Dr Simon Elliott

Simon, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Absolute pleasure, Dan.

It's always lovely to come and join you on History Hit.

Because within a few hundred years of it being founded, it came to dominate its entire, entire known world.

Absolutely.

But also you get this really beautiful origin story, or I should say origin stories.

So you have Romulus and Remus, who are the sons of a Vestal Virgin called Rhea Silvia, who is forced to abandon them on the banks of the Tiber.

Yeah.

Okay, so that's more a mythological origin story, you'd say.

Well, let's go through it, because the key thing is it's important to the Romans.

It's very important to the Romans.

So, Rea Silvia goes to a sanctuary of Mars, and then she leaves and she's pregnant.

And she's got two sons who are born, Romulus and Remus, and she's forced to abandon them on the banks of the river Tiber.

And there they're saved by the river god Tiberinus, of course.

And then they're raised and suckled by a she-wolf, of course.

But later in life, they become aware of their origins.

They realize that they should have been players in their own world.

But then they fall out because they alight on a place where they want to found a city.

This is the city of Rome and it has seven hills famously.

And Romulus wants to found the settlement on the Palatine Hill, which later becomes the site of the Imperial Palace.