The games went on, and at the height of the gayety and excitement there was a sudden trumpet call, and all was in confusion. Each soldier seized a Sabine maiden and carried her off as if she were a child. The men who were not so burdened formed a rear guard. The older people were already on their way home. Some of them did not know what had happened. Before anything could be done by the startled and angry Sabine men, the soldiers were inside the walls of the city and the shout of “Talassa! Talassa!” revealed that this was a revival of the ancient custom of marriage by capture.
The Sabines were angry enough to go to war, But they could do nothing that night, for a successful war would need preparations. There was a parley, and Romulus himself informed the commissioners that the weddings would take place with all due ceremony, and that in the meantime the girls were in the city, under the care of matrons of the best families, and would be given the best of care and provided with all things necessary for a bride. Let there be no mistake about this: if any attempt were made to recapture the Sabine girls the soldiers would fight. They had got their brides, and they meant to keep them. It was a sleepless night in the town by the riverside, but in the morning the Sabines were seen returning to their mountains.
It is not to be understood that all the people on the Square Hill approved of the capture of the Sabine girls. It did not seem to them, of course, as it would to the society of to-day, because they considered that a girl ought to marry, in any case, as her elders thought best that she should. But Tullius the priest, and three or four of the other older men, were very doubtful about the wisdom of angering the Sabine men by such a proceeding. Naso and his brother objected to the capture because they had never heard of such a thing. They were men whose minds never took kindly to any sort of new idea. When they made their great move and left their old home, they seemed to have exhausted all the ability to change that they had. They held to every old custom they had ever heard of, as a limpet holds to a rock. But the thing was done, and there was nothing they could do now except to prophesy that it could not possibly turn out well.