By Jacques-Louis David - Own work, Mbzt, 2016-09-07 16:51:28, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51344689
Romulus and Remus
"In Roman mythology, Romulus and Remus are twin brothers whose story tells of the events that led to the founding of the city of Rome and the Roman Kingdom by Romulus, following his fratricide of Remus. The image of a she-wolf suckling the twins in their infancy has been a symbol of the city of Rome and the ancient Romans since at least the 3rd century BC. Although the tale takes place before the founding of Rome in 753 BC, the earliest known written account of the myth is from the late 3rd century BC. Possible historical bases for the story, and interpretations of its local variants, are subjects of ongoing debate.
The legend as a whole encapsulates Rome's ideas of itself, its origins and moral values. For modern scholarship, it remains one of the most complex and problematic of all foundation myths, particularly in the manner of Remus's death.
The myth was fully developed into something like an "official", chronological version in the Late Republican and early Imperial era; Roman historians dated the city's foundation to between 758 and 728 BC, and Plutarch reckoned the twins' birth year as 771 BC.
Citation: Wikipedia, “Romulus and Remus.”
The legend as a whole encapsulates Rome's ideas of itself, its origins and moral values. For modern scholarship, it remains one of the most complex and problematic of all foundation myths, particularly in the manner of Remus's death.
The myth was fully developed into something like an "official", chronological version in the Late Republican and early Imperial era; Roman historians dated the city's foundation to between 758 and 728 BC, and Plutarch reckoned the twins' birth year as 771 BC.
Citation: Wikipedia, “Romulus and Remus.”
The Haunting Effects
of Violent Beginnings
In many respects, the story of Romulus and Remus is a delightful myth, rich with enchanting qualities. It tells of twin brothers miraculously spared from death, carried to safety by the river Tiber and suckled by a she-wolf who embodies a surprising gentleness. A woodpecker feeds them, a shepherd raises them, and fate itself seems playful rather than grim. The story is animated by themes of survival, kinship, and improbable care at the edges of danger. Even the founding of a city emerges from a sense of vitality and daring, as though Rome itself were born from courage, imagination, and a touch of wild grace.
And yet there is a dark side. According to traditions, Romulus killed Remus in order to establish Rome. The most common account is that, during a dispute over the founding of the city, Remus mocked Romulus by leaping over the newly marked walls of Rome. Romulus—angered by the transgression—killed Remus, declaring that anyone who violated the city’s boundaries would meet the same fate. Thus the founding myth includes fratricide, and yet the myth is celebrated by virtue of what was achieved: the founding of a great city. The story of Romulus and Remus is one example of a founding myth in which violence is implicitly legitimized because it is seen as securing order. Fratricide, in this case, becomes the terrible price of stability.
What is said about this myth can be said of many others around the world. Again and again, communities narrate their beginnings through stories in which violence is not incidental but constitutive—violence that clears space, establishes boundaries, defeats rivals, or secures legitimacy. These stories differ in detail and tone, but they share a common structure: order is born through bloodshed, and what follows is celebrated for its endurance, power, or beauty rather than interrogated for the harm that made it possible.
Over time, such myths do more than explain origins; they educate moral sensibilities. They teach successive generations what kinds of force are thinkable, what sacrifices are deemed acceptable, and which lives may be lost in the name of a greater good. Even when the violence is no longer openly admired, its logic persists, shaping expectations about leadership, security, and the seeming inevitability of coercion.
Seen in this light, the problem is not confined to Rome. It is a recurring human pattern: founding violence becomes normalized through storytelling, institutional memory, and cultural pride. The enduring challenge, wherever such myths are inherited, is whether a people can remember their origins truthfully without remaining captive to them—whether they can acknowledge what was achieved without continuing to authorize the violence that once made it seem possible.
Within the myth of Romulus and Remus, the fratricide does more than explain the founding of a city; it signals the emergence of a warrior-centered moral order. Authority is secured through force, boundaries are made sacred through the threat of violence, and legitimacy flows from the capacity to defend—and enforce—those boundaries. In this way, the founding act authorizes a social hierarchy in which warriors occupy a privileged place.
Over time, such myths do cultural work. They normalize the idea that order requires violence, that stability depends upon the willingness to kill when lines are crossed, and that those most adept at organized force are uniquely fit to rule. The warrior class does not arise merely as a practical necessity for defense; it becomes a moral ideal. Courage, honor, loyalty, and discipline are defined largely in martial terms, while alternative virtues—care, persuasion, humility, reconciliation—are subordinated or considered 'weak.'
