the most famous animal in the whole history of rome — the absolute emblem of the city, cast in bronze, struck on coins and carried as a standard by the legions — may never have been an animal at all. the she-wolf who suckled the founding twins was, perhaps, at the very beginning, a woman of flesh and blood.
roman tradition fixes the foundation in 753 bce, a date more symbolic than historical: archaeology shows continuous occupation on the hills centuries earlier, and the varronian dating is today regarded as conventional. according to the account, amulius — the usurping king of alba longa — ordered the twins romulus and remus, sons of his niece rhea silvia, to be thrown into the tiber, to do away with the legitimate heirs to the throne he had wrested from his brother numitor. the myth tells that they survived, suckled by a she-wolf sent by the gods, until a shepherd called faustulus took them in and raised them as his own.
once grown to manhood, the twins resolved to found their own city on the very river that had almost killed them. and here the myth turns from wonder to crime. romulus traced with a plough a sacred furrow in the earth, the pomerium, the religious frontier that set the urban apart from the wild. remus, to mock his brother’s defences, leapt across that line. romulus took it as an unforgivable sacrilege and killed him on the spot. rome was literally being born stained by fratricide.
rome was being born stained by fratricide. and the romans did not hide it: they accepted it as proof of their warlike nature.
the she-wolf, however, was another matter. already in antiquity the episode of the divine animal aroused suspicion, and it was livy who recorded — without endorsing it — an alternative explanation circulating in his own day: “sunt qui larentiam… lupam inter pastores vocatam putent”, there are those who think that the shepherds called larentia lupa. in everyday latin, the word lupa did indeed mean “she-wolf”, but it was also a common slang term for women who worked as prostitutes.
hence the conjecture, already preserved by the classical tradition: that the wife of the shepherd faustulus — identified in some versions with acca larentia, although plutarch distinguishes between them — was a lupa in that second sense, and that, over the centuries, as the origin of the capital of the world was dignified, the woman of low repute was transformed into a sacred beast sent by mars. a note of caution: it is not a proven fact, but one of the rationalisations the romans themselves turned over to account for a symbol that made them uneasy. modern scholarship neither confirms nor refutes it; it simply records it as evidence that, even then, there were those who read the legend with scepticism.
the image survived every doubt. the she-wolf with the twins at her teats — the lupa capitolina — became the emblem of rome par excellence, present on coins, on reliefs and on standards for centuries as the seal of the city’s identity. the bronze statue now preserved in the capitoline museums was long taken to be an etruscan work of the v century bce, but the technical debate opened in 2006 by the restorer anna maria carruba — who pointed out that the piece is cast in a single pour, a medieval procedure rather than an etruscan one — has called its antiquity into question. the laboratory dating agrees: radiocarbon on residues from the casting core places it in the xi–xii centuries ce, and thermoluminescence in the viii–xiv centuries. the traditional attribution to the v century bce still has its defenders, but laboratory dating points to the middle ages without scholarly consensus on its true age.
beyond the animal, what the foundation makes plain is the kind of community romulus had built. to people it quickly, he opened an asylum that drew fugitives, debtors and criminals from across the region: a city of men with no past and no scruples. the problem was obvious and demographic. there were males to spare and almost no women, and no neighbouring community wanted to marry into such rabble. rome ran the risk of dying out in a single generation, and the solution romulus would find was to be the first great international crime in its history.
