Romulus occupies a central place in Roman tradition as the city’s legendary founder. This essay examines how his myth shaped collective identity, institutions and political ideology across centuries of Roman history. Three arguments demonstrate his lasting significance for Roman self-understanding.
The Etiological Myth and Civic Origins
Romulus supplied Romans with an authoritative narrative of their beginnings. Ancient writers credited him with selecting the Palatine site, performing the sacred boundary ritual and establishing the first citizen body. These stories offered a shared charter myth that united disparate communities under a single civic genealogy. Without this foundational legend, later historians would have lacked a coherent explanation for Rome’s sudden rise among the Latin peoples.
Attribution of Core Institutions
Tradition assigned to Romulus the creation of the Senate, the division of citizens into tribes and the organisation of the earliest legions. Although modern scholarship recognises these arrangements as the product of gradual evolution, their consistent association with Romulus invested them with primordial legitimacy. By linking present structures to the city’s supposed founder, Romans could present political and military practices as timeless and therefore beyond serious challenge.
Utility in Later Political Discourse
Successive regimes invoked Romulus to legitimate innovation. Augustus, for instance, promoted visual and literary parallels between himself and the founder, thereby framing the principate as a restoration rather than a rupture. The same imagery reappeared under later emperors whenever emphasis on origins served to stabilise authority. Romulus thus functioned as a flexible ideological resource rather than a merely antiquarian figure.
Conclusion
Through myth, institutional precedent and rhetorical reuse, Romulus remained indispensable to Roman conceptions of who they were and how their state had come into being. His story provided continuity, authority and a means of negotiating change, confirming his vital importance to ancient Roman identity.
References
- Beard, M. (2015) SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Profile Books.
- Cornell, T.J. (1995) The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). Routledge.
- Wiseman, T.P. (1995) Remus: A Roman Myth. Cambridge University Press.
