The founding of Rome, which schoolbooks recount as a legend of wolves and twins, was in reality a meticulous, terrifying, and beautiful religious act, marked by gestures that today we would struggle to comprehend.
And yet, in those gestures lies the entire soul of a people who did not just want to build houses, but to create a sacred space where the living and the dead could finally dwell together.
Romulus’s first gesture, the founder’s, was not to plant a stake or dig a trench. It was to choose the place. But not just any choice. Then, as in many ancient civilizations, it was believed that the destiny of a people depended entirely on the place where they decided to take root. For this reason, Romulus, who was Latin and had learned the art of augurs from the Etruscans, did not consult oracles nor follow sacred animals. He asked the gods to speak through the flight of birds. And the birds, it is said, indicated the Palatine Hill. That hill, today swallowed by the center of Rome, was then a wild place dominated by woods and pastures, yet it was there that the Eternal City was to be born.
The true founding began with a sacrifice. Romulus offered to the divinities, his companions arranged themselves around and lit a fire with bushes. Then, one after another, they jumped through the light flame. It was not a game, it was not a superstitious rite: it was a purification. The ancients believed that the sacred fire could wash away every physical or moral stain, and for the act they were about to perform—founding a city, hosting the gods and the dead—they had to be pure. Without that inner cleansing, no foundation would have been valid. Today, where the sense of ritual has been lost, perhaps we should remind ourselves: even we, before starting something great, should cross our own fire.
Then came the most intimate, deepest, most easily misunderstood moment. Romulus dug a small circular pit and threw into it a sod of earth that he had brought with him from the city of Alba, his native land. One by one, his companions did the same: each threw into the pit a bit of earth brought from their own city of origin. It seems a symbolic gesture, and it was, but also a legal and religious act of total seriousness. Because ancient religion forbade abandoning the land where one’s ancestors rested; leaving the native soil meant betraying the Manes, the spirits of the dead. So those first Romans found a genius solution: they symbolically carried with them their earth, their ancestors, their homeland. Thus, by throwing those sods into the pit, they brought the dead with them. The pit was called the mundus, and in the archaic religious language it indicated precisely the region of the Manes, the underworld. From that hole, it was said, the souls of the dead came out three times a year to see the light again. And upon that pit Romulus erected an altar and lit the fire: the first hearth of the city.
Around that hearth the houses, the streets, the temples had to rise. Not before, because the sacred fire was the pulsating heart of the community, the point from which everything started. And around that fire Romulus traced a furrow with a special plow: the share was of bronze, drawn by a white bull and a white cow. He himself, with head veiled and in priestly attire, held the plow handle chanting prayers, while the companions followed him in religious silence. The sods lifted by the share were thrown back inside, so that no particle of that sacred earth ended up on the stranger’s side. That furrow was the pomerium, the inviolable boundary of the city: to jump it was a sacrilege. Legend has it that Remus, Romulus’s brother, did so—and paid with his life.
But if the furrow was inviolable, how did one enter and exit the city? Simple: at certain points Romulus lifted the share, leaving intervals. Those intervals were the gates, the portae, not simple physical gaps but sacred thresholds controlled by the gods. Behind the furrow, then, rose the walls, also sacred: no one could restore them without the permission of the pontiffs. On the sides, a small free space, the pomoerium, remained inviolate: one could neither plow nor build. It was the city’s breath, its buffer zone with the divine.
All this ritual—the choice of place, the sacrifice, the leap into the fire, the pit of the dead, the furrow, the gates, the walls—was not a one-time event. Every year the Romans remembered it with a festival: the dies natalis of Rome, the day of the city’s birth. A birthday that did not just celebrate an anniversary, but symbolically renewed the act of foundation, rekindling the bond between the living, the dead, and the gods.
Today, more than two thousand years later, those practices seem distant, almost irrational. And yet, if we look at them closely, they speak to us of something we have lost: the awareness that a community is not born by chance, but from an act of sacrificial will. That our cities, our homes, our living spaces are not simple containers, but places charged with memory, with rites, with pacts with those who preceded us. Perhaps we no longer need white bulls nor circular pits, but we still need to find our fire, our earth, our furrow. Because without sacred roots, even the greatest city becomes just a pile of stones, and without a rite to remember it, even the most glorious history ends in oblivion.
RVSCB
