Neither could the augurs sitting at Rome divine what inauspicious circumstance had occurred to the consul in the camp.

Who did not plainly perceive, that the dictator's being a plebeian, was the defect which the augurs had discovered ?" These and other arguments were urged in vain by the tribunes: the affair however ended in an interregnum.

At last, after the elections had been adjourned repeatedly on one pretext or another, the fourteenth interrex, Lucius AEmilius, elected consuls Caius Paetelius, and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus, or Cursor, as I find him named in some annals.
[Footnote 172: Any noise happening during the taking of the auspices was reckoned inauspicious; hence _silentium_ signified among the augurs, every circumstance being favourable.] 24.

It has been recorded, that in this year Alexandria in Egypt was founded; and that Alexander, king of Epirus, being slain by a Lucanian exile, verified in the circumstances of his death the prediction of Jupiter of Dodona.

At the time when he was invited into Italy by the Tarentines, a caution had been given him, "to beware of the Acherusian waters and the city Pandosia, for there were fixed the limits of his destiny." For that reason he made the greater haste to pass over to Italy, in order to be at as great a distance as possible from the city Pandosia in Epirus, and the river Acheron, which, after flowing through Molossis, runs into the lakes called Infernal, and is received into the Thesprotian gulf.