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The persons, however, appointed by Camillus to resume and mark out, in this general confusion, all consecrated places, coming, in their way round the Palatium, to the chapel of Mars, found the chapel itself indeed destroyed and burnt to the ground, like everything else, by the barbarians; but whilst they were clearing the place, and carrying away the rubbish, lit upon Romulus's augural staff, buried under a great heap of ashes.
Romulus's original colonists thought it a monstrous thing that the Sabines, because they had been admitted to a share of the city and the country, should propose to rule over it; while the Sabines not unreasonably urged that because, after the death of Tatius, they had acquiesced in Romulus reigning alone, now in their turn they ought to furnish a king of their own nation.
He assigned to each trade its special privileges, common to all the members, and arranged that each should have its own times of meeting, and worship its own special patron god, and by this means he did away with that habit, which hitherto had prevailed among the citizens, of some calling themselves Sabines, and some Romans; one boasting that they were Tatius's men, and other Romulus's.
Too justly the historian accuses the genius of past art, in that, types of too many such elsewhere, the galleries of Berlin "are made up, like other galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-Wolf, and the Correggiosity of Correggio, and contain, for instance, no portrait of Friedrich the Great, no likeness at all, or next to none at all, of the noble series of Human Realities, or any part of them, who have sprung, not from the idle brains of dreaming dilettanti, but from the head of God Almighty, to make this poor authentic earth a little memorable for us, and to do a little work that may be eternal there."
They with the assistance of many persons killed Amulius, and after bestowing the kingdom of Alba on their grandfather Numitor themselves made a beginning of founding Rome in the eighteenth year of Romulus's life.
It was also natural, that March, dedicated to Mars, should be Romulus's first, and April, named from Venus, or Aphrodite, his second month; in it they sacrifice to Venus, and the women bathe on the calends, or first day of it, with myrtle garlands on their heads.
But what some write, that, of fourteen thousand that fell that day, above half were slain by Romulus's own hand, verges too near to fable, and is, indeed, simply incredible: since even the Messenians are thought to go too far in saying that Aristomenes three times offered sacrifices for the death of a hundred enemies, Lacedaemonians, slain by himself.
In other words, the astrologer was to determine what must have been the relative positions of the sun, moon, and stars, at the birth of Romulus, in order to produce a being whose life should exhibit such transactions and events as those which appeared in Romulus's subsequent history.
Romulus's surname Quirinus, some say, is equivalent to Mars; others, that he was so called because the citizens were called Quirites; others, because the ancients called a dart or spear Quiris; thus, the statue of Juno resting on a spear is called Quiritis, and the dart in the Regia is addressed as Mars, and those that were distinguished in war were usually presented with a dart; that, therefore, Romulus, being a martial god, or a god of darts, was called Quirinus.
Moreover, Romulus's greatest achievement was the slaying of one man, the despot of Alba, whereas Skeiron, Sinis, Prokrustes, and Korynetes were merely the accompaniments and prelude to the greater actions of Theseus, and by slaying them he freed Greece from terrible scourges, before those whom he saved even knew who he was.
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