out of a wooden pillar, after causing dismay and flight in the palace, not so much struck the king’s heart with sudden terror, as it filled him with anxious solicitude.  Accordingly, since Etruscan soothsayers were only employed for public prodigies, terrified at this so to say private apparition, he determined to send to the oracle of Delphi, the most celebrated in the world; and not venturing to intrust the responses of the oracle to any other person, he despatched his two sons to Greece through lands unknown at that time, and yet more unknown seas.  Titus and Arruns were the two who set out.  They were accompanied by Lucius Junius Brutus, the son of Tarquinia, the king’s sister, a youth of an entirely different cast of mind from that of which he had assumed the disguise.  He, having heard that the chief men of the city, among them his own brother, had been put to death by his uncle, resolved to leave nothing in regard to his ability that might be dreaded by the king, nor anything in his fortune that might be coveted, and thus to be secure in the contempt in which he was held, seeing that there was but little protection in justice.  Therefore, having designedly fashioned himself to the semblance of foolishness, and allowing himself and his whole estate to become the prey of the king, he did not refuse to take even the surname of Brutus,[55] that, under the cloak of this surname, the genius that was to be the future liberator of the Roman people, lying concealed, might bide its opportunity.  He, in reality being brought to Delphi by the Tarquinii rather as an object of ridicule than as a companion, is said to have borne with him as an offering to Apollo a golden rod, inclosed in a staff of cornel-wood hollowed out for the purpose, a mystical emblem of his own mind.  When they arrived there, and had executed their father’s commission, the young men’s minds were seized with the desire of inquiring to which of them the sovereignty of Rome should fall.  They say that the reply was uttered from the inmost recesses of the cave, “Young men, whichever of you shall first kiss his mother shall enjoy the sovereign power at Rome.”  The Tarquinii ordered the matter to be kept secret with the utmost care, that Sextus, who had been left behind at Rome, might be ignorant of the response of the oracle, and have no share in the kingdom; they then cast lots among themselves, to decide which of them should first kiss his mother, after they had returned to Rome.  Brutus, thinking that the Pythian response had another meaning, as if he had stumbled and fallen, touched the ground with his lips, she being, forsooth, the common mother of all mankind.  After this they returned to Rome, where preparations were being made with the greatest vigour for a war against the Rutulians.