Plutarch, Romulus
Bernadotte Perrin, Ed.

20. The city thus doubled in its numbers, a hundred of the Sabines were added by election to the Patricii,¹ and the legions were enlarged to six thousand footmen and six hundred horsemen.² The people, too, were arranged in three bodies, the first called Ramnenses, from Romulus; the second Tatienses, from Tatius; and the third Lucerenses, from the grove into which many betook themselves for refuge, when a general asylum was offered,³ and then became citizens. Now the Roman word for grove is ‘lucus.’ [2] That these bodies were three in number, their very name testifies, for to this day they call them tribes, and their chief officers, tribunes. And each tribe had ten phratries, or brotherhoods, which, as some say, were named after the thirty Sabine women;⁴ but this seems to be false, since many of them bear the names of places. [3] However, they did make many other concessions to the women, to do them honour, some of which are as follow: to give them the right of way when walking; not to utter any indecent word in the presence of a woman; that no man should be seen naked by them, or else that he be liable to prosecution before the judges of homicide; and that their children should wear a sort of necklace, the ‘bulla,’ so called from its shape (which was that of a bubble), and a robe bordered with purple.

[4] The two kings did not at once hold council in common with one another, but each at first sat with his own hundred councillors apart, then afterwards they united them all into one body, as at the present time. Tatius dwelt where now is the temple of Moneta, and Romulus beside the so-called Steps of Fair Shore;⁵ these are near the descent into the Circus Maximus from the Palatine. [5] There also, it is said, grew the sacred cornel-tree, of which the following tale is told. Romulus, once, in trial of his strength, cast thither from the Aventine hill a spear, the shaft of which was made of cornel-wood; the head of the spear sank deep into the ground, and no one had strength to pull it up, though many tried, but the earth, which was fertile, cherished the wooden shaft, and sent up shoots from it, and produced a cornel-trunk of good size. Those who came after Romulus preserved this with religious care as one of the most sacred objects, and walled it in. [6] And if any visitor thought that it was not green nor flourishing, but likely to wither away and die, he immediately proclaimed it loudly to all he met, and these, as though helping to save a house on fire, would cry ‘Water! Water!’ and run together from all sides carrying full buckets to the place. But when Caius Caesar, as they say, was repairing the steps about the enclosure, and the workmen dug here and there in the neighbourhood, the roots were inadvertently destroyed and the tree withered away.