Ancient Rome · 753 BCE (traditional date)

How Was Rome Founded? Romulus, Remus and the Evidence

By the Aurelius editorial team · 3 min read · Updated 15 October 2026

In short

  • The legend of Romulus and Remus was a story Romans told about themselves; even Livy declined to vouch for it.
  • Archaeology shows Rome grew gradually from Iron Age hill villages; the date 753 BCE was calculated centuries later.
  • The myth mattered because it explained Roman values: war, divine favour and a curse of brother killing brother.
Bronze statue of a lean she-wolf with bared teeth standing over two small naked infants who reach up to suckle.
The Capitoline Wolf, Capitoline Museums, Rome. Long believed to be an Etruscan bronze of the 5th century BCE, it may actually be medieval; the twins were added in the late 15th century. Jastrow · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

In April 248 CE, Emperor Philip the Arab threw Rome a thousandth birthday party. Every Roman knew the date, the founder's name and the wolf that had nursed him. The question is how much of that anyone actually knew.

The story Romans told

The legend, as the historian Livy told it in the age of Augustus, begins with a crime. Amulius seized the throne of Alba Longa from his brother and made his niece, Rhea Silvia, a Vestal priestess so that she could have no children. She bore twins anyway, and named the war god Mars as their father.

Amulius had the babies left by the flooded Tiber. A she-wolf found and suckled them, and a shepherd, Faustulus, raised them. Grown up, Romulus and Remus restored their grandfather to his throne and set out to found a city of their own.

They quarrelled over where. Each watched the sky for omens: Remus saw six vultures first, Romulus twelve. In the fight that followed, Remus was killed. Livy offers two versions of his death, and passes on a deflating rumour: the “wolf” may have been the shepherd's wife, since lupa was also slang for a prostitute.

Baroque painting of a she-wolf nursing two plump infants on a riverbank, with a reclining river god and a shepherd behind a tree.
Peter Paul Rubens, Romulus and Remus, c. 1615–16, Capitoline Museums, Rome: the she-wolf nurses the twins by the Tiber while the shepherd Faustulus approaches. Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1615–16 · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

A date worked out on paper

Ancient writers did not agree on when this happened. Rome's first historian, Fabius Pictor, writing around 200 BCE, placed the founding about 748 BCE; the Greek historian Timaeus put it in 814 BCE, the same year as Carthage's. The date 753 BCE became standard only in the first century BCE, through the calculations of the scholar Varro.

The tradition also claims that just seven kings ruled across the 244 years from 753 to 509 BCE, an average of almost 35 years each. Few historians accept that. Many suspect the founder himself was invented from the city's name: “Romulus” looks like a name made out of “Roma”.

What the ground says

Archaeology tells a slower story. Bronze Age pottery shows people living on Rome's hills before 1000 BCE. By the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, villages of oval huts built of timber, wattle and thatch stood on the Palatine Hill; the holes cut into the rock for their posts can still be seen. The marshy valley below, later the Forum, was used for burials.

Over the following generations the villages merged. During the 7th century BCE the valley was drained and laid out as a public square, and huts gave way to buildings with stone foundations and tiled roofs. A city emerged gradually. Nobody founded it in a day.

Painted scene of thatched timber huts on a grassy hilltop above a marshy valley and a winding river.
Illustration: a reconstruction of Iron Age huts on the Palatine Hill in the 8th century BCE, based on postholes cut into the hill's bedrock. Illustration (AI-generated)

A wall and an argument

Some archaeologists think the legend preserves a real event. In the late 1980s, Andrea Carandini excavated traces of a wall at the foot of the Palatine and dated it to the 8th century BCE, close to the traditional founding. He argued that a deliberate act of founding really took place.

Many historians accept the wall but not the leap to Romulus. A wall shows that a community marked out its territory; it cannot tell us who gave the order, or what he was called. Evidence can be consistent with a legend without proving it.

Why a city needs a myth

Romans valued the story for what it said about them. A founder fathered by Mars suited a people who saw war as their calling. A second legend made the Trojan prince Aeneas their ancestor, giving Rome a place in the Greek world's greatest epic; Julius Caesar's family claimed descent from Aeneas's son.

The dark detail mattered too. Writing amid the civil wars of the first century BCE, the poet Horace blamed Rome's self-destruction on a curse that began with Remus's blood. Each generation retold the founding to explain its own present.

