History of Rome

​Then letters of the praetor Quintus Minucius, whose province was the Bruttii, were read in the senate: that money had been secretly carried off by night from the treasury of Proserpina at Locri, and that no traces existed as to whom the crime belonged.

​The senate took it with indignation that there was no end to sacrileges, and that not even Pleminius, so clear and recent an example of both guilt and punishment, deterred men.

​A task was given to the consul Gaius Aurelius to write to the praetor among the Bruttii that it was the senate’s pleasure that an inquiry into the plundered treasury be held in the same manner as the praetor Marcus Pomponius ​had held it three years before; that whatever money had been found should be replaced; if less should be found, it should be made up, and expiatory rites, if it seemed proper, should be performed as the pontiffs had previously decreed.

​The care of expiating the violation of that temple was further excited by portents reported at the same time from several places. In the territory of the Lucanians they reported that the sky had been on fire, at Privernum that the sun had been red through the whole day though the sky was clear, ​at Lanuvium in the temple of Juno Sospita a huge noise had arisen by night. Already unnatural births of animals were being reported in several places: among the Sabines an infant of uncertain sex was born, whether it was male or female, and another of sixteen years was found likewise with ambiguous sex;

​at Frusino a lamb was born with a swine’s head, at Sinuessa a pig with a human head, and in the Lucanian public land a colt with five feet.

​All these seemed foul and monstrous, and of nature wandering into unnatural offspring; above all, the hermaphrodites were detested and ordered to be immediately carried out into the sea, just as recently in the consulship of Gaius Claudius and Marcus Livius an offspring of similar portent had been carried out.

​Nonetheless, they ordered the decemvirs to consult the books concerning that portent. The decemvirs from the books ordered the same sacred rites that had been performed recently after that portent. In addition, they ordered a hymn to be sung through the city by thrice nine virgins and a gift to be carried to Queen Juno.

​Gaius Aurelius the consul, in accordance with the response of the decemvirs, took care that these things should be done. The hymn, just as Livius had composed it within the memory of their fathers, so then Publius Licinius Tegula composed it.