chapotraphouse

They have to have a brilliant leader

(almost no women)

I think it comes from north america brain/settler brain, where settlers roll in, kill/replace the original inhabitants who were living there for millennia, and "found" a "new" settlement that you can assign a founder to. Then you export that way of thought to places where it has no basis in reality and you end up with roman statue avatar twitter guys (and musk apparently) actually believing that cities that have existed since cities began could have singular founding figures and didn't organically emerge because it's a good place to settle down

Iirc, we even have evidence of wars fought between the inhabitants of the different hills of rome, implying that it is such a good place for a settlement that multiple groups settled there before growing too large to be supported by the resources available on their hill alone.

One of the funniest things here is that unlike heavily mythologized figures like Gilgamesh or various biblical leaders Rome's legendary founder isn't even believed to have existed at all. Like they didn't just make up stories about some old king, he was just invented and named after the city relatively late in its existence. It'd be like if America's civic cult developed to the point that "Uncle Sam" was written into the historical record as a literal demigod who built Jamestown by himself and led a bloody crusade across the continent before writing the constitution himself.

With my vast Civilization experience I can confidently inform you that Beijing was founded by Mao Zedong in 4000 BC.