by contraction, Pomoerium, which means behind the walls or beyond the
walls (_post moenia_). Wherever they intend to place a gate they take
off the ploughshare, and carry the plough over, leaving a space. After
this ceremony they consider the entire wall sacred, except the gates;
but if they were sacred also, they could not without scruple bring in
and out necessaries and unclean things through them.

XII. It is agreed that the foundation of the city took place on the
eleventh day before the Kalends of May (the 21st of April). And on this
day the Romans keep a festival which they call the birthday of the city.
At this feast, originally, we are told, they sacrificed nothing that has
life, but thought it right to keep the anniversary of the birth of the
city pure and unpolluted by blood. However, before the foundation of the
city, they used to keep a pastoral feast called Palilia. The Roman
months at the present day do not in any way correspond to those of
Greece; yet they (the Greeks) distinctly affirm that the day upon which
Romulus founded the city was the 30th of the month. The Greeks likewise
tell us that on that day an eclipse of the sun took place, which they
think was that observed by Antimachus of Teos, the epic poet, which
occurred in the third year of the sixth Olympiad. In the time of Varro
the philosopher, who of all the Romans was most deeply versed in Roman
history, there was one Taroutius, a companion of his, a philosopher and
mathematician, who had especially devoted himself to the art of casting
nativities, and was thought to have attained great skill therein. To
this man Varro proposed the task of finding the day and hour of
Romulus's birth, basing his calculations on the influence which the
stars were said to have had upon his life, just as geometricians solve
their problems by the analytic method; for it belongs, he argued, to the
same science to predict the life of a man from the time of his birth,
and to find the date of a man's birth if the incidents of his life are