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Later, when the children were born and the despot gave orders to do away with them, by the decree of Fortune no barbarous or savage servant but a compassionate and humane man received them, with the result that he did not kill them; but there was a margin of the river, bordering upon a green meadow,Perhaps Plutarch is attempting to give a version of super ripas Tiberis effusus lenibus stagnis . . . in proxima alluvie of Livy, i. 4. shaded round about with lowly shrubs; and here the servant deposited the infants near a certain wild fig-tree, to which people later gave the name Ruminalis. Cf. 278 c, supra. Then a she-wolf, that had newly whelped, with her dugs distended and overflowing with milk because her young had perished, being herself in great need of relief, circled around Cf. cursum flexisse of Livy, i. 4. the infants and then gave them suck, thus ridding herself of the pain caused by the milk as if it had been a second birth-pang. And a bird sacred to Mars, which they call the woodpecker, visited them and, perching near on tiptoe, would, with its claw, open the mouth of each child in turn and place therein a morsel, sharing with them a portion of its own food. Wherefore they named this wild fig-tree Ruminalis, from the teat (ruma) which the wolf offered to the children as she crouched beside the tree. And for a long time the people who dwelt near this place preserved the custom of never exposing any of the new-born infants, but they acknowledged and reared them all, in honour of Romulus’s experience and the similarity of the childrens’ case with his.
