We all have a story that gives meaning to our lives, explains who we are, how we got here, where we are going, and what our role is in all this. Whether or not we have consciously cultivated such a narrative or identified it as such, we each have one, however vague. This is now commonly called a metanarrative or grand narrative, and its importance has been discussed before on our site.
Historically, a significant part of that narrative is what we might call sacred myths, especially the founding myths of cities, nations, and peoples. Not all such narratives are fictitious or even fictionalized history; for us Catholics, the inspired and therefore inerrant books of Genesis and the Apocalypse give us our big-picture terminus a quo and terminus ad quem, our origin story and our destiny. The rest of Holy Scripture and Apostolic Tradition fills in the details, while every bit of our Catholic faith and morals informs it so that the whole of our lives, in microscopic detail, is fit into our own personal part of this grand narrative.
Here, I would like to focus on the founding narrative of Christian Rome and how it compares and contrasts with the founding myth of the pagan Romans, the story of Romulus and Remus
Romulus and Remus, so the story goes, were twins descended from Aeneas of Troy, that very model of Roman pietas who was immortalized in Virgil’s Aenead. There are many secondary sources where one may read the story — such as Wikipedia and the World History Encyclopedia — but the “canonical” narrations are to be found in Livy, Dionysius, and Plutarch, with some more or less significant variation in detail. Later Latin authors would continue to develop Rome’s foundational myth.
In brief, the twins were born of Rhea Silvia, who was the daughter of Numitor, the King of Alba Longa (likely today’s Castel Gandolfo). When Amulius, Numitor’s brother, usurped the throne, the new king compelled Rhea Silvia to become a Vestal Virgin, but Mars or Hercules (or someone else, depending on the account) impregnated her and she gave birth to the twins. The penalty for a Vestal Virgin who violated her commitment to celibacy was death, usually by being buried alive. Because Amulius did not want to incur the wrath of the children’s divine father by killing the mother and children, he opted for the somehow less offensive method of imprisoning Rhea Silvia and abandoning the children on the banks of the Tiber to die of exposure. But, the servant tasked with carrying out this cruelty took compassion on the little ones and they were sent, Moses-like, into a little floating basket on the Tiber, where the god Tiberinus, Father of the River, brought them to safety. They were nursed by the she-wolf Lupa in a cave called the Lupercal, then fed by a woodpecker. Eventually, they were adopted by Faustulus, who raised them to be shepherds like himself.
When they were grown to adulthood, they one day got into a pastoral altercation with the shepherds of King Amulius, and Remus was taken captive to Alba Longa. Romulus raised a small army and freed Remus, killing Amulius in the process. Having been offered the reign of Alba Longa by the inhabitants, the brothers demurred and, instead, restored their grandfather, Numitor, to his throne, deciding to found their own city elsewhere. Sadly, they could not agree on where. The Seven Hills of what would become Rome were the general vicinity, but Romulus chose the Palatine Hill, while the Aventine was Remus’ preferred locale. (I shall skip over the bizarre episode involving augury, a sort of prophetical bird-watching which obviously lacked a proper rule book, otherwise it would have settled the matter.) Each set out to build, and when Remus made fun of Romulus’ defensive walls by having the temerity to jump over them to show their uselessness, Romulus ended the matter by killing his brother (other accounts have a servant of Romulus carrying out the dirty deed). Thus, in a story redolent of a tragic account from Genesis, a sort of “original sin” came to Rome by way of fratricide; in the City of God, Saint Augustine, who was well aquatinted with Roman myths, would compare and contrast the story of Romulus and Remus to that of Cain and Abel.
With his twin now dead, Romulus went on to organize the City; recruit inhabitants (not always forthrightly); establish Rome’s laws and institutions, like the Senate and the Patricians; and even codify its religion. Eventually, he would be deified as the god, Quirinus; hence, the Quirinal Palace is named after him. The date assigned to the founding of the City by Romulus is April 21, 753, BC, which is reckoned the year 1 in the Roman dating system (denominated as AUC: Ab Urbe Condita: from the building of the City.)
How much of the story of Romulus and Remus is true is debated. Some take it as myth cut of whole cloth, but others take it as history that has been heavily mythologized, which last strikes me as entirely reasonable. According to Wikipedia,
The archaeologist Andrea Carandini is one of very few modern scholars who accept Romulus and Remus as historical figures, and dates an ancient wall on the north slope of the Palatine Hill to the mid-8th century BC and names it the Murus Romuli.
By the time we come to the mid-fifth century, the era of persecution now a thing of the past, the City having been substantially Christianized, and the papacy well institutionalized, a newer founding narrative comes into the Roman consciousness: This narrative depicts the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, brothers in the faith and in the Apostolic College, as the founders of Christian Rome, something better and more noble than its heathen antecedent. Thus, in a sermon preached for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul in the year 441, Pope Saint Leo the Great tells his Roman audience:
The whole world, dearly-beloved, does indeed take part in all holy anniversaries, and loyalty to the one Faith demands that whatever is recorded as done for all men’s salvation should be everywhere celebrated with common rejoicings. But, besides that reverence which today’s festival has gained from all the world, it is to be honoured with special and peculiar exultation in our city, that there may be a predominance of gladness on the day of their martyrdom in the place where the chief of the Apostles met their glorious end. For these are the men, through whom the light of Christ’s gospel shone on you, O Rome, and through whom you, who was the teacher of error, was made the disciple of Truth. These are your holy Fathers and true shepherds, who gave you claims to be numbered among the heavenly kingdoms, and built you under much better and happier auspices than they, by whose zeal the first foundations of your walls were laid: and of whom the one that gave you your name defiled you with his brother’s blood. These are they who promoted you to such glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state [1 Peter 2:9], and the head of the world through the blessed Peter’s holy See you attained a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government. For although you were increased by many victories, and extended your rule on land and sea, yet what your toils in war subdued is less than what the peace of Christ has conquered.
