before them. The fathers,
overcome by indignation, expressly forbade either their restoration or
confiscation. They were given to the people to be rifled, that, having
been polluted as it were by participation in the royal plunder, they
might lose forever all hopes of reconciliation with the Tarquins. A
field belonging to the latter, which lay between the city and the
Tiber, having been consecrated to Mars, was afterward called the
Campus Martius. It is said that there was by chance, at that time, a
crop of corn upon it ripe for harvest; this produce of the field, as
they thought it unlawful to use it, after it had been reaped, a large
number of men, sent into the field together, carried in baskets corn
and straw together, and threw it into the Tiber, which then was
flowing with shallow water, as is usual in the heat of summer; thus
the heaps of corn as they stuck in the shallows settled down, covered
over with mud; by means of these and other substances carried down to
the same spot, which the river brings along hap-hazard, an island[3]
was gradually formed. Afterward I believe that substructures were
added, and that aid was given by human handicraft, that the surface
might be well raised, as it is now and strong enough besides to bear
the weight even of temples and colonnades. After the tyrant's effects
had been plundered, the traitors were condemned and punishment
inflicted. This punishment was the more noticeable, because the
consulship imposed on the father the office of punishing his own
children, and to him, who should have been removed even as a
spectator, was assigned by fortune the duty of carrying out the
punishment. Young men of the highest rank stood bound to the stake;
but the consul's sons diverted the eyes of all the spectators from the
rest of the criminals, as from persons unknown; and the people felt
pity, not so much on account of their punishment, as of the crime by
which they had deserved it. That they, in that year above all others,
should have brought themselves to betray into the hands of one, who,
formerly a haughty tyrant, was now an exasperated exile, their country
recently delivered, their father its deliverer, the consulate which
took its rise from the Junian family, the fathers, the people, and
all the gods and citizens of Rome. The consuls advanced to take their
seats, and the lictors were despatched to inflict punishment. The
young men were stripped naked, beaten with rods, and their hea