Reign of Romulus
Romulus (c. 771 BC–c. 717 BC) and Remus (c. 771 BC–c. 753 BC) Romulus was not only Rome’s first king but also the city’s founder. In 753 B.C., Romulus began building the city upon the Palatine Hill. After founding Rome, he invited criminals, runaway slaves, exiles, and other undesirables by granting them asylum. In this manner, Romulus populated five of the seven hills of Rome .To provide his citizens with wives, Romulus invited the neighboring Sabine tribe to a festival where he abducted the Sabine women and brought them back to Rome (remembered as The Rape of the Sabine Women). After the ensuing war with the Sabines, Romulus brought the Sabines and Romans under the diarchy of himself and Titus Tatius.
Romulus divided the people of Rome between the able bodied men and those unfit for combat. The fighting men became the Roman legions consisting of 6,000 infantry and 600 cavalry. The rest became the people of Rome and out of these people, Romulus selected 100 of the most noble men to serve as senators in an advisory council for the king, the Roman Senate. These men he called patres, and their descendants became the republican nobles and elite, the patricians. With the union between the Romans and Sabines, Romulus added another 100 members to the Senate of Sabine birth.
Under Romulus, the augurs became an official part of the Roman religion and the Comitia Curiata was instituted. To form the basis of the Comitia Curiata, Romulus divided the people of Rome into three tribes: one for Romans (ramnes), a second for Sabines (tities), and a third for all others (luceres). Each tribe elected ten representatives, known as curiae, to form a single voting body. Romulus would convene the Curiate and lay proposals from either himself or the Senate before the Curiate for ratification. All proposals passed before the Comitia Curiata were either unanimously supported or unanimously defeated as the majority of curiate voting was viewed as the opinion of the entire Curiate.
After 38 years as king of Rome, Romulus had fought in several successful wars, expanding the control of Rome over all of Latium and many of the surrounding areas. Romulus would be remembered as early Rome’s greatest conqueror and as one of the men with the most pietas in Roman history. After his death at the age of 54, Romulus was deified as the war god Quirinus and served not only as one of the three major gods of Rome but also as the deified likeness of the city of Rome.
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