Parallels, or a comparison between the Greek and Roman Histories. (36-37)

Philonome, the daughter of Nyctimus and Arcadia, went many times to the chase with Diana. Mars lay with her in the shape of a shepherd, and fetched up her belly. She was delivered in time of twins, which for fear of her father she threw into the river Erymanthus. By a strange fatality of providence they were driven safe into a hollow oak, which happening to be the kennel of a wolf, this wolf threw her whelps into the river, and suckled the children. Tyliphus a shepherd, that had seen this with his own eyes, took these children and brought them up as his own, calling one of them Lycastus, and the other Parrasius, which reigned successively in Arcadia.—This is reported by Zopyrus Byzantius, in the Third Book of his Histories.

Amulius dealing very tyrannically with his brother Numitor, killed his son Aenitus as they were a hunting, and made his daughter Sylvia . . . a priestess of Juno. Mars got her with child, and when she had laid her belly of twins, she confessed the truth to the tyrant; which put him in such an apprehension, that he exposed them both on the side of the river Tiber, where they were carried by the stream to a place where a she-wolf had her whelps. The wolf cast away her own, and gave suck to these children. Faustus a shepherd, observing this, took the children to himself, and called them by the names of Romus

After the destruction of Troy, Agamemnon and Cassandra were killed; but Orestes, that was brought up with Strophius, revenged the death of his father.—Pyrander’s Fourth Book of Peloponnesian Histories.

Fabius Fabricianus, a kinsman of Fabius Maximus, having taken Tuxium, the chief city of the Samnites, sent to Rome the image of Venus Victrix, which among them was held in great veneration. His wife Fabia was debauched by Petronius Valentinus, a handsome young man, and afterwards she treacherously murdered her husband; but for her son Fabricianus who was yet in his infancy, she shifted him away to be privately brought up, and so provided for his security. When he was grown up, he destroyed both his mother and the adulterer, and was formally acquitted for it by a decree of the Senate.—Dositheus’s Third Book of Italian History.