Remus

Remus shares his birth story with his twin Romulus. Livy says the Vestal Rhea Silvia bore twins and named Mars as their father, perhaps so that a god would carry the blame. Exposed beside the flooded Tiber, the boys were suckled by a she-wolf and raised by the herdsman Faustulus and his wife Larentia. Plutarch says both names came from ruma, the Latin word for teat, and gives the second twin as Romus or Remus.

Remus is the twin who gets caught. In Livy, brigands ambushed the brothers during the Lupercalia. Romulus fought them off, but Remus was dragged before Amulius and accused of raiding Numitor's lands. He was handed to Numitor for punishment. Plutarch has Numitor's own herdsmen seize Remus while Romulus was busy with a sacrifice. Dionysius of Halicarnassus records both versions: an ambush after a quarrel over pasture, and an attack on the runners at the Lupercalia.

In Plutarch, Remus speaks for himself before Numitor. He says Numitor seems more like a king than Amulius, because he hears a case before he punishes. Then he tells what he knows: that he and his twin had believed themselves the children of Faustulus and Larentia. Dionysius says Remus went to his fate in silence, without pleading, and that Numitor asked him to avenge the wrongs of his house. In Livy and Plutarch, Remus raised a band inside Alba while Romulus attacked, and Amulius was killed.

Ovid's Fasti tells of an earlier contest that Remus won. During a sacrifice to Faunus, a herdsman shouted that robbers were driving off the cattle. The twins ran out by different ways, and Remus and the Fabii recovered the herd first. Remus pulled the entrails from the spits and said only the victor would eat them. Romulus came back to bare bones. He laughed, but was pained that Remus and the Fabii had won where his own Quintilii had not. Ovid makes this the reason the runners at the Lupercalia go without clothes.

With Numitor restored at Alba, the twins set out to found a city where they had been exposed. Livy says that as twins neither could claim precedence by age, so they asked the gods through augury who would name and rule it. Romulus watched from the Palatine and Remus from the Aventine. Plutarch says Remus had already laid out a strong precinct there, called the Remonium. Dionysius says Remus favoured a site later named Remoria after him, and watched either from the Aventine or from Remoria itself.

Livy says six vultures appeared to Remus first, and then twelve to Romulus. Each twin was hailed king by his own followers, one side claiming priority and the other the number of birds. Plutarch reports that some said Romulus lied about his twelve. Dionysius goes further: Romulus sent for his brother before seeing any birds at all. Six vultures then appeared to Remus, flying from the right. When Remus reached the Palatine and asked what Romulus had seen, twelve vultures flew over. Remus complained that he had been deceived and refused to give up his claim.

The quarrel ended with Remus dead, told in several ways below. His burial differs too. Plutarch says Romulus buried Remus, together with his foster-fathers, in the Remonia. Dionysius says he was buried at Remoria, the site he had wanted for the city. He adds that Romulus, overcome by grief and remorse, lost all wish to live until Laurentia, his foster-mother, comforted him.

Who killed Remus is the central disagreement. Livy gives two versions. In one, the rival parties came to blows after the augury and Remus fell in the tumult. In the other, which Livy calls more common, Remus mockingly jumped the newly raised walls and the enraged Romulus killed him. Plutarch says Remus, angry at the deceit, mocked and obstructed the trench being dug for the wall. When he leapt across it, he was struck by Romulus in some accounts and by his companion Celer in others. Dionysius calls death in the battle the most probable account. His alternative has Remus concede the rule, leap the finished wall, and die from a blow of Celer's mattock.

Ovid's Fasti tells the leap without Romulus's hand in it. Romulus put Celer in charge of the works and told him to kill anyone who crossed the walls or the ploughed trench. Remus, not knowing the order, mocked the low walls and asked whether the people would be safe behind them. He leapt them at once, and Celer struck him down with a shovel. Romulus swallowed his tears in public. At the funeral he kissed the bier and said farewell to a brother taken from him against his will.

Ovid's Fasti also makes Remus the origin of a festival of the dead. After the funeral, his bloodstained ghost stood by the bed of Faustulus and Acca. It said that if the birds had granted him the kingdom, he could have been the greatest among his people. It asked where its father Mars was, and said the she-wolf had been kinder than a citizen's reckless hand. It cursed Celer and cleared its brother, who had not wanted the death. Then it asked for a day in its honour.

Romulus named that day the Remuria, Ovid says, and the harsh first letter later softened, giving the name Lemuria. The silent spirits of the dead came to be called lemures. Ovid puts this explanation in the mouth of Mercury, who had often seen the palace of Stygian Jove. It is Ovid's etymology, told as a poet's aetiology, and no other source used here repeats it.

Not every ancient writer made Remus a twin raised by herdsmen. Dionysius reports Roman accounts in which Romulus and Remus were sons of Aeneas, or of a daughter of Aeneas. In one of them, the brothers received a share of the Latin lands, and Remus founded several cities. The last of these was a Rome, named after himself, which later stood empty until Romulus and Remus resettled it.