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Among the Romans, the enormous disproportion of wealth surmounted the ideal restraints of a doubtful tradition, and an obsolete statute; a tradition that the poorest follower of Romulus had been endowed with the perpetual inheritance of two jugera; a statute which confined the richest citizen to the measure of five hundred jugera, or three hundred and twelve acres of land.
Perhaps any success that attended the experiment which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted thing at all, but only an accident of accidents proceeded just from the fact that the small subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely sacrificed Remus, had in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle of life and even of "fun."
He suddenly disappeared on the Nones of July, as they call the month which was then Quintilis, leaving nothing of certainty to be related of his death; the senators suffered the people not to search, or busy themselves about the matter, but commanded them to honor and worship Romulus as one taken up to the gods, and about to be to them, in the place of a good prince, now a propitious god.
By a miraculous coincidence he was born on the very day on which Romulus founded Rome; that is, the tenth day before the Calends of May.
If we consider Romulus as the founder of the Roman state, certainly he who killed his brother, that he might reign alone, did not desire to come under restraints from the controling power of the senate, nor to refer the councils of his sovereignty to the decision of a collective body.
Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that circus a minute. No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an hour's stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped.
Here he dismounted, and dedicated his spoils, being the third, and, up to our day, the last who ever did so: first comes Romulus, with the spoils of Acron of Cæninum; second, Cornelius Cossus offered the spoils of Tolumnius the Etruscan; third, Marcellus offered these spoils of Britomartus, the king of the Gauls; after Marcellus, no man.
There, they say, grew the holy cornel tree, of which they report, that Romulus once, to try his strength, threw a dart from the Aventine Mount, the staff of which was made of cornel, which struck so deep into the ground, that no one of many that tried could pluck it up; and the soil, being fertile, gave nourishment to the wood, which sent forth branches, and produced a cornel-stock of considerable bigness.
Romulus sprang back with a cry of terror, and then stopped, and in a crouching attitude, ready to fly for his life and freedom, gazed at the enemy of all creation. But the look he received in return was so kindly, and withal so peculiar and so unlike any that he had ever seen before, that his instinct to fly yielded to his curiosity to discover.
They dressed up as free women in the attire of matrons and maids, and in this guise they went forth from the city, scoffed and jeered at all whom they met, and engaged among themselves in a fight, striking and throwing stones at each other. Another Roman king who perished by violence was Tatius, the Sabine colleague of Romulus.
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