To foreign reasons add, my Muse, some Latin ones, and let my steed career in his own dusty course. A she-goat had been sacrificed as usual to hoof-footed Faunus, and a crowd had come by invitation to partake of the scanty repast. While the priests were dressing the inwards, stuck on willow spits, the sun then riding in mid heaven, Romulus and his brother and the shepherd youth were exercising their naked bodies in the sunshine on the plain; they tried in sport the strength of their arms by the gloves and javelins and by hurling ponderous stones. Cried a shepherd from a height, “O Romulus and Remus, robbers are driving off the bullocks across the pathless lands.” To arm would have been tedious; out went the brothers both in opposite directions; but ’twas Remus who fell in with the freebooters and brought the booty back. On his return he drew the hissing inwards from the spits and said, “None but the victor surely shall eat these.” He did as he had said, he and the Fabii together. Thither came Romulus foiled, and saw the empty tables and bare bones. He laughed, and grieved that Remus and the Fabii could have conquered when his own Quintilii could not. The fame of the deed endures: they run stripped, and the success of that day enjoys a lasting fame.
Perhaps you may also ask why that place is called the Lupercal, and what is the reason for denoting the day by such a name. Silvia, a Vestal, had given birth to heavenly babes, what time her uncle sat upon the throne. He ordered the infant boys to be carried away and drowned in the river. Rash man! one of those babes will yet be Romulus. Reluctantly his servants carry out the mournful orders. Yet they weep as they bear the twins to the place appointed. It chanced that the Albula, which took the name of Tiber from Tiberinus, drowned in its waves, was swollen with winter rain: where now the forums are, and where the valley of the Circus Maximus hes, you might see boats floating about. Hither when they were come, for farther they could not go, one or other of them said: “But how like they are! how beautiful is each! Yet of the two this one has more vigour. If lineage may be inferred from features, unless appearances deceive me, I fancy that some god is in you—but if some god were indeed the author of your being, he would come to your rescue in so perilous an hour; surely he would come to the rescue, unless the mother needed his help, she who has borne and lost her children in a single day. Ye bodies, born together to die together, together pass beneath the waves!” He ended, and from his bosom he laid down the twins.
Both squalled alike: you would fancy they understood. With wet cheeks the bearers wended their homeward way. The hollow ark in which the babes were laid supported them on the surface of the water: ah me! how big a fate the little plank upbore! The ark drifted towards a shady wood, and, as the water gradually shoaled, it grounded on the mud. There was a tree (traces of it still remain), which is now called the Rumina fig-tree, but was once the Romulan fig-tree. A she-wolf which had cast her whelps came, wondrous to tell, to the abandoned twins: who could believe that the brute would not harm the boys? Far from harming, she helped them; and they whom ruthless kinsfolk would have killed with their own hands were suckled by a wolf! She halted and fawned on the tender babes with her tail, and licked into shape their two bodies with her tongue. You might know they were scions of Mars: fearless, they sucked her dugs and were fed on a supply of milk that was never meant for them. The she-wolf (lupa) gave her name to the place, and the place gave their name to the Luperci. Great is the reward the nurse has got for the milk she gave. Why should not the Luperci have been named after the Arcadian mountain? Lycaean Faunus has temples in Arcadia.
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