An Empty City Solves Its Own Problem: Romulus, the Asylum and the Sabine Women

The existing description already carries Romulus's founding through the she-wolf, the augury contest and Remus's death. Livy's own narrative places one more episode between the city's marking-out and its first war, and it is the episode that explains why war came at all. With Rome barely founded and its population made up chiefly of shepherds, refugees and the ambitious men Romulus's own hillside asylum had drawn in from every direction, the new city had almost no women and so no way to outlast its own first generation. Romulus's solution was deliberate policy rather than accident. He proclaimed a religious festival in honor of Consus, god of the stored grain harvest, and invited the neighboring peoples, the Sabines among them, to attend as guests. At a signal during the games Roman men seized the unmarried women from the crowd and carried them into the city, an act Livy calls violent but frames as calculated statecraft aimed at securing Rome's future rather than as simple abduction for its own sake. The Sabines marched on Rome to recover their daughters, and it was the women themselves, according to Livy's telling, who ended the resulting war by stepping between their fathers and their new husbands and begging both sides to stop, a peace that joined the two peoples under Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius as co-rulers of one city.