The legend continues with Romulus hastening the growth of Rome by making it a refuge for outcasts and fugitives. As the bulk of the newcomers were men, Romulus thus to secure wives for his subjects invited the inhabitants of a nearby Sabine village to attend a festival at Rome. At a given signal each of his men selected a Sabine woman and carried her to within the city walls – the famous rape of the Sabine women. The Sabine men, led by Titus Tatius (d.748 BC), king of the Sabine town of Cures, took up arms against the Romans, but the Sabine women intervened and peace was made. The greater part of the Sabines migrated to Rome to become one people with their new allies: Romulus ruling on the Palatine, Tatius on the Capitoline. After the death of Tatius, Romulus ruled alone.
Romulus is said to have divided the people into nobles called patricians, and commoners called plebeians. After reigning for almost forty years, Romulus mysteriously vanished in a clap of thunder. The superstitious believed that he metamorphosed into the god Quirinus (thus founding the model for the deification of Roman rulers in the imperial period), the cynical thought that the senators had killed him, each one removing part of his body hidden under their cloaks.
He was succeeded by Numa Pompilius (80; r.715-673 BC), son-in-law of Tatius. Moving to a new home on the Forum, he built a palace (the Regia). He is credited with establishing regular cults and priests (flamines, pontifices, Salii and Vestal Virgins), and correlating the lunar and solar year by replacing the ‘Romulean’ ten-month with a twelve-month year.
The peaceful Numa was succeeded by the warrior Tullus Hostilius (69; r.672-641 BC), whose grandfather Hostilius had fallen in the war that had followed the abduction of the Sabine women. Hostilius soon came up against the area’s other major power – Alba Longa. The two cities had adjoining borders and a tradition of cattle-raiding across them.
To avoid a war, Hostilius and the Alban king Mettius Fufetius each chose a group of three brothers to represent them, and the nation of the losing brothers would be subordinate to the victors. The kings swore to abide by the result, witnessed by Marcus Valerius (this is the first mention of the Valerian family). The Romans chose the Horatian brothers and two of them fell before the third emerged victorious.
Mettius sought to regain the city’s independence by provoking Rome’s other neighbour, the Fidenates, into war. The Romans won the battle, and for his treachery Hostilius had Mettius torn apart by two chariots driven in opposite directions. Alba Longa was destroyed, and its citizens transported to Rome where they settled mainly on the Caelian Hill. With the sudden increase in the city’s population, the Senate’s meeting place was too small so Hostilius constructed another, the Curia Hostilia at the corner of the Forum.
With Ancus Marcius (59; r.640-617 BC), the fourth king and the grandson of Numa, the kingship once more rotated from a Roman to a Sabine. Legend credits him with waging war successfully against the Latins and the settling of a number of them on the Aventine Hill, the construction of the first bridge over the Tiber (the Pons Sublicius), the conquest of territory between Rome and the sea along the left (south) bank of the Tiber, and the foundation of Ostia at the river’s mouth and the exploitation of the nearby saltpans.
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