What is religious about founding a city?

This paper will focus on an engagement with the work of Michel Serres, and especially the first volume of his Foundation Trilogy, Rome. What is it about the process of foundation which demands the myth of a definitive sense of the beginning? Working backwards from this modern approach to foundations towards the ancient descriptions of a foundation moment discloses why such significance is given to a moment in time, when archaeology almost always shows a process over time. I want to explore the intuition that the answer lies in the desire or necessity to involve definitively the notion of religion in the completion of community, and that this will take us towards an understanding of the ancient conception of community.