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

During the period traditionally associated with Romulus (around 750 BCE), the hills later known as the “Seven Hills” were still separate from one another. Each hill had its own settlement, farming range, and defensive habits, and daily life revolved around families and small communities. The distances between them were not great, yet not small enough to produce natural unity. On the contrary, such proximity may have brought competition and friction over land, water sources, and passage rights. Neighboring hills were potential partners, but also sources of recurring tension.

Romulus’s place in history is less that of a ruler and more that of 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 hills were independent, each defending itself, and there was no overarching army, law, or permanent authority. Under such structural conditions, Romulus could not have ruled the Seven Hills in any institutional sense as a “king.” He was more likely an early hill leader centered on the Palatine, maintaining influence through personal authority, force, and religious–arbitral roles.

The title “first king of Rome” is itself a retrospective label. It does not reflect the political reality of Romulus’s time, but rather the need of a later, mature city to locate a clear point of origin. The stories of his birth, the founding of the city, and the killing of his brother belong to political myth. Their function is to compress a long and complex formation process into a memorable and narratable beginning. These stories are not equivalent to verifiable historical events.

Romulus was not a “king sitting on a throne each day,” but a figure who, in an environment where no city-state yet existed, was gradually pushed into the position of a strongman by repeatedly handling concrete matters. His “daily life” determined how he became such a figure.

At this stage, power did not reside in institutions, but in whoever could continuously solve problems. His activities were first military in nature. As a leader around the Palatine, he would have had to organize defense, lead clashes, and distribute spoils. In an environment where the hills were independent and tensions likely frequent, whoever survived conflict, prevailed, and stabilized the aftermath would naturally gain followers. A strongman was not elected but confirmed through repeated conflict.

Second, he had to act as an arbiter. Boundary disputes, grazing routes, and internal quarrels were everyday matters. Without written law or permanent institutions, resolving disputes depended on personal authority and immediate judgment. Someone who could produce decisions temporarily accepted by both sides would be called upon again and again. Power here was not command, but repeated invocation.

Third, Romulus would have presided over religious and ritual actions. This was not secondary but central. In early Latin society, religion was less a system of belief than a tool of order. Presiding over sacrifices, oaths, and boundary-marking rites meant confirming the continuity and limits of the community. Whoever stood at the center of ritual was seen as representing the group. The strongman was often also the ritual center.

He also had to absorb and integrate newcomers. The early tradition about “receiving outsiders” and “expanding population” reflects not romance but strategy: in a competitive hill environment, gathering more able-bodied people meant expanding survivable space. Leadership was not maintained by bloodline, but by whether more people were willing to remain.

Through these repeated, concrete daily matters, Romulus gradually shifted from a hill leader to the person who should step in “when things became serious.” He did not establish a city-state nor design institutions, but the roles he played—military leader, arbitration center, ritual host, and point of population integration—formed the outline of what later became kingship.

Romulus became a strongman not because he declared himself king, but because, in a world without stable structure, he repeatedly took on the most difficult, dangerous, and irreplaceable tasks. When later generations looked back and needed a starting figure, this repeatedly confirmed strongman was naturally straightened into the “first king.”

In Roman myth, Romulus and his twin brother Remus were born into a royal line. Their mother, Rhea Silvia, princess of Alba Longa, was forced to become a Vestal Virgin and forbidden to bear children. Yet she gave birth to the twins and claimed Mars as their father. Upon learning this, the king ordered the infants killed.

A servant, unwilling to do so, placed them in a basket and set them adrift on the Tiber. When the waters receded, the basket came to rest near a cave at the foot of the Palatine. A she-wolf discovered them and nursed them; later, a shepherd, Faustulus, brought them home and raised them. When grown, the brothers learned their origins, overthrew the usurper, and restored their grandfather’s throne. They then decided to found a city at the place where the wolf had found them. A dispute arose over the site and who should rule, so they turned to augury. Romulus saw the omen first; Remus mocked him. The conflict escalated, Remus crossed the boundary Romulus had marked, and Romulus killed him.

Romulus alone completed the founding ritual on the Palatine and named the city after himself. He plowed a boundary line to define its extent. The city was first defined as space, not as institutions. He then established an asylum, receiving fugitives, the homeless, and outsiders. Rome did not require pure lineage; it needed people and strength. The community was not formed through inheritance, but through gathering and absorption. Later, during an assembly, Romulus was swallowed by a storm and disappeared. Some said he was taken by the gods and became the deity Quirinus. Thereafter, Romans worshiped him as the city’s founder and guardian.

This story does not attempt to show Romulus as good, just, or even fully human. What it provides is a repeatable 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 we can directly rely upon. All accounts of Romulus come from authors writing centuries later, the earliest between the third and first centuries BCE, notably Livy and Plutarch. They wrote at least five hundred years after the supposed time of Romulus. This means these records are not contemporary evidence but later reconstruction and retrospection.

Archaeology confirms very little. Findings show that in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, there were indeed continuous settlements on the Palatine, with hut remains, hearths, and grain-processing traces. But the population was small, there were no walls, and no unified urban plan. These findings demonstrate stable habitation, not the presence of a ruler with institutional authority, nor any of the specific acts described in myth.

Thus, in modern historiography, Romulus is not treated as a historical figure who accomplished specific deeds, but as a name compressed by later generations to refer to the transitional phase when Rome moved from scattered villages toward an early town. He represents a time marker, a phase of transformation, and an indispensable anchor in later royal narratives, rather than a ruler whose policies, actions, or chronology can be reconstructed.

Romulus endures not because of historical verifiability, but because of narrative necessity. From the Republican period onward, Rome required a clear answer to “where we came from”; the royal sequence required a first link; collective memory required a personified origin. For this reason, Romulus became indispensable.

Modern historiography does not simply reject the myth, but limits 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 associated with him as historically valid. What remains is not a verifiable biography, but a mythologized historical phase.