He heard somewhere of the drink that Faustulus the shepherd had taught Mamurius how to make when the sickness came before, and he remembered other things Faustulus had said of the fever. When the pestilence was gone, he called the fathers of the city together, and they took counsel how to keep it from coming back.
Tullius, who was now an old man, said that in his opinion bad water was the cause of much sickness. The fever began in a part of the city where there was no drainage.
Naso said that it was all because the people had allowed strangers to come in, and the gods were angry.
Romulus made no comment on that. He did not know, himself, whether the gods were displeased and had sent the sickness, but he was sure of one thing. It could do no harm to take all possible means of preventing it.
Mamurius said, and Marcus Colonus upheld him, that in the old days on the Mountain of Fire, where the people had plenty of good water and bathed often, they seldom had any sickness. Calvo observed quietly that baths were not impossible even here; it was only a question of building them and conducting the water they had into fountains. An Etruscan he had once known said that he had seen it done in a city larger than this.
After the death of his wife and child Romulus seemed to feel that he was in a way the father of all his people, more especially of the people who were outside the ordinary fraternities and families of the old stock. He set his own servants and followers at work, under the direction of Calvo, and with the help of some of the other citizens who thought as he did, a beginning was made on a proper water-supply and a system of public baths. He set the young men to exercising and racing, keeping themselves in condition; [pg 241]he urged all who could to go out into the country, form colonies, or at least have country houses. It was the nature of Romulus to look at things, not as they affected himself alone, but as they would affect all the people. If Emilia could die of fever, if his son could die, in spite of all his care, any man’s wife and child could. There was no safety for one but in the safety of all. He thought that out in the same instinctive way that he had reasoned about the robbers. It was not enough to clear out a robbers’ den, or to escape illness once. What he set himself to do was to stop the evil. When Naso objected that the gods alone could do that, Romulus did not argue the matter. His own opinion was that if men depended upon the gods to do anything for them that they could do for themselves, the gods would have a good right to be angry. A man might as well sit down under a tree and expect grain to spring up for him of itself, and the sheep to come up to him and take off their fleeces, and the grapes to turn into wine and fill the vats without hands, as to expect the gods to take care of him if he used no judgment.
None of the Romans, in fact, were really great believers in miracles. They did all they could in the way of ceremony and worship, but they took good care to do also everything that they [pg 242]had found by experience produced results. Romulus had the practical nature of his people. He had heard a great deal of miracles at one time and another, but he had ceased to expect them to happen. It would be quite as great a miracle as could be expected if three different tribes of people succeeded in building up a city without civil war.