the strife with
Remus, the difficulty was not yet fully settled. Remus was very little
disposed to acquiesce in his brother's assumed superiority over him.
He was sullen, morose, and ill at ease, and was inclined to take
little part in the proceedings which were going on. Finally an
occasion occurred which produced a crisis, and brought the rivalry and
enmity of the brothers suddenly and forever to an end. Remus was one
day standing by a part of the wall which his brother's workmen were
building, and expressing, in various ways, and with great freedom, his
opinions of his brother's plans; and finally he began to speak
contemptuously of the wall which the workmen were building. Romulus
all the time was standing by. At length, in order to enforce what he
said about the insufficiency of the work, Remus leaped over a portion
of it, saying, "This is the way the enemy will leap over your wall."
Hereupon Romulus seized a mattock from the hands of one of the
laborers, and struck his brother down to the ground with it, saying,
"And this is the way that we will kill them if they do." Remus was
killed by the blow.

As soon as the deed was done, Romulus was at once overwhelmed with
remorse and horror at the atrocity of the crime which he had been so
suddenly led to commit. His anguish was so great for a time that he
refused all food, and he could not sleep. He caused the dead body of
Remus, and also those of Faustulus and of Plistinus, the brother of
Faustulus, to be buried with the most solemn and imposing funeral
ceremonies, so as to render all possible honor to their memory; and
then, not satisfied with this, he instituted and celebrated certain
religions rites, to prevent the ghosts of the deceased from coming
back to haunt him. The ghosts, or specters of the dead that came back
to haunt and terrify the living were called _lemures_. Hence the
celebration which Romulus ordained was called the Lemuria, and it
continued to be annually observed in Rome during the whole period of
its subsequent history.

Precisely what the ceremonies were which Romulus performed to appease
the spirit of his brother can not now be ascertained, as there was no
particular description of them recorded. But the Lemuria, as afterward
performed, were frequently described by Roman writers, and they were
of a very curious and extraordinary character. The time for the
celebration of these rites was in May, the anniversary, as was
supposed, of the days in w