1The question of the royal property, which they had earlier voted to return, is referred to the senators afresh. 1Overcome by anger, they forbade it to be returned and forbade it to be taken into the public treasury: it was given to the commons to plunder, so that, once tainted by the royal spoil, they might lose for ever the hope of peace with the Tarquins. 2The land of the Tarquins, which lay between the city and the Tiber, was consecrated to Mars and afterwards became the Campus Martius. 3It happened, they say, that a crop of spelt was standing there at the time, ripe for harvest. 3Because it was sacrilegious to consume the produce of this field, a great crowd of men sent in together cut the crop, straw and all, and tipped it in baskets into the Tiber, which was flowing with little water, as it usually does in the height of summer.
4So the heaps of grain, sticking in the shallows, settled there, coated with mud; 4an island was then gradually formed, as other things that the river happens to bring down were carried to the same place. 4Later, I believe, embankments were added and art lent its help, so that the ground, now standing high and firm, could even support temples and colonnades. 5When the property of the royal family had been plundered, the traitors were condemned and punishment was inflicted, all the more conspicuous because the consulship laid upon a father the duty of punishing his own children, and fortune made the very man who ought to have been kept from watching the one who carried out the penalty.
6There stood the young men of the noblest birth, bound to the stake; 6but the consul's sons had drawn the eyes of all onto themselves and away from the rest, as if these were persons unknown, and people pitied them not so much for the punishment as for the crime by which they had deserved it: that in that year of all years they had brought themselves to betray their newly freed country, their father its liberator, the consulship born of the Junian house, the senators, the commons, all that was divine and human at Rome, to one once a proud king, now a hostile exile. 8The consuls advanced to their seat, and the lictors were sent to inflict the punishment.
8They strip them, beat them with rods and strike them with the axe, while all the time the father, his expression and his face, offered a spectacle, a father's feelings showing plainly as he performed the office of public punishment. 9After the punishment of the guilty, so that there might be a notable example in both directions for checking crime, the informer was given a reward of money from the treasury, freedom and citizenship. 9He is said to have been the first to be freed by the rod of manumission. 10Some think that even the word vindicta comes from him; 10his name, they say, was Vindicius. 10After him it became the rule that those freed in this way were regarded as admitted to citizenship.