Sabine Women- Roman GroupCollective

The Seizure

Romulus had a city full of men and no women. His envoys went to the neighboring peoples asking for the right of intermarriage, and every one refused. The Romans were refugees, exiles, adventurers. No father would give his daughter to such a city.

Romulus announced a festival in honor of Consus and invited the neighbors to attend with their families. The Sabines came in great numbers, curious to see Rome. At a signal during the games, the Roman men rushed into the crowd and seized the young unmarried women. The families fled. Livy records that Romulus visited each woman afterward, promising honorable marriage, property, and citizenship. The women had not been asked.

The Battlefield

The neighboring peoples attacked Rome one by one. Romulus defeated them one by one. He killed King Acron of the Caeninenses in single combat and carried the spoils to Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitoline. But the Sabines were different. Their king Titus Tatius gathered an army Rome could not easily brush aside.

Tarpeia, the daughter of the Roman garrison commander, opened the Capitoline gate to the Sabines in exchange for what they wore on their arms. She meant their gold bracelets. They crushed her under their shields. The Sabines poured into the valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline, the ground where the Forum would later stand, and the battle turned into a slaughter neither side could win.

The Sabine women ended it. They ran onto the field with their hair unbound and their infants in their arms. They placed themselves between the lines. Livy gives them the speech: they would rather die than live as widows or orphans, having lost either the fathers who raised them or the husbands and children they had come to love. Both armies stopped. Romulus and Titus Tatius became co-rulers. The Sabines settled on the Quirinal, the Romans kept the Palatine, and the combined people took the name Quirites.