Romulus probably never existed, but Rome's hills were busy long before 753 BC
Romans dated their city to 21 April 753 BC, when Romulus supposedly killed his twin and marked out a town on the Palatine. Archaeology tells a slower story: villages on separate hills, a cattle ford on the Tiber, and centuries of gradual merging that produced a unified city only around 600 BC.
The legend was elaborate. Romulus and Remus, sons of the war god Mars and a Vestal virgin from the royal house of Alba Longa, were abandoned on the Tiber, nursed by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd. After restoring their grandfather to his throne, they quarrelled over founding a new town, and Remus died. The family line was traced back to Aeneas of Troy. Ancient scholars disagreed on the year, but Varro's calculation of 753 BC, flaws and all, still underpins most modern reckonings of the Roman calendar era. The Parilia festival on 21 April became the city's birthday and was turned into the Romaea in AD 121.
Most historians now treat all this as fiction. Mary Beard has glossed the founder's name as Mr Rome, a figure invented backwards from the city itself. Andrea Carandini has argued that some single founding act might lie behind the myth, but that view is a controversial minority position resting on contested readings of the excavations.
The ground itself explains more. In the Bronze Age the Forum Boarium, north of the Aventine, was a seasonally dry plain offering an inland harbour, pasture for watering animals and one of the Tiber's major fords between Etruria and Campania. The steep Capitoline beside it made a natural citadel that could also control salt production along the river. Manure and pottery from the middle Bronze Age survive there, and the Capitoline hosted settlements from about 1700 BC, with its slopes being terraced by the 13th century BC.
By 1000 BC the valley of the later Forum held cremation graves. During the eighth century burials there stopped, paving appeared and the Forum became public space, while a wall went up on the Palatine between 730 and 720 BC, perhaps tracing the sacred boundary later Romans credited to Romulus. City-state formation, probably a Greek idea spreading around the Mediterranean, encouraged the hill communities to combine. The Romans themselves kept a humble Hut of Romulus on the Palatine, with no real basis for linking it to him.
Source: Founding of Rome
