ch. 561.56Determined to finish his temple, he sent for workmen from all parts of Etruria,
and not only used the public treasury to defray the cost, but also compelled the plebeians to
take their share of the work. This was in addition to their military
service, and was anything but a light burden. Still they felt it less of a hardship to
build the temples of the gods with their own hands, than they did afterwards when they
were transferred to other tasks less imposing, but involving greater toil-the construction of
the fori in the Circus and that of the Cloaca Maxima, a subterranean tunnel to receive all
the sewage of the City. The magnificence of these two works could hardly be
equalled by anything in the present day. When the plebeians were no longer required
for these works, he considered that such a multitude of unemployed would prove a burden
to the State, and as he wished the frontiers of the empire to be more widely colonised, he
sent colonists to Signia and Circeii to serve as a protection to the City by land and sea.
[Note] While he was carrying out these undertakings a frightful
portent appeared; a snake gliding out of a wooden column created confusion and panic in
the palace. The king himself was not so much terrified as filled with anxious forebodings.
The Etruscan soothsayers were only employed to interpret prodigies which affected the
State; but this one concerned him and his house personally, so he decided to send to the
world-famed oracle of Delphi. Fearing to entrust the oracular response to any one else, he
sent two of his sons to Greece, through lands at that time unknown and over seas still less
known. Titus and Arruns started on their journey. They had as a travelling companion L.
Junius Brutus, the son of the king's sister, Tarquinia, a young man of a very different
character from that which he had assumed. When he heard of the massacre of the chiefs of
the State, amongst them his own brother, by his uncle's orders, he determined that his
intelligence should give the king no cause for alarm nor his fortune any provocation to his
avarice, and that as the laws afforded no protection, he would seek safety in obscurity and
neglect. Accordingly he carefully kept up the appearance and conduct of an idiot, leaving
the king to do what he liked with his person and property, and did not even protest against
his nickname of Brutus; for under the protection of that nickname the soul which was one
day to liberate Rome was awaiting its destined hour.
The story runs that when brought to Delphi by the Tarquins, more as a butt for their
sport than as a companion, he had with him a golden staff enclosed in a hollow one of
cornel wood, which he offered to Apollo as a mystical emblem of his own character. After
executing their father's commission the young men were
desirous of ascertaining to which of them the kingdom of Rome would come. A voice
came from the lowest depths of the cavern: Whichever of you, young men, shall be the
first to kiss his mother, he shall hold supreme sway in Rome. Sextus had remained
behind in Rome and to keep him in ignorance of this oracle and so deprive him of any
chance of coming to the throne, the two Tarquins insisted upon absolute silence being kept
on the subject. They drew lots to decide which of them should be the first to kiss his
mother. On their return to Rome, Brutus, thinking that the oracular utterance had another
meaning, pretended to stumble, and as he fell kissed the ground, for the earth is of course
the common mother of us all.
Then they returned to Rome, where preparations were being energetically pushed
forward for a war with the Rutulians.
