still the people murmured less at building the temples of the gods
with their own hands, than at being transferred, as they afterward
were, to other works, which, while less dignified, required
considerably greater toil; such were the erection of benches in the
circus, and conducting underground the principal sewer, the receptacle
of all the filth of the city; two works the like of which even modern
splendour has scarcely been able to produce.[52] After the people had
been employed in these works, because he both considered that such
a number of inhabitants was a burden to the city where there was no
employment for them, and further, was anxious that the frontiers of
the empire should be more extensively occupied by sending colonists,
he sent colonists to Signia[53] and Circeii,[54] to serve as defensive
outposts hereafter to the city on land and sea. While he was thus
employed a frightful prodigy appeared to him. A serpent gliding out of
a wooden pillar, after causing dismay and flight in the palace, not so
much struck the king's heart with sudden terror, as it filled him with
anxious solicitude. Accordingly, since Etruscan soothsayers were only
employed for public prodigies, terrified at this so to say private
apparition, he determined to send to the oracle of Delphi, the most
celebrated 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 yet more unknown seas. Titus
and Arruns were the two who set out. They were accompanied by Lucius
Junius Brutus, the son of Tarquinia, the king's sister, a youth of an
entirely different cast of mind from that of which he had assumed the
disguise. He, having heard that the chief men of the city, among them
his own brother, had been put to death by his uncle, resolved to leave
nothing in regard to his ability that might be dreaded by the king,
nor anything in his fortune that might be coveted, and thus to be
secure in the contempt in which he was held, seeing that there was but