usages and written
rules in all the ceremonies to be observed, as in a religious rite.
First, they dug a round trench about that which is now the Comitium,
or Court of Assembly and into it solemnly threw the first-fruits of all
things either good by custom or necessary by nature; lastly, every man
taking a small piece of earth of the country from whence he came, they
all threw them in promiscuously together. This trench they call, as they
do the heavens, Mundus; making which their centre, they described the
city in a circle round it. Then the founder fitted to a plough, a bronze
ploughshare, and, yoking together a bull and a cow, drove himself a
deep line or furrow round the bounds; while the business of those that
followed after was to see that whatever earth was thrown up should
be turned all inwards towards the city, and not to let any clod lie
outside. With this line they described the wall, and called it, by a
contradiction, Pomoerium, that is, "post murum," after or beside the
wall; and where they designed to make a gate, there they took out the
share, carried the plough over, and left a space; for which reason they
consider the whole wall as holy, except where the gates are; for had
they adjudged them also sacred, they could not, without offence to
religion, have given free ingress and egress for the necessaries of
human life, some of which are in themselves unclean.

As for the day they began to build the city, it is universally agreed
to have been the twenty-first of April, and that day the Romans annually
keep holy, calling it their country's birthday. At first, they say, they
sacrificed no living creatures on this day, thinking it fit to preserve
the feast of their country's birthday pure and without stain of blood.
Yet before ever the city was built, there was a feast of herdsmen and
shepherds kept on this day, which went by the name of Palilia. The Roman
and Greek months have now little or no agreement; they say, however, the
day on which Romulus began to build was quite certainly the thirtieth
of the month, at which time there was an eclipse of the sun which they
conceive to be that seen by Antimachus, the Teian poet, in the third
year of the sixth Olympiad. In the times of Varro the philosopher, a
man deeply read in Roman history, lived one Tarrutius, his familiar
acquaintance, a good philosopher and mathematician, and one, too, that
out of curiosity had studied the way of drawing schemes and tables, and