Su Fang Ng makes (I think) a pretty compelling case that that Hobbes ‘rejects the story of Lucretia’s rape as the foundational myth of Rome in favour of the wolf suckling Remus and Romulus, which represents a more monarchical aetiological myth of state formation.’ According to the story, Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman, is raped by a king’s son named Tarquin (a name I had come across before as the kind of thing a stereotypically posh British person might name their child, which it turns out is extremely fucked up thing to do) and kills herself. This suicide prompts a rebellion amongst the Roman aristocracy, following which Rome ceases to be a kingdom and becomes instead a republic. It makes sense that Hobbes, obsessed with making sure that there’s ultimately one person with the power to decide, and much more worried about the threat of political dissolution than he is about abuse of sovereign power, would be less interested in this kind of origin story than he is in the one where two brothers, more or less identical, fight to the death to decide which one gets to be the decided. But reading Ng made me wonder whether a similar argument could be made about Augustine.
According to The City of God, the story of Romulus and Remus encapsulates the truth of the earthly city: a society in which everyone loves themselves above everything else, and which conflict emerges out of pride, selfishness, and the desire for mastery. Augustine contrasts the story of the warring Roman twins with the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which for Augustine exemplifies not the war of all against all which characterises the earthly city but the conflict between the heavenly city — Abel, a pilgrim — and the earthly city — Cain, who exemplifies ‘the devilish envy that the wicked entertain towards the good for no other reason than that they are good, whereas they themselves are evil.'(15.6).
Lucretia does appear in The City of God, not as an avatar of republican revolution but as a thought experiment on the ethics of sexual violence and of self-murder (Augustine rejects the suggestion that women should be held morally responsible for their violation by others, but also, because he can’t just be kind for once in his life, does insist that to kill oneself in the wake of violation is to add ‘to the crime of others a crime of [one’s] own’ (1.19)); and then briefly in a later discussion of how the Roman kings met their ends which seems to me (on an admittedly superficial reading) intended to demonstrate that the fortunes of Roman leaders should not be straightforwardly understood as indicative of divine judgment: in service, that is, of Augustine’s broader insistence that the declining fortunes of the Western Empire can not be laid at the feet of Christianity’s rising influence.
All of which is to wonder whether, on the one hand, Augustine’s favouring of Romulus and Remus can, as for Hobbes be seen as a rejection of a republican model of imperial (and perhaps also divine) power; and also (in light of Anthony Kaldellis’ argument that Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, can best be understood as continuing the Roman Republican tradition) whether we might see the division between Western and Eastern Roman empires as in part a division between these two different models of imperial power.
An und für sich 
