Cacus Steps

At the southwestern corner of the Palatine Hill, a narrow flight of ancient stairs once cut down the slope toward the valley of the Circus Maximus. Known as the Scalae Caci — the Steps of Cacus — this modest thoroughfare connected some of Rome’s most sacred ground: the platform of the Temple of Magna Mater above, the Clivus Victoriae below, and, at its upper end, the site traditionally identified as the Casa Romuli, the humble hut of Rome’s founder. When the steps were first constructed is unknown, and the reason for their association with Cacus is equally uncertain.

The association with Cacus reaches back to Rome’s foundational legends, as recorded in Livy (I.7). Yet scholars have long recognised that Cacus and his sister Caca are not simply mythological figures: they are ancient Italic fire deities, their religious identity predating the legendary narrative layered over them. Both names preserve a stratum of pre-Roman Italic religious practice that the later foundation myth obscured but did not entirely erase.

The topographic picture is complicated but not obscure. Ancient sources — Solinus, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, and Diodorus Siculus — each gesture toward the site, though Plutarch’s manuscript tradition has required revisions to make the reference coherent. What emerges is a consistent orientation: the top of the steps (the supercilium) was identified in antiquity as marking the edge of Roma Quadrata, the archaic ritual boundary of the city, and as the location of the Casa Romuli. These associations place the Scalae Caci at the very heart of Rome’s mythic self-understanding.

Archaeologically, the picture is partial. At the upper end, travertine foundations of an imperial-period gate survive in place, along with a small section of road paving; the gentle gradient of the preserved steps — a riser roughly every two metres — suggests a ramp designed for regular foot traffic rather than a ceremonial ascent. In the early imperial period a travertine gate was erected at the upper end of the staircase, with several road pavers still in situ nearby. Lower down, the ancient stairway was absorbed into the fabric of a later imperial structure and survives only as an internal staircase. The extent to which the Scalae Caci continued beyond this point to descend the hill is unknown; they may have continued as far as the Forum Boarium, though neither the archaeological record nor the literary sources confirm this.

In the same topographic cluster, the fourth-century survey of Rome’s regions known as the Regionary Catalogue records an Atrium Caci — probably a hall of some kind in the vicinity of the steps — though its precise relationship to the stairway remains uncertain. Similarly unresolved is the question of the Porta Romanula, which some scholars place at the junction of the Scalae Caci and the Clivus Victoriae rather than further north. What the steps ultimately illustrate is the difficulty of recovering a coherent picture of the archaic Palatine: the remains are fragmentary, the sources few and textually uncertain, and the boundaries between topographic fact and foundation myth have never been cleanly drawn.

FURTHER READING

1. Carandini, Andrea. Rome: Day One. Princeton University Press, 2011.
2. Small, Jocelyn Penny. “THE METAMORPHOSIS OF CACU.” Cacus and Marsyas in Etrusco-Roman Legend. (PMAA-44), Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 3–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zvpkg.5. Accessed 20 July 2026.
3. Blum-Sorensen, Jessica. “Mistaken Identities.” Epic Ambition: Hercules and the Politics of Emulation in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023, pp. 148–84. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.21099715.9. Accessed 20 July 2026.
4. Galinsky, G. Karl. “The Hercules-Cacus Episode in Aeneid VIII.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 87, no. 1, 1966, pp. 18–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/292975. Accessed 20 July 2026.