Rome – the foundation

It is quite easy and straight forward when you think of it.

According to the legend, Troy fell in 1184 BC and its hero Aeneas (son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite) escapes the city carrying with him his father and his son Ascanius.

Aeneas wanders for years on the Mediterranean (including a love affair with Dido in the city of Carthage) until he reaches Italy where Ascanius, by now grown up, founded the city of Alba Longa not that distant from the site where eventually Rome would be founded. The year is now 1152 BC.

Ascanius begins a line of kings of which the last one was called Amulius who takes over the throne of Alba Longa from his rightful occupant, his own brother Numitor.

Numitor had a daughter named Rhea Silvia.

So that Rhea could Silvia would not produce a son and a potential threat and heir to the throne, Amulius makes her a Vestal Virgin.

Mars, the war god, gets frisky and impregnates Rhea Silvia (a god getting a Virgin impregnated…this sounds familiar…)

Amulius realising that Rhea was pregnant gets her arrested and Rhea dies of ill treatment.

However – and this is the crucial bit – before dying she delivers her two twin sons, Romulus and Remus.

Amulius then orders his men to throw the twins into the river Tiber.

His men, however, mess up and dump the two boys on the shallow waters of the river’s edge and go away.

Luckily, the two boys are found by a she wolf that feeds them with its own milk until they are strong enough to be brought to adulthood by the royal herdsman, Faustulus.

The two boys then overthrow Amulius and restore Numitor to his rightful place as king of Alba Longa and it is then that they decide to found a new settlement on the bank of the river Tiber where they had been found and this becomes the city of Rome.

The year is now the legendary 753 BC.

With plots like this who needs to watch soap operas!?

Aeneas escaping the burning city of Troy is a scene profusely reproduced by various artists throughout the centuries. One of my favourites is Bernini’s sculpture in Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Aeneas being a hero of Troy against the Greeks and a son of the goddess Venus provides the heroic and divine origin a city like Rome deserves.

This is a story of propaganda. Julius Caesar, for instance, traced his ancestors back to Aeneas so that he could claim his origins in a hero linked with the gods.

The iconic statue of the she wolf with Romulus and Remus can be admired in the Capitoline Museum, Rome.

The statue of the she wolf is dated V century BC of Etruscan origin (even though recently this has been disputed by Anna Maria Carruba in her “La Lupa Capitolina – Un bronzo medieval” according to which the famous statue could be dated in the Middle Ages which just reiterates that Rome is always ready to be discovered again and endlessly).

The twins were added around the end of the XV century by the Florentine artist Antonio Pollaiuolo.