The Founding of Rome & the Monarchy

1. The Legend of Aeneas — Rome’s Trojan Ancestry

Roman tradition traced the city’s origins to the Trojan prince Aeneas, son of the goddess Aphrodite/Venus and the mortal Anchises. According to the Aeneid of Virgil (composed 29–19 BC at the command of Augustus), Aeneas, having escaped the burning of Troy, journeyed to Italy after long wanderings, driven by fate to found a new Troy. He married the Latin princess Lavinia, and his son (or follower) Ascanius founded the city of Alba Longa, seat of the kings from whom Romulus, the founder of Rome, was said to descend. The story, powerfully exploited by the Emperor Augustus (who claimed descent from Aeneas through the gens Julia), gave Rome a noble Greek-and-Trojan ancestry and a divine mandate — a founding myth of extraordinary power that shaped Roman identity for a thousand years (World History Encyclopedia, "Aeneas," worldhistory.org/aeneas/).

2. Romulus and Remus — The Founding of Rome (753 BC)

The best-known founding story is that of the twin brothers Romulus and Remus. They were the sons, in the common version, of Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin, and the god Mars. Rhea Silvia’s wicked uncle Amulius had usurped the throne of Alba Longa from her father Numitor and, forcing her into the Vestal virginate, ordered the twins exposed to die. Set adrift on the Tiber in a basket, the infants were saved when the river carried them to the shore, where a she-wolf (the lupa) suckled them and a woodpecker fed them until they were found and raised by the shepherd Faustulus and his wife Acca Larentia. Grown to manhood, the brothers restored their grandfather Numitor to his throne and resolved to found a city. Disputing over the site and the augury, Romulus, tradition says, killed Remus and founded the city on the Palatine Hill on 21 April 753 BC, naming it Rome after himself. To provide it with citizens (chiefly men), Romulus staged the "Rape of the Sabine Women," abducting women of the neighbouring Sabine people for wives, an act that led to war and then to union with the Sabines under their king Titus Tatius. Romulus was credited with the earliest institutions: the legions, the Senate (100 senators, the patres), the division of the people into curiae, and the comitia curiata. He was said to have been taken up to heaven in a storm — deified as Quirinus, the god of the Roman people (World History Encyclopedia, "Romulus and Remus," worldhistory.org/Romulus_and_Remus/).

3. The Seven Kings of Rome (753–509 BC)

Roman tradition names seven kings who ruled from the founding to the abolition of the monarchy, four of Latin and Sabine origin and three from Etruscan cities:

Except for the last, the kings were believed to be elective chosen by the Senate and the people with the approval of the gods, and their reigns were later read as establishing the constitutional traditions of Rome: the power of the Senate, the military levy, the religious cults and the later offices of state all traced their origin to this age (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Republic," worldhistory.org/Roman_Republic/).

4. The Etruscan Influence

The later kings — and much of early Roman civilisation — were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, the wealthy, urbanised people of central Italy to the north of Rome. From them Rome derived key elements of its religion, its art, its engineering, its gladiatorial games, its practice of divination from entrails and omens, the toga and the fasces (bundle of rods, symbol of authority), and much of its urban planning, including the construction of the great temples, sewers, walls and the Capitoline complex. The Roman triumph, the insignia of the magistrates and the title of the supreme official all bear an Etruscan imprint. The Etruscan kings made Rome a real city and a power on the Latin plain, and their expulsion did not end Etruscan cultural influence over Rome (World History Encyclopedia, "Etruscan Civilization," worldhistory.org/Etruscan_Civilization/).

5. The Rape of Lucretia and the Fall of the Monarchy (509 BC)

Rome’s monarchy fell, in the traditional account, through a single terrible act. Tarquin the Proud and his son Sextus Tarquinius offered violence to the noblewoman Lucretia, wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus; rather than live in shame, Lucretia publicly revealed the outrage and took her own life. Her kinsmen — led by Lucius Junius Brutus, nephew of the king — raised the citizens, expelled Tarquin the Proud and the Etruscan royal family (c. 509 BC), and abolished the monarchy. Brutus and Collatinus were chosen as the first two consuls, and the Roman Republic was born. The date 509 BC — almost certainly too exact, and the whole episode wrapped in legend — became the sacred founding moment of the Republic and of Roman "liberty," and the names Brutus and Lucretia remained for centuries the touchstones of freedom and virtue (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Republic," worldhistory.org/Roman_Republic/).

