The Comic History of Rome. À Beckett Gilbert Abbott
of such an offence having been committed by an unfortunate Vestal, who found her position little better than being buried alive, she was made to undergo literally that awful penalty.
Though the duties of the Vestals were rigidly enforced, and the letting out of the sacred fire was, in some cases, punished by the extinction of the delinquent's vital spark, they enjoyed some peculiar advantages. Though their acts were under strict control, they were, in one sense, allowed a will of their own; for they were permitted, even when under age, to make their own testaments. They occupied reserved seats at public entertainments; and if they happened to meet a criminal in custody, they had the privilege of releasing him from the hands of the police of the period. Notwithstanding these inducements, the office of Vestal was not in much request; and, in the event of a vacancy, it was awarded by lot to some young lady, whose dissatisfaction with her lot was usually very visible. Such is a brief outline of the duties and liabilities of the order into which Amulius forced his niece, and it has been the subject of complaint in more recent times that Rome still occasionally does as Rome used to do. We will now return to Rhea Silvia, who appears to have entered the service of the goddess as a maid-of-all-work; for she was in the habit of going to draw water from a well; and it was on one of these aquatic excursions she met with a military man, passing himself off as Mars who paid his addresses to her, and proved irresistible.
Rhea Silvia gave birth to twins; upon which her cruel uncle ordered her to be put to death, and desired that her infant offspring should be treated as a couple of unwelcome puppies, and got rid of by drowning in the ordinary manner.
The children were placed in a cradle, or, as some say, a bowl, and turned adrift on the river; so that Amulius, if he had any misgiving as to the security of his crown, preferred to drown it in the bowl with his unhappy little relatives.
It happened that there had been such a run on the banks of the Tiber, that its coffers or coffer-dams had poured out their contents all over the adjacent plains, and caused a very extensive distribution of its currency. Among other valuable deposits, it chanced to lodge for security, in a branch connected with the bank, the children of Rhea Silvia, who, by the way, must have been very fortunate under the circumstances, in being able to keep a balance. The infants were not in a very enviable condition; for there was nobody to board and lodge them, though the Tiber was still at hand to wash and do for them. The high tide proved a tide of good fortune to the children, who were floated so far inland, that when the river receded, they were left high and dry at the foot of a fig3 tree, with no one, apparently, to care a fig what became of them. Under these circumstances a she-wolf, who had gone down to the Tiber to drink, heard the whimpering of the babies among the trees, and, her attention being drawn off from the water in the river to the whine in the wood, she came forward in the most handsome manner in the capacity of a wet-nurse to give them suck and succour. How this wolf became possessed of so much of the milk of human kindness, does not appear, and it is not perhaps worth while to inquire.
The children, it is said, were awakened by receiving a gentle licking from the tongue of the animal standing in loco parentis over them. Finding the situation damp, the wolf removed the infants to her den, where they were visited by a philanthropic woodpecker; who, when they were hungry, would bring them some tempting grub, or worm, by which the woodpecker soon wormed itself into the children's confidence. Other members of the feathered tribe made themselves useful in this novel nursery, by keeping off the insects; and many a gnat found itself – or rather lost itself – unexpectedly in the throat of some remorseless swallow. However well-meaning the animal may have been, the children could not have profited greatly, if there had been no one ready to take them from the month; and happily Faustulus, the king's shepherd, who had watched them as they were being carried to the wolf's cave or loup-hole, provided them with another loophole to get out of it. Taking advantage of the wolf's temporary absence from home, the "gentle shepherd," resolving to rescue the children, by hook or by crook, removed the babes to his own hut, and handed them over to his wife Laurentia, as a sort of supplement to their previously rather extensive family.
Some historians, refusing to believe the story of the Wolf and the Woodpecker, have endeavoured to reconcile probability with tradition, by suggesting that the wife of Faustulus had got the name of the Wolf from the contrast she presented to her lamb-like husband, and that the supposed woodpecker was simply a hen-pecker, in the person of Laurentia.