The deeper consequence is that violence, once sacralized at the beginning, becomes self-perpetuating. Each generation inherits not only stories of past conquest but also a tacit lesson: that greatness is forged through domination and preserved through strength. The warrior class thus comes to see itself not as one vocation among others, but as the custodian of civilization itself.
The myth continues. What began as a singular act becomes a pattern, not by explicit choice, but by moral inheritance. To recognize this continuity is unsettling It suggests that celebration without reckoning is never neutral, and that achievements built on violence do not simply rest on history but continue to shape the moral imagination of those who inherit them.
If we live in such a situation, the question, then, is not only what has been achieved, but what kind of people those achievements are forming us to be—and whether we are willing to interrupt the inheritance rather than merely enjoy its fruits. The interruptionn, the breaking of the power of the myth, depends on our acknowledging that we are agents in the haunting of the past.
Conscious haunting occurs as the events are retold, remembered, ritualized, and sometimes celebrated. Stories are narrated in schools, monuments are erected, anniversaries observed, victories commemorated. In these retellings, violence may be justified, aestheticized, sacralized, or reluctantly acknowledged. Even when critically examined, even when reluctantly acknowledged, the very act of repetition keeps the past present, ensuring that it continues to exert moral and emotional force.
Unconscious haunting occurs more subtly. Here the violence is no longer explicitly recalled, yet its moral logic seeps into the habits of thought, patterns of expectation, and reflexive judgments of a culture. It lives on as an inherited sense of what is “necessary,” what kinds of force are permissible, who counts as expendable, and which ends are thought to justify which means. This haunting is not narrated so much as embodied—encoded in institutions, social norms, and unspoken assumptions about order, security, and success.
In both forms, the past is not inert. It functions as a living pressure upon the present, shaping what feels natural, inevitable, or realistic. And when the past involves a violent beginning, the spirit of violence endures.
Generations may emerge who want to turn around - to repent - of the violence. The question, then, is how a people might turn around—or repent—from such an origin without denying it.
One response is conscious reinterpretation. Successive generations can retell the story in ways that refuse to glorify the violence at its core. The fratricide is not erased, but re-framed as a tragedy rather than a necessity, a warning rather than a justification. In this way, memory becomes moral work: the story is told so that the violence haunts as a problem, not as a precedent.
A second response lies in counter-practices that interrupt the unconscious haunting. If the moral of the myth has quietly shaped habits of domination, exclusion, or “necessary” force, repentance takes form not only in words but in institutions, laws, and rituals that embody alternative values—restraint rather than conquest, persuasion rather than coercion, shared power rather than fraternal rivalry. Over time, such practices can re-encode the moral imagination of a culture.
A third response is public lament. Repentance does not require pretending that the founding could have been otherwise; it requires acknowledging that something precious was lost at the beginning. Lament keeps the wound visible without allowing it to harden into destiny. It creates space for grief, accountability, and humility across generations.
Finally, there is the possibility of conversion of meaning. A people may come to see that true founding does not lie in the original act at all, but in repeated decisions to choose life over violence. The city, the nation, or the community is then “re-founded” again and again—not by erasing its past, but by refusing to let the past dictate the future.
In this sense, repentance is not a single moment but a long historical discipline: a sustained effort to loosen the grip of inherited violence on the imagination, and to allow new habits of thought and action to take root.
- ChatGPT with help from Jay McDaniel
And yet there is a dark side. According to traditions, Romulus killed Remus in order to establish Rome. The most common account is that, during a dispute over the founding of the city, Remus mocked Romulus by leaping over the newly marked walls of Rome. Romulus—angered by the transgression—killed Remus, declaring that anyone who violated the city’s boundaries would meet the same fate. Thus the founding myth includes fratricide, and yet the myth is celebrated by virtue of what was achieved: the founding of a great city. The story of Romulus and Remus is one example of a founding myth in which violence is implicitly legitimized because it is seen as securing order. Fratricide, in this case, becomes the terrible price of stability.
What is said about this myth can be said of many others around the world. Again and again, communities narrate their beginnings through stories in which violence is not incidental but constitutive—violence that clears space, establishes boundaries, defeats rivals, or secures legitimacy. These stories differ in detail and tone, but they share a common structure: order is born through bloodshed, and what follows is celebrated for its endurance, power, or beauty rather than interrogated for the harm that made it possible.
