About 1000 B.C.. Villanovan migrants crossed the Tiber and settled in Latium. No one knows whether they conquered, or exterminated, or merely married the neolithic population they found there. Slowly the agricultural villages of this historic region between the Tiber and the Bay of Naples coalesced into a few jealously sovereign city-states, loath to unite except in annual religious festivals or occasional wars. The strongest was Alba Longa, lying at the foot of Mt. Alban, probably where Castel Gandolfo now shelters the Pope on summer days. It was from Alba Longa, perhaps in the eighth century before Christ, that a colony of Latins—greedy for conquest, or driven by the pressure of the birth rate upon the land—moved some twenty miles to the northwest and founded the most famous of man’s habitations.
This hazardously hypothetical paragraph contains all that history dares say about the origin of Rome. But Roman tradition was not so parsimonious. When the Gauls burned the city in 390 B.C.. most historical records were presumably destroyed, and thereafter patriotic fancy could paint a free picture of Rome’s birth. What we should call April 22, 753 B.C., was given as the date, and events were reckoned A.U.C.—anno urbis conditae—“in the year from the city’s foundation.” A hundred tales and a thousand poems told how Aeneas, offspring of Aphrodite-Venus, had fled from burning Troy, and how, after suffering many lands and men, he had brought to Italy the gods or sacred effigies of Priam’s city. Aeneas had married Lavinia, daughter of the king of Latium; and eight generations later their descendant Numitor, said the story, held the throne of Alba Longa, Latium’s capital. A usurper, Amulius, expelled Numitor and, to end the line of Aeneas, killed Numitor’s sons and forced his only daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a priestess of Vesta, vowed to virginity. But Rhea lay down by the banks of a stream and “opened her bosom to catch the breeze.”29 Too trustful of gods and men, she fell asleep; Mars, overcome with her beauty, left her rich with twins. Amulius ordered these to be drowned. They were placed on a raft, which kind waves carried to the land; they were suckled by a she-wolf (lupa) or—said a skeptical variant—by a shepherd’s wife, Acca Larentia, nicknamed Lupa because, like a wolf’s, her love-making knew no law. When Romulus and Remus grew up they killed Amulius, restored Numitor, and went resolutely forth to build a kingdom for themselves on the hills of Rome.
Archeology offers no confirmation to these stories of our youth; probably they contain a core of truth. Perhaps the Latins sent a colony to develop Rome as a strategic moat against the expanding Etruscans. The site was twenty miles from the sea, and not well adapted to maritime commerce; but in those days of marauding pirates it was an advantage to be a bit inland. For internal trade Rome was well placed at the crossroads of traffic on the river and the land route between north and south. It was not a healthy location; rains, floods, and springs fed malarial marshes in the surrounding plain and even in the lower levels of the city; hence the popularity of the seven hills. The first of these to be settled, tradition said, was the Palatine, possibly because an island near its foot made easier there the fording and bridging of the Tiber. One by one the neighboring slopes were peopled, until the human overflow crossed the river and built upon the Vatican and Janiculum.IV The three tribes—Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans—that dwelt on the hills joined in a federation, the Septimontium, and slowly merged into the city of Rome.
The ancient story goes on to tell how Romulus, to secure wives for his settlers, arranged some public games and invited the Sabines and other tribes to attend. During the races the Romans seized the Sabine women and drove off the Sabine men. Titus Tatius, King of the Sabine Curites tribe, declared war and advanced upon Rome. Tarpeia, daughter of the Roman who had charge of a fortress on the Capitoline, opened a gate to the invaders. They crushed her with their shields in fair recompense; and later generations gave her name to that “Tarpeian Rock” from which condemned men were hurled to death. As the troops of Tatius neared the Palatine, the Sabine women, not insensitive to the compliment of capture, secured an armistice on the plea that they would lose their husbands if the Curites won, and their brothers or fathers if the Curites lost. Romulus persuaded Tatius to share the kingdom with him and join his tribe with the Latins in a common citizenship; thereafter the freemen of Rome were called Curites or Quirites.30 There may again be some elements of truth in this wholesale romance—or perhaps it patriotically concealed a Sabine conquest of Rome.
After a long reign Romulus was lifted up to heaven in a whirlwind, thereafter to be worshiped as Quirinus, one of Rome’s favorite gods. Tatius too having died, the heads of the more important families chose a Sabine, Numa Pompilius, as king. Probably the real power of government, between the foundation of the city and the Etruscan domination, was in the hands of these elders, or senatores, while the functions of the king, like those of the archon basileus in coeval Athens, were chiefly those of the highest priest.31 Tradition pictured Numa as a Sabine Marcus Aurelius, at once philosopher and saint. “He strove,” says Livy,
to inculcate fear of the gods as the most powerful influence that could act upon . . . a barbarous people. But as this effort would fail to impress them without some claim to supernatural wisdom, he pretended that he had nocturnal interviews with the divine nymph Egeria; and that it was on her advice that he was instituting the religious ritual most acceptable to Heaven, and was appointing special priests for each major deity.32
By establishing a uniform worship for the diverse tribes of Rome, Numa strengthened the unity and stability of the state;33 by interesting the bellicose Romans in religion, Cicero thought, Numa gave his people forty years of peace.34
His successor, Tullus Hostilius, restored to the Romans their normal life. “Convinced that the vigor of the state was becoming enfeebled through inaction, he looked around for a pretext for war.”35 He chose Rome’s mother city, Alba Longa, as an enemy, attacked it, and completely destroyed it. When the Alban king broke a promise of alliance, Tullus had him tied to two chariots and torn to pieces by driving the chariots in opposite directions.36 His successor, Ancus Martius, agreed with his martial philosophy; Ancus understood, according to Dio Cassius,
that it is not sufficient for men who wish to remain at peace to refrain from wrongdoing . . . but the more one longs for peace the more vulnerable one becomes. He saw that a desire for quiet was not a power for protection unless accompanied by equipment for war; he perceived also that delight in freedom from foreign broils very quickly ruined men who were unduly enthusiastic over it.37