Asylum

The Asylum was an enclosed refuge established, according to Roman tradition, by Romulus on the Capitoline Hill to attract settlers to his new city.” Its location is described in ancient sources as inter duos lucos — “between the two groves” — the saddle between the hill’s two peaks, the Arx to the north and the Capitolium to the south. Livy records it as a locus saeptus, a physically bounded sacred space; Ovid in his Fasti describes it as originally enclosed by a high stone wall. Anyone who entered — fugitives, exiles, runaway slaves, debtors — was granted protection and, in time, Roman citizenship. Tacitus, in his Histories, calls it the lucus Asyli, the grove of the Asylum, and records its destruction by fire during the Vitellian assault on the Capitoline in AD 69, when flames spread to the broader sacred precinct above.

The phrase inter duos lucos reflects a physical reality. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing during the Augustan period, confirms that the Capitoline summits had once been wooded and that the hollow between them was a grove-filled depression. The Asylum occupied this space, and as late as the Augustan period Livy still describes it as a locus saeptus — a delimited enclosure. Cicero, writing in 57–56 BC, describes the site of the house of Marcus Manlius Capitolinus — located on the same saddle — as clothed by two groves, suggesting the wooded character of the area persisted well into the Republic.

The topographical question of where, precisely, the Asylum stood has occupied modern scholars because the same phrase — inter duos lucos — is also used in ancient sources to locate the Temple of Veiovis, an archaic deity understood as a youthful, chthonic counterpart to Jupiter. The temple was vowed in 200 BC and dedicated in 192 BC, but remained unknown to modern scholarship until 1939, when excavations under the Piazza del Campidoglio uncovered it embedded in the southwestern corner of the Tabularium, Rome’s state archive built around 78 BC. The Tabularium’s ground plan bends noticeably to accommodate the older shrine.

This proximity has generated genuine debate. The reconstruction most widely accepted, developed by T. P. Wiseman, places the Asylum just south of the Temple of Veiovis, in the area traversed by a road running between the two summits from the Roman Forum toward the Campus Martius. Anna Mura Sommella, working on the Capitoline in the 1990s, proposed instead a small asymmetrical niche on the Tabularium’s southern flank, east of the temple, where excavators found traces of a mud hut alongside Bronze and Iron Age remains — evidence of occupation on this part of the hill stretching back long before Rome’s traditional founding date. The quarrel partly turns on the Latin word lucus itself: whether it denotes a physical grove of trees or simply the open clearing within one.

Neither question can be settled on current evidence. What is certain is that the Asylum was no abstraction. It remained physically delimited into the imperial period, and the tradition it carried — of a city assembled from the displaced, the runaway, and the stateless — remained central to how Rome understood its own origins.

FURTHER READING

1. Wiseman, Timothy Peter. Remus: a Roman myth. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
2. Cornell, Tim. The beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). Routledge, 2012.
3. Dench, Emma. Romulus’ asylum: Roman identities from the age of Alexander to the age of Hadrian. Oxford University Press, 2005.
4. Lee-Stecum, Parshia. “Roman Refugium: Refugee Narratives in Augustan Versions of Roman Prehistory.” Hermathena, no. 184, 2008, pp. 69–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23041581. Accessed 19 July 2026.