The foundation of the city of Rome is shrouded in mystery and legend. The traditional founder of Rome is Romulus, who, according to mythical accounts, was raised by a she-wolf with his brother Remus and later and killed his brother for control of their new city. Other myths include the city being founded by Aeneas of Troy, whose feuds with Dido was the eventual cause of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. (Dido, according to legend, founded the city of Carthage in northern Africa.) Whether or not these people existed, a group of hilltop villages lying upon an Italian trade route on the river Tiber were unified in the mid-8th Century B.C. (traditionally 753). The Iron Age culture of the Tiber river valley was known as Villanovan, and slowly groups of villages unified under a powerful ruling class.
Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6 a/She-wolf_suckles_Romulus_and_Remus.jpg |
The Etruscans were at their peak of their power throughout the 6th Century B.C., even forming an alliance with the Carthaginians to fight the Greeks at Alalia (on modern-day corsica) in 535 B.C., gaining control of the island. It was during this time period that the first sewers and walls were built in Rome. However, the Etruscan dominance over Rome was somewhat short-lived. To the south, the Etruscans continued to have difficulty subduing the city of Cumae. Eventually, the Latin cities revolted near the end of the 6th Century B.C., quite possibly at the request of the Cumaeans. In the decades to come, Rome and the surrounding towns of Latium were at odds with their Etruscan overlords and their Italian neighbors, leading to a long path of war for Rome to gain and sustain her sovereignty.
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