36
Amulius dealing very tyrannically with his brother Numitor, killed his son Aenitus as they were a hunting, and made his daughter Sylvia . . . a priestess of Juno. Mars got her with child, and when she had laid her belly of twins, she confessed the truth to the tyrant; which put him in such an apprehension, that he exposed them both on the side of the river Tiber, where they were carried by the stream to a place where a she-wolf had her whelps. The wolf cast away her own, and gave suck to these children. Faustus a shepherd, observing this, took the children to himself, and called them by the names of Romus and Romulus, which came afterwards to be the founders of Rome.—Aristides’s Italian Histories.
37
After the destruction of Troy, Agamemnon and Cassandra were killed; but Orestes, that was brought up with Strophius, revenged the death of his father.—Pyrander’s Fourth Book of Peloponnesian Histories.
37
Fabius Fabricianus, a kinsman of Fabius Maximus, having taken Tuxium, the chief city of the Samnites, sent to Rome the image of Venus Victrix, which among them was held in great veneration. His wife Fabia was debauched by Petronius Valentinus, a handsome young man, and afterwards she treacherously murdered her husband; but for her son Fabricianus who was yet in his infancy, she shifted him away to be privately brought up, and so provided for his security. When he was grown up, he destroyed both his mother and the adulterer, and was formally acquitted for it by a decree of the Senate.—Dositheus’s Third Book of Italian History.
38
Busiris, the son of Neptune and Anippe the daughter of Nilus, was used to invite strangers in to him under a pretence of hospitality, and then to murder them; but divine vengeance met with him at last, for Hercules found out the villany, and killed him with his club. —Agatho the Samian.
