Founding of Rome

[4] The combination of the hilltop settlements into a single polity by the later 8th century BC was probably influenced by the trend for city-state formation emerging from ancient Greece.

Roman myth held that their city was founded by Romulus, son of the war god Mars and the Vestal virgin Rhea Silvia, fallen princess of Alba Longa and descendant of Aeneas of Troy.

Exposed on the Tiber river, Romulus and his twin Remus were suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal before being raised by the shepherd Faustulus, taking revenge on their usurping great-uncle Amulius, and restoring Alba Longa to their grandfather Numitor.

The Parilia Festival on 21 April was considered to commemorate the anniversary of the city's founding during the late Republic and that aspect of the holiday grew in importance under the Empire until it was fully transformed into the Romaea in AD 121.

Most modern historians dismiss these ancient accounts of a single founder descended from a Trojan lineage establishing the city at specific point in time as fiction.

Etruscan speakers were concentrated in modern Tuscany with a similar language called Raetic spoken on the upper Adige (the foothills of the eastern Italian Alps).

[7] The start of the Iron age saw a gradual increase in social complexity and population that led to the emergence of proto-urban settlements in central and northern Italy writ large.

[8] There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the area of modern Rome from at least 5,000 years ago, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures any Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites.

[10] The area of the Forum Boarium north of the Aventine Hill was a seasonally dry plain that simultaneously provided a safe inland port for the era's seafaring ships, a wide area for watering horses and cattle,[10] and a safe ford of the Tiber[11] with shallow and slow-flowing water even if Tiber Island had not yet formed,[10] one of the river's major fords between Etruria and Campania.

[2] This advantageous but exposed location was closely flanked by the Capitoline, which at that time rose sharply from the more easterly bank of the Tiber[10] and provided a ready citadel for defense and for control of the salt production along the river and at its mouth.

Excavations near the modern Capitoline Museums suggest the construction of fortifications and some scholars have speculated that settlements also existed on the other hills, especially the Janiculum, Quirinal, and Aventine.

[22] The earliest votive deposits are found in the early seventh century on the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, suggesting that by that time a city had formed with monumental architecture and public religious sanctuaries.

[23] Certainly, by 600 BC, a process of synoikismos was complete and a unified Rome – reflected in the production of a central forum area, public monumental architecture, and civic structures – had by then been formed.

[24] By the late Republic, the usual Roman origin myth held that their city was founded by a Latin named Romulus on the day of the Parilia Festival (21 April) in some year around 750 BC.

Some accounts further asserted that there had been a Mycenaean Greek settlement on the Palatine (later dubbed Pallantium) even earlier than Romulus and Remus, at some time prior to the Trojan War.

[31] Some scholars, particularly Andrea Carandini, have argued that it remains possible that these foundation myths reflect actual historical events in some form and that the city and Roman Kingdom were in fact founded by a single actor in some way.

It also served as a measure of societal control, with the patricians partially justifying their long dominance of Roman institutions by their supposed descent from Alba Longan nobility and other legendary figures.

Romulus was later chronologically connected to Aeneas and the time of the Trojan War by introducing a line of Alban kings, which scholars consider to be entirely spurious.

[52] Ancient attempts to date the foundation of the city were based on the length of the republic, counted by the number of consuls, followed by subtracting of an estimated regal period.

Augustus's Fasti running to AD 13 and the Secular Games celebrated at Rome's 900th and 1000th anniversaries under Antoninus Pius and Philip I, meanwhile, used dates computed from a foundation a year later in 752 BC.

[60] Amulius orders that the children be left to die on the slopes of the Palatine or in the Tiber River, but they are suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal cave and then discovered by the shepherd Faustulus and taken in by him and his wife Acca Larentia.

The dispute is variously said to have been over the naming of the new city, over the interpretation of auguries,[64] whether to place it on the Palatine or Aventine Hill, or concerned with Remus's disrespect of the new town's ritual furrow or wall.

[65] Wiseman and some others attribute the aspects of fratricide to the 4th-century BC Conflict of the Orders, when Rome's lower-class plebeians began to resist excesses by the upper-class patricians.

[66] Romulus, after ritualistically ploughing the generally square course of the city's future boundary, erects its first walls and declares the settlement an asylum for exiles, criminals, and runaway slaves.

[69] In his 1995 Beginnings of Rome, Tim Cornell argues that the myths of Romulus and Remus are "popular expressions of some universal human need or experience" rather than borrowings from the Greek east or Mesopotamia, inasmuch as the story of virgin birth, intercession by animals and humble stepparents, with triumphant return expelling an evil leader are common mythological elements across Eurasia and even into the Americas.

[85] These cults, along with the early – in literary terms – account of Cato the Elder, show how Italians and Romans took these Greek histories seriously and as reliable evidence by later annalists, even though they were speculations of little value.

[91] Another story, attributed to Hellanicus of Lesbos by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, says that Rome was founded by a woman named Rhome, one of the followers of Aeneas, after landing in Italy and burning their ships.