Preface:

Human beings’ need for belief has existed since the very beginning of human existence. As primates, we sense a rupture between ourselves and the other animals around us. Our capacity for thought, our individuality, and our consciousness bring with them loneliness and confusion. The uncertainty produced by this confusion and anxiety naturally drives us to seek forces greater than ourselves, forces invested with authority. Who are we? What are we permitted to do? What does the future look like?

This essay was written in collaboration with ChatGPT.

In early Rome—and more broadly across the Italian–Etruscan cultural world—space did not possess inherent legitimacy. A piece of land did not automatically qualify as a city simply because it was occupied; the gathering of people did not in itself imply divine approval; even control achieved through violence could only produce a temporary stronghold, not guarantee long-term existence. In other words, physical possession, population size, and military strength were insufficient to make a place truly “a city.”

The legitimacy of a city’s existence could come from only one source: confirmation of divine will. That divine will was not the product of abstract reasoning; its only visible manifestation in reality was augury and the religious rituals that followed from it. Only when augury indicated divine permission could ritual proceed, and only when ritual was completed did the nature of the space itself change. In this context, augury was not a tool for predicting the future but a mechanism of authorization. It answered not the question “Will this place succeed in the future?” but a more fundamental one: “Does the divine allow human beings to establish order here?”

Within the pomerium, the nature of space was fundamentally transformed. The gods were formally invited into the city, residing there through altars, sacred fire, and continuous ritual practice. Human actions were no longer merely individual or familial acts but were incorporated into an order jointly constituted by gods and humans. Within this framework, the division of time, the formation of marriage, the handling of death, and the execution of judgment all acquired religious meaning, no longer serving merely technical or utilitarian purposes.

Accordingly, the city was not simply “a safer place,” but a space explicitly incorporated into the cosmic order. Every action within it was implicitly carried out under divine observation and approval. By contrast, outside the city remained the realm of nature and mobility, where war and violence could be legitimately exercised. There, no stable or enduring legal order existed; military action, forcible occupation, and temporary domination were all permissible states.

It was precisely because of this fundamental distinction that Rome developed a series of arrangements that may appear strict but were in fact highly coherent: generals were required to relinquish command outside the city; armed troops were forbidden to enter the city freely; and the powers associated with war could not be brought within its boundaries. The reason lay not in administrative technique, but in the fact that such forces, once inside, would contaminate a space already acknowledged by the gods and incorporated into order.

In legend, the killing of Remus for leaping over the boundary is not fundamentally about disrespectful attitude or insolent speech. The crucial point is that if crossing the pomerium incurred no cost, the boundary would effectively cease to exist. Once the boundary vanished, the very conditions for the city’s founding would collapse. In such a case, the “city” would have been annulled at the very moment of its birth, reduced to nothing more than a temporary gathering of people, liable at any time to disperse, migrate, or be replaced by a stronger force.

The act of crossing the pomerium therefore carried a meaning far beyond mere trespass. It first signified a denial of the gods’ permission for the city’s existence. If the boundary could be casually stepped over, mocked, or ignored, then the divine will previously confirmed through augury and ritual would be nullified, hollowing out the foundation of the city’s existence. Second, it denied the fundamental distinction between inside and outside. The city was governed by stable law, ritual, and daily order precisely because it had been cut off from the conditions of nature, war, and violence. Once the boundary failed, the city would slide back into a state indistinguishable from the outside, where law and religion no longer held priority.

In Roman tradition, the end of Romulus was deliberately framed not as death but as disappearance. While addressing a public assembly, a sudden storm arose, clouds and thunder obscured the scene, and the crowd scattered. When the storm cleared, Romulus was gone. The city then proclaimed that he had not died but had been taken up to the heavens and transformed into the god Quirinus. This was not a romantic mythologization, but a highly functional political–religious narrative design. The manner of Romulus’s exit had to be carefully controlled, because it bore directly on the source of Rome’s legitimacy.

