Romulus
Romulus is the legendary founder and first king of Rome. The tradition, in Livy, Plutarch and others, makes him and his twin Remus the sons of the war god Mars and Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin of the royal house of Alba Longa whose uncle had usurped the throne and forced her into the priesthood so that she would bear no rival heirs. The infants were ordered drowned, floated ashore in a basket, and were suckled by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd, Faustulus, and his wife. Grown, they restored their grandfather to Alba Longa and set out to found a city of their own. They quarrelled over the site and the omens; Remus mocked his brother's low wall by jumping over it, and Romulus killed him, saying that so would perish anyone else who crossed his walls. The traditional date of the founding is 753 BC. To populate the city he opened an asylum for exiles, runaways and the dispossessed, which gave him men and no women. He invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and had the young women seized — the rape of the Sabine women — and when their fathers made war, the women themselves intervened between the lines, and the two peoples merged under joint rule. He is credited with the senate of a hundred fathers, the division of the people into three tribes and thirty curiae, and the first legions. He is said to have vanished in a storm at the Campus Martius and to have been worshipped afterwards as the god Quirinus.
- Lived: 771 BCE – 716 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: king, founder, military_leader
