a deep furrow round the boundaries.  It is the duty of his attendants to throw the clods inwards, which the plough turns up, and to let none of them fall outwards.  By this line they define the extent of the fortifications, and it is called by contraction, Pomoerium, which means behind the walls or beyond the walls (post moenia).  Wherever they intend to place a gate they take off the ploughshare, and carry the plough over, leaving a space.  After this ceremony they consider the entire wall sacred, except the gates; but if they were sacred also, they could not without scruple bring in and out necessaries and unclean things through them.

XII.  It is agreed that the foundation of the city took place on the eleventh day before the Kalends of May (the 21st of April).  And on this day the Romans keep a festival which they call the birthday of the city.  At this feast, originally, we are told, they sacrificed nothing that has life, but thought it right to keep the anniversary of the birth of the city pure and unpolluted by blood.  However, before the foundation of the city, they used to keep a pastoral feast called Palilia.  The Roman months at the present day do not in any way correspond to those of Greece; yet they (the Greeks) distinctly affirm that the day upon which Romulus founded the city was the 30th of the month.  The Greeks likewise tell us that on that day an eclipse of the sun took place, which they think was that observed by Antimachus of Teos, the epic poet, which occurred in the third year of the sixth Olympiad.  In the time of Varro the philosopher, who of all the Romans was most deeply versed in Roman history, there was one Taroutius, a companion of his, a philosopher and mathematician, who had especially devoted himself to the art of casting nativities, and was thought to have attained great skill therein.  To this man Varro proposed the task of finding the day and hour of Romulus’s birth, basing his calculations on the influence which the stars were said to have had upon his life, just as geometricians solve their problems by the analytic method; for it belongs, he argued, to the same science to predict the life of a man from the time of his birth, and to find the date of a man’s birth if the incidents of his life are given.  Taroutius performed his task, and after considering the things done and suffered by Romulus, the length of his life, the manner of his death, and all such like matters, he confidently and boldly asserted that Romulus was conceived by his mother in the first year of the second Olympiad, at the third hour of the twenty-third day of the month which is called in the Egyptian calendar Choiac, at which time there was a total eclipse of the sun.  He stated that he was born on the twenty-first day of the month Thouth, about sunrise.  Rome was founded by him on the ninth day of the month Pharmouthi, between the second and third hour; for it is supposed that the fortunes of cities, as well as those of men, have their certain periods which can be discovered by the position of the stars at their nativities.  The quaint subtlety of these speculations may perhaps amuse the reader more than their legendary character will weary him.