They agreed to decide their dispute by watching the flight of birds, and having taken their seats apart, it is said that six vultures appeared to Remus, and afterwards twice as many to Romulus.  Some say that Remus really saw his vultures, but that Romulus only pretended to have seen them, and when Remus came to him, then the twelve appeared to Romulus; for which reason the Romans at the present day draw their auguries especially from vultures.  Herodorus of Pontus says that Hercules delighted in the sight of a vulture, when about to do any great action.  It is the most harmless of all creatures, for it injures neither crops, fruit, nor cattle, and lives entirely upon dead corpses.  It does not kill or injure anything that has life, and even abstains from dead birds from its relationship to them.  Now eagles, and owls, and falcons, peck and kill other birds, in spite of Aeschylus’s line,

    “Bird-eating bird polluted e’er must be.”

Moreover, the other birds are, so to speak, ever before our eyes, and continually remind us of their presence; but the vulture is seldom seen, and it is difficult to meet with its young, which has suggested to some persons the strange idea that vultures come from some other world to pay us their rare visits, which are like those occurrences which, according to the soothsayers, do not happen naturally or spontaneously, but by the interposition of Heaven.

X. When Remus discovered the deceit he was very angry, and, while Romulus was digging a trench round where the city wall was to be built, he jeered at the works, and hindered them.  At last, as he jumped over it, he was struck dead either by Romulus himself, or by Celer, one of his companions.  In this fight, Faustulus was slain, and also Pleistinus, who is said to have been Faustulus’s brother and to have helped him in rearing Romulus and his brother.  Celer retired into Tyrrhenia, and from him the Romans call quick sharp men Celeres; Quintus Metellus, who, when his father died, in a very few days exhibited a show of gladiators, was surnamed Celer by the Romans in their wonder at the short time he had spent in his preparations.

XI.  Romulus, after burying Remus and his foster-parents in the Remurium, consecrated his city, having fetched men from Etruria, who taught him how to perform it according to sacred rites and ceremonies, as though they were celebrating holy mysteries.  A trench was dug in a circle round what is now the Comitium, and into it were flung first-fruits of all those things which are honourable and necessary for men.  Finally each man brought a little of the earth of the country from which he came, and flung it into one heap and mixed it all together.  They call this pit by the same name as the heavens, Mundus.  Next, they drew the outline of the city in the form of a circle, with this place as its centre.  And then the founder, having fitted a plough with a brazen ploughshare, and yoked to it a bull and a cow, himself ploughs