Romulus

The existing description already carries Romulus's founding through the she-wolf, the augury contest and Remus's death. Livy's own narrative places one more episode between the city's marking-out and its first war, and it is the episode that explains why war came at all. With Rome barely founded and its population made up chiefly of shepherds, refugees and the ambitious men Romulus's own hillside asylum had drawn in from every direction, the new city had almost no women and so no way to outlast its own first generation. Romulus's solution was deliberate policy rather than accident. He proclaimed a religious festival in honor of Consus, god of the stored grain harvest, and invited the neighboring peoples, the Sabines among them, to attend as guests. At a signal during the games Roman men seized the unmarried women from the crowd and carried them into the city, an act Livy calls violent but frames as calculated statecraft aimed at securing Rome's future rather than as simple abduction for its own sake. The Sabines marched on Rome to recover their daughters, and it was the women themselves, according to Livy's telling, who ended the resulting war by stepping between their fathers and their new husbands and begging both sides to stop, a peace that joined the two peoples under Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius as co-rulers of one city.

Rome's traditional founding date, 753 BCE, was not handed down by direct record from the event itself. Roman antiquarian scholarship never agreed on a single founding year from any contemporary source, and the date was reconstructed centuries after the fact rather than recorded at the time. The scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, writing in the first century BCE, worked backward from king lists and reign lengths to fix the founding at what the Roman calendar reckoned as the 21st of April, and his chronology became Rome's own official standard, the source of the abbreviation later writers used to count years from the city's founding. Varro's date did not arrive at a blank calendar day. April 21 already belonged to the Parilia, an older pastoral festival honoring Pales, protector of shepherds and flocks, involving the ritual purification of animals by leaping over bonfires, and Roman tradition already held that Romulus's own foster father Faustulus had been a shepherd. Varro's calculation fused an existing agricultural holiday to a new civic one rather than inventing either from nothing. Modern Rome still marks the date each year as Natale di Roma, a civic celebration descended from the same April day, run today as historical commemoration rather than as any continuation of Pales's ancient rite.