The Founding of Rome

The event

According to Rome's own cherished tradition, the city was founded in 753 BC by Romulus, who (along with his twin brother Remus) had supposedly been abandoned as an infant, suckled by a she-wolf, and raised by a shepherd before growing up to found a city on the Palatine Hill beside the Tiber River. A quarrel between the brothers over where exactly to build the city's walls ended, tradition says, with Romulus killing Remus and becoming Rome's first king.

Whatever we make of the details of the Romulus legend, archaeologists have found genuine evidence of settlement on Rome's hills dating to roughly this period, so the traditional date is not simply invented out of nothing — it reflects a real memory of Rome's obscure beginnings as one more small hill town among many in ancient Italy. For roughly two and a half centuries, tradition holds, a series of seven kings ruled the young city before it threw off monarchy altogether.

No one in 753 BC could have imagined what this small settlement would become. Yet in God's providence, this city of shepherds and shepherd-kings would one day rule the entire Mediterranean world — including the little town of Bethlehem — and would furnish, through its roads, its common languages of Greek and Latin, its laws, and its enforced peace, the very stage on which the gospel of Jesus Christ would go out to the nations.

Dating

753 BC is the traditional founding date calculated by the Roman scholar Varro in the 1st century BC, working backward from later, better-documented events; it is not a contemporary record. The Romulus and Remus story itself is legendary, though archaeological remains on the Palatine Hill do show settlement in roughly this era, lending some support to the general timeframe even if the specific narrative can't be verified.

Other witnesses

• Livy, History of Rome 1.4-7
• Varro's chronology (1st c. BC)