Romulus Takes the Sabine Women

The problem is simple and shameful.

Rome has men. Rome has walls. Rome has a name and a god and a sacred furrow and a king. What it does not have is women. Romulus has filled the new city with runaway slaves, landless refugees, escaped debtors from the Latin and Etruscan towns — the desperate and the ambitious, which is to say, the Roman type. They have come. They have built. They have no one to build for, and no one to continue what they have built.

Romulus sends embassies to the neighboring peoples asking for intermarriage rights. The requests are refused everywhere. The Sabines, the Latins, the Etruscans — none of them want their daughters going to a city of criminals and runaways. The calculation is cold: Rome is a generation old. It may not last another generation. Why give a daughter to a city that might not exist when she is old enough to have grandchildren?

Romulus receives the refusals and says nothing. He begins to plan.

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He announces a festival.

The Consualia — games in honor of the god Consus, whose underground altar sits in the Circus Maximus valley between the Palatine and Aventine hills. The invitation goes to all the neighboring peoples. It is calculated: the Sabines in particular, who live in the hill country to the northeast, are a populous and proud people. They come in large numbers. They bring their wives. They bring their daughters. They bring the old men and the children. A festival is safe. A festival is neutral ground.

The games begin. The spectacle is arranged around the Circus valley. The crowd is packed in, the Sabines and Latins and others pressed close against their Roman hosts, watching the performances.

Romulus gives a signal.

Every Roman man seizes the nearest unmarried Sabine woman and runs.

Livy, who is a careful man, is also an honest one. He uses the word raptae — seized, snatched. The later euphemism is the Rape of the Sabine Women, which in Latin means abduction but which carries what it carries. The fathers escape. The husbands escape. The women do not escape.

Romulus, afterward, gives a speech to the women. He explains that this was necessity, not cruelty. That the Romans intended to treat them as wives and not as slaves. That they would have honored status, legal protection, the rights of Roman matrons. That their children would be Romans. He tells them that the Romans who seized them were motivated by admiration, and that admiration is a form of love, and that love, given time, is returned.

The women, Livy says, were eventually pacified by these arguments and by the attentions of their husbands.

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The Sabine fathers are not pacified.

Under Titus Tatius, the Sabine king, they raise an army and march on Rome. The war lasts, in the legendary account, long enough for an act of treachery and a battle. The treachery: a Roman woman named Tarpeia opens the Capitoline gate to the Sabines in exchange for what they wear on their left arms — meaning their gold bracelets. The Sabines enter and give her what they wear on their left arms: their shields, which they pile on top of her until she is crushed. The Tarpeian Rock, from which traitors will be thrown for the next seven centuries, is named for her.

The battle: the Sabines and Romans are locked in combat in the valley between the Capitoline and Palatine — the future Forum — when the Sabine women appear.

They have been Roman wives long enough now to have children, or to be pregnant with children. They run into the space between the armies with their hair loose and their children in their arms, the posture of public mourning, and they stand between the lines.

They tell both armies: you are killing our husbands. You are killing our fathers. Whichever side wins, we lose. Either our fathers kill the men we now belong to, or our husbands kill the fathers who raised us. Stop.

Both armies stop.

Romulus and Titus Tatius agree to rule jointly. The two peoples merge. The Sabines come down from their hills and join the city on the Tiber. The population that Romulus’s kidnapping created becomes Rome’s first great act of absorption — the template for how the city will grow for the next thousand years. You do not have to be born Roman. You become Roman. The terms of the becoming were not always gentle, but the becoming was always real.

The women who were seized and became the hinge on which this merger turned are honored in Roman ceremony forever after. At Roman weddings, the hair of the bride is parted with a spear — because Roman marriage began with seizure. The ritual spear does not explain away the violence. It remembers it.