8. This Roman silver coin, of 89 BCE, shows two of Rome’s first citizens carrying off two of the Sabine women. The name of the man responsible for minting the coin, almost legible underneath the scene, was Lucius Titurius Sabinus – which presumably accounts for his choice of design. On the other side is the head of the Sabine king, Titus Tatius.
Livy defends the early Romans. He insists that they seized only unmarried women; this was the origin of marriage, not of adultery. And by stressing the idea that the Romans did not choose the women but took them at random, he argues that they were resorting to a necessary expedient for the future of their community, which was followed by loving talk and promises of affection from the men to their new brides. He also presents the Roman action as a response to the unreasonable behaviour of the city’s neighbours. The Romans, he explains, had first done the correct thing, by asking the surrounding peoples for a treaty which would have given them the right to marry each other’s daughters. Livy explicitly – and wildly anachronistically – refers here to the legal right of conubium, or ‘intermarriage’, which much later was a regular part of Rome’s alliances with other states. The Romans turned to violence only when that request was unreasonably rebuffed. That is to say, this was another case of a ‘just war’.
Others presented it differently. Some detected right at the origin of the city all the telltale signs of later Roman belligerence. The conflict, they argued, was unprovoked, and the fact that the Romans took only thirty women (if thirty it was) demonstrates that war, not marriage, was uppermost in their minds. Sallust gives a hint of this view. At one point in his History of Rome (a more general treatment than his War against Catiline, surviving only in scattered quotations in other authors), he imagines a letter – and it is only imagined – supposedly written by one of Rome’s fiercest enemies. It complains about the predatory behaviour of the Romans throughout their history: ‘From the very beginning they have possessed nothing except what they have stolen: their home, their wives, their lands, their empire.’ Perhaps the only way out was to blame it all on the gods. What else could you expect, another Roman writer suggested, when Romulus’ father was Mars, the god of war?
The poet ‘Ovid’ – Publius Ovidius Naso, to give him his Roman name – took a different line again. Roughly Livy’s contemporary, he was as subversive as Livy was conventional – ending up banished in 8 CE, partly for the offence caused by his witty poem, Love Lessons, about how to pick up a partner. In this he turns Livy’s story of the abduction on its head and presents the incident as a primitive model of flirtation: erotic, not expedient. Ovid’s Romans start by trying to ‘spot the girl they each fancy most’ and go for her with ‘lustful hands’ once the signal is given. Soon they are whispering sweet nothings in the ears of their prey, whose obvious terror only enhances their sex appeal. Festivals and entertainments, as the poet wickedly reflects, have always been good places to find a girl, from the earliest days of Rome. Or to put it another way, what a great idea Romulus had for rewarding his loyal soldiers. ‘I’ll sign up,’ Ovid jokes, ‘if you give me that kind of pay.’
The girls’ parents, so the usual story has it, certainly did not find the abduction either funny or flirtatious. They went to war with the Romans for the return of their daughters. The Romans easily defeated the Latins but not the Sabines, and the conflict dragged on. It was at this point that Romulus’ men came under heavy attack in their new city and he was forced to call on Jupiter Stator to stop the Romans from simply running for their lives, as Cicero reminded his audience – without reminding them that the whole war was over stolen women. The hostilities were only halted in the end thanks to the women themselves, who were now content with their lot as Roman wives and mothers. They bravely entered the field of battle and begged their husbands on one side and fathers on the other to stop the fighting. ‘We’ll better die ourselves,’ they explained, ‘than live without either of you, as widows or as orphans.’
Their intervention worked. Not only was peace brought about, but Rome was said to have become a joint Roman–Sabine town, a single community, under the shared rule of Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius. Shared, that is, until a few years later, when, in the kind of violent death that became one of the trademarks of Roman power politics, Tatius was murdered in a nearby town during a riot that was partly of his own making. Romulus became the sole ruler again, the first king of Rome, with a reign of more than thirty years.
Brother versus brother, outsiders versus insiders
Not far under the surface of these stories lie some of the most important themes of later Roman history, as well as some of the deepest Roman cultural anxieties. They have a lot to tell us about Roman values and preoccupations, or at least about the preoccupations of those Romans with time, money and freedom to spare; cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich. One theme, as we have just seen, was the nature of Roman marriage. Just how brutal was it destined to be, given its origins? Another, glimpsed already in the words of the Sabine women who were trying to reconcile their warring fathers and husbands, was civil war.
One of the big puzzles about this foundation legend is its claim that two founders were involved, Romulus and Remus. Modern historians have floated all kinds of solutions to explain the apparently redundant twin. Perhaps it points to some basic duality in Roman culture, between different classes of citizen or different ethnic groups. Or maybe it reflects the fact that later there were always two consuls in Rome. Or perhaps deeper mythic structures are involved, and Romulus and Remus are some version of the divine twins that are found in various corners of world mythology, from Germany to Vedic India, including in the biblical story of Cain and Abel. But whatever solution we choose (and most modern speculation has not been very convincing), an even bigger puzzle is that fact that one of the founding twins really was redundant – since Remus was killed by Romulus, or in other versions by one of his henchmen, on the very first day of the city.
For many Romans, who did not sanitise the story under the label of ‘myth’ or ‘legend’, this was the most unpalatable aspect of the foundation. It seems to have made Cicero so uncomfortable that, in his own account of Rome’s origin in On the State, he does not mention it: Remus appears at the start, to be exposed with Romulus, but then just fades out of the tale. Another writer – the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a resident of Rome in the first century BCE but usually called after his home town on the coast of modern Turkey – chose to depict Romulus as inconsolable at the death of Remus (‘he lost the will to live’). Yet another, known to us only as Egnatius, had a bolder way of getting round the problem. The only thing recorded about this Egnatius is that he overturned the story of the murder entirely and asserted that Remus survived to a ripe old age, actually outliving his twin.