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Have you ever heard of the Seven-League Boots, the boots in which one could take many miles at a single step?
Well, there is a still bigger boot; it is over five hundred miles long, and it is in the Mediterranean Sea.
No, it’s not a real boot, but it would look like one if you were miles high in an airplane and looking down upon it.
It is called Italy.
Something very important happened in Italy, not long after the First Olympiad in Greece. It was so important that it was called the Year 1, and for a thousand years people counted from it as the Greeks did from the First Olympiad and as we do now from the birth of Christ. This thing that happened was not the birth of a man, however. It was the birth of a city, and this city was called Rome.
The history of Rome starts with stories that we know are fairy tales or myths in the same way that the history of Greece does. Homer told about the wanderings of the Greek, Odysseus. A great many years later a poet named Virgil told about the wanderings of a Trojan named Æneas.
Æneas fled from Troy when that city was burning down and started off to find a new home. Finally after several years, he came to Italy and the mouth of a river called the Tiber. There Æneas met the daughter of the man who was ruling over that country, a girl by the name of Lavinia, and married her, and they lived happily ever after. The children of Æneas and Lavinia ruled over the land, and they had children, and their children had children, and their children had children, until at last boy twins were born. These twins were named Romulus and Remus. Here endeth the first part of the story and the trouble begins, for they did not live happily ever after.
At the time the twins were born, a man had stolen the kingdom, and he feared that these two boys might grow up and take his stolen kingdom away from him. So he put the twins in a basket and set them afloat on the river Tiber, hoping that they might be carried out to sea or upset and be drowned. This, he thought, was nearly all right, so long as he didn’t kill them with his own hands. But the basket drifted ashore instead of going out to sea or upsetting, and a mother wolf found the twins and nursed them as if they were her own babies. A woodpecker also helped and fed them berries. At last a shepherd found them and brought them up as if they were his own sons until they grew up and became men. This sounds a good deal like the story of Paris who was left out to die and was found and brought up by a shepherd also.
Romulus and Remus with the wolf
Each of the twins then wished to build a city. But they could not agree which one was to do it, and in quarreling over the matter, Romulus killed his own twin brother Remus. Romulus then built the city by the Tiber River, on the spot where he and his brother had been saved and nursed by the mother wolf. Here there were seven hills. This was in 753 B.C., and he named the city Roma after his own name, and the people who lived there were called Romans. That is why, ever afterward, the Roman kings always said they were descended from the Trojan hero Æneas, the great-great-great-grandfather of Romulus.
Don’t you believe this story? Neither do I. But it is such an old, old story everyone is supposed to have heard it even though it is only a legend.
In order to get people for the city which he had started, it is said that Romulus invited all the thieves and bad men who had escaped from jail to come and live in Rome, promising them that they would be safe there.
Then as none of the men had wives, and there were no women in his new city, Romulus thought up a scheme to get the men wives. He invited some people called Sabines, who lived nearby, both men and women, to come to Rome to a big party.
They accepted, and a great feast was spread. In the middle of the feast, when everyone was eating and drinking, a signal was given, and each of the Romans seized a Sabine woman for his wife and ran off with her.
The Sabine husbands immediately prepared themselves for war against the Romans, who had stolen their wives. When the battle had begun between the two armies, the Sabine women ran out in the midst of the fighting between their new and old husbands and begged them both to stop. They said they had come to love their new husbands and would not return to their old homes.
What do you think of that?
It sounds like a pretty bad beginning for a new city, doesn’t it? And you may well wonder how Rome turned out—a city that started with Romulus killing his brother and that was settled by escaped prisoners who stole the wives of their neighbors. We’ll see if the Romans continued to do such wicked things as their city grew older.