Why Rome's founding date is 21 April 753 BC

Rome’s traditional founding date, 21 April 753 BC, was fixed by the scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in the 1st century BC, around seven centuries after the event it claims to record. Romans never fully agreed on the year. The tale of Romulus and Remus probably took shape only around the 4th century BC.

The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in Augustus’ Rome, listed the competing answers of earlier writers (Varro’s, which does not appear in his list, is added for comparison):

Writer	Founding year given
Timaeus of Sicily	813 BC (same year as Carthage)
Quintus Fabius	747 BC
Cato the Elder	751 BC
Polybius	750 BC
Lucius Cincius	728 BC
Varro (not in Dionysius)	753 BC

That is a spread of 85 years. Varro’s version became the standard one.

His method was less scholarly than it sounds. Plutarch records that Varro gave his friend Tarutius, a philosopher who also cast horoscopes, the task of working backwards from the events of Romulus’ life to the hour of his birth. Tarutius obliged with the day Romulus was conceived, the day he was born, and the hour Rome was founded, “between the second and third hour”, on the grounds that a city has a destiny written in the stars, just as a person does. It is a calculation as confident as Archbishop Ussher’s date for the Creation. Plutarch’s own verdict was that such speculations appeal to readers through “novelty and extravagance”.

The day itself was borrowed. 21 April was already the Parilia, a shepherds’ festival that Plutarch says was held even before the city existed.

Archaeology agrees with the legend on the century, if not the day. Post-holes of Iron Age huts with wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs survive on the Palatine Hill, beneath the later palace of Domitian. They date to the 8th century BC, when Rome was still a village of huts rather than a walled city. Romans still mark 21 April as the Natale di Roma.