If Romulus had died at human hands—whether by assassination, internal conflict, or coup—the conclusion would have been the same: the founder of the city could be negated. The city’s origin would then be reinterpreted as the failure of a personal rule, rather than the beginning of a recognized order. Rome would no longer appear as something “permitted to exist,” but merely as the residue of a power struggle.

If he had been overthrown or deposed, the problem would have been even more severe. That would imply that the authority of the founding itself was subject to revision or revocation, leaving the city’s legitimacy vulnerable to political fluctuation. Rome would lose an indisputable point of origin, and the justification for its existence would be drawn into perpetual political contestation.

Thus, only one narrative was safe: ascension. When Romulus was proclaimed the god Quirinus, the act of founding the city was removed from the sphere of human power and returned to the sacred realm. He was not killed, nor deposed, but “reclaimed” by the gods. The founding was thereby sealed as a completed act—unchangeable, unaccountable, and unrepeatable.

Ancient historians, while preserving the official myth, also deliberately left open a narrow gap for another explanation: that Romulus, in the later phase of his rule, may have been killed by senators or nobles because his power had become overly concentrated. This suggestion is not a later conspiracy theory, but a muted aside from ancient authors themselves, who understood that mythological narrative did not exhaust historical reality.

It must be emphasized, however, that this version was always treated as rumor. It was never systematically developed: no clear perpetrators, no public trial, no accountable political process. Its function was not to replace the official narrative, but to provide a realistic footnote explaining political tension—that Romulus’s personal authority may indeed have pressed against the limits of aristocratic tolerance.

After Romulus’s disappearance, Rome did not immediately select a successor, but entered a period without a king.

The Interregnum was not a passive power vacuum, but a deliberately inserted “de-mythologizing buffer” following the founder’s exit. After Romulus disappeared, Rome did not rush to install a new ruler. Instead, power was temporarily returned to the Senate, and succession was handled through a highly procedural, deliberately cooling process. During this period, senators ruled in rotation—not as a collective holding long-term authority, but as individuals exercising supreme power for only a few days at a time. This design intentionally prevented anyone from accumulating lasting authority: the terms were too short to build personal prestige, and the frequent transitions blocked any single faction from consolidating dominance.

From the outset, the purpose of this arrangement was not “to govern the city,” but to manage risk. First, it prevented the power vacuum that might have followed the founder’s disappearance; the city could not be allowed to slide back into tribal conditions or violent competition. Second, rotation balanced families and factions, ensuring that all key forces were included in the transitional structure rather than excluded from it. Most importantly, this stage served a third goal: finding someone who would not replicate Romulus. Rome needed not a second founder, but a ruler capable of bringing the city into a normal, stable condition.

Post-Romulus Rome was not “a unified whole,” but a composite of different families, war-based groups, and both old and new migrants. If the second king had come from within Rome, any candidate would have been interpreted as a victory for one faction, immediately reigniting competition. An outsider, by contrast, was not embedded in Rome’s networks of bloodline and merit, and therefore could not be naturally categorized as “belonging” to anyone. Kingship was thus de-factionalized.

For this reason, Numa Pompilius, as a Sabine, was sufficiently “external” to avoid entanglement in Roman internal factions, yet sufficiently “related” to be accepted as a member of the community. This geographical and cultural position—close but not internal—formed the practical basis for his selection as the second king.

The Sabines were a mountain people of central Italy, whose core territory lay in the Apennine highlands northeast of Rome, roughly corresponding to today’s northeastern Lazio and southern Umbria. Geographically, their homeland was inland, elevated, and relatively isolated, in sharp contrast to Rome’s location along the lower Tiber near the coast. These conditions shaped Sabine society: dispersed populations, an agrarian economy, a conservative pace of life, and political and religious structures oriented toward stability and continuity rather than outward expansion.

Culturally, the Sabines stood in a relationship of both conflict and integration with early Rome. The legendary “abduction of the Sabine women” already reflects tension and demographic incorporation, while the subsequent union of Sabines and Romans constituted one of Rome’s earliest instances of cross-ethnic integration. The Sabines were therefore not an entirely foreign other, but an early component of the Roman community—positioned outside the city spatially, and outside its internal system institutionally.