The Founding of Rome and the Kingdom: From Myth to Monarchy

Long before there was a Roman Empire, before there was a Roman Republic, before there was even a written history, there was a story about a she-wolf, a pair of twins, and a city carved out of the Italian hills. The Romans told that story for more than a thousand years. It was the founding myth of one of the greatest states in human history, and like most founding myths it contained both a kernel of historical truth and a great deal of wishful thinking. The real founding of Rome was not a single event but a slow, messy, centuries-long process of consolidation, conquest, and cultural exchange — and its earliest chapters are more interesting, and more foreign, than the legend suggests.

The Legend of Romulus and Remus

The most famous version of the Roman origin story was fixed in writing by the poet Virgil in the Aeneid and by the historian Livy in the late first century BCE, although the basic tale was already centuries old. According to the legend, a Trojan prince named Aeneas fled the burning city of Troy and after years of wandering made his way to the Italian peninsula. There he married a local princess, Lavinia, and founded a dynasty that would eventually produce two brothers: Numitor, the legitimate king of the city of Alba Longa, and Amulius, who seized the throne by force.

To prevent his sister from producing a rival claimant, Amulius made her a Vestal Virgin, sworn to a thirty-year chastity in service of the goddess Vesta. But the god Mars visited her, and she gave birth to twin boys: Romulus and Remus. Fearing the prophecy that they would overthrow him, Amulius ordered the infants drowned in the Tiber River. The basket in which they were floated ashore near the foot of the Palatine Hill, where a she-wolf — the lupa that still appears on the civic seal of Rome — suckled them. A shepherd and his wife found the twins and raised them in the wild.

When they grew to manhood, Romulus and Remus learned of their royal blood, killed Amulius, and restored Numitor to his throne. But the brothers themselves wanted to found a city of their own. They consulted the gods, watching the sky for birds. Remus saw six vultures first. Romulus saw twelve. Romulus began to mark out the sacred boundary of the new city, the pomerium, with a plough. Remus, in mockery, leapt over the wall. Romulus killed him, and gave the city his name: Roma.

The Romans dated the founding to 21 April 753 BCE. For centuries afterwards, the Romans celebrated the anniversary with the Parilia, a pastoral festival of purification. Modern scholars treat the legend as poetic and political rather than historical, but it shaped Roman identity for two millennia. As the historian Livy himself admitted in his preface, the most ancient history of Rome was wrapped in fable, and he would not trouble to distinguish the true from the false.

What Archaeology Actually Shows

The archaeological evidence tells a different, slower story. Excavations on the Palatine Hill and around the Roman Forum have revealed settlements dating back to at least the 10th century BCE, more than two centuries before the traditional date of the founding. The earliest inhabitants lived in wattle-and-daub huts raised on piles above the malarial marshes at the foot of the hills. Burial grounds from the period contain both Latin and Sabine grave goods, suggesting that the early population was a mix of Italic peoples who had migrated into the region over centuries.

By the 8th century BCE these scattered hilltop villages were being organized into something larger. Latin and Sabine communities on the Palatine, the Esquiline, the Viminal, and the Quirinal were joined in a religious federation centered on the cult of Vulcan and other common gods. The Septimontium, an early festival of the seven hills, probably dates from this period and may reflect a real political consolidation.

By the 7th century BCE the village had grown into a town of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people, surrounded by a defensive wall of tufa stone. Tufa quarried from the local hills would give the early Romans a cheap and abundant building material, and the soft stone was used for everything from foundations to the oldest parts of the Roman Forum’s paving.

The most important external influence in this formative period was Etruscan. The Etruscans were a wealthy, urbanized people of central Italy, with close trading and cultural ties to the Greek colonies of southern Italy and to Phoenicia. Their engineering, their writing system, their religious rituals, and their urban planning would shape early Rome in ways the Romans themselves later preferred to forget.

The Etruscan Kings and the Unification of Rome

The traditional list of the seven kings of Rome is a mixture of legend, names lifted from later Roman families, and possibly a few genuine historical figures. The first four kings — Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and Ancus Marcius — are at best half-historical. The last three — Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus — are far more solidly attested, and at least two of them were almost certainly of Etruscan origin.

The Roman tradition held that Rome had been ruled by seven kings in succession, the last of whom was overthrown in 509 BCE. Modern historians do not believe that there ever was a single line of seven kings, but the tradition is useful because it preserves the memory of a real political transition: the rise of monarchy in Rome, its Etruscan coloring, and its eventual collapse.

