And the female slaves
assemble and play, and afterwards beat and throw stones at each other,
as they did then, when they helped the Romans to fight. These accounts
are admitted by but few historians, and indeed the calling out one
another's names in the daytime, and walking down to the Goats' Marsh
seems more applicable to the former story, unless, indeed, both of these
events happened on the same day.
Romulus is said to have been fifty-four years old, and to be in the
thirty-eighth year of his reign when he disappeared from the world.
COMPARISON OF THESEUS AND ROMULUS.
I. The above are all the noteworthy particulars which we have been able
to collect about Theseus and Romulus. It seems, in the first place, that
Theseus of his own free will, and without any compulsion, when he might
have reigned peacefully in Troezen, where he was heir to the kingdom, no
mean one, longed to accomplish heroic deeds: whereas Romulus was an
exile, and in the position of a slave; the fear of death was hanging
over him if unsuccessful, and so, as Plato says, he was made brave by
sheer terror, and through fear of suffering death and torture was forced
into doing great exploits. Moreover, Romulus's greatest achievement was
the slaying of one man, the despot of Alba, whereas Skeiron, Sinis,
Prokrustes, and Korynetes were merely the accompaniments and prelude to
the greater actions of Theseus, and by slaying them he freed Greece from
terrible scourges, before those whom he saved even knew who he was.
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