The Capitoline Wolf: the myth of the twins and the mystery of the statue
The she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus: Livy's account, the Lupercal cave, the Lupercalia festival and the debate on the Capitoline bronze.
No image identifies Rome as strongly as the she-wolf suckling two twins. The story of Romulus and Remus, saved by a wolf on the banks of the Tiber, was for the Romans the very story of their origin, and the bronze statue in the Capitoline Museums has become the emblem of the city. Behind this familiar image, however, lie a myth rich in variants, an ancient February rite and a dating problem that is still open.
The foundation myth
According to the tradition reported by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor, king of Alba Longa, was made a Vestal by her uncle Amulius, who had usurped the throne. When she gave birth to twins, whom she said were the sons of Mars, Amulius had them abandoned in the flooded Tiber. The basket ran aground by a fig tree, the ficus Ruminalis, and a she-wolf coming down from the nearby hills suckled them.
The shepherd Faustulus then found the children and entrusted them to his wife Acca Larentia. Livy himself reports a rationalising interpretation: some believed that Larentia was called lupa, she-wolf, by the shepherds because she was a prostitute, and that the legend arose from this. The historian reports it without adopting it, showing how the ancients themselves already debated their foundation myths.
The Lupercal cave
The wolf was linked to a precise place: the Lupercal, a cave on the slopes of the Palatine where, according to tradition, the twins had been suckled. There, every year on 15 February, began the Lupercalia, a festival of purification in which young priests, the Luperci, ran around the hill dressed in goatskins, striking passers-by with strips of hide. It was believed that the women they struck would receive fertility.
The festival survived long after the rise of Christianity, until towards the end of the fifth century Pope Gelasius I opposed its celebration. As for the cave, it has never been identified with certainty: a decorated chamber discovered in 2007 beneath the Palatine was proposed as the Lupercal, but the hypothesis has been rejected by many archaeologists.
An Etruscan or a medieval statue?
The sources mention ancient statues of the wolf. Livy reports that in 296 BC the aediles Ogulnii set up a group of the wolf with the twins near the Ruminal fig, and Cicero recalls a Capitoline wolf struck by lightning in 65 BC. The statue now in the Capitoline Museums was donated to the Roman people by Pope Sixtus IV in 1471, but the twins were added only at the end of the fifteenth century, perhaps by Antonio del Pollaiolo.
For a long time the wolf was considered an Etruscan work of the fifth century BC. During the restoration of the late 1990s, however, it was observed that it had been cast in a single pour, a technique typical of the Middle Ages, and later analyses suggested a date between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The debate is not closed, and the statue remains a model case of how ancient iconography continued to live on through the centuries.
From a civic symbol the wolf has become a sign recognised everywhere: copies of the statue were donated in the twentieth century to many cities around the world, and the image appears in the emblems of sports clubs, institutions and coins. Whether Etruscan or medieval, it sums up in a few elements the Roman idea of origins: an abandonment, a wild animal that becomes a nurse, a destiny foretold.