Romulus, Remus and the contest of the vultures to found Rome
Six vultures for Remus, twelve for Romulus: how Livy, Ennius and Dionysius told of the auspices of Rome's foundation and what they meant politically.
According to tradition, Rome was born of an auspice. The twins Romulus and Remus, resolved to found a city in the places where they had grown up, could not agree on which of them should give it his name and rule it. Being twins, the right of the firstborn could not settle the question. They therefore turned to the gods, asking them to point out the chosen one through the flight of birds.
Livy's account
Livy, in the first book of his history, relates that Romulus chose the Palatine and Remus the Aventine as places of observation. The first sign came to Remus, who saw six vultures. Shortly afterwards twelve appeared to Romulus. Each group of supporters proclaimed its own leader king: one side claimed priority in time, the other the greater number of birds observed.
The dispute turned into a brawl, and in the confusion Remus was killed. Livy also reports a more widespread version, according to which Remus mockingly leapt over the walls his brother had just traced, and Romulus killed him, declaring that the same fate would befall anyone else who crossed his walls. The historian presents both versions as traditions, without choosing between them.
The other versions
The ancient sources do not agree on every detail. In the fragment of Ennius's Annals preserved by Cicero in De divinatione, the scene is described with great solemnity, and the placing of the brothers on the hills does not match Livy's. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian of the Augustan age, adds that according to some Romulus announced the sign before he had actually seen it.
These variants show that the legend was already debated in antiquity. The question was not merely one of storytelling: the very idea of legitimate power depended on how the foundation was told. A king chosen by the gods through a correct auspice had an authority that no one could challenge, and the story offered a model to every magistrate who took the auspices.
Augustus and the twelve vultures
The memory of Romulus's auspice played an important part in the propaganda of Augustus. Suetonius relates that in 43 BC, when the young Octavian took the auspices for his first consulship, twelve vultures appeared to him, as they had to the founder of Rome. The sign presented him as a new Romulus, destined to refound the city after the civil wars.
The name Augustus, conferred in 27 BC, also belonged to this imagery. Suetonius explains that it was preferred to the name Romulus because it was more solemn, and that it recalled places consecrated by augural rite. In support he quotes a line by Ennius on the founding of the city, “augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est”, which sets the two words side by side and suggests their kinship.
The story of the twins and the vultures is a legend, but one that the Romans took very seriously. Every time a magistrate took the auspices, he repeated in some way the gesture of the founder. Rome saw itself as a city born under the gaze of the gods, and the augural rite guaranteed its continuity, day after day.