of the planets and stars when he came into the world! He
accordingly applied to a noted astrologer to work out the problem for
him. Given, a history of the incidents and events occurring to the man
in his progress through life; required, the exact condition of the
skies when the child was born. In other words, the astrologer was to
determine what must have been the relative positions of the sun, moon,
and stars, at the birth of Romulus, in order to produce a being whose
life should exhibit such transactions and events as those which
appeared in Romulus's subsequent history. When the astrologer had thus
ascertained the condition of the skies at the time in question, the
_astronomers_, as Varro concluded, could easily calculate the month
and the year when the combination must have occurred.

Now, it was the custom in those days to reckon by Olympiads, which
were periods of four years, the series commencing with a great victory
at a foot-race in Greece, won by a man named Coroebus, from which
event originated the Olympian games, which were afterward celebrated
every four years, and which in subsequent ages became so renowned. The
time when Coroebus ran his race, and thus furnished an era for all
the subsequent chronologists and historians of his country, is
generally regarded as about the year 776 before Christ; and the result
of the calculations of Varro's astrologer, and of the astronomers who
perfected it, was, that to lead such a life as Romulus led, a man must
have been born at a time corresponding with the first year of the
second Olympiad; that is, taking off from 776, four years, for the
first Olympiad, the first year of the second Olympiad would be 772;
this would make the time of his birth 772 before Christ; and then
deducting eighteen years more, for the age of Romulus when he began to
build his wall, we have 754 before Christ as the era of the foundation
of Rome. This method of determining a point in chronology seems so
absurd, according to the ideas of the present day, that we can hardly
resist the conclusion, that Varro, in making his investigation, was
really guided by other and more satisfactory modes of determining the
point, and that the horoscope was not what he actually relied upon.
However this may be, the era which he fixed upon has been very
generally received, though many others have been proposed by the
different learned men who have successively investigated the question.

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