The founders and heroes of Rome

A myth that ends in a city

Greek myth tends to end with a hero's fate. Roman myth ends with a state. Its greatest figures are not simply strong or clever; they are founders, ancestors, and deified protectors whose stories explain why Rome exists and what holds it together. The arc runs from the fall of Troy to the founding of the city to the deification of its founder — and beyond, into the imperial habit of turning great men into gods.

Running through all of it is one word: pietas. It is best not translated simply as “piety.” It means dutiful devotion to gods, family, ancestors, and country — duty, loyalty, reverence, and responsible relationship all at once. It is the ethical spine of the national epic, and, as the story keeps insisting, it can demand terrible sacrifices.

Aeneas was a Trojan hero adopted as the great ancestor of the Roman people. Earlier Greek traditions knew him, but Roman authors — above all Virgil — made his journey from fallen Troy to Italy the sacred prehistory of Rome and of Augustus. He carries his father Anchises and the household gods out of the burning city, leads the survivors across the Mediterranean, and becomes the mythic ancestor of Rome and the Julian line.

He embodies pietas: duty to gods, family, destiny, and a community that does not yet exist. When he names himself, he names the virtue: “I am Aeneas, duty-bound” (sum pius Aeneas, Aeneid 1). But Virgil refuses easy moral complacency. Aeneas leaves Dido, fights a brutal war in Italy, and kills Turnus in rage at the epic's shocking end, after seeing the belt Turnus stripped from the dead Pallas. His mission creates both future Rome and present suffering. The Aeneid forces genuinely philosophical questions — about fate, free will, empire, and whether duty can justify personal sacrifice — without pretending to resolve them.

Tradition made Romulus and Remus the sons of Mars and Rhea Silvia, exposed as infants, suckled by a she-wolf, and raised to found a city. Roman chronology conventionally placed the foundation in 753 BCE, though the narrative is legend, not contemporary history. Romulus organized early civic institutions and created one of the most powerful origin narratives in Western memory: the wolf and the twins.

But the founding is stained at its root. The brothers quarreled over signs, location, and authority, and the rivalry ended with Remus's death — placing fratricide at the very beginning of Rome. Plutarch preserves multiple versions of that death rather than one certain account, a valuable reminder that ancient authors themselves knew conflicting traditions. Remus is less a cult figure than a tragic counter-founder, the excluded possibility in Rome's origin story. And Romulus is morally ambiguous throughout: the murder of Remus, the seizure of the Sabine women, and Plutarch's report of a later slide toward harsher one-man rule all complicate the founder-hero. The women who tie the two stages together — figures like Acca Larentia, remembered as the twins' foster-mother — carry their own tangle of competing traditions, right down to the ambiguous word lupa, which could mean both she-wolf and, in slang, prostitute.

Romulus occupies the boundary between hero, king, ancestor, and god. One tradition held that he did not die but vanished, then appeared in divine form and commanded the Romans to worship him under the name Quirinus. Plutarch preserves this apparition story, in which the deified founder announces that Rome is destined for greatness. Quirinus was already an archaic Roman god — a member of the old triad Jupiter–Mars–Quirinus, often connected with the citizen body — and the identification of Quirinus with Romulus made him Rome's foundational example of political deification: the transformation of a founder into a divine protector.

The honest caution matters here. The equation Quirinus = Romulus is late enough to raise historical questions, and the god's pre-Romulean nature is genuinely obscure; claims about his exact original function should be presented as hypotheses, not facts. What is certain is the pattern it set. Deification became the template by which Rome turned political founders into divine guardians — a habit that ran forward into the imperial cult and the apotheosis of emperors.

Roman foundation literature is populated with figures who stand just before the city itself. Evander, a legendary Arcadian settler, was said to have established a community on the future site of Rome before Romulus; in the Aeneid he becomes Aeneas's ally and the father of Pallas, guiding Aeneas through a landscape Virgil's audience knows as future Rome — and losing his son to Turnus, so that alliance turns to grief. Anna Perenna, goddess of the year's cycle and renewal, gets the funniest divine practical joke in Ovid's Fasti, deceiving Mars by disguising herself as Minerva. And Acca Larentia accumulates competing biographies — nurse of the twins, wife of the shepherd Faustulus, benefactor, or courtesan — showing myth-making in action, as one name gathers rival stories. These are collected on the legendary figures page.