ricia [109], and
many of whom had been in the senate. By the mother's side he was nearly
related to Pompey the Great; and after he had borne the office of
praetor, was one of the twenty commissioners appointed by the Julian law
to divide the land in Campania among the people. But Mark Antony,
treating with contempt Augustus's descent even by the mother's side, says
that his great grand-father was of African descent, and at one time kept
a perfumer's shop, and at another, a bake-house, in Aricia. And Cassius
of Parma, in a letter, taxes Augustus with being the son not only of a
baker, but a usurer. These are his words: "Thou art a lump of thy
mother's meal, which a money-changer of Nerulum taking from the newest
bake-house of Aricia, kneaded into some shape, with his hands all
discoloured by the fingering of money."

V. Augustus was born in the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and
Caius Antonius [110], upon the ninth of the calends of October [the 23rd
September], a little before sunrise, in the quarter of the Palatine Hill
[111], and the street called The Ox-Heads [112], where now stands a
chapel dedicated to him, and built a little after his death. For, as it
is recorded in the proceedings of the senate, when Caius Laetorius, a
young man of a patrician family, in pleading before the senators for a
lighter sentence, upon his being convicted of adultery, alleged, besides
his youth and quality, that he was the possessor, and as it were the
guardian, of the ground which the Divine Augustus first touched upon his
coming into the world; and entreated that (74) he might find favour, for
the sake of that deity, who was in a peculiar manner his; an act of the
senate was passed, for the consecration of that part of his house in
which Augustus was born.

VI. His nursery is shewn to this day, in a villa belonging to the
family, in the suburbs of Velitrae; being a very small place, and much
like a pantry. An opinion prevails in the neighbourhood, that he was
also born there. Into this place no person presumes to enter, unless
upon necessity, and with great devotion, from a belief, for a long time
prevalent, that such as rashly enter it are seized with great horror and
consternation, which a short while since was confirmed by a remarkable
incident. For when a new inhabitant of the house had, either by mere
chance, or to try the truth of the report, taken up his lodging in that
apartment, in the course of the night, a f