critics will reprove me for saying that Julius Caesar
only increased the number to seven, while many are of opinion he added
three more, and made them a decemvirate: mean time Livy tells us the
institution began in the year of Rome 553, during the consulate of
Fulvius Purpurio and Marcellus, upon a motion of Romuleius if I
remember. They had the privilege granted afterwards of edging the gown
with purple like the pontiffs, when increased to seven in number; and
they were always known by the name _Septemviratus,_ or _Septemviri
Epulonum_, to the latest hours of Paganism.

The tomb of Caius Cestius is supposed to have cost twelve thousand
pounds sterling of our money in those days; and little did he dream that
it should be made in the course of time a repository for the bones of
_divisos orbe Britannos_: for such it is now appointed to be by
government. All of us who die at Rome, sleep with this purveyor of the
gods; and from his monument shall at the last day rise the re-animated
body of our learned and incomparable Sir James Macdonald: whose numerous
and splendid acquirements, though by the time he had reached twenty-four
years old astonished all who knew him, never overwhelmed one little
domestic virtue. His filial piety however; his hereditary courage, his
extensive knowledge, his complicated excellencies, have now, I fear, no
other register to record their worth, than a low stone near the stately
pyramid of Jupiter's caterer.

The tomb of Caecilia Metella, wife of the rich and famous Crassus, claims
our next attention; it is a beautiful structure, and still called _Capo
di Bove_ by the Italians, on account of its being ornamented with the
_oxhead and flowers_ which now flourish over every door in the new-built
streets of London; but the original of which, as Livy tells us, and I
believe Plutarch too, was this. That Coratius, a Sabine farmer, who
possessed a particularly fine cow, was advised by a soothsayer to
sacrifice her to Diana upon the Aventine Hill; telling him, that the
city where _she_ now presided--_Diana_--should become mistress of the
world, and he who presented her with that cow should become master over
that city. The poor Sabine went away to wash in the Tyber, and purify
himself for these approaching honours[AF]; but in the mean time, a boy
having heard the discourse, and reported it to _Servius Tullius_, he
hastened to the spot, killed Coratius's cow for him, sacrificed her to
Diana, and hung her hea