l great
transactions. On the other hand, the memory of public events in early
periods of the world, was preserved only through tradition; and
tradition cares little for the exact and the true. She seeks only for
what is entertaining. Her function being simply to give pleasure to
successive generations of listeners, by exciting their curiosity and
wonder with tales,--which, the more strange and romantic they are,
the better they are suited to her purpose--she concerns herself very
little with such simple verities as dates and names. The exposure of
the twin infants of Rhea, supposing such an event to have actually
happened, she remembered well, and repeated the narrative of
it--adorning it, doubtless, with many embellishments--from age to age,
so that the whole story comes down to modern times in full detail; but
as to the time when the event took place, she gave herself no concern.
The date would have added nothing to the romance of the story, and
thus it was neglected and forgotten.

In subsequent times, however, when regular historical annals began to
be recorded, chronologists attempted to reason backward, from events
whose periods were known, through various data which they ingeniously
obtained from the preceding and less formal narratives, until they
obtained the dates of earlier events by a species of calculation. In
this way the time for the building of Rome was determined to be about
the year 754 before Christ. As to Romulus himself, the tradition is
that he was but eighteen or twenty years old when he commenced the
building of it. If this is true, his extreme youth goes far to
palliate some of the wrongs which he perpetrated--wrongs which would
have been far more inexcusable if committed with the deliberate
purpose of middle life, than if prompted by the unthinking impulses
and passions of eighteen.

A certain Roman philosopher, named Varro, who lived some centuries
after the building of the city, conceived of a very ingenious plan for
discovering the year in which Romulus was born. It was this. By means
of the science of astrology, as practiced in those days, certain
learned magicians used to predict what the life and fortunes of any
man would be, from the aspects and phases of the planets and other
heavenly bodies at the time of his birth. The idea of Varro was to
reverse this process in the case of Romulus; that is, to deduce from
the known facts of his history what must have been the relative
situations