Rome, the capital city of Italy today, has made its mark on history as the location where the great Roman Empire of Classical Antiquity emerged. This fascinating empire of the ancient world emerged there and expanded into different parts of Europe and other parts of the world from there. Thought to have been founded in 753 BC, Rome harbours countless mysteries in its early history. What we know today about the early history of Rome is a mixture of legend and the reality in the greater number of cases and it leads the reader to a captivating journey in history.

One of the most interesting legends about the early history of Rome is the rape of the Sabine women. According to legend, an enormous number of men, the majority of whom were criminals and fugitives, flocked to Rome to start a new life there in the initial days of the city. Romulus, the founder and first king of Rome, was fearful for the future of the new settlement, realizing that the female population in the city was extremely low. He knew he had to do something for the purpose of settling the problem for good. He devised a clever plan and decided to invite the Sabines, a neighbouring tribe to the Romans, for a banquet. The Sabines accepted the invitation, thinking that this was a friendly call. The men of Rome ambushed the Sabine men during the banquet and abducted their women, taking advantage of the fact that the Sabine men had been drunk and exhausted after drinking too many cups.

The word rape, which we employ in today’s law for the purpose of denoting a type of sexual assault, is derived from Latin word rapere, meaning snatching something and running away, taking by force or kidnapping someone. Hence, the original word from which we derive the word rape did not denote any sexual assault in a direct manner in ancient times. While we, as the people of the 21^st century, regard rape only in the manner of a sexual assault in the majority of cases, the rape of the Sabine women is an incident with implications of a deplorable political act of abduction of a group of women from their men. Indeed, this is a type of sexual assault, too, but the outstanding elements in this legend are , from a historical standpoint, a political trick and sanctification of a newly-established state through marriage. As such, the abducted Sabine women were now the spouses of the men of Rome who had kidnapped them and they were tasked with the sacred duty of bearing new babies so that Rome could survive and thrive as a new city. According to Livy, great historian of Rome who handed down to us one of the most detailed narrations of this incident, the men of Rome immediately embraced their wives as indigenous citizens of Rome and demonstrated unwavering respect for them.

We haven’t been able to find any archeological evidence of the rape of the Sabine women up to now although the incident is mentioned in Latin and Greek texts. The legend was transmitted orally for centuries and written down eons later; therefore, there is consensus among historians that this incident is a fictional one. However, what really matters is the role of this legend in the moulding of the Roman identity. As the legend unfolds, the Sabine women establish peace between their relatives who returned for revenge and the men of Rome whom they had recently been the wives of after managing to stop the bloody combat between both parties. This phenomenon highlights the blending of different ethnic groups and probably symbolizes Rome’s will to become an empire one day in the future. After all, one secret of the success of great empires like the Romans and Ottomans and the USA ( this country, with its historic and cultural policies,  fulfills the definition of an empire in my frame of reference although it does not call itself an empire ) , which have had a lasting impact in history, is that they could assimilate intelligent and hardworking people under a pan-ethnic identity whatever their ethnic origins are and benefit from their productivity. Servius Tullius, great king of Rome who I mentioned in Characters Disguised behind Masks, one of my previous articles here, waged wars against Etruscan cities although he himself was of Etruscan origin and extended Rome’s dominion as a political power in the peninsula. What I conclude from this phenomenon as a reader of history is that an original Roman identity had been forming as far back as the 6^th century BC and that this could be interpreted as a harbinger of the formation of a great empire in the future. It is quite important to also add that Servius Tullius is frequently called the man who made Rome Rome in historical sources.

