Preface: The Starting Point of the Roman Narrative. This essay was completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

A: “The First King of Rome”

In the period when Romulus was active (around 750 BCE), the hills later known as the “Seven Hills” were still independent of one another. Each hill had its own settlement, cultivated land, and defensive arrangements, and daily life revolved around families and small communities. The distance between them was not great, yet insufficient to produce spontaneous unity; on the contrary, such proximity more often meant sustained vigilance. Neighboring hills were both potential partners and constant sources of conflict, with friction typically centered on land, water, and rights of passage.

Romulus’s place in history is better understood not as that of a ruler, but as a starting figure fixed in retrospect. Traditional chronology places his activity in the mid–eighth century BCE, but at that time Rome did not yet exist as a unified city. The Seven Hills were separate, each defending itself, and there was no army, legal system, or standing authority that encompassed the whole. Under such structural conditions, Romulus could not have ruled the Seven Hills as a “king” in an institutional sense. He was more likely an early hill leader centered on the Palatine, maintaining influence through personal prestige, force, and a combined religious–arbitral role.

The title “the first king of Rome” is itself a retrospective designation. It does not reflect the political reality of Romulus’s time, but rather the mature city-state’s later effort to identify a clear point of origin. Accounts of his birth, the founding of the city, and the killing of his brother belong to political myth. Their function is to compress a complex process of formation into a single narrative figure, providing Rome with an origin that could be remembered and retold. These stories are not equivalent to verifiable historical events.

Romulus was not a king who “sat on a throne every day.” He was a figure pushed into the position of a strongman through the repeated handling of concrete problems in an environment where the city-state had not yet formed. His “daily life” determined how he became such a figure.

At this stage, power did not reside in institutions, but in the ability to resolve problems continuously. Romulus’s daily activities were first and foremost military. As a leader in the Palatine area, he needed to organize defense, lead conflicts, and distribute spoils. In a setting where hills were independent and clashes frequent, those who survived conflict, prevailed, and stabilized the aftermath naturally attracted followers. A strongman was not elected; he was confirmed through repeated confrontation.

Second, he had to assume the role of arbiter. Boundary disputes, grazing routes, and internal conflicts arose daily. In the absence of written law or standing institutions, dispute resolution depended on personal authority and immediate judgment. Someone whose decisions were provisionally accepted by both sides would repeatedly be turned to again. Power here was not command, but repeated invocation.

Third, Romulus needed to preside over religious and ritual practices. This was not a peripheral role, but a central one. In early Latin society, religion was not a belief system so much as an instrument of order. To conduct sacrifices, oaths, and boundary rites was to affirm communal limits and continuity. Whoever stood at the center of ritual was regarded as representing “us.” Strongmen were often also ritual focal points.

In addition, he played a role of absorption and integration. Early stories about “welcoming outsiders” and “expanding population” reflect not romantic gestures, but practical strategies: in a competitive hill environment, the ability to gather more fighting-age people meant greater room for survival. A strongman was sustained not by lineage, but by whether more people were willing to remain.

Through these repetitive and concrete daily tasks, Romulus gradually shifted from being a hill leader to becoming the figure who would step forward “when matters grew serious.” He did not establish a city-state, nor did he design institutions, but the roles he occupied—military leadership, arbitral center, ritual officiant, and point of population integration—together formed the prototype of later kingship.

Romulus became a strongman not because he proclaimed himself king, but because in a world without stable structures, he repeatedly took on the hardest, most dangerous, and least replaceable work. When later generations looked back and required a founding figure, this repeatedly confirmed strongman was naturally straightened into “the first king.”

B: “Romulus Founded Rome and Named It After Himself”

In Roman myth, Romulus and his twin brother Remus were born into a royal house. Their mother, Rhea Silvia, was a princess of Alba Longa who was forced to become a Vestal Virgin and was therefore forbidden to bear children. She nonetheless gave birth to twins, claiming their father was the god of war, Mars. When the king learned of this, he ordered the infants to be killed.

A servant, unwilling to carry out the order, placed the two children in a basket and set it adrift on the Tiber River. When the waters receded, the basket came to rest near a cave at the foot of the Palatine Hill. A she-wolf discovered the infants and nursed them; later, a shepherd named Faustulus took them home and raised them. When the brothers grew up and learned of their origins, they overthrew the usurping king and restored their grandfather to the throne. They then decided to found a city at the place where they had been discovered by the wolf. A dispute arose over the site and over who should rule, and they turned to augury. Romulus saw the signs first; Remus mocked him. The conflict escalated, Remus crossed the boundary Romulus had marked out, and Romulus killed him.

Romulus alone completed the founding rites, established a city on the Palatine Hill, and named it Rome after himself. He plowed a furrow along the hilltop to mark the city’s boundary, defining the city first as a space rather than an institution. He then established an asylum, taking in fugitives, the dispossessed, and outsiders. Rome did not require pure lineage; it required population and strength. The community did not grow through inheritance, but through aggregation and absorption. Later, during an assembly, Romulus was engulfed by a storm and disappeared. Some said he was taken up by the gods and became the god Quirinus. From then on, the Romans worshipped him as the city’s founder and guardian.

This set of stories does not attempt to prove that Romulus was good, just, or even fully human. What it provides is a point of return: a city prototype that begins with abandonment, takes shape through boundary-making and conflict, and expands through absorption.

In eighth-century BCE Rome, there were no written records that we can directly rely on. All accounts of Romulus were written centuries later, the earliest dating to between the third and first centuries BCE, by authors such as Livy and Plutarch. When they wrote, they were separated from the supposed “age of Romulus” by at least five hundred years. In historiographical terms, these are not contemporaneous records, but later compilations, reconstructions, and retrospections.