Tarquinius Priscus, according to tradition, came from the Etruscan city of Tarquinii and became king around 616 BCE. He is credited with major public works: the draining of the Forum, the construction of the Cloaca Maxima (the great sewer that still drains parts of Rome), the founding of public games, and the reorganization of the army. The Cloaca Maxima is in fact an Etruscan engineering project, and the description of Tarquin as a drainage engineer is essentially accurate: building Rome on dry ground was a generational project.

Servius Tullius, the sixth king, is credited with the great political reform that bears his name. He is said to have divided the Roman people into classes and centuries according to wealth, replacing the old tribal divisions of the army with a property-based system. Whether Servius Tullius was a real king or a legendary figure, the Servian Constitution almost certainly represents a real reform, probably of the early 5th century BCE, in which Roman society was reorganized along economic lines and the heavy infantry phalanx was replaced by the more flexible manipular legion that would eventually conquer the Mediterranean.

The Roman Army in the Regal Period

Rome’s early military organization, in the traditional telling, mirrored its social structure. Under the Servian reforms, all citizens were required to serve in the army, and the equipment each man could afford — helmet, breastplate, greaves, sword, spear, and the large curved scutum shield — determined his place in the battle line. The wealthiest citizens fought as fully armored heavy infantry in the front ranks. The poorest served as skirmishers and support troops, with little more than a sling or a javelin.

The Roman legion of the regal period was a citizen army in the strictest sense. There was no professional standing force, no separate officer class, and no permanent military infrastructure. When war threatened, the consul or the king would levy an army, march to the threatened frontier, fight a battle, and return home to harvest the crops. The idea of a long professional campaign was almost unimaginable. This would change dramatically in the late Republic, when soldiers began to serve for years at a time and to identify more with their generals than with the state.

The Last King and the Birth of the Republic

The seventh and last king, Tarquinius Superbus (“Tarquin the Proud”), is the villain of the Roman founding story. According to Livy, he came to power by murdering his predecessor Servius Tullius and ruled as a brutal tyrant, ignoring the Senate, terrorizing the citizens, and ultimately raping the chaste noblewoman Lucretia, whose suicide in 509 BCE sparked a rebellion that drove him from the city. The story of Lucretia — virtuous, violated, and willing to die to vindicate her honor — became one of the foundational myths of the Roman Republic, the moral origin story of a political system that defined itself against the abuse of monarchical power.

Whether or not the legend is literally true, the political events of around 509 BCE are well-attested. Rome expelled its kings, abolished the monarchy, and replaced it with a system of annually elected magistrates. The consular fasti, the inscribed list of Rome’s chief magistrates, begins in 509 BCE. Whether the new Republic was the result of a popular uprising, an aristocratic coup, or an external invasion by the neighboring Latin and Etruscan cities is debated, but the result is not: the Romans would never again tolerate a king. The very word rex, “king,” became an insult. When, almost five centuries later, generals like Sulla and Julius Caesar began to concentrate kingly power in their own hands, the Romans recognized the danger at once and fought the fall of the Roman Republic with desperate fury.

Religion, Ritual, and the Calendar

Roman religion in the regal period was a strange and conservative thing. The Romans believed that every action of public importance had to be authorized by the gods, and they developed an extraordinarily elaborate system of ritual to ensure divine favor. Priests called augurs read the will of the gods by watching the flight of birds, the behavior of sacred chickens, and the entrails of sacrificed animals. The calendar itself was a religious document, with each month governed by a set of feast days, festivals, and prohibitions.

One of the most important cultural contributions of the early kings was the establishment of Rome’s religious institutions. The Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta who tended the sacred hearth fire of Rome, were supposedly founded by Numa Pompilius, the second king. The college of Pontiffs, the priesthood that regulated religious life, took shape in this period, as did the cults of Mars, Jupiter, and Quirinus, the three great gods of the Roman state. The early Romans did not worship their gods in temples, but in open-air sacred precincts, and the architecture of the temple would only arrive in earnest under Etruscan influence in the 6th century BCE.

From Villages to a City

By the end of the regal period, somewhere around 500 BCE, Rome had been transformed from a cluster of hilltop villages into a city of perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants. It had a forum, a sewer, a defensive wall, a citizen army, a system of public law, and a calendar of religious festivals. It governed a territory of some 800 square kilometers, the future heart of the Roman state. The transition from monarchy to Republic did not break this development; it accelerated it.

The kings had given Rome its first urban shape, its army, its religious institutions, and much of its early engineering. The Republic would now take these foundations and build on them. Over the next four and a half centuries, the Romans would conquer Italy, fight the Punic Wars against Carthage, and emerge as the unrivalled master of the Mediterranean. The story of how that happened begins with the overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus and the establishment of the Roman Republic.

For the broader arc of Roman history, see the complete history of the Roman Empire.