Rome deliberately preserved a founding origin that admits its own crime

Evidence

The Romans never forgot that their city was founded both by a miracle (the she-wolf’s mercy) and by a crime (a brother’s murder) — a mixture of the noble and the terrible at the very root of their history, as if to say that even the greatest cities are built by people capable of both wonder and wrong. — , A Year of World Stories, 14074

Categorization

• SEED: Why a civilization would keep an origin story that confesses a founding murder — a counterintuitive cultural choice worth an essay.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Great Derivative: How the Athens-to-Washington Story Fabricates the Inheritance It Pretends to Record”