From an archaeological perspective, the facts that can be confirmed are extremely limited. Excavations show that in the ninth to eighth centuries BCE, there was indeed continuous human settlement on the Palatine Hill, with hut remains, hearths, and evidence of grain processing. But the population was small, there were no city walls, and there was no unified urban plan. These findings can only demonstrate stable settlement activity; they cannot prove the existence of a ruler with institutional authority, nor can they be matched to the specific actions described in myth.

Accordingly, in modern historical understanding, Romulus is not a historical figure who “accomplished many concrete achievements,” but rather a name condensed by later generations to designate the transitional phase in the eighth century BCE when Rome moved from scattered villages toward an early town. He represents a temporal marker, a phase of transformation, and an indispensable anchor point in later narratives of kingship—not a ruler whose policies, actions, or chronology can be reconstructed.

Romulus was preserved not because of his historical reality, but because of his narrative function. From the Republican period onward, Rome required a clear answer to the question of where it came from; the sequence of kings required a first link; and the city-state’s collective memory required an origin figure that could be told and personified. For these reasons, Romulus became necessary.

Modern historiography does not simply reject this myth, but restricts how it is used. Scholars do not deny the place of the name “Romulus” in Roman tradition, but they no longer treat any specific actions, institutions, or events attributed to him as established historical fact. What remains is not a verifiable biography, but a mythologized historical phase.

C: “The Narrative Significance of ‘the First Roman King’ Over Actual Construction”

Romulus did not build the walls of Rome; this is clear from chronological, archaeological, and institutional perspectives alike. Tradition places his activity in the mid–eighth century BCE, when the Palatine Hill was only a limited-scale settlement, lacking the population, technology, and organizational capacity required for permanent defensive works. Archaeological evidence likewise indicates that at this stage there were no stone walls, ditches, or continuous defensive systems enclosing the settlement. The city had not yet taken shape, and there was no concept of collective defense.

What myth describes as Romulus “drawing a boundary” does not refer to a city wall, but to the pomerium—a sacred boundary in the religious sense. This was a symbolic line established through ritual, distinguishing inside from outside, sacred space from non-sacred space. It had no military function and no physical form, yet it reserved, at the level of belief, a space that the city could later occupy and expand. Romulus’s role in myth was to provide the “city” with a nameable, memorable point of origin, not to supply its engineering foundations.

The first true city walls appeared in the sixth century BCE, when Rome was no longer a collection of scattered hill settlements but a city that had already achieved factual integration. Movement, conflict, and cooperation among the Seven Hills had become routine; public space and political mechanisms were beginning to stabilize; and external threats no longer targeted individual hills but the entire settlement. Only under these conditions did defense become a genuinely collective problem.

Rome’s first wall in the full sense of the term is traditionally attributed to the reign of Servius Tullius, that is, the Servian Wall built in the sixth century BCE. This attribution does not mean that the wall was the product of a single king’s personal will or labor. Rather, it indicates that during his reign Rome first possessed the capacity to organize, initiate, and sustain such a comprehensive defensive project.

The nature of the project itself made individual construction impossible. Building a city wall required large-scale mobilization, stable authoritative coordination, years of sustained labor and material investment, and the integrated use and modification of terrain. These conditions could only be met while kingship still existed and central authority was capable of coordinated command. In this context, royal power functioned as organizer and mobilizer: defining the scope of the project, coordinating participation among different hills, and ensuring that the work was not interrupted by short-term conflicts or disputes over resources.

At the same time, the wall was not a “royal project,” but a civic one. Labor, materials, and maintenance were distributed among the city’s members as obligations. Participation in the construction of the wall meant acknowledging one’s belonging to the city and assuming the corresponding responsibility for its defense. Through this collective investment, the wall transformed an abstract “community” into a concrete, defensible spatial entity.

The significance of the Servian Wall, therefore, does not lie in its representation of a particular king’s personal achievement, but in what it marks as a stage: Rome had formed sufficiently to require collective defense, and had matured enough to commit irreversible, long-term resources to a shared space. The wall was not the beginning of Rome, but Rome’s confirmation of its own existence. From this point on, “Rome” was not only conceptually defined, but physically enclosed and protected.

Romulus’s importance, accordingly, does not lie in any concrete institutional accomplishments—unifying the Seven Hills, building walls, or establishing laws were all achievements of later periods—but in his selection as the answer to the question of where Rome came from. As the Palatine Hill later became a symbolic center, early local leaders were naturally elevated into founders and first kings. The individual figure thus replaced a long, unconscious process of aggregation, becoming the starting point of Rome’s political memory.

It was precisely at this moment that older forms of power began to appear ill-suited. Kingship had once been necessary—it concentrated resources, pushed through large projects, and completed integration at an unstable stage. But once the wall was finished, defense institutionalized, and civic obligations evenly distributed, personal rule became a liability. Continued concentration of supreme power in a single individual meant reclaiming as private possession what had been collectively paid for and jointly completed. This tension did not need to be argued; it only needed to be felt.

At the same time, public space within the city had developed the capacity to carry political life. Judgments, oaths, assemblies, and disputes repeatedly took place in the same spaces. People gradually became accustomed to being seen, answered, opposed, or supported in public. Authority no longer derived from bloodline or residential elevation, but from the ability to stand one’s ground in shared space. Power began to shift from individuals to procedures, from heredity to rotation.

Thus the city-state was not proclaimed into existence. It emerged naturally after the completion of the walls, as older forms of power gradually lost their necessity and new mechanisms proved less conflictual. The republic was not a rupture, but the most stable form available to a city that had already been compelled to live together and needed to continue doing so.