THE STORY OF ROME'S ORIGINS IS SURELY THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS foundation myth. After centuries of revision, its received version developed into a bricolage of lively tales calculated to favor early Rome with a sense of destiny. According to the familiar narrative, the twin sons of Mars and descendants of Aeneas's royal line, Romulus and Remus, were set afloat on the flooded Tiber by the usurping king of Alba Longa. Landing beside the Palatine, they were taken in and nursed by a wolf dwelling in the Lupercal, a cave overlooking the Velabrum, and later raised by shepherds. In adulthood the pair resolved to found a community but quarreled over its location, Romulus favoring the Palatine and Remus the Aventine. Each ascended his hill to seek auspicious signs from the skies. More by vehemence than logic, Romulus declared his own augury superior, and in April 753 B.C.E. (the date varies by source) he founded his town on the Palatine by plowing a furrow around it to create the pomerium, which he fortified with a gated wall. This quasi-magical protective boundary, but not the wall, would be expanded repeatedly in future centuries.

Mythical Rome in its infancy confronted many difficulties and ferocious foes, but Romulus, designated king of his people, overcame them all by force or diplomacy. Emphatically, his people had no special ethnicity. By any means necessary, he drew them from various peoples in the region, as when he invited the Sabines to games held in the Vallis Murcia (later the Circus Maximus) between the Palatine and Aventine, only to have his men snatch the young women from the crowd and forcibly marry them. Thus began a series of conflicts and accommodations with peoples of central Italy under Romulus and six successive kings, each distinguished for particular character traits and material contributions to the growing city.

Despite its undeniable mythic cast, a few influential modern scholars take the story of the kings seriously, seeking to match its general outlines, if not every detail, with the archaeological record of the early settlement. This school of thought will not detain us. We are satisfied to observe only that the stories themselves became embedded early in Rome's identity, and thus – because embryonic greatness must be anchored to landmarks – influenced its urban development.