1Meanwhile the question is asked who could bear the weight of so great a burden and be able to succeed so great a king: Fame, the herald of truth, marks out illustrious Numa for the throne; 4he does not think it enough to have learned the rites of the Sabine people: in his capacious mind he conceives greater things and inquires what the nature of the universe is. 7Love of this pursuit made him leave his homeland and Cures and make his way to the city of Hercules' host. 9When he asked what founder had set Greek walls on Italian shores, one of the older natives, not ignorant of the ancient past, answered him thus: 'The son of Jupiter, rich with the Iberian cattle from Ocean, is said to have reached the Lacinian shores after a fortunate voyage, and, while his herd wandered through the tender grass, to have himself entered the house of great Croton, a roof not inhospitable, and relieved his long toil with rest, and as he left to have said: "In the age of your grandsons this will be the site of a city"; 18and the promise proved true.
19For there was a certain Myscelos, born of Argive Alemon, the man most favoured by the gods in that age. 21Leaning over him as he lay weighed down by heavy sleep, the club-bearer addresses him: "Go, seek the stony waters of the far-off Aesar! 23Come, abandon your ancestral home!" 24and he threatens many fearful things if he does not obey; 25after that, sleep and the god depart together. 26The son of Alemon rises and turns over the fresh vision in his silent mind, and his judgement long struggles with itself: the deity bids him go, the laws forbid him to leave, and death is fixed as the penalty for one who wishes to change his country.
30Gleaming Sol had hidden his shining head in Ocean, and darkest Night had raised her starry head: the same god seemed to be present, to give the same warning, and to threaten more and heavier things if he did not obey. 34He was terrified, and was at once preparing to move his ancestral household gods to a new home: a murmur arises in the city, and he is put on trial for scorning the laws; 36and when the prosecution had been completed and the charge proved plain without a witness, the accused, unkempt, raising his face and hands to the gods above, said: "O you to whom twice six labours gave a right to heaven, bring help, I pray!
40For you are the cause of my crime." 41There was an ancient custom of using white and black pebbles, condemning the accused with the black, acquitting them of guilt with the white; 43then too the grim verdict was cast in this way, and every pebble dropped into the pitiless urn was black. 45As soon as the urn, turned over, poured out the pebbles to be counted, the colour of all had changed from black to white, and the verdict, made white by the power of Hercules, set the son of Alemon free. 48He gives thanks to his patron, the son of Amphitryon, and with favouring winds sails the Ionian sea, passes Sallentine Neretum, and Sybaris, and Crimisa, and the fields of Iapyx; 53and when he had barely travelled along the lands that face these shores, he finds the fated mouth of the river Aesar, and not far from there a mound beneath which the earth covered the hallowed bones of Croton; and there, in the land he had been commanded, he founded walls and gave the city the name of the man buried there.' 58Such, by sure and agreed tradition, were the beginnings of the place and of the city set within Italian borders.