The Childhood of Rome

by Louise Lamprey

Romulus had separated his force into three companies and sent them toward Alba Longa by three roads and in small groups, not to attract attention, until they were within a few hours’ [pg 134]march of the town of the chief. Here they halted, and some of the outlaw band came up with them, carrying new shields and weapons that had been hidden in a cave until the time came to use them. The place of meeting was a wild rocky place where not even goats could have found pasture, and here Romulus made a brief speech giving them their orders. Fortune, he said, always favored those who were loyal to the gods. Amulius was loyal to nothing; he was a liar, a thief and a coward, and the invisible powers of heaven were arrayed against him. He was not afraid that any of his followers would offend the gods. Whatever else they had done, they had not bullied the weak or robbed the poor, or turned their backs on the strong, or violated the holy places of any city. They were to go forward in the faith that the stars of heaven would fight for them and against the armies of Amulius.

Some of the country people were there to serve as guides. There was a way around the city to the back, where the wall was not so high, and Remus and his party would go first and come around that way. The colonists were to swing to the left, where a road branched off, and come up toward the gate where the barracks were. Romulus himself with his own men would attack the main gate just after dawn and push his way [pg 135]in while the troops were partly distracted to the left and to the rear. When he gave the signal, a triple drum roll, the colonists were to give back as if they were retreating, and follow his men in at the main gate and bar it after them. He would send a part of his men toward the west gate to take the troops in the rear, and if they could drive the enemy out and hold that gate, the city would be in Romulus’ hands.

It all went as it was planned. The headlong rush of the young chief and his men, who were as active and sinewy as cats, took them through the main gate and over the walls almost at the same moment. They had brought slim tree trunks with the nubs of the branches left on, for ladders, and rawhide ropes on which they could swarm up over the walls in half a dozen places at a time. The soldiers were completely taken by surprise, and many surrendered at once. The invaders were in the public square and pushing into the palace of the chief almost before the bewildered and terrified people found out what had happened. Romulus himself was the first to enter the private rooms of Amulius, and there he found the old chief dying from a spear wound in the breast. The captain of his guard had killed him and then offered his sword to Romulus in the hope of being the first to gain favor.

“A man who is false to one master will be false to two,” said Romulus, with a flash like lightning in his dark eyes. He ordered the captain bound and turned over to his grandfather, when he should arrive, for judgment. This was not the sort of timber he wanted for an army. If the captain had surrendered, it would have been very well, but to kill his master in his room, unarmed, for a reward, was black treachery, and it was not the young chieftain’s plan to encourage either traitors or cowards.

From the steps of the palace he sent the triple drum roll sounding through the gray light of a rainy morning, and heard it answered by the battle shout of the young men of the colony, as they came charging into the gate, and by the shrill piercing music of the pipes from the company Remus led. The three companies met in the square, keeping order and rank as if it were a game, and as they saw their leader standing in the doorway in the red flame of the torches, they shouted the triple shout of victory. Standing there in his armor, above the savage confusion, the white faces of the people uplifted to him from the crowded streets, he looked every inch a chieftain. He beckoned his brother to his side, and lifted his sword, and all was still.

“Ye who know what Amulius did in the days [pg 137]of his brother Numa,” he began, “know now that he is dead.

“Ye who know that he killed his own sons for fear they should grow up and rebel against him, fear him no more, for he is dead.

“Ye who have been bowed down with the burden of his cruelty and his greed, rise up and stand straight like men, for he is dead.

“Ye, the gods of his fathers and mine, who know what he was in his lifetime, I call on ye to judge whether his slayer did well to kill him, for he is dead.

“Ye, the people of the Long White Mountain, who have heard the name of Romulus and the name of Remus, know now that we are the children whom he would have slain after he had killed our father and our mother, and that we were saved by a wolf of Mars to live and rule our own people now that Amulius is dead.