In Virgil's Aenida and Ab Urbe he conducts a libretto by Tito Lívio, Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus flees from Troy with his father Anquises, his son Ascânio and the survivors of the city. With this he makes several pilgrimages that take him, finally, to Lazio, on the Italic peninsula. There he is received by the local Latin king who offers his daughter's hand, Lavínia. This provokes the fury of the king of the rútulos, Turno, a powerful italic monarch who had been interested in her.
A terrible war between the populations of the peninsula breaks out and as a result, Turno is killed. Aeneas, now married, founds the city of Lavínio in honor of his wife. Her son, Ascânio governs in the city for thirty years until he decides to move and found his own city, Alba Longa. About 400 years later, the son and legitimate heir of the twelfth king of Alba Longa, Numitor, is deposed by a stratagem of his brother Amúlio. In order to secure the throne, Amulio murders the male descendants of Numitor and forces his niece Reia Silvia to become vestal (virgin priestess, consecrated to the goddess Vesta), however, this pregnancy of the god Mars and this union the brothers Rômulus and Rowing.
As a punishment, Amúlio arrests Reia in a dungeon and has his children thrown into the Tiber River. Like a miracle, the basket where the children were ended up getting bogged down on one of the banks of the river at the foot of the Palatino and Capitolino mountains, in a region known as Germalo, where they are found by a suckling wolf; next to the children was a woodpecker, a sacred bird for the Latins and for the god Mars, who protects them. Later, a shepherd named Fáustulo meets the boys near the foot of Figueira Ruminal (Ficus Ruminalis), at the entrance to a cave called Lupercal. He picks them up and takes them to his home where they are raised by his wife Aca Larência.