Romulus founds Rome, or so the story goes
What happened
Roman tradition held that twin brothers Romulus and Remus, abandoned as infants and suckled by a she-wolf, grew up to found a city on the site where they had washed ashore. Romulus began digging trenches and raising walls around his chosen hill, the Palatine; when Remus mocked him by leaping over the unfinished wall, Romulus killed his own brother for it and named the city for himself. The historian Livy dated Remus's death and the city's founding to 21 April 753 BCE, a date generations of later Romans treated as fact.
Why it matters
Rome told this story about itself for a reason: a city founded on fratricide and a wall no one may cross without consequence previews, in miniature, exactly how Rome would treat every border and rival for the next twelve centuries. Every date in the rest of this timeline is still counted from the year Livy assigned this legend.
How we know
This is legend, not verified history, and the playbook here is honesty rather than certainty. Livy himself was writing more than 700 years after the date he gives, drawing on oral tradition and earlier lost histories, not eyewitness testimony or contemporary records, and no inscription or document from the eighth century BCE confirms any of it.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Romulus and Remus · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Ancient Egypt → · A parallel civilization already three thousand years old when Rome's own founding legend begins