Over time, such myths do more than explain origins; they educate moral sensibilities. They teach successive generations what kinds of force are thinkable, what sacrifices are deemed acceptable, and which lives may be lost in the name of a greater good. Even when the violence is no longer openly admired, its logic persists, shaping expectations about leadership, security, and the seeming inevitability of coercion.
Seen in this light, the problem is not confined to Rome. It is a recurring human pattern: founding violence becomes normalized through storytelling, institutional memory, and cultural pride. The enduring challenge, wherever such myths are inherited, is whether a people can remember their origins truthfully without remaining captive to them—whether they can acknowledge what was achieved without continuing to authorize the violence that once made it seem possible.
Within the myth of Romulus and Remus, the fratricide does more than explain the founding of a city; it signals the emergence of a warrior-centered moral order. Authority is secured through force, boundaries are made sacred through the threat of violence, and legitimacy flows from the capacity to defend—and enforce—those boundaries. In this way, the founding act authorizes a social hierarchy in which warriors occupy a privileged place.
Over time, such myths do cultural work. They normalize the idea that order requires violence, that stability depends upon the willingness to kill when lines are crossed, and that those most adept at organized force are uniquely fit to rule. The warrior class does not arise merely as a practical necessity for defense; it becomes a moral ideal. Courage, honor, loyalty, and discipline are defined largely in martial terms, while alternative virtues—care, persuasion, humility, reconciliation—are subordinated or considered 'weak.'
The deeper consequence is that violence, once sacralized at the beginning, becomes self-perpetuating. Each generation inherits not only stories of past conquest but also a tacit lesson: that greatness is forged through domination and preserved through strength. The warrior class thus comes to see itself not as one vocation among others, but as the custodian of civilization itself.
The myth continues. What began as a singular act becomes a pattern, not by explicit choice, but by moral inheritance. To recognize this continuity is unsettling It suggests that celebration without reckoning is never neutral, and that achievements built on violence do not simply rest on history but continue to shape the moral imagination of those who inherit them.
If we live in such a situation, the question, then, is not only what has been achieved, but what kind of people those achievements are forming us to be—and whether we are willing to interrupt the inheritance rather than merely enjoy its fruits. The interruptionn, the breaking of the power of the myth, depends on our acknowledging that we are agents in the haunting of the past.
Conscious haunting occurs as the events are retold, remembered, ritualized, and sometimes celebrated. Stories are narrated in schools, monuments are erected, anniversaries observed, victories commemorated. In these retellings, violence may be justified, aestheticized, sacralized, or reluctantly acknowledged. Even when critically examined, even when reluctantly acknowledged, the very act of repetition keeps the past present, ensuring that it continues to exert moral and emotional force.
Unconscious haunting occurs more subtly. Here the violence is no longer explicitly recalled, yet its moral logic seeps into the habits of thought, patterns of expectation, and reflexive judgments of a culture. It lives on as an inherited sense of what is “necessary,” what kinds of force are permissible, who counts as expendable, and which ends are thought to justify which means. This haunting is not narrated so much as embodied—encoded in institutions, social norms, and unspoken assumptions about order, security, and success.
In both forms, the past is not inert. It functions as a living pressure upon the present, shaping what feels natural, inevitable, or realistic. And when the past involves a violent beginning, the spirit of violence endures.
Generations may emerge who want to turn around - to repent - of the violence. The question, then, is how a people might turn around—or repent—from such an origin without denying it.
One response is conscious reinterpretation. Successive generations can retell the story in ways that refuse to glorify the violence at its core. The fratricide is not erased, but re-framed as a tragedy rather than a necessity, a warning rather than a justification. In this way, memory becomes moral work: the story is told so that the violence haunts as a problem, not as a precedent.
A second response lies in counter-practices that interrupt the unconscious haunting. If the moral of the myth has quietly shaped habits of domination, exclusion, or “necessary” force, repentance takes form not only in words but in institutions, laws, and rituals that embody alternative values—restraint rather than conquest, persuasion rather than coercion, shared power rather than fraternal rivalry. Over time, such practices can re-encode the moral imagination of a culture.
A third response is public lament. Repentance does not require pretending that the founding could have been otherwise; it requires acknowledging that something precious was lost at the beginning. Lament keeps the wound visible without allowing it to harden into destiny. It creates space for grief, accountability, and humility across generations.
