Uncle Krud's Travelling Roma

Chasing the ghosts of Romulus and Remus around ancient Rome.

Steve of Hog Wild Stuff has agreed to release this beauty in its namesake. Keep it moving and post pictures. Lots of pictures! ©¿©¬

Romulus and Remus are the traditional founders of Rome. According to the legend recorded as history by Plutarch and Livy, Romulus served as the first King of Rome. Romulus would slay Remus over a dispute over which one of the two brothers had the support of the local gods to rule the new city and give it his name. After founding Rome, Romulus not only created the Roman Legions and the Roman Senate, but also added citizens to his new city by abducting the women of the neighboring Sabine tribes, which resulted in the mixture of the Sabines and Romans into one people. Romulus would become ancient Rome's greatest conqueror, adding large amounts of territory and people to the dominion of Rome.

Before their lives began, Romulus and Remus’s grandfather Numitor and his brother Amulius, descendants of fugitives from Troy, received the throne of Alba Longa, upon their father’s death. Numitor received the sovereign powers as his birthright while Amulius received the royal treasury, including the gold Aeneas brought with him from Troy. But because Amulius held the treasury, thus having more power than his brother, he dethroned Numitor as the rightful king. Out of fear that Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, would produce children that would one day overthrow him as king, he forced Rhea to become a Vestal Virgin, priestesses sworn to celibacy.

However, one night Mars, the god of war, came to Rhea in the temple of Vesta and raped her. She bore him twin boys of remarkable size and beauty, later named Romulus and Remus. Amulius was enraged and had Rhea buried alive (the standard punishment for Vestal Virgins who violated their vow of celibacy) and ordered the death of the twins by exposure. However, the servant ordered to kill the twins could not. He placed the two in a cradle and laid the cradle on the banks of the Tiber river and went away. The river, which was in flood, rose and gently carried the cradle and the twins downstream.

Romulus and Remus were kept safe by the river god Tiberinus, who made the cradle catch in the roots of a fig tree growing in the Velabrum swamp, which therefore has a high symbolic significance. He then brought the infant twins up onto the Palatine Hill. There, they were nursed by a she-wolf (lupa in Latin, a designation also used for female prostitutes, leading to an alternative theory that the "wolf" was actually human) underneath a fig-tree and were fed by a woodpecker, two animals that were sacred to Mars. Romulus and Remus were then discovered by Faustulus, a shepherd for Amulius, who brought the children to his home. Faustulus and his wife, Acca Larentia, raised the boys as their own.