ROMULUS. 51

ploughshare, and, yoking together a bull and a cow, drove himself a deep line or furrow round the bounds ; while the business of those that followed after was to see that what- ever earth was thrown up should be turned all inwards towards the city, and not to let any clod lie outside. With this line they described the wall, and called it, by a contrac- tion, Pomoerium, that is, post niiiram, after or beside the wall ; and where they designed to make a gate, there they took out the share, carried the plough over, and left a space ; for which reason they consider the whole wall as holy, except where the gates are ; for had they adjudged them also sacred, they could not, without offence to religion, have given free ingress and egress for the necessaries of human life, some of which are in themselves unclean. As for the day they began to build the city, it is univer- sally agreed to have been the twenty-first of April, and that day the Romans annually keep holy, calling it their country's birth-day. At first, they say, they sa- crificed no living creature on this day, thinking it fit to preserve the feast of their country's birth-day pure and without stain of blood. Yet before ever the city was built, there was a feast of herdsmen and shepherds kept on this day, which went by the name of Palilia. The Roman and Greek months have now little or no agree- ment; they say, however, the day on which Romulus began to build was quite certainly the thirtieth of the month, at which time there was an eclipse of the sun which they conceive to be that seen by Antimachus, the Teian poet, in the third year of the sixth Olympiad. In the times of Varro the philosopher, a man deeply read in Ro- man history, lived one Tarrutius, his familiar acquain- tance, a good philosopher and mathematician, and one, too, that out of curiosity had studied the way of drawing schemes and tables, and was thought to be a proficient in

the art; to him Varro propounded to cast Romulus's