Mother of Rome
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Mother of Rome
Buy Now for ₹546.23
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Narrated by:
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Emily Bruni
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Written by:
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Lauren J.A. Bear
About this listen
A powerful and fierce reimagining of the earliest Roman legend: the twins, Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of history's greatest empire, and the woman whose sacrifice made it all possible.
The names Romulus and Remus may be immortalized in map and stone and chronicle, but their mother exists only as a preface to her sons' journey, the princess turned oath-breaking priestess, condemned to death alongside her children.
But she did not die; she survived. And so does her story.
Beautiful, royal, rich: Rhea has it all—until her father loses his kingdom in a treacherous coup, and she is sent to the order of the Vestal Virgins to ensure she will never produce an heir.
Except when mortals scheme, gods laugh.
Rhea becomes pregnant, and human society turns against her. Abandoned, ostracized, and facing the gravest punishment, Rhea forges a dangerous deal with the divine, one that will forever change the trajectory of her life…and her beloved land.
To save her sons and reclaim their birthright, Rhea must summon nature's mightiest force—a mother's love—and fight.
All roads may lead to Rome, but they began with Rhea Silvia.
©2025 Lauren J.A. Bear (P)2025 W.F. Howes LtdWhat stayed with me wasn’t just the retelling, because yes, the old stories are all here, their bones familiar, their names echoing from somewhere we’ve all heard before. But the writer doesn’t worship the past. She unsettles it. Turns it slightly, just enough for the light to fall differently. And in that shift, what emerges is not grandeur… but ache. A very human, very fragile ache.
Rhea, in many ways, stops being a character and starts becoming a feeling. There is something deeply unsettling about her existence — not just a wolf, not just human, but something caught in between, learning instinct like a language she was never meant to speak, and yet somehow… it fits. There’s a quiet violence in that transformation, not the kind that spills blood, but the kind that reshapes identity. And still, despite everything, the village loves her. Not fears, not worships — loves. And that love feels heavier than any curse. Because it means she belongs… and also that she can lose.
And that is where the book quietly breaks you.
Because beneath the mythology, beneath the gods and the stories we think we understand, there is this constant undercurrent — that life does not warn you before it changes. That everything you hold, everything you think is steady, can shift in a single moment and leave you standing in a version of the world that feels almost familiar… but not quite. There is a melancholic stillness in the way this is written. Not dramatic, not exaggerated. Just accepted. As if loss, transformation, and quiet suffering are not events… but states of being.
Even the divine is not spared.
There’s this haunting thread that runs through it — the idea that gods may still walk amongst us, not as thunder or miracles, but as something softer, almost forgettable. A soldier who believes he saw Aphrodite, and you’re left wondering whether that moment was divine revelation… or just a fragile human trying to give meaning to something too beautiful to be ordinary. And somewhere in that uncertainty, the line begins to echo — what is happiness to a god? — and it doesn’t feel philosophical anymore. It feels tired. As if even divinity, when stretched across time, begins to hollow out.
What I loved most, though, is how the writer refuses to give you comfort. There are no clean resolutions here. No neat understanding of right or wrong, human or divine, love or loss. Everything bleeds into everything else. Just like life does. Just like it always has.
And maybe that’s the point.
That these old stories were never really about gods.
They were always about us… trying to survive the quiet, inevitable unraveling of everything we hold close, and still, somehow, finding a way to keep going.
Like a wolf learning to live with a human heart.
Wolf living with a Human Heart!
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