Pip: Remi Tribe, where even a Roman pyramid turns out to have a Remi angle — sort of.
Mara: Robert Remy is behind both posts this week, and together they cover Rome's founding mythology and the strange afterlife of that myth in the city's medieval landscape. Let's start with the origin story itself.
Roman Origin Stories
Pip: Rome's foundation myth is not a gentle tale of civic pride. It is a story built on usurpation, divine paternity, fraternal rivalry, and a wall that one brother crossed at fatal cost. The question the posts are really asking is: what does it mean that Romans chose this particular story to explain themselves?
Mara: The Romulus and Remus post puts it directly: "Whether Romulus and Remus actually existed is less important than what Romans believed their story said about Rome itself." The myth was never really about biography.
Pip: Right — and the stakes of that framing are considerable. If the myth is a self-portrait, then Rome looked at its own origin and saw conflict, not innocence. A city born from fratricide is a city that has already told you something about its priorities.
Mara: The post traces how that portrait was assembled layer by layer. Rhea Silvia's twins are fathered by Mars, abandoned on the Tiber, nursed by a she-wolf, and eventually raised by a shepherd named Faustulus and his wife Acca Larentia. The she-wolf image became so central it produced its own complication: the Latin word lupa could mean wolf or, in slang, prostitute — which means the famous nursing scene may have started as a story about a woman, not an animal.
Pip: So Rome's most iconic founding image might be a pun that calcified into marble. That's either embarrassing or deeply on-brand.
Mara: The post notes we simply cannot know which tradition came first. What is clear is that the myth kept absorbing contradictions rather than resolving them. The augury dispute — Remus sees six vultures, Romulus sees twelve, each claims divine favor — does not settle the question of who should lead. It sharpens the conflict until Remus jumps Romulus's wall and is killed for it.
Pip: And Romulus delivers the line that doubles as a founding policy statement.
Mara: "So perish whoever else shall leap over my walls." The post is careful to note those exact words may not be historical, but the message is unambiguous: Rome's boundaries are sacred, and the cost of crossing them is death — even for a brother.
Pip: The post also makes the point that Rome was never imagined as ethnically pure from the start. The early city absorbed fugitives and exiles, then seized Sabine women, then eventually merged with the Sabines entirely. Conflict produces assimilation, assimilation produces Rome.
Mara: That pattern — outsiders becoming Romans — is one the post identifies as a recurring feature of Roman expansion. The myth encodes it from the very first generation.
Pip: Which is where the second post picks up in a genuinely unexpected way. The piece on Meta Remi follows the myth forward into medieval Rome, where two large pyramids were reidentified as the tombs of Romulus and Remus. The Pyramid of Cestius — built around 18 to 12 BCE as the tomb of a Roman magistrate named Gaius Cestius — became known as Meta Remi, the supposed tomb of Remus, while a now-demolished pyramid near the Vatican was called Meta Romuli.
Mara: The Meta Remi post explains the linguistic logic: meta referred originally to the conical turning posts in a Roman circus, and by the Middle Ages the word applied to any tall, tapered monument. A pointed structure associated with Remus became the Meta Remi. Medieval Romans had effectively given the twin founders twin monumental tombs — a tidy legendary explanation that happened to be entirely wrong.
Pip: The inscription naming Gaius Cestius was literally carved into the monument the whole time. Medieval Rome just had a lot of ruins and not enough Latin readers paying close attention.
Mara: The Meta Romuli did not survive. Pope Alexander VI ordered it demolished in 1499. The Pyramid of Cestius survived partly because Emperor Aurelian incorporated it into Rome's defensive walls roughly four centuries after Cestius was buried there — structural usefulness turned out to be good preservation strategy.
Pip: So the myth outlasted the empire, colonized the ruins, and one of those ruins is still standing. That is a remarkable run for a story about two brothers who could not agree on a hill.
Mara: The founding myth doesn't just explain Rome's past — it shaped how the city's landscape was read for centuries afterward. And that layering of myth onto archaeology is exactly what both posts are tracing.
Pip: Rome built a story about itself, and the story kept building long after Rome stopped.
Mara: Next time we'll see what else is accumulating on the site. There's more ground to cover.