that govern ordinary creatures.

A woodpecker also brings food to the infants. The woodpecker is sacred to Mars; its presence confirms the divine paternity. The twins are fed by a god’s bird and a god’s animal in a god’s sacred grove. By the logic of Roman religion, which tracks divine will through natural phenomena, the message could not be clearer: these children are meant to live.

The shepherd Faustulus discovers them. He is, by most accounts, the foreman of Amulius’s royal herds — which means the herdsman of the man who tried to kill the boys now saves them. He takes them home. His wife Acca Larentia — whose name links her to the lares, the household gods, and to a legendary courtesan of the same name — nurses the twins as her own.

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They grow up herdsmen and brigands on the Palatine Hill.

The Roman sources are not embarrassed by this. Romulus and Remus spend their youth rustling cattle, getting into fights with neighboring shepherds, and leading a loose band of young men whose status is ambiguous — free enough to swagger, landless enough to fight. Remus is captured in one such raid and brought before Numitor, the deposed king, as a thief. Something about the young man’s bearing — or his age, or the story Faustulus has been telling the twins about their true origin — leads Numitor to recognize him.

The twins discover who they are. They kill Amulius. They restore their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba Longa. A generation’s worth of wrong is set right in an afternoon.

Then comes the question that determines everything: where to build the new city?

Romulus wants the Palatine. Remus wants the Aventine. They agree to let augury decide — the reading of divine will through the flight of birds, the most Roman of methods. Remus sees six vultures. Romulus sees twelve. The followers of each brother immediately dispute the result: Remus saw his birds first; Romulus saw more. The dispute is irresolvable because both readings are correct and both are incompatible. The city cannot have two founders. The gods, in their Roman economy, have not provided a tie-breaker.

Romulus begins to dig the sacred furrow that marks the city’s boundary — the pomerium, whose religious status is absolute. Remus, mocking, jumps over it.

Romulus kills him.

The exact formula varies by source. Some say it was one of Romulus’s followers who struck the fatal blow in anger. Some say Romulus did it himself, with the words: So perish anyone who crosses my walls. What all sources agree on is that the walls were crossed, and the crosser died, and the crosser was the founder’s brother, and Romulus did not stop building.

The city is one day old when it is founded on a murder. This is Rome. This will always be Rome. The walls hold because the man who drew them proved, once, that he would kill for them.