Sabine Women, the Rape of the.
      The daughters and wives of the Sabini, a people inhabiting the Appennine Sabine Hills north-east of Rome. The Sabine Women were abducted under orders of Romulus, Rome's first king. Romulus' motivation for taking the women against their will was to get wives for the predominantely male rabble populating the nascent settlement on the Tiber. The abduction of these Sabine Women led to hostilities between the Romans and the Sabini; but eventual reconciliation between their Sabine fathers and their new Roman husbands was effected by the Sabine Women themselves.
     Livy's pro-Roman account records that the women were not raped, but that they agreed to their new associations with the Roman men. Livy recounts how the women's hearts were won over by their captors' kindly attitude and eventually the common bond of the Roman children they bore. The forced cultural merger was sealed with joint rule under Romulus and Titus Tatius, the Sabine king, and became a milestone in the establishment of early Rome.
     Plutarch records that by some accounts "only" thirty women were taken by the Romans; but, he cites other sources who claim that the Rape of the Sabine Women involved five- to six hundred abductions. Whether the tale of the Sabine Women reflects actual historical events or was derived entirely from mythology — i.e. an Indo-European myth about the creation of a divine society from two disparate populations, as G. Dumézil proposed — has offered material for scholarly argument. A majority of scholars look to historical truth in the legend's elements, and it is believed that cultural interaction between early Romans on the lower Tiber and the upstream Sabines occurred over centuries of Rome's vaguely documented past.

Further References:
      Momigliano, A. 1963. "An Interim Report on the Origins of Rome". Journal of Roman Studies 53:95-121.
      Salmon, E.T. 1982. The Making of Roman Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
      Potter, D.S. 2014. Ancient Rome: a new history. Thames and Hudson.
     Dumézil, G. 1966 (1970). Archaic Roman Religion, with an appendix on the religion of the Etruscans. 2 volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.