Romulus and Remus were the names of the two infants, who, as they grew up, began to take after their foster-mother the wolf, turning out exceedingly wild lads, with a lupine propensity for worrying the flocks, and going on altogether in a very brutal manner. Remus was taken up on a charge of sheep stealing, or something very like it, and brought before Numitor, his own grandfather, when a recognition took place in a manner not much in accordance with the ordinary rules of evidence. Romulus had also been apprised of his relationship by Faustulus, who must have made a pretty bold guess at a fact he could not have known; and the two lads, being adopted by Numitor, were sent for their education to Gabii, where everything was taught that men of rank in those days were expected to learn, and whence the word Gaby is clearly derivable. Anxious to do something for the old gentleman, their grandfather, Romulus and Remus got up a demonstration in his favour, and they succeeded in restoring him to the throne of Alba Longa, a long row of white houses, which was less of a territory than a Terrace, and it is a strange coincidence that Terracina, or little Terrace, formed one end of it. Amulius was killed, and leaving Numitor sole master of White's Row, Romulus and Remus resolved on a building speculation a great deal higher up – that is to say on the spot where they had passed the days of their infancy. Before the new city was commenced, a dispute arose, first, about what it should be called, and secondly, as to who should govern it. Romulus and Remus, being twins, could not bring the law of primogeniture to bear upon their little differences, and it was therefore agreed to refer the matter to augury, which should decide who was to be inaugurated as the ruler of the new colony. Romulus mounted the Palatine Mount, and Remus took his station on the Aventine, when both began to keep a very sharp look out for something ominous. Remus was the first to remark something odd in the shape of six vultures flying from north to south, but Romulus no sooner heard the news than he declared he had seen twelve, and the question arose whether, figuratively speaking, the one bird in hand seen by Remus should outweigh the two in the bush that subsequently appeared to Romulus. The augur, when appealed to, gave, as usual, a very ambiguous answer. It amounted, in effect, to the observation that there were six of one and a dozen of the other; so that the soothsayer, instead of having said anything to soothe, was far more likely to irritate. Both parties claimed the victory; Remus contending for the precedence usually granted to the early bird, and Romulus maintaining that he had been specially favoured, by having been permitted to see so many birds of a feather flock together. Romulus accordingly commenced drawing his plans in the Etruscan fashion, by causing a boundary line to be marked out with a plough, to which were yoked a heifer and a bull, a ceremony from which, perhaps, the English term bulwarks, and the French word boulevards or bulvards, may or may not be derivable. The line thus traced was called the Pomœrium, and where an entrance was to be made, it was customary to carry the plough across the space – a little engineering difficulty that gave the name of Porta to a gate, from the verb portare, to carry. Remus looked on at the proceedings in a half-quizzing, half-quarrelsome spirit, until the wall rose a little above the ground, when he amused himself by leaping derisively over it. "Thus," said he, "will the enemy leap over those barriers." "And thus," rejoined the superintendent or clerk of the works – one Celer, who acted in this instance with thoughtless celerity – "thus shall die whoever may leap over my barriers."4 With these words he gave Remus a mortal blow, and the legend goes on to state, that Romulus was immediately seized with remorse, and subsequent visits from his brother's ghost rendered Romulus himself little better than the ghost of what he used to be. Remus showed as much spirit after his decease as during his lifetime; and took the form of the deadly nightshade, springing up at the bed-side, to poison the existence of his brother.
Tradition tells us that Romulus came at length to terms with the ghost, who agreed to discontinue his visits, in consideration of the establishment of the festival of the Lemuria – called, originally, Remuria – in honour of his memory. The rites were celebrated bare-footed – an appropriate penalty for one who had stepped into a brother's shoes; the hands were thrice
From this circumstance the fig was considered figurative of the foundation of the city, and held sacred in Rome for many centuries.
The Pomœrium was not the actual wall, but a boundary line, held very sacred by the Romans. It consisted of nothing but the clod turned inwards by the furrow, and, it is probable, that the offensive act of Remus was not his leaping over the wall, but his hopping over the clod, which would, naturally, excite indignation against him as an unmannerly clod-hopper.