For several days now, the city of Rome has been celebrating its 2762nd birthday. Festivities kicked off on Sunday the 19th with a fabulous bicycle-chariot race in the Circus Maximus and the projection of She-Wolves on the Palazzo dei Conservatori in the Piazza del Campidoglio.
Just as wonderful as those events, was a re-enactment of the foundation of Rome that took place in the Circus Maximus yesterday afternoon. A large audience gathered to watch the dramatic performance staged by the Gruppo Storico Romano on one of Rome’s most beautiful, crisp, cool, clear spring day (montage of scenes from the performance above, audience below.
We presume that you all know the story, but just in case, here’s a visual overview of the fantastic events that led to the foundation of Rome on April 21, 753 BC.
The story begins in lovely Alba Longa, a city founded when Aeneas, a great Trojan hero and son of the goddess Venus, left the Trojan war and sailed to the Italian peninsula in the company of his son Ascanius. Ascanius founded Alba Longa in the Castelli Romani, the hills to the south of Rome, and for generations the city (a very cosmopolitan place by the looks of the set representing it in the upper left photo above) was ruled by the descendants of Aeneas and Ascanius.
Among those descendants was a King named Numitor, who ascended the throne in eighth century BC (he’s shown with his son in the upper right photo above and with his son and his daughter, Rhea Silvia, in the lower left photo above). Numitor’s reign was not to be a long one, however, for his power-hungry, bouffant-wearing brother Amulius (see the lower right photo above and the upper left photo below) stormed the royal palace and announced his intention to seize the throne.
With a bit of struggle (top left and right above), Amulius took control of Alba Longa. Fearful that his brother Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia might marry and give birth to a son who would be the rightful ruler of the city, but unwilling to put the girl to death, Amulius appointed Rhea Silvia as a Vestal Virgin, a position that provided her with great status, but also required that she remain chaste for 30 years under penalty of death. Happy to have survived the coup that dethroned her father, Rhea Silvia took the vow of chastity willingly and gave herself over to the performance of the holy rites that helped to protect the city of Alba Longa (see bottom right photo).
Though Rhea Silvia was the most pious and devoted and priestesses, the gods took her fate into their hands. In fulfillment of a vow made long before to Aeneas, in which Venus had promised that he would found a race of men that would rule the world, the war god Mars made his way down to earth and paid a nocturnal visit to the holy Vestal, leaving her pregnant with twins (see above, top left and right).
Rhea Silvia was forced to tell her uncle, King Amulius, that she had broken her vow of chastity. Having already done a great deal of harm to his family, he agreed to allow Rhea Silvia to carry the babies and give birth in secret, with the caveat that after the babies were born, they would be exposed to the elements so that no one would ever know of their existence.
Thus, when Rhea Silvia gave birth to twin boys, the babies were taken by the king who put them in a basket and set his slaves to dump them in the nearby Tiber River. However, the slaves did not follow orders exactly. Upon arriving at the Tiber and discovering it to be flooded, they simply put the basket down in the first puddle they saw, presuming that the babies would not survive in the wild. They could not have been more wrong! From the nearby Palatine Hill, a She-Wolf came down to the Tiber River to get a drink. Seeing the babies lying on the riverside, and having recently given birth to a litter of pups herself, she carried the babies back to her hillside cave and cared for them as their own. (A quick note on the Gruppo Storico production: they didn’t have a She-Wolf! How can you re-enact the foundation of Rome without a She-Wolf?!) Eventually the newborns were found by a shepherd Faustulus, who brought them home to his wife. The two named them Romulus and Remus and raised them as their own (see above, bottom right photo).
When they had grown into young men, Faustulus and his wife told Romulus and Remus the true story of their origins. They quickly came to realize that they were royalty from Alba Longa and re-instated their father as king after killing their uncle Amulius. Then, they took it upon themselves to found a city on the site where their lives had been miraculous saved by the She-Wolf.
Standing near the Tiber, however, and discussing who would lead their new city, the twins began to quarrel. Romlulus wanted to found his city on the Palatine Hill (see the top left photo above), while Remus much preferred the Aventine. Unable to settle the dispute between themselves, their father Numitor advised the young men to let the gods make the decision. Thus, they stood and looked to the sky, hoping for a sign from the heavens. Almost immediately, Remus saw six vultures fly over the Aventine Hill and it seemed that this might be the gods’ way of marking him as the winner. Shortly thereafter, however, twelve vultures flew over the Palatine and Romulus was declared to be the victor (see top right photo, above).
Invoking a traditional Roman city-founding ritual, Romlulus harnassed two oxen to a plow and began to plow a furough that would mark an involable and sacred boundary around his new city (see above, bottom left). As Romulus performed this ritual, Remus continued to decry his victory (see above, bottom right photo).
The argument continued until Remus defiled the sacred boundary created by Romulus (see above, bottom left), jumping over the furrow and thereby provoking his twin brother to kill him with his own hands and leaving Romulus as the sole ruler of the brand new city (see above, bottom right).
