[Illustration: A plan of Rome in classical times, showing the seven hills]
On what would now be called the twenty-first of April, the day when the sun passes from the sign of the Ram into the sign of the Bull, in the beginning of the month sacred to Dia Maia, the goddess of growth, the city was founded.
The first rite was one of purification. Fire, which cleanses all things, was called upon to make pure every one who was to take part in the ceremonies of the day. The father of the city stood with Romulus near a long heap of brushwood. With a coal from the altar fire Romulus lighted the pile and leaped across the flame, followed by the others in turn.
Then around the spot where Faustulus had always said he found the children, Romulus dug a small circular trench. The space inside this was called the _mundus_, the home of the spirits. Here the ancestors of all these people who had left their old homes might find a new home, a place where they would still be remembered and honored, a sort of sacred guest chamber in the life of the new city. These invisible dwellers by the altar would see their children’s children and all their descendants keeping the good old customs and the ancient wisdom from dying out, just as they showed their ancestry in their eyes and hair and gait and way of speaking.
The things that were put in this trench, in a hollow called the “outfit vault,” were all symbols of the life of the people. First Romulus himself threw into it a little square of sod that he had brought from the courtyard of the house where he was born, on Alba Longa. Each of the fathers of the colony in turn threw in a piece of sod they had brought from their old homes on the Mountain of Fire. This, like so many things in old ceremonies, was a bit of homely poetry. When a man was obliged to leave the place where he was born he took with him a little of the sod. Even to-day we find people taking from their old homes a root of sweetbriar, or a pot of shamrock or heather, a cutting of southernwood or of lilac. The look and the smell of it waken in them a love that is older than they are, that goes back to some unknown forefather who brought it from a still older place, perhaps, centuries ago. To the people of long ago this feeling was part of religion.