the founder of rome did not die in his bed. according to the official version, he vanished into thin air, snatched up by the gods in the middle of a storm. the rumour running through the streets told another story: he was murdered, and the miraculous disappearance was the alibi the senate sold the people.
tradition places romulus’s end around the middle of the eighth century, after almost forty years on the throne. with time, the account runs, the first king had turned into an autocrat: he ruled with no regard for the senate and despised the assembly of patres he himself had created. one day, while reviewing his troops beside the goat marsh (caprae palus) on the field of mars, a sudden storm broke and darkness swallowed the sky. when the light returned, the throne was empty. romulus had vanished.
the senators swore that romulus had ascended to heaven. the people believed it. but in the streets a much more earthly version was going around.
the senators at once proclaimed that romulus had been taken up into the heavens and turned into the god quirinus. the version suited everyone: it gave rome a deified founder and closed the episode with no one to blame. but the two readings already coexist in the ancient tradition itself, which records the more sinister murmur: livy (i.16) notes it, and plutarch (romulus 27) and dionysius of halicarnassus (ii.56) spell it out: the suspicion that the senators, fed up with the tyrant, closed in on him under cover of the storm, stabbed him, dismembered the body and carried it out hidden beneath their togas, piece by piece, without the guard noticing. if true, the first king of rome would also have been the victim of its first assassination.
apotheosis or crime, the outcome was a power vacuum, with the city on the brink of civil war between the roman and sabine factions. the solution was as cunning as it was revealing: rather than hand the throne to either side, they chose a neutral outsider, a sabine with a reputation for piety and good sense, numa pompilius. and if romulus had been the king of the sword, numa would be the king of the altar.
numa grasped one thing: a people born of fugitives and warriors cannot be governed by laws alone, but by fear of the gods. to lend authority to his reforms, he put it about that he received direct counsel from a nymph, egeria, in a sacred grove. sheltered by that supernatural mandate, he built up, from almost nothing, the religious architecture of the roman state: he instituted the pontifical college — whose head would come to be called the pontifex maximus — ordered the priestly colleges and gave institutional form to the cult of the vestals — which tradition says he brought from alba longa, where vesta was already worshipped. he also, according to the account, reformed the chaotic calendar to bring civil time into step with religious time.
the true meaning of the episode lies in the contrast with his predecessor. tradition presents rome as oscillating from the beginning between two poles — war and law, mars and janus — and numa as the proof that the city knew how to pause and build institutions when it had to. he reigned, they say, for forty-three years without drawing the sword once: a long age of legislative and religious peace.
a sceptical glance is in order here, and the chronology itself invites one. tradition compresses the whole monarchy into seven kings over some two and a half centuries, giving reigns of implausible length — more than thirty years on average — and parcels out rome’s institutions among them with suspicious neatness: romulus the founder and the army, numa religion, and so on. modern historians suspect that those seven kings collapse many more rulers into one figure, or that their biographies are later constructions that project the origin of each institution backwards onto an exemplary figure. numa, in that sense, is not so much a man as an emblem: the archetype of the pious legislator to whom rome attributed, en bloc, the foundations of its religious life. his memory carried such force that, centuries later, the emperor augustus would present himself as a new numa, restorer of piety and peace after the civil wars.
but rome had been born of blood, and the calm ended up boring it. the next king would bring the city back to the battlefield, and he would do so in the strangest way imaginable: by staking the future of two peoples on a duel to the death.
