Why April 21: Varro, the Parilia and the Date Rome Chose for Itself

Rome's traditional founding date, 753 BCE, was not handed down by direct record from the event itself. Roman antiquarian scholarship never agreed on a single founding year from any contemporary source, and the date was reconstructed centuries after the fact rather than recorded at the time. The scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, writing in the first century BCE, worked backward from king lists and reign lengths to fix the founding at what the Roman calendar reckoned as the 21st of April, and his chronology became Rome's own official standard, the source of the abbreviation later writers used to count years from the city's founding. Varro's date did not arrive at a blank calendar day. April 21 already belonged to the Parilia, an older pastoral festival honoring Pales, protector of shepherds and flocks, involving the ritual purification of animals by leaping over bonfires, and Roman tradition already held that Romulus's own foster father Faustulus had been a shepherd. Varro's calculation fused an existing agricultural holiday to a new civic one rather than inventing either from nothing. Modern Rome still marks the date each year as Natale di Roma, a civic celebration descended from the same April day, run today as historical commemoration rather than as any continuation of Pales's ancient rite.