The sanctuary

Romulus now had a city with walls, a name, and almost nobody living in it, and his solution stood right here on this hill.

Between the two peaks of the Capitoline, in the dip where you're standing now, he declared a sanctuary. Anyone who came here was free, no matter what they had done elsewhere. Runaway slaves, debtors, exiles and men with a sentence hanging over them somewhere else all headed to Rome, and the city filled up with exactly those people.

Later Romans were pretty open about this. Livy, the great Roman historian, simply wrote it down, and for centuries Rome's enemies threw it back at them: an empire built by the dregs of Italy.

And yet there was an idea in it that would mark the city forever. Rome handed citizenship to foreigners, to freed slaves and eventually to almost everyone in the empire, which set it apart from the Greek cities where you could only get it by being born into it.

Let's head over to the southwestern edge of the square, where the rock drops away steeply.