Plutarch's opening Life of Parallel Lives sifts the competing legends of Rome's wolf-suckled founder, from his miraculous birth and the rape of the Sabine women to his unexplained vanishing during a storm.
Romulus opens Plutarch's Parallel Lives with a problem Plutarch states outright: no one agrees on who founded Rome, why it bears that name, or where Romulus himself came from. Plutarch works through half a dozen rival origin stories — Pelasgian settlers, Trojan refugees, a woman named Rhome who burned the ships, a phallus rising from a king's hearth — before settling on the version he finds "most widely credited and best attested": Romulus and his twin Remus, grandsons of the deposed Alban king Numitor, exposed as infants on the flooding Tiber, suckled by a she-wolf, raised by the herdsman Faustulus, and eventually restored to their grandfather after overthrowing the usurper Amulius.
From there the Life follows Romulus through the founding proper: the augury contest with Remus that ends in his brother's death, the ritual plowing of the pomerium, the asylum that filled the new city with runaways and the landless, and the seizure of the Sabine women — a mass abduction Plutarch treats as a hard-necked but explicable response to a city with no wives. War with the Sabines nearly destroys Rome until the abducted women themselves run between the battle lines and beg their fathers and husbands to stop, producing a merged state under joint kings, Romulus and Tatius. The back half of the Life tracks Rome's wars with Fidenae, Veii, and Cameria, Romulus's drift into an increasingly autocratic style of rule, and his sudden disappearance during an assembly, amid a violent storm, in his fifty-fourth year — an ending Plutarch treats with visible skepticism, comparing it to Greek tales of vanished heroes like Aristeas and Cleomedes before offering his own philosophical account of what apotheosis could mean.
As the first of the Parallel Lives, Romulus sets the terms for the whole project: Plutarch is doing comparative biography, not just history, and he tells the reader so by constantly flagging his sources (Fabius Pictor, Diocles of Peparethus, Juba, Varro) and by refusing to adjudicate between competing legends where the evidence won't allow it. The Life became one of antiquity's most consequential origin narratives — the source, filtered through countless later retellings, for the she-wolf, the twins, the fratricide, and the rape of the Sabine women as the base layer of Roman self-understanding, and eventually paired by Plutarch with Theseus as founder-figures whose cities both trace their beginnings to violence made sacred.
“The great name of Rome, which has spread through fame among all mankind, is not agreed upon by the historians as to who gave it to the city and for what reason”
— Romulus
“There, then, as the infants lay, they say the she-wolf was seen suckling them, and a woodpecker was also present, helping to feed and guard them.”
— Romulus
“Indeed, nothing did more to increase Rome than this — its constant practice of attaching to itself and incorporating those whom it conquered.”
— Romulus
“It pleased the gods, Proculus, that we should spend so much time among men, we who came from there, and having founded a city of the greatest power and glory, should again dwell in heaven.”
— Romulus
“We must say, then, holding to what is safe, in the words of Pindar, that the body of everyone follows overpowering death, but a living image of eternity still remains; for that alone comes from the gods.”
— Romulus
Plutarch reports it as disputed: Remus mocked and interfered with Romulus's construction of the city wall, and when he leapt over the trench that marked its line, he was struck down — by Romulus himself according to some accounts, or by a companion named Celer according to others. Plutarch does not choose between the versions, and Romulus later buries Remus with honor alongside his foster-parents.
Plutarch reports the popular claim that Romulus wanted a pretext for war, but calls this unlikely. He argues the real motive was practical: Rome's new settlers were mostly poor and wifeless men, and Romulus hoped the abduction would force a mixing and eventual kinship between Romans and Sabines, which is in fact what happened after the women intervened to stop the war.
After a bloody, undecided battle in which Romulus himself was struck down by a stone, the abducted Sabine women ran between the battle lines begging both sides to stop, arguing they could not bear to see their fathers and husbands kill each other. A truce followed, and the two peoples merged into one city under joint kings, Romulus and Tatius.
In the fifth year of his reign, some of Tatius's own relatives murdered envoys from Laurentum; when Tatius blocked justice for the killing, the victims' relatives killed Tatius himself while he was sacrificing at Lavinium. Romulus buried him with honor but did not pursue punishment, which Plutarch notes fed suspicion that Romulus was glad to rule alone.
During an assembly outside the city, a violent, sudden storm darkened the sky; when it cleared, Romulus was gone and no trace of his body or clothing was found. Some suspected the senators had murdered and dismembered him, but the patrician Julius Proculus swore under oath that Romulus had appeared to him, declaring he had returned to the gods and would watch over Rome as the guardian spirit Quirinus.
Plutarch closes the Life stating that Romulus vanished at fifty-four years of age, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign.
Plutarch reports it as the most credited version but surrounds it with rival accounts (a servant girl nicknamed 'she-wolf,' a phallus rising from a hearth, a Trojan refugee named Rhome) and repeatedly flags his sources by name, treating the whole founding narrative as a set of traditions to be weighed rather than a single settled fact.
The Life credits Romulus with founding the senate and its hundred original 'patrician' families, the patron-client relationship, the legion and its division into centuries, the augural staff called the lituus, the pomerium boundary ritual, and the earliest version of Rome's laws on marriage and homicide.
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