e city when there was no
employment for them, and further, he was anxious that the frontiers of
the empire should be more extensively occupied by sending colonists, he
sent colonists to Signia and Circeii, to serve as defensive barriers
hereafter to the city by land and sea. While he was thus employed a
frightful prodigy appeared to him. A serpent sliding out of a wooden
pillar, after causing dismay and a run into the palace, not so much
struck the king's heart with sudden terror, as filled him with anxious
solicitude. Accordingly when Etrurian soothsayers only were employed for
public prodigies, terrified at this as it were domestic apparition, he
determined on sending persons to Delphos to the most celebrated oracle
in the world; and not venturing to intrust the responses of the oracle
to any other person, he despatched his two sons to Greece through lands
unknown at that time, and seas still more so. Titus and Aruns were the
two who went. To them were added, as a companion, L. Junius Brutus, the
son of Tarquinia, sister to the king, a youth of an entirely different
quality of mind from that the disguise of which he had assumed. Brutus,
on hearing that the chief men of the city, and among others his own
brother, had been put to death by his uncle, resolved to leave nothing
in his intellects that might be dreaded by the king, nor any thing in
his fortune to be coveted, and thus to be secure in contempt, where
there was but little protection in justice. Therefore designedly
fashioning himself to the semblance of foolishness, after he suffered
himself and his whole estate to become a prey to the king, he did not
refuse to take even the surname of Brutus, that, concealed under the
cover of such a cognomen, that genius that was to liberate the Roman
people might await its proper time. He, being brought to Delphos by the
Tarquinii rather as a subject of sport than as a companion, is said to
have brought with him as an offering to Apollo a golden rod, enclosed in
a staff of cornel-wood hollowed out for the purpose, a mystical emblem
of his own mind. When they arrived there, their father's commission
being executed, a desire seized the young men of inquiring on which of
them the sovereignty of Rome should devolve. They say that a voice was
returned from the bottom of the cave, "Young men, whichever of you shall
first kiss his mother shall enjoy the sovereign power at Rome." The
Tarquinii order the matter to be kept secret with