The Abduction of the Sabine Women

Also called: Rape of the Sabine Women, Sabine women, Titus Tatius, Tarpeia

A legend handed down over the centuries.

A Roman founding legend told in Book 1 of Livy and by Plutarch. Lacking wives, the men of Rome invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and carried off their daughters; the war that followed ended when the Sabine women, now Roman wives, rushed between the armies — and the two peoples are said to have become one.

This Roman founding legend is told in Livy’s History of Rome (Book 1, chapters 9–13), Dionysius, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus and Ovid. The new city of Rome was a community of men without wives, and its neighbours refused intermarriage. Romulus held a festival of the god Consus (the Consualia) and invited the neighbouring Sabines with their families; at a signal the young Romans seized the Sabine maidens. Livy says Romulus promised the women the full rights of lawful wives.

The Sabine king Titus Tatius came with an army, and the story of Tarpeia, daughter of a Roman officer, who opened the citadel on the Capitoline to the enemy, belongs to this tale. When the two armies clashed in what would become the Forum, the Sabine women — by now wives and mothers of Romans — rushed with dishevelled hair into the midst of the fighting and placed themselves between their fathers and their husbands. The fighting stopped, and the two peoples became one state under the joint rule of Romulus and Tatius.

The story is read as a memory of Rome’s mingling with the Sabines and as an explanation of Roman wedding customs, such as carrying the bride over the threshold. “Rape” here translates the Latin raptus, a carrying off by force; the subject was a favourite of Western art, from Poussin and David to Giambologna’s sculpture.