untain. The horses of Hippolytus being frightened
by a sea-monster, he is killed by being thrown from his chariot, and
becomes a God, under the name of Virbius. Tages, the Diviner, arises
out of a clod of earth. The lance of Romulus is changed into a
cornel-tree. Cippus becomes horned, and goes into voluntary
banishment, rather than his country should be deprived of its
liberty by his means.

With his mind cultivated with precepts such as these and others, they
say that Numa returned to his country, and, being voluntarily
invited,[53] received the sovereignty of the Roman people. Blest with a
Nymph for his wife, and the Muses for his guides, he taught the rites of
sacrifice, and brought over to the arts of peace a race inured to savage
warfare. After, full of years, he had finished his reign and his life,
the Latian matrons and the people and the Senators lamented Numa at his
death. But his wife, leaving the city, lay hid, concealed in the thick
groves of the valley of Aricia, and by her groans and lamentations
disturbed the sacred rites of Diana, brought thither by Orestes. Ah! how
oft did the Nymphs of the grove and of the lake entreat her not to do
so, and utter soothing words. Ah! how often did the hero, the son of
Theseus, say to her as she wept, "Put an end to it; for thy lot is not
the only one to be lamented. Consider the like calamities of others,
thou wilt {then} bear thine own better. And would that an example, not
my own, could lighten thy grief! yet even my own can do so."

"I suppose, in discourse it has reached thy ears that a certain
Hippolytus met with his death through the credulity of his father, by
the deceit of his wicked step-mother. Thou wilt wonder, and I shall
hardly be able to prove it; but yet I am he. In former times, the
daughter of Pasiphae, having tempted me in vain, pretended that I wished
to defile the couch of my father, a thing that she herself wished to do;
and having turned the accusation {against me}, (whether it was more
through dread of discovery, or through mortification at her repulse) she
charged me. And my father expelled me, {thus} innocent, from the city,
and as I went he uttered imprecations against my head, with ruthless
prayers. I was going to Troezen, {the city} of Pittheus,[54] in my flying
chariot, and I was now proceeding along the shores of the Corinthian
gulf, when the sea was aroused, and an enormous mass of waters seemed to
bend and to grow in the for