170The building was majestic and vast. 170lofty with a hundred columns, it stood at the top of the city, the palace of Laurentine Picus, awe-inspiring with its woods and the reverence of their forefathers. 173Here it was an omen for kings to receive the sceptre and first raise the fasces; this temple was their senate house, this the seat of their sacred feasts; here, when a ram had been slaughtered, the fathers used to sit at the long tables. 177Moreover, the statues of their ancestors of old stood in order in the entrance, carved from ancient cedar: Italus, and father Sabinus the vine-planter, keeping his curved sickle in his likeness, and old Saturn, and the image of two-faced Janus, and other kings from the beginning, who had suffered wounds of war fighting for their country.
183Besides, many arms hang on the sacred doorposts, captured chariots and curved axes, and helmet crests and huge bars of gates, and javelins and shields and beaks torn from ships. 187There sat Picus himself, tamer of horses, with the Quirinal staff, girt in a short robe of state, and bearing the sacred shield on his left arm; 189whom his wife Circe, seized by desire, struck with her golden wand and changed by her drugs into a bird, and sprinkled his wings with colours.