newly founded rome had a problem no wall could solve: it was condemned to disappear within a single generation. the city romulus had raised in the mid-eighth century bce was not a city in any proper sense, but a camp of men.
his open-door policy towards fugitives and outlaws had filled the hills with shepherds and outlaws — but with scarcely any women. and no family from the surrounding communities was willing to hand over its daughters to such a rabble, men without past or honour. rome needed wives in order to produce a second generation, and no one would give them. with diplomacy a failure, romulus was left with deceit.
it was no romantic abduction: the latin word raptus (a seizing by force) denoted a kidnapping, an act of violence. it was state policy at swordpoint.
the trap was carefully laid. romulus announced grand festival games in honour of the god consus (the consualia, later identified with neptune) and summoned the surrounding populations. they came in droves and, among them, above all the sabines, a mountain people who arrived in good faith and with their whole families. at the climax of the festival, romulus gave the signal. his men drew their swords, drove off the sabine men by force and seized all the young women. tradition christened it the rape of the sabines, but the name’s ambiguity is worth clearing up: the latin word raptus did not allude to a passionate rapture but to an abduction, an act of force. it was no impulse, but the cold calculation of a state operation engineered to manufacture marriages and, through them, citizens.
to soften the crime, the chronicles have romulus go in person to speak with the captives, promising them full civil rights and respect as legitimate mothers of free men, not the status of slaves. modern scholarship reads the whole episode as an aetiological myth: the story with which the romans explained, after the fact, how their community had absorbed the italic peoples around them. the traditional description sometimes speaks of synoecism (the merging of separate communities), but the term is imprecise here: synoecism properly understood is the voluntary fusion of several communities into a single city, and what the myth narrates is exactly the opposite, an assimilation imposed by violence. the real, negotiated fusion would come later.
because the story did not end with the abduction. some time afterwards the sabines returned in arms, determined to avenge the affront, and the clash threatened to become a massacre. then, according to the account, came the turn that gave the whole story its meaning: the sabine women themselves, who by then had borne roman children, threw themselves onto the battlefield, between the two armies, begging fathers and husbands not to kill one another. the slaughter stopped, and from that truce came the union of both peoples under a shared government.
that fusion left its mark even on the topography tradition handed down. the account had romulus and the sabine king titus tatius reign together for a time, and placed the sabines settled on the quirinal hill, facing the roman palatine: two peoples, two hills, a single nascent state. modern historians dismiss the novelistic details, yet acknowledge a plausible core: early rome may indeed have formed through the confluence of neighbouring latin and sabine communities, and the sabine element remained inscribed in its cults and in its most archaic institutions.
the meaning of the myth lies in that conclusion. rome did not tell its own story as a pure race, but as a mixture: a city capable of devouring its enemies and integrating them until they became part of itself. that assimilating vocation — violent first, generous with citizenship afterwards — would be one of the real engines of its expansion in the centuries to come: rome would grow by absorbing peoples and granting them, sooner or later, citizenship, a strategy no other ancient power practised on such a scale. it is no accident that the episode became one of the favourite themes of western art, sculpted and painted again and again as a founding image of rome itself.
with population secured, however, the danger ceased to come from outside. romulus had amassed too much power, and within the very walls of the city, beneath the togas of the senate, something far darker was beginning to take shape.
