Romulus

" And in this matter there is so much reckoning and skill, that from this day, which we see marked down in Ennius and in the great Annals, earlier eclipses of the sun have been reckoned back as far as that one which befell on the Nones of Quintilis in the reign of Romulus;

"A most just one, and so on backward all the way to Romulus, who was king six hundred years before this time.

when the people has been bereft of a just king, 'a longing holds their hearts for long,' as Ennius says, 'after the death of the best of kings';

For what is less to be approved than that the images of all men fall upon me — Homer, Archilochus, Romulus, Numa, Pythagoras, Plato — and not in the form they had:

but because we call our children liberi, born of us, Liber and Libera were named as born of Ceres, a thing they preserve in the case of Libera but not so in that of Liber) — hence too Romulus, whom some think to be the same as Quirinus.

Leucothea, who was Ino, and her son Palaemon, all Greece worships — as well as Hercules, Aesculapius, the sons of Tyndareus, our own Romulus, and very many others, whom they think received into heaven as it were new and enrolled citizens.

Otherwise, if man will invent a god in the way that Romulus invented Consus and Tatius Cloacina and Hostilius Pavor and Metellus Alburnus and a certain one before this time Antinous, this will be lawful for others too.

because He has been known from the beginning, because He never lay hid, because He always shone forth — even before Romulus himself, much more before Tiberius.

It is unworthy, in short, that Romulus should have had a Proculus to affirm his ascent into heaven, but that Christ, a god, should have found no announcer of his descent from his own heaven — as though that other did not ascend by the same ladders of falsehood as this one descended.

By what steps, pray, did Romulus ascend to heaven — by those things which these men call goods, or by his exploits and virtues?

From this, and by the belief of our own people, Romulus dwells in heaven and passes his days with the gods, as Ennius said, assenting to the common report;

Numa, taking over Rome small and inglorious, settled moreover in a foreign land, with inhabitants who were a mongrel and base lot, and besides enemies to all their neighbors, poor and savage and living in peril because of Romulus' harshness—Numa made them hold their land securely and be friends to those round about, and established laws and gods and a constitution, and became the cause of all the …

Equally he notes that Romulus perished during an eclipse of the sun;

while under Romulus a woman who had touched wine was slain with impunity by her husband Metennius.

If at Rome Romulus first displayed the four-horse chariot, I think that he too was enrolled among the idols, if he is the same as Quirinus.

although they vindicate the Consualia too for Romulus, because he dedicated them to Consus, the god, as they will have it, of counsel—that counsel, namely, by which he then devised the rape of the Sabine virgins for marriages for his soldiers.