6. Significance of the Monarchic Age

Whatever the truth of every story, the monarchic era established the deep structures on which all later Roman history rested: the city on the seven hills at the crossing of the Tiber; the Latin and Sabine and Etruscan peoples fused into one citizen body; the Senate as the council of elders; the religious order and priesthoods; the military framework (the comitia centuriata, the legion, the centuriate army); and above all the republican principle that no man, not even a king, was above the law. The expulsion of the kings became the Romans’ moral foundation: from that day the very name of rex (king) was loathed, and for nearly five centuries the Republic feared and hated tyranny above all else. It is with this determined aversion to kings — and this legend of a city born of a she-wolf, destined to rule the world — that we enter the era of the Republic.

6b. The Seven Hills and the Geography of Early Rome

Rome’s fabled situation — "the city of the seven hills" — was the key to its success. The city grew on and around seven hills — the Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine — which rose above the plain of the Forum and the river Tiber. The site offered almost everything: defensible heights; the river for water, trade and defence (crossed by the earliest bridge, the Pons Sublicius, and guarded at the island of the Tiber); abundant fresh water from springs; and a location at the natural crossing point of the Tiber where the great trade routes of central Italy converged. The oldest settlement was on the Palatine, where the Lupercal (the cave where, in legend, the she-wolf suckled the twins) was venerated, and where archaeology has found the earliest Iron Age huts (the capanne) of the first Romans. The Forum below the hills became the meeting-place, market, and political and religious heart of the city. The seven hills, linked and eventually surrounded by the Servian Wall (attributed to King Servius Tullius), made Rome a naturally strong and central city — situated, as the Romans liked to say, at the meeting-point and navel of the Italian peninsula, poised to spread outward from its seven hills to the whole Mediterranean (World History Encyclopedia, "Rome," worldhistory.org/Rome/).

6c. Religion and the Calendar in the Regal Period

The reign of Numa Pompilius, the lawgiver-king, was credited by the Romans with the foundation of their religion — and the religious institutions of the monarchy shaped Roman life for a thousand years. Numa was said to have appointed the flamines (priests of individual gods), the Vestal Virgins (the priestesses of Vesta who guarded the sacred hearth and its never-extinguished fire), and the Salii (the dancing priests of Mars), to have founded the colleges of the pontiffs and augurs (the interpreters of divine will and the validity of ceremonies), and to have given Rome its calendar — traditionally a ten-month year in the earliest days, reworked and, in legend, fixed by Numa into the twelve-month year with the intercalary months that kept it in step with the seasons. The Romans’ religion was practical, legalistic and civic: correct observance of ritual (the pax deorum, the "peace of the gods") was thought to secure divine favour for the state, and a vast apparatus of priests, sacred days and sacrifices regulated it. The later republic and empire inherited this system whole, with its colleges, its pontifex maximus (chief priest, in time held by the emperors themselves) and its calendar named after the gods and the months (January from Janus, March from Mars, and so on). Rome’s religion — polytheistic, formal, state-centred — was the indispensable companion of its politics from the huts on the Palatine to the basilicas of the late empire (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Religion," worldhistory.org/Roman_Religion/).

6d. The Archaeology of Regal Rome — What We Actually Know

Beneath the legends, archaeology reveals the reality of early Rome and lends the traditional account a measure of truth. On the Palatine Hill, excavations have found the earliest huts (c. 1000–750 BC) that match the legendary founding; the Forum shows the draining of the marshy valley (the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer, attributed to the Etruscan kings) and its transformation into a public square in the 7th–6th centuries BC. The Regia (the king’s palace, later the residence of the pontifex maximus), the Temple of Vesta, the Comitium (assembly place) and the Rostra (speakers’ platform) have all been traced back to the regal age. The Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, begun by Tarquin the Elder and dedicated (traditionally 509 BC) under the early Republic, was the greatest temple of Rome, and its layout matches the Etruscan temple tradition. The imposing Servian Wall, traditionally of Servius Tullius — though the surviving tufa blocks date to the 4th century BC — shows the early city’s extent and its desire for defence. And the whole material culture of 7th–6th-century Rome — its pottery, its magnificent Etruscan-influenced bronzes and goldwork (such as the Pyrgi plaques and the Regolini-Galassi tomb treasure) — confirms that Rome was a wealthy and civilised city long before the Republic. The traditional history, filtered and refashioned as it may be, rests on a genuine archaeological foundation: Rome really was an Etruscans-influenced, rich, urbanising city whose institutions, once harnessed by the Republic, were fit to conquer the world (World History Encyclopedia, "Rome," worldhistory.org/Rome/).

7. Selected Sources & Further Reading

While this is a place for so great a race, let the gods and the auspices favour the city.— Livy, Ab Urbe Condita I (trans., Perseus)