nus
Marcellinus speaks of him as being said to have sprung out of the
earth in Etruria.

Ovid next makes a passing allusion to the spear of Romulus, which,
when thrown by him from the Mount Aventine towards the Capitol,
sticking in the ground was converted into a tree, which immediately
put forth leaves. This prodigy was taken for a presage of the future
greatness of Rome: and Plutarch, in his life of Romulus, says that
so long as this tree stood, the Republic flourished. It began to
wither in the time of the first civil war; and Julius Caesar having
afterwards ordered a building to be erected near where it stood, the
workmen cutting some of its roots in sinking the foundations, it
soon after died. It is hardly probable that a cornel tree would
stand in a thronged city for nearly seven hundred years; and it is,
therefore, most likely, that care was taken to renovate it from time
to time, by planting slips from the former tree.

The story of Genucius Cippus is one of those strange fables with
which the Roman history is diversified. Valerius Maximus gives the
following account of it. He says that Cippus, going one day out of
Rome, suddenly found that something which resembled horns was
growing out of his forehead. Surprised at an event so extraordinary,
he consulted the augurs, who said that he would be chosen king, if
he ever entered the city again. As the royal power was abhorred in
Rome, he preferred a voluntary banishment to revisiting Rome on
those terms. Struck with this heroism, the Romans erected a brazen
statue with horns over the gate by which he departed, and it was
afterwards called 'Porta raudusculana,' because the ancient Latin
name of brass was 'raudus,' 'rodus,' or 'rudus.' The fact is,
however, as Ovid represents it, that Cippus was not going out of
Rome, but returning to it, when the prodigy happened; he having been
to convey assistance to the Consul Valerius. The Senate also
conferred certain lands on Cippus, as a reward for his patriotism.
He lived about two hundred and forty years before the Christian era.
Pliny the Elder considers the story of the horns of Cippus as much a
fable as that of Actaeon. It appears, however, that the account of
the horns may have possibly been founded on fact, as excrescences
resembling them have appeared on the bodies of individuals. Bayle
makes mention of a girl of Palermo, who had little horns a