Although I specified earlier that the traditionally-accepted date of the establishment of the city of Rome is 753 BC, this is also a supposition based on legend. Roman scholar Varro, who lived between 116-27 BC, stated the foundation date of Rome to be 753 BC based on legend, literary texts and astronomical calculations and this year began to be accepted as the traditional establishment date of the city after this. Nonetheless, modern research has demonstrated to us that there was human settlement around the territory where the city of Rome is located from approximately 1000 BC onwards, albeit disorganized and scattered. For one thing, we know that the people of the Villanovan culture, the last Iron Age culture of Europe between the dates of 1000-700 BC, were settled in the immediate vicinity of Rome and they built walls on hills for defence purposes. Later, these walls were extended; the hills they had been built upon started to harbour more and more people and finally, these settlements became big and powerful Etruscan cities like Veii and Tarquinii. Rome was never a completely Etruscan city, but if we carefully monitor the urbanization process in the Apennine peninsula, which started with the Proto-Etruscan existence in the Villanovan culture, we also reasonably conclude that the territory of Rome and its immediate vicinity harbored human settlement, albeit disorganized, even before the traditional establishment date of Rome. What is left of the cities the Etruscans built on hills could still be visited today even though some other constructions were built over them later. To illustrate, the city of Volterra ( Velathri in Etruscan ) to the southwest of Florence is a place each refined person must visit before they pass away, in my humble opinion.

There are four major theories about the origin of the word Rome: The first one is that the word is derived from Rumon. The word Rumon is thought to be the Etruscan name for the River Tiber, which flows through Rome. This Etruscan word, in turn, might have been derived from the word rum ( a ), which could mean nipple in Etruscan or one of the Italic languages. Just as a river fulfills the drinking needs of people and gives them life just as a mother does, this phenomenon might have led the way to the naming of the River Tiber as Rumon and furthermore, served as an inspiration for the naming of the city of Rome. Two factors reinforce this possibility. The first is that Palatine, the first hill on which the city of Rome was built, looked like the breast of a woman. Moreover, legend has it that a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the two brothers who founded Rome ( as the story goes, Romulus killed Remus due to a conflict they had during the delineation of the city borders at the time when they were building Rome ) , enabling them to survive, in a cave on the slopes of Palatine. This reinforces the symbolic significance of Palatine in the sense of being the life-giver to Rome. All in all, the word rum ( a ) could both have been the inspiration for the naming the city of Rome and been the source of the word Rumon, which is thought to be the Etruscan name for the River Tiber. The second theory holds that the name Rome for the city could have been derived from Greek word rhōmē, which means might. Given the magnificence of the Roman Empire, this makes sense. The third theory specifies that the expression urobsma could be the source of the name of the city. Nevertheless, I couldn’t state that I am convinced somehow about this because there is no such word in Latin. Urbs, meaning city and robur, meaning might in Latin, were mingled for the purpose of constructing a new word to be able to explain the root of the word Rome, but this kind of reasoning somehow looks awkward to me in the endeavor to discover the origin of the word. The fourth theory is that the name for the city was derived from Romulus, the founder-king of Rome. In fact, it is most probably vice versa, which is to say that Romulus was called Romulus because he founded the city of Rome. Romulus could mean little Roman or just Roman in Latin. The truth of the matter is that all these suppositions are based on pure reasoning and no concrete opinion could be expressed at the end of the day regarding the origin of the name of the city of Rome, though rum ( a ) and Etruscan Rumon look like the most plausible theories taking the topography of Rome and the Etruscan heartland into account.

In my opinion, the urbanization process observed in the Villanovan culture is quite an interesting historical development because it shows us that survival was not the only problem of the Iron Age communities and some of them were beginning to take on ethnic and cultural identity and political organization was gaining importance for them. The walled urban settlements built on hills by the communities of the Villanovan culture paved the way for the emergence of the fascinating Etruscan civilization in the Apennine peninsula in later times and this development enabled the birth of the city of Rome and the Roman identity with the contributions of other Italic peoples and an empire that has left its indelible mark on world history and continues to influence people around the world emerged. In my opinion as a person who believes that there is development and synthesis in history and there is no miraculous or coincidental occurrence as to how historical phenomena unfold, this period of world history in the country called Italy is profoundly mysterious and captivating.