Finally, there is the possibility of conversion of meaning. A people may come to see that true founding does not lie in the original act at all, but in repeated decisions to choose life over violence. The city, the nation, or the community is then “re-founded” again and again—not by erasing its past, but by refusing to let the past dictate the future.
In this sense, repentance is not a single moment but a long historical discipline: a sustained effort to loosen the grip of inherited violence on the imagination, and to allow new habits of thought and action to take root.
- ChatGPT with help from Jay McDaniel
Contemporary Analogues
1. National Security as Sacred Boundary
Modern states often sacralize borders in ways that echo Romulus’s wall. Crossing lines—territorial, legal, or symbolic—becomes not merely a violation of law but a moral transgression. Violence carried out in the name of “security” is framed as tragic but necessary, while those harmed by it are rendered abstract, distant, or regrettable collateral. The founding logic persists: order is preserved by demonstrating a willingness to kill when boundaries are crossed.
2. Revolutionary Violence as Moral Birth
Movements that define themselves through liberation or revolution frequently narrate their origins as moments when violence was unavoidable, even purifying. The founding bloodshed is remembered as a painful but redemptive passage, and later coercion is justified by appeal to that original necessity. What begins as resistance hardens into a moral template: justice is imagined as something that must be seized rather than cultivated.
3. Economic Order Built on Disposability
Global economic systems often rest on unacknowledged forms of structural violence: forced displacement, environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and slow harm to vulnerable populations. These are not remembered as “violence” at all, but as the regrettable costs of growth, progress, or stability. Like the founding fratricide, suffering is rendered invisible once the system proves durable and profitable.
4. Policing and Punishment as Moral Theater
In many societies, the use of force by institutions of punishment becomes a public demonstration of order. Harshness is interpreted as seriousness; restraint is read as weakness. The underlying myth is familiar: peace is maintained not by trust or repair but by the credible threat of harm. The warrior logic survives in uniform, badge, and spectacle.
5. Technological Progress as Bloodless Myth
Technological cultures often imagine themselves as post-violent, yet the infrastructures of innovation frequently rely on extraction, surveillance, dispossession, and environmental harm. Because the violence is indirect, delayed, or outsourced, it is rarely named. Progress is celebrated; the cost is normalized. The myth shifts form, but the structure remains: greatness without reckoning.
6. Cultural Identity Defined by Defeat of an Enemy
Communities sometimes sustain coherence by remembering themselves as forged against an adversary—real or imagined. The enemy becomes essential to identity. Violence, exclusion, or domination is justified not as cruelty but as survival. In this way, the founding act is continually reenacted in rhetoric, policy, and posture, long after the original threat has changed or disappeared.
7. Masculinity as Warrior Virtue
Beyond formal institutions, the warrior-centered moral order persists in cultural ideals of strength, leadership, and worth. Aggression is coded as realism; empathy as naïveté. Those who can dominate are seen as fit to lead. Care, vulnerability, and reconciliation are feminized, marginalized, or treated as luxuries. The myth shapes not only politics but personality.
8. “Necessary Evil” as Moral Shortcut
Perhaps the most pervasive analogue is linguistic rather than institutional: the appeal to “necessary evil.” This phrase functions as a moral anesthetic. It allows harm to be acknowledged without being confronted, and responsibility to be assumed without being transformed. Once necessity is invoked, imagination closes. The founding logic is reactivated in miniature, again and again.
- ChatGPT with help from Jay McDaniel
Modern states often sacralize borders in ways that echo Romulus’s wall. Crossing lines—territorial, legal, or symbolic—becomes not merely a violation of law but a moral transgression. Violence carried out in the name of “security” is framed as tragic but necessary, while those harmed by it are rendered abstract, distant, or regrettable collateral. The founding logic persists: order is preserved by demonstrating a willingness to kill when boundaries are crossed.
2. Revolutionary Violence as Moral Birth
Movements that define themselves through liberation or revolution frequently narrate their origins as moments when violence was unavoidable, even purifying. The founding bloodshed is remembered as a painful but redemptive passage, and later coercion is justified by appeal to that original necessity. What begins as resistance hardens into a moral template: justice is imagined as something that must be seized rather than cultivated.
