[Illustration: Combat between the Horatii and Curiatii.]
Seeing the result of the contest, Fuffetius, on the part of the Albans, gave out that they gave in, and the Romans returned home with Horatius at their head, carrying--in a huge bundle--the spoils of the Curiatii. At the entrance of the city he met his sister, who, perceiving among the spoils, a garment of her late lover, embroidered with a piece of work from her own hands, commenced another piece of work of a most frantic and desperate character. Maddened at the sight of the yarn she had spun for the lost object of her affections, she began spinning another yarn that threatened to be interminable, if her brother had not soon cut the thread of it. She called him by all kinds of names but his own, and was, in fact, as noisy and abusive as a conventional "female in distress," or, as that alarming and dangerous nuisance, "an injured woman." Horatius, who had found the blades of three assailants less cutting than a sister's tongue, interrupted her as she ran through her wrongs, by running her through with his sword, accompanying the act with the exclamation, "Thus perish all the enemies of Rome." Notwithstanding the excitement and _éclat_ attending the triumphant entry of Horatius into Rome, the proper officer of the period, whoever he may have been, was evidently not only on duty, but prepared to do it, for the victorious fratricide, or sororicide, was at once hurried off to the nearest Roman station. Having been taken before the king, his majesty saw great difficulties in the case, and was puzzled how to dispose of it. Taking out the scales of justice, he threw the heavy crime of Horatius into one; but the services performed for his country, when cast into the other scale, seemed to balance the matter pretty evenly. Tullus, therefore, referred the case to another tribunal, which sentenced the culprit to be hanged, but he was allowed to have so capitally acquitted himself in the fight, that he was acquitted of the capital punishment. This was commuted for the penalty of passing under the yoke, which consisted of the ceremony of walking under a pike raised upright on two others, and at these three pikes the only toll placed upon his crime was levied.