the Sabines and others.  This being refused Romulus had recourse to a stratagem, proclaiming that he had discovered the altar of Consus, the god of counsels, an allegory of his cunning in general.  In the midst of the solemnities, the Sabine maidens, thirty in number, were carried off, from whom the curiae received their names:  this is the genuine ancient legend, and it proves how small ancient Rome was conceived to have been.  In later times the number was thought too small; it was supposed that these thirty had been chosen by lot for the purpose of naming the curiae after them; and Valerius Antias fixed the number of the women who had been carried off at five hundred and twenty-seven.  The rape is placed in the fourth month of the city, because the consualia fall in August, and the festival commemorating the foundation of the city in April; later writers, as Cn.  Gellius, extended this period to four years, and Dionysius found this of course far more credible.  From this rape there arose wars, first with the neighboring towns, which were defeated one after another, and at last with the Sabines.  The ancient legend contains not a trace of this war having been of long continuance; but in later times it was necessarily supposed to have lasted for a considerable time, since matters were then measured by a different standard.  Lucumo and Caelius came to the assistance of Romulus, an allusion to the expedition of Caeles Vibenna, which however belongs to a much later period.  The Sabine king, Tatius, was induced by treachery to settle on the hill which is called the Tarpeian arx.  Between the Palatine and the Tarpeian rock a battle was fought, in which neither party gained a decisive victory, until the Sabine women threw themselves between the combatants, who agreed that henceforth the sovereignty should be divided between the Romans and the Sabines.  According to the annals, this happened in the fourth year of Rome.

But this arrangement lasted only a short time; Tatius was slain during a sacrifice at Lavinium, and his vacant throne was not filled up.  During their common reign, each king had a senate of one hundred members, and the two senates, after consulting separately, used to meet, and this was called comitium.  Romulus during the remainder of his life ruled alone; the ancient legend knows nothing of his having been a tyrant:  according to Ennius he continued, on the contrary, to be a mild and benevolent king, while Tatius was a tyrant.  The ancient tradition contained nothing beyond the beginning and the end of the reign of Romulus; all that lies between these points, the war with the Veientines, Fidenates, and so on, is a foolish invention of later annalists.  The poem itself is beautiful, but this inserted narrative is highly absurd, as for example the statement that Romulus slew ten thousand Veientines with his own hand.  The ancient poem passed on at once to the time when Romulus had completed his earthly career, and Jupiter