The reference to Romulus and Remus is obvious. To appreciate the comparison more, the reader must bear in mind that Romulus and Remus were shepherds, so in calling the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, “your holy Fathers and true shepherds,” Pope Saint Leo artfully compared and contrasted the pagan with the Christian founders of the City.
In a wonderfully written article for the website of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, Claudio Salvucci connects some fascinating dots between festivals associated with the two pairs of founders. First, April 21 is not only the date of the founding of Rome; it was also observed as the festival of Parilia, dedicated to the god of shepherds and livestock, Pales. Thus, the shepherding connection mentioned by Pope Leo is made more explicit. Mr. Salvucci goes on to note that Good Shepherd Sunday, with its very “pastoral” Epistle and Gospel, often falls near April 21. Next, the festival of the Quirinalia — dedicated to Romulus under his “divine” name — was celebrated annually on February 17, which is very close to the Feast of Saint Peter’s Chair on February 22. Third and last, after the temple of Quirinus was destroyed in 49 B.C., it was rebuilt and rededicated in 16 B.C., on the third day from the kalends of July, i.e., June 29 — at which point it appears that the festival was “translated” to that date, thus “preparing the way,” some sixteen years before the Incarnation (and roughly two years before the birth of Our Lady), for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on that same date.
In an academic paper written for a scholarly symposium, “Romulus and Peter: Remembering and Reconfiguring Rome’s Foundation in Late Antiquity,” Mark Humphries notes that by the time of Saint Leo, even the pagans had begun to soften the rough edges of the story of Romulus and Remus, with some accounts omitting the fratricide altogether. While the pagans may have been under Christian influence in doing so, that connection cannot, according to Humphries, be proven. What can be proven, though, is that, in the person of the Spanish-Roman poet, Prudentius (348-413), the Christian Romans overtly sought to de-paganize Rome as they completed its Christianization. As Prudentius himself put it:
Trample on the rites of the heathen, strike down your idols, O Rome, and devote song to the martyrs and praise the apostles.
Thus did the poetic praise of Christ, and — mutatis mutandis — of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, weave itself into a new founding narrative of the City and the Empire of Rome. The reign of Leo the Great would begin roughly twenty-seven years after Prudentius’ death, so it is quite possible that the Spaniard’s poetry prepared the way for Leo’s sermon we quoted earlier. Humphries develops his thought over fourteen pages, with another three of bibliography. In the interests of space, we can only fast-forward to his conclusion:
The poems of Prudentius reflect a decisive shift in the perception of Rome’s origins, in which the primordial foundation under Romulus (and Remus) was effaced by a new narrative that prioritised Peter (and Paul). We have seen that already by the fourth century, the story of Romulus and Remus presented Roman authors with a problematic vision of the city’s origins, in which the foundational act was stained with the blood of fratricide. This was a difficulty that authors sought to confront by various means, ranging from passing over it in silence (as Eutropius did) to denying it outright (as, for example, in the Origo Gentis Romanae’s quotation of Licinius Macer). …
That [Christian] rejection [of the foundation of Rome by Romulus and Remus] is plain by the time of Leo the Great, as is the anchoring of Rome’s foundation narrative in another story, that of Peter and Paul. That this was already developing by c. 400 is clear from the significant echoes of this new foundational narrative, and its explicit opposition to the version with Romulus and Remus, in the poetry of Prudentius.
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The literal Crux of our Catholic grand narrative took place at three o’clock in the afternoon of March 25, the year AD 33, when our Divine Lord and Redeemer died on the Cross to reconcile our sinful race to God. One curious circumstance of His Crucifixion is related to us by Dom Prosper Guéranger: According to a tradition of the Fathers, Jesus was crucified with His back to Jerusalem, as if rejecting the nation that had rejected Him and fulfilling the awful prophecy that terminates the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen:
Therefore I say to you, that the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and shall be given to a nation yielding the fruits thereof. — Matthew 21:43
As a result of this bearing of the sacred Corpus, Dom Guéranger says that the Crucified faced West — towards Rome. We know from Holy Scripture that Jesus recited parts of Psalm twenty-one while in His last agony, as two of His seven last words come from it. Some commentators believe that Our Lord silently recited the rest of the Psalm, all the way to its last victorious verse:
There shall be declared to the Lord a generation to come: and the heavens shall shew forth His justice to a people that shall be born, which the Lord hath made. — Ps. 21:32
On the Cross, Our Lord’s thoughts as well as His eyes faced pagan Rome, soon to be converted and made the center of that “people that shall be born, which the Lord hath made” — the very capital of Christendom. From the City of Romulus and Remus, center of a universal temporal empire which takes its name, it would become the City of Peter and Paul, center of a universal spiritual empire, the true Church — One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic… and Roman.
