Founding of Rome

Rome's founding is traditionally dated to 753 BCE, when, according to Roman legend, Romulus established a settlement on the Palatine Hill beside the Tiber River. The date is a later construction rather than a recorded fact, but the story of the city's birth shaped how Romans understood themselves for more than a thousand years, and the city it describes went on to dominate the Mediterranean world.

The date itself comes from the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, who worked in the first century BCE and calculated the founding year by counting back through lists of magistrates and kings. Other ancient writers offered figures that differed by several years. The legend they drew on told of twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, descendants of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who were abandoned as infants and suckled by a she-wolf before being raised by a shepherd. After a quarrel over where to build their city, Romulus killed Remus and became the first king. Later tellers added episodes such as the seizure of the Sabine women, meant to explain how the early town gained its population.

Archaeology tells a more gradual story. Excavations on the Palatine and in the Forum show small huts and burials from roughly the eighth century BCE and earlier, suggesting that villages of herders and farmers on the surrounding hills slowly merged into a single community. The site had real advantages: a crossing point on the Tiber, access to salt routes, and defensible high ground not far from the sea. Over the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, contact with Etruscan neighbors to the north and Greek colonies to the south brought urban planning, monumental building, and new religious and artistic habits. Whether a single figure like Romulus ever existed is unknown, and most historians regard him as legendary.

Tradition holds that Rome was ruled by seven kings, the last of whom was expelled around 509 BCE, leading to the Republic. From that republic grew a state that conquered Italy, defeated Carthage, and eventually built an empire stretching from Britain to Egypt. Roman law, language, engineering, and political ideas left a deep mark on later European and Mediterranean societies.

The founding story remained influential long after antiquity. Romans celebrated the city's birthday each April, and the she-wolf became an enduring civic symbol, still seen across modern Rome. The legend is best read as a window into Roman identity, while the actual origins of the city lie in a slow, archaeologically visible process of settlement and consolidation.