Marble sculpture of a young man carrying an old man on his shoulder, with a small boy at his feet.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius, 1618–19, Galleria Borghese, Rome: the Trojan hero carries his father out of burning Troy, the journey Romans believed led to their founding. Daderot, 2019 · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

In their own words

“Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded… and are rather adorned with poetic legends than based upon trustworthy historical proofs, I purpose neither to affirm nor to refute. It is the privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things with human, and so to add dignity to the beginnings of cities.”

Livy, History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita), Preface 6–7, late 1st century BCE

Translation after B. O. Foster (Loeb Classical Library). Livy was writing more than seven centuries after the date he gives for the founding, and says openly that he cannot vouch for the stories.

Why it happened

  • Iron Age villages on the Palatine and nearby hills grew and merged over several centuries.
  • The site offered defensible hills and an easy crossing point on the Tiber close to the coast.
  • Later Romans wanted a founding story that explained their warlike identity and linked them to the Greek world.

What happened next

  • By tradition, Rome was ruled by kings until Tarquin the Proud was expelled around 509 BCE. Read the story →
  • Romulus's name stayed politically useful: Octavian was offered it before he chose “Augustus”. Read the story →
  • The last emperor in the West, deposed in 476 CE, was a boy named Romulus. Read the story →

Why it still matters

Rome still celebrates its birthday every 21 April, the Natale di Roma, with costumed parades through the ancient centre. The date rests on arithmetic done by a scholar some seven hundred years after the event it marks: a reminder that a tradition can outlive the evidence behind it by two thousand years.

Key people

Romulus
Legendary founder and first king; his name may simply be derived from “Roma”
Remus
Romulus's twin, killed in the quarrel over the new city in every version of the legend
Livy
Historian (c. 59 BCE–c. 17 CE) whose History of Rome is the fullest surviving account of the founding legends
Varro
Scholar (116–27 BCE) whose calculations made 753 BCE the standard founding date
Tarquin the Proud
Seventh and last king in the tradition, whose expulsion began the Republic

Key terms

Palatine Hill
The hill where Rome's Iron Age huts stood and where emperors later built their residences; the word “palace” comes from its name.
Augury
Reading the will of the gods from the flight of birds; Romans took the auspices before major public acts.
Parilia
A shepherds' festival on 21 April that Romans celebrated as the city's birthday.
Foundation myth
A story a community tells about its origins; it often reveals the community's values more reliably than its history.

Test yourself

Whose calculations made 753 BCE the standard date for Rome's founding?

  1. The historian Livy
  2. The historian Fabius Pictor
  3. The scholar Varro
  4. The emperor Augustus
Show the answer

The scholar Varro. Marcus Terentius Varro fixed the date in the 1st century BCE. Earlier writers disagreed: Fabius Pictor put the founding around 748 BCE and the Greek historian Timaeus in 814 BCE.

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Frequently asked questions

How did Rome actually begin?

Iron Age villages on the Palatine and nearby hills grew and merged over several centuries. The site offered defensible hills and an easy crossing point on the Tiber close to the coast. Later Romans wanted a founding story that explained their warlike identity and linked them to the Greek world.

What came after the founding of Rome?

By tradition, Rome was ruled by kings until Tarquin the Proud was expelled around 509 BCE. Romulus's name stayed politically useful: Octavian was offered it before he chose “Augustus”. The last emperor in the West, deposed in 476 CE, was a boy named Romulus.

Whose calculations made 753 BCE the standard date for Rome's founding?

The scholar Varro. Marcus Terentius Varro fixed the date in the 1st century BCE. Earlier writers disagreed: Fabius Pictor put the founding around 748 BCE and the Greek historian Timaeus in 814 BCE.

What is the main primary source for “The Founding of Rome: Legend and Evidence”?

Livy, History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita), Preface 6–7 (late 1st century BCE). Translation after B. O. Foster (Loeb Classical Library). Livy was writing more than seven centuries after the date he gives for the founding, and says openly that he cannot vouch for the stories.

Sources

  • Livy, History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita), Preface and Book 1.3–1.7
  • Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)
  • T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC) (1995)
  • Andrea Carandini, Rome: Day One (2011)

Images are credited under each picture. Paintings and photographs come from public collections via Wikimedia Commons; scenes with no surviving image are marked as illustrations.