1 Earliest Rome

4- R E L I G I O U S P L A C E S
4.8a Romulus establishes the 'pomerium
Plutarch, Life of Romulus 11.1-4
The Romans traced the origin of the pomerium to the very act of foundation of
Rome: it was the furrow ploughed by Romulus to mark out the extent of his
new city.
He then set to building his city. He summoned from Etruria men who were
used to giving detailed prescriptions according to certain sacred laws and formulae, and
to acting, so to speak, as expounders of holy ritual. 1
A circular pit was dug near the area
that is now the comitium 2
and in it were deposited offerings of all the things whose use is
thought proper according to human custom, or is rendered necessary by nature. And in
the end, each man threw in a small piece of earth, brought from his native country, and
they mixed it all together. They call this pit the mundus, the same word that they used for
the heavens. 3
Then they marked out the city around it, as if marking out a circle from the
point of a compass. And the founder put a bronze blade on his plough, yoked up a bull
and a cow, and himself drove them on, drawing a deep furrow around the boundary -
while his followers had the task of pushing back inside the city all the clods of earth that
the plough turned up and not letting a single one lie outside. It was with this line that
they marked out the course of the wall, and it was called the pomerium, a contracted form
of'post murum', 'behind' or 'next to the wall'. 4
And where they intended to put in a gate,
they took the ploughshare out of the ground, lifted the plough over and left a space.
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1. The Romans believed that the pomerium, and many other of their religious traditions,
owed their origin to 'Etruscan ritual' (see Vol. 1, 60-1). The pomerium WAS certainly not
a specifically Roman institution - being found in other cities of central Italy; sec, e.g.,
Varro, On the Latin Language V. I43.
2. A circular area in front of the republican senate house. Plutarch here offers a different
version from others (including Tacitus, below 4.8b) who locate the centre of Romulus'
foundation on the Palatine hill.
3. See 4.7 n. 4. Note again the association of a religious place on earth with the heavens.
Like the Latin word templum (4.4), mundus referred both to an earthly shrine and to the
heavens, or even the cosmos as a whole.
4. A common Roman etymology of the word. See Varro, On the Latin Language v. 143;
Antaya(1980).
4.8b The original 'pomerium'and its extensions
As Rome grew, the pomerium was seen essentially as a religious boundary - not
as a marker of the city's defences or of the edge of the built-up area. But its position
changed over time, as it was 'extended' on several occasions in the late
Republic and early Empire. Tacitus, in discussing these extensions, regards its
original line as a matter of antiquarian speculation.
See further: Vol. 1, 177-8 and Maps 1-3; Labrousse (1937); Syme (1978)*;
Richardson (1992) 293-6*.