To the left of Romulus and in back, is a war-helmeted goddess, Minerva (Athena, for the Greeks), with a little winged victory goddess, known by the Greek name of Nike. Nike was associated with Athena. Also to the left is a scene with smaller characters than the two traditional gods and the one newly enrolled one. It symbolizes Romulus' past. The canine creature is the she-wolf who, according to legend, nurtured the twin infant boys Romulus and Remus. This she-wolf or lupa was said to have suckled the twins while the woodpecker Picus fed and watched over them, until Faustulus the swineherd took the boys to his home to raise them among humans, under the care of his wife Larentia, whom Livy says may have been known as a lupa [Livy 1.4]. [Although lupa is the Latin for she-wolf, colloquially, it refers to a prostitute.]
Romulus was a successful military leader of the Romans, and its first king. Plutarch says he antagonized the senators so much that when he mysteriously died on the Nones of July, they fell under suspicion. One popular theory to explain the fact that Romulus didn't just die, but disappeared, during an apparent eclipse or storm,
"[A]s the king was holding a muster in the Campus Martius, near the swamp of Capra, for the purpose of reviewing the army, suddenly a storm came up, with loud claps of thunder, and enveloped him in a cloud so thick as to hide him from the sight of the assembly; and from that moment Romulus was no more on earth."
Livy I.16
was that he was taken up to join the gods.
Here is the entire passage about the apotheosis of Romulus, from Plutarch's Life of Romulus, in English public domain translation:
He disappeared on the Nones of July, as they now call the month which was then Quintilis, leaving nothing of certainty to be related of his death; only the time, as just mentioned, for on that day many ceremonies are still performed in representation of what happened. Neither is this uncertainty to be thought strange, seeing the manner of the death of Scipio Africanus, who died at his own home after supper, has been found capable neither of proof or disproof; for some say he died a natural death, being of a sickly habit; others, that he poisoned himself; others again, that his enemies, breaking in upon him in the night, stifled him. Yet Scipio's dead body lay open to be seen of all, and any one, from his own observation, might form his suspicions and conjectures; whereas Romulus, when he vanished, left neither the least part of his body, nor any remnant of his clothes to be seen. So that some fancied, the senators, having fallen upon him ill the temple of Vulcan, cut his body into pieces, and took each a part away in his bosom; others think his disappearance was neither in the temple of Vulcan, nor with the senators only by, but that, it came to pass that, as he was haranguing the people without the city, near a place called the Goat's Marsh, on a sudden strange and unaccountable disorders and alterations took place in the air; the face of the sun was darkened, and the day turned into night, and that, too, no quiet, peaceable night, but with terrible thunderings, and boisterous winds from all quarters; during which the common people dispersed and fled, but the senators kept close together. The tempest being over and the light breaking out, when the people gathered again, they missed and inquired for their king; the senators suffered them not to search, or busy themselves about the matter, but commanded them to honor and worship Romulus as one taken up to the gods, and about to be to them, in the place of a good prince, now a propitious god. The multitude, hearing this, went away believing and rejoicing in hopes of good things from him; but there were some, who, canvassing the matter in a hostile temper, accused and aspersed the patricians, as men that persuaded the people to believe ridiculous tales, when they themselves were the murderers of the king.
This page first appeared as the answer to a January 2012 Guess Who
