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By these testimonies of men the cause of Fortune is supported; after which I proceed now to other arguments taken from the things themselves, beginning from the first foundations of the city of Rome. And first of all, it cannot be denied that, by the birth and preservation of Romulus, by his education and growth, the foundations of Rome were first laid by Fortune; but then withal it must be acknowledged that Virtue finished the building. As to their origin and birth who first founded and built the city, it looked like a wonderful good Fortune. For it is said that their mother conceived by a God; and as Hercules is said to have been sown in a long night, the natural day being preternaturally prolonged by the sun’s standing still; so it is reported concerning the begetting of Romulus, that the sun was eclipsed at the time, being in conjunction with the moon, as the immortal God Mars was with the mortal Sylvia. The same is said to have happened about the time of his death. For on the seventh of July, called Nonae Capratinae, which is a feast observed to this day with great solemnity, while the sun was under an eclipse, he suddenly vanished out of the sight of men. After their nativity, when the tyrant would have murdered the new-born babes, by the conduct of Fortune, who was concerned for the preservation of their lives, Romulus and Remus fell into the hands of a servant no ways barbarous and cruel, but pitiful and tender-hearted, who laid them on the pleasant green bank of a river, in a place shaded with lowly shrubs, near to that wild fig-tree, to which the name of Ruminalis was afterwards given. There it was that a she-wolf, having lost her young whelps, by chance lighted on them, and being burdened with her swollen dugs, inflamed for want of evacuation, she gladly let out her overheated milk, as if it had been a second birth, and suckled the young children. The woodpecker also, a bird sacred to Mars, came often unto them, and supporting herself upon one claw, she did by turns open both their mouths with the other, and distribute unto each of them convenient gobbets of her own food. This fig-tree was therefore called Ruminalis, from Ruma, the dug, which the wolf lying down there gave to the infants. And from a veneration of this strange chance of Romulus and of every thing resembling it, the inhabitants thereabout would not expose any of their offspring; but they carefully reared and fostered all new births.