3. Economic Order Built on Disposability
Global economic systems often rest on unacknowledged forms of structural violence: forced displacement, environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and slow harm to vulnerable populations. These are not remembered as “violence” at all, but as the regrettable costs of growth, progress, or stability. Like the founding fratricide, suffering is rendered invisible once the system proves durable and profitable.
4. Policing and Punishment as Moral Theater
In many societies, the use of force by institutions of punishment becomes a public demonstration of order. Harshness is interpreted as seriousness; restraint is read as weakness. The underlying myth is familiar: peace is maintained not by trust or repair but by the credible threat of harm. The warrior logic survives in uniform, badge, and spectacle.
5. Technological Progress as Bloodless Myth
Technological cultures often imagine themselves as post-violent, yet the infrastructures of innovation frequently rely on extraction, surveillance, dispossession, and environmental harm. Because the violence is indirect, delayed, or outsourced, it is rarely named. Progress is celebrated; the cost is normalized. The myth shifts form, but the structure remains: greatness without reckoning.
6. Cultural Identity Defined by Defeat of an Enemy
Communities sometimes sustain coherence by remembering themselves as forged against an adversary—real or imagined. The enemy becomes essential to identity. Violence, exclusion, or domination is justified not as cruelty but as survival. In this way, the founding act is continually reenacted in rhetoric, policy, and posture, long after the original threat has changed or disappeared.
7. Masculinity as Warrior Virtue
Beyond formal institutions, the warrior-centered moral order persists in cultural ideals of strength, leadership, and worth. Aggression is coded as realism; empathy as naïveté. Those who can dominate are seen as fit to lead. Care, vulnerability, and reconciliation are feminized, marginalized, or treated as luxuries. The myth shapes not only politics but personality.
8. “Necessary Evil” as Moral Shortcut
Perhaps the most pervasive analogue is linguistic rather than institutional: the appeal to “necessary evil.” This phrase functions as a moral anesthetic. It allows harm to be acknowledged without being confronted, and responsibility to be assumed without being transformed. Once necessity is invoked, imagination closes. The founding logic is reactivated in miniature, again and again.
- ChatGPT with help from Jay McDaniel
Romulus and Remus
a scholarly discussion - BBC's In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Romulus and Remus, the central figures of the foundation myth of Rome. According to tradition, the twins were abandoned by their parents as babies, but were saved by a she-wolf who found and nursed them. Romulus killed his brother after a vicious quarrel, and went on to found a city, which was named after him.
The myth has been at the core of Roman identity since the 1st century AD, although the details vary in different versions of the story. For many Roman writers, the story embodied the ethos and institutions of their civilisation. The image of the she-wolf suckling the divinely fathered twins remains a potent icon of the city even today.
With Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge; Peter Wiseman
Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter; Tim Cornell
Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Reading List:
Carandini, Andrea. Rome: Day One. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Cornell, T. J. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). London: Routledge, 1995.
Fraschetti, Augusto. The Foundation of Rome. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Grandazzi, Alexandre. The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Livy. The Early History of Rome: Books I–V. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. London: Penguin Classics, 2002.
Livy. The Rise of Rome: Books 1–5. Translated by T. J. Luce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Ovid. Times and Reasons: A New Translation of Fasti. Translated by Anne Wiseman and Peter Wiseman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Plutarch. Lives. Vol. 1. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Wiseman, T. P. Remus: A Roman Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Wiseman, T. P. The Myths of Rome. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.
The myth has been at the core of Roman identity since the 1st century AD, although the details vary in different versions of the story. For many Roman writers, the story embodied the ethos and institutions of their civilisation. The image of the she-wolf suckling the divinely fathered twins remains a potent icon of the city even today.
With Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge; Peter Wiseman
Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter; Tim Cornell
Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester.
Producer: Thomas Morris.
Reading List:
Carandini, Andrea. Rome: Day One. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Cornell, T. J. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). London: Routledge, 1995.
Fraschetti, Augusto. The Foundation of Rome. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Grandazzi, Alexandre. The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Livy. The Early History of Rome: Books I–V. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. London: Penguin Classics, 2002.
Livy. The Rise of Rome: Books 1–5. Translated by T. J. Luce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Ovid. Times and Reasons: A New Translation of Fasti. Translated by Anne Wiseman and Peter Wiseman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Plutarch. Lives. Vol. 1. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Wiseman, T. P. Remus: A Roman Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Wiseman, T. P. The Myths of Rome. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.
By Wilfredor, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145564917