After killing his brother, Romulus became the first king of Rome, which is named for him. Left to drown in a basket on the Tiber by a king of nearby Alba Longa and rescued by a she-wolf, the twins lived to defeat that king and found their own city on the riverвЂ™s banks in 753 B.C.

by Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars, the god of war. Origins of RomeДЄs legend has it, Rome was founded in 753 B.C. was one of the most dramatic implosions in the history of human civilization. The long and triumphant reign of its first emperor, Augustus, began a golden age of peace and prosperity by contrast, the Roman EmpireвЂ™s decline and fall by the fifth century A.D. After 450 years as a republic, Rome became an empire in the wake of Julius CaesarвЂ™s rise and fall in the first century B.C.

Among the many legacies of Roman dominance are the widespread use of the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) derived from Latin, the modern Western alphabet and calendar and the emergence of Christianity as a major world religion. Internal Struggles in the Late RepublicД«eginning in the eighth century B.C., Ancient Rome grew from a small town on central ItalyвЂ™s Tiber River into an empire that at its peak encompassed most of continental Europe, Britain, much of western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean islands.

Legion of the wolf battlefield 1