Romulus began acting as a tyrant towards the end of his reign, and that the cloud which surrounded him that day on the parade ground was not a divine thundercloud but a cloud of dust raised by senators falling on him with knives. The assumed-into-heaven story was far more popular – and obviously neither actually happened – but the survival of the tyranny version well into the Imperial period suggests that there was at least a strain of high Roman culture that wanted to lionise the killing of even the divine Romulus, son of Mars, in the name of Rome.
