Quirinus and the Deification of Romulus

At a Glance

Central figures: Romulus, first king of Rome, son of Mars and Rhea Silvia; Julius Proculus, a senator who claimed to witness Romulus’s apotheosis; Quirinus, the deified form Romulus assumed among the gods.
Setting: Rome, the Campus Martius and the Quirinal Hill, during the final year of Romulus’s reign; sources include Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti.
The turn: On the Nones of Quintilis, during a muster on the Campus Martius, a sudden storm enveloped Romulus and he vanished from among the assembled citizens, leaving an empty throne and immediate suspicion of murder by the senators.
The outcome: Julius Proculus testified before the people that Romulus had appeared to him at dawn, declared himself the god Quirinus, and commanded the Romans to practice the arts of war; the Senate ratified the apotheosis and the people accepted it.
The legacy: A temple to Quirinus was established on the Quirinal Hill, and the Roman citizens received their formal title Quirites; the festival of the Quirinalia was celebrated annually on the seventeenth day before the Calends of March.

Romulus had ruled for thirty-seven years when he disappeared. There was no body. There was no tomb. One moment the king stood on the Campus Martius reviewing the assembled ranks of Roman citizens, and the next moment a storm broke over the field - black cloud, hard rain, thunder so close that the ground shook beneath the feet of men who had fought wolves and Sabines and never flinched. When the sky cleared, the king’s chair was empty.

The patricians, who had been standing nearest to him, said the gods had taken him up. The common people looked at the patricians and wondered whether the gods had needed help.

The Storm on the Campus Martius

It was the Nones of Quintilis - high summer, the kind of Roman day when heat pools in the hollows between hills and the Tiber stinks. Romulus had called a general review. The citizens gathered in their centuries on the flat ground west of the city walls, arranged by tribe and property class, the system Romulus himself had established. He sat on a raised seat. The senators stood around him in a loose ring.

What happened next depends on who you believe. Livy reports the storm plainly: a thick cloud descended on the field, a darkness like nightfall at midday, and when it lifted Romulus was gone. The soldiers in the outer ranks had seen nothing but rain. The senators, drenched and blinking, offered their account - that a whirlwind had carried the king bodily into the sky.

But Livy also records the other version, the one spoken in low voices and never quite suppressed. That the senators had grown tired of Romulus. That in thirty-seven years he had accumulated imperium beyond any man’s portion - lawgiver, war leader, priest, judge, the sole interpreter of augury. That under cover of the storm, certain patricians had torn his body apart and carried the pieces away beneath their robes.

Both stories circulated. For a few days, the city was dangerous. The common people loved Romulus. They remembered that he had given them land, given them law, beaten the Sabines, beaten the Fidenates, beaten the Veientes. If the senators had killed him, the plebs would want blood in return.

Julius Proculus at Dawn

Into this silence stepped Julius Proculus, a man Livy describes as respected by both factions. He came before the assembled people and swore an oath. At first light, he said, Romulus had appeared to him on the road from Alba Longa. Not a shade - not the pale wisp of a manes visiting from the underworld - but a figure larger and more terrible than any living man, clad in shining armor, standing in the road as solidly as a boundary stone.

Proculus reported the king’s words. He said Romulus told him to carry a message to Rome: that it was the will of heaven for the city to become the capital of the world, that the Romans must cultivate the arts of war above all others, and that no human force would be able to resist Roman arms. Then the figure rose from the road and vanished into the upper air.

Romulus gave one further instruction, according to Proculus. The Romans were to worship him under a new name. He was no longer Romulus. He was Quirinus.

Whether Proculus believed what he said, whether the senators had coached him, whether the vision was real - Livy does not settle the question. He reports it. The effect was immediate. The crowd’s anger broke. Grief replaced suspicion. If the gods had wanted Romulus, then Romulus belonged to the gods.

The Name on the Hill

Quirinus was not a new invention. The name was old - older, perhaps, than Rome itself. Roman antiquarians traced it to the Sabine word for spear, curis, and associated it with the armed citizen body. Before Romulus vanished, the Quirinal Hill already bore that name, and there were already rites performed there to a god called Quirinus whose nature was unclear. He was armed. He was associated with the assembled people in peacetime - not the army on campaign, which belonged to Mars, but the citizens at home in their civic capacity.

What the apotheosis accomplished was a fusion. The dead king and the old god became one. Romulus-who-was became Quirinus-who-always-had-been. The Romans, assembled as citizens rather than soldiers, took their formal name from him: Quirites. When a magistrate addressed the people in the Forum, he addressed them as Quirites. When a soldier was discharged and returned to civilian life, he became a Quiris again - a spear-carrier of a different kind.

A temple was built on the Quirinal, one of the oldest in the city. It received a flamen - the Flamen Quirinalis, one of the three major priesthoods alongside the Flamen Dialis of Jupiter and the Flamen Martialis of Mars. That Quirinus stood in this company tells you what the Romans thought of him. He ranked with the king of the gods and the god of war. The triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus was the oldest divine hierarchy Rome acknowledged, older than the later Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.

The Quirinalia

The festival came on the seventeenth day before the Calends of March - by modern reckoning, the thirteenth of February. Ovid mentions it in the Fasti. It fell during the period when the last of the grain from the previous harvest was being parched and ground, and the festival had an association with the roasting of spelt called the Stultorum Feriae - the Feast of Fools - because it was the last chance for those who had missed their proper tribal observance to complete the rite. The connection to Quirinus-as-Romulus is civic: the god gathers up the stragglers, the ones who fell behind, and folds them back into the community.

The Flamen Quirinalis performed the sacrifice. The rite was simple - grain offerings, no blood, a ceremony more domestic than martial. Quirinus in his festival aspect was not the war-king vanishing into storm clouds. He was the god of the assembled people doing ordinary work: grinding grain, keeping house, tending the civic fire that Vesta guarded but that Quirinus, in his way, also stood for.

The Empty Chair

Romulus left no bones. The Romans, who cared enormously about proper burial - who feared the unburied dead, who fed the manes at the Parentalia, who stopped all public business during the Lemuria to appease wandering ghosts - had no grave to visit. What they had instead was a god on a hill, a priest in antique robes, a name that every citizen carried as a title, and a story that worked two ways at once: the king was murdered by jealous senators, and the king was taken up by heaven. Both were true. Both were Roman. The res publica could hold contradictions like that, the way a temple can hold both light and shadow at once inside its walls.

On the Quirinal, the flamen performed the rites. The chair on the Campus Martius stayed empty. No one sat in it again.