The Capitoline she-wolf, one of the best-known Etruscan bronze sculptures, probably dates to the first half of the fifth century. Enveloped in famous myths, she served as a symbol for Roman qualities, both positive and negative.1 Her origin and location in Rome is much debated. She is a mother, depicted in a moment of high alertness, ready to protect her young. Unlike in other representations, she is not shown with the twins, Romulus and Remus; they were added in the Renaissance to adapt the statue to the myth. This raises several questions: why did a wolf become the symbol of Rome? How did Romans and non-Romans interpret this symbol? And why were the twins missing in antiquity?
In republican Rome a statue of a she-wolf stood in two places: one near the ‘‘wolf or Mars cave’’ at the Lupercal on the slope of the Palatine (Dion. Hal. 1.79.8) or (perhaps more probably) near the assembly place ( comitium) in the Forum, the other on the Capitol where Cicero saw a she-wolf with little Romulus before they were damaged by lightning in 65 (Div. 1.20; Cat. 3.19). The former presumably was identical with the sculpture the aediles Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius set up in 296 at the Ficus Ruminalis (Livy 10.23). An early Roman silver didrachm, coined around the time of Q. Ogulnius’ consulship in 269, probably represents this sculpture.2
The twins were therefore firmly linked with the wolf from at least the late fourth century. No extant evidence suggests that this myth was generally known much earlier. What explains its emergence at precisely that time? And why did this myth provide Rome with two founders? More importantly, what is the relationship of myth and history in this story - and in other stories about early Rome? The present chapter
Tries to offer answers to this broader question and to establish what we do know with reasonable certainty about the beginnings and the early history of Rome down to the end of Rome’s conquest of Italy and the beginning of its expansion into the western Mediterranean in 264.
World History
