deed say that nothing is entrusted
to them except the eternal fire, which King Numa appointed to be
worshiped as the origin of all things. For fire has the liveliest motion
of anything in nature; and everything is produced by motion or with some
kind of motion. All other parts of matter when heat is absent lie
useless and apparently dead, requiring the power of fire as the breath
of life, to call them into existence and make them capable of action.

Numa therefore, being a learned man and commonly supposed on account of
his wisdom to hold communion with the Muses, consecrated fire, and
ordered it to be kept unquenched for ever as an emblem of the eternal
power that orders all things. Others say that, as among the Greeks, a
purificatory fire burns before the temple, but that within are other
holy things which no man may see, except only the virgins, who are named
Vestals; and a very wide-spread notion is, that the famous Trojan
Palladium, which was brought to Italy by Aeneas, is kept there. Others
say that the Samothracian gods are there, whom Dardanus brought to Troy
after he had founded it, and caused to be worshipped there, which, after
the fall of Troy, Aeneas carried off and kept until he settled in Italy.
But those who pretend to know most about such matters say that there are
two jars of no great size in the temple, one open and empty, and the
other full and sealed, and that these may be seen only by the holy
virgins. Others think that this is a mistake, arising from the fact
that, at the time of which we are treating, the Vestal virgins placed
most of their sacred things in two jars and concealed them in the earth
under the Temple of Quirinus, which place even to the present day is
called the _Doliola_, or place of the jars.

XXI. However this may be, the Vestals took the most important of their
holy things and betook themselves to flight along the Tiber. Here Lucius
Albinus, a plebian, was journeying among the fugitives, with his wife
and infant children and their few necessaries in a waggon. When he saw
the Vestal virgins, without any attendants, journeying on foot and in
distress, carrying in their bosoms the sacred images of the gods, he at
once removed his wife, children, and property from the waggon and handed
it over to them, to escape into one of the Greek cities in Italy. The
piety of Albinus and his care for the duties of religion at so terrible
a crisis deserve to be recorded.

The rest of the priest