The Timpson Lyceum · History of Rome – Titus Livius (2025)

Romulus, First King of Rome– Lecture 2 (History of Rome)

Overview

With the city founded, the lecture turns to its first king, Romulus, and to the institutions Rome credited him with creating. Romulus is remembered less as a lawgiver than as a conqueror and organizer: he populated an empty city, seized wives for it by force, fought and absorbed his neighbors, and built the nested military-political machine — tribes, curiae, senate, and legion — that would define Rome for centuries. This is where legend begins to shade into recognizable institutional history.

The reign matters because nearly every enduring Roman structure is retrojected onto it: the Senate, the split between patricians and plebeians, the citizen-soldier assembly, the symbols of kingship, and above all the pattern of war followed by integration that let a tiny settlement grow by swallowing the peoples it beat. The Rape of the Sabine Women and the resulting union with Titus Tatius's Sabines dramatize that pattern, and the whole apparatus of Roman power can be read out of the tidy numbers Romulus is said to have imposed.

Key Concepts

• The Asylum — To fill his under-populated city, Romulus opened a sanctuary on the Capitoline Hill to fugitives, exiles, runaway slaves, criminals, and foreigners. It worked as a recruiting drive but drew an overwhelmingly male population — a demographic time bomb for a new city.
• The Rape of the Sabine Women — Rebuffed when he sought marriage-alliances with neighboring tribes, Romulus staged a great festival in honor of Neptune (the Consualia), then seized the young women — chiefly Sabines — while driving the men out. The Romans framed it as making wives, not slaves: the women were promised shared property, citizenship, and rights.
• War and integration — Outraged neighboring tribes attacked piecemeal and were beaten; time and again the captured women interceded, and Rome absorbed the defeated peoples rather than destroying them. Rome grew by assimilation, a habit that persisted for centuries.
• Titus Tatius and the Sabine war — The main body of Sabines under king Titus Tatius attacked methodically. Tarpeia, daughter of the citadel's commander, betrayed the Capitoline gate for "what the Sabines wore on their left arms" — and was crushed under their shields; the Tarpeian Rock became Rome's execution cliff.
• Intervention of the Sabine women — As the two armies fought in the valley (the future Forum), the abducted women, now wives and mothers, threw themselves between their fathers and husbands and stopped the war.
• Dual kingship — Peace merged the peoples: Romulus and Titus Tatius ruled jointly, and the Senate doubled from 100 to 200 with 100 Sabine members. Tatius was later assassinated and Romulus ruled alone again.
• The three tribes — Rome was organized into three tribes: Ramnes (the original Latins), Tities (the Sabines), and Luceres (origin lost — possibly Alban or Etruscan).
• The 30 curiae — Each tribe was divided into 10 curiae, giving 30 in all. The curia was simultaneously a military levy district and a voting unit — the soldiers and the voters were the same men.
• The Senate and the patres — Romulus's advisory council of "fathers" (patres), men who could name their lineage. Their families became the patricians; everyone else, the plebeians. The Senate could only advise the king — with one crucial exception (below).
• Symbols of kingship — Romulus adopted 12 lictors as attendants (linked to the 12 vultures, or to Etruscan practice) and wore purple trim, which became the color of Roman authority.
• The interregnum and imperium — When a king died, the Senate's one real power activated: a senator became interrex for 5 days to find a successor. A candidate had to pass the Senate, then the curiate assembly, then the auspices, and finally be granted imperium — the right to command — by the people.
• Battle of Fidenae — Against the Etruscan town of Fidenae, Romulus won by a feigned retreat: a hidden reserve ambushed the pursuers, exploiting the fact that ancient armies broke and were slaughtered in the rout, not the clash. Veii was similarly checked, ending in a 100-year truce.
• Death and apotheosis — Romulus vanished in a storm and was worshipped as the god Quirinus — or, in the cynical version, was killed by senators who no longer needed a warlike king. Tradition gives him a 37-year reign.

Worked Example

How the 3 / 30 / 300 scheme nests. Romulus's organization of the state is really one number pattern repeated at every level. Start from the top and multiply down.

1. Rome has $3$ tribes: Ramnes, Tities, Luceres.

2. Each tribe splits into $10$ curiae, so the total is

$3 \times 10 = 30 \text{ curiae}.$

1. Each curia owes the state (there being no taxes yet, only service) a fixed military contribution: about $100$ infantry and $10$ cavalry. Summing the infantry over all curiae gives the original legion's foot:

$30 \times 100 = 3{,}000 \text{ infantry}.$

1. Summing the cavalry gives the mounted arm — the king's bodyguard, the celeres:

$30 \times 10 = 300 \text{ cavalry}.$

1. Read the same pattern per tribe and it nests perfectly. Each tribe furnishes $10$ curiae, $1{,}000$ infantry (under a tribune), and $100$ cavalry; and each tribe contributes $100$ senators. Tabulating per tribe versus the whole:

$\text{Senate: } 3 \times 100 = 300, \qquad \text{Cavalry: } 3 \times 100 = 300.$

The Senate began at $100$ under Romulus and doubled to $200$ with the Sabines, reaching the canonical $300$ as the three-tribe scheme filled out.

1. The result is a single mnemonic — 3, 30, 300, 3000 — in which the political body (300 senators), the cavalry bodyguard (300 celeres), and the legion (3,000 foot + 300 horse) all fall out of the same $3 \times 10 \times 100$ structure. Army and assembly are literally the same men counted two ways. $\blacksquare$

Summary

• Romulus solved his empty city with the Asylum (population) and the Rape of the Sabine Women (wives), then grew Rome by beating and absorbing its neighbors.
• The Sabine war ended in union: the women's intervention, dual kingship with Titus Tatius, and a Senate doubled to 200 before Romulus again ruled alone.
• The state was built on a nested numeric scheme — 3 tribes × 10 curiae = 30, yielding 3,000 infantry, 300 cavalry (celeres), and 300 senators.
• Kingship carried the Senate as advisors, symbols like the 12 lictors and purple, and the succession machinery of the interrex, curiate assembly, and grant of imperium.
• Romulus the conqueror won by tactics such as the feigned retreat at Fidenae, then departed in a storm to become the god Quirinus after a traditional 37-year reign.