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Ab Urbe Condita, books 5-7 - 5

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1. 1

   Book V Peace was now established elsewhere, but Romans and Veientes were at war, and their rage and animosity were such that the end was clearly at hand for those that should be vanquished. Each people held an election very different from that of the other. The Romans enlarged the number of their military tribunes with consular authority, and elected eight, a greater number than ever before, to wit, Manius Aemilius Mamercus (for the second time), Lucius Valerius Potitus (for the third), Appius Claudius Crassus, Marcus Quinctilius Varus, Lucius Julius Iulus, Marcus Postumius, Marcus Furius Camillus, Marcus Postumius Albinus. But the Veientes, weary of annual canvassing, which was sometimes the cause of brawls, chose a king. This gave offence to the feelings of the Etruscan peoples, who loathed not more the institution of kings than the King himself. He had for some time been hateful to the nation by reason of his wealth and arrogance, since he had violently broken up a solemn festival, which it is impious to interrupt, in his resentment of a political rebuff; and because the suffrages of the Twelve Peoples had returned another man as priest in preference to him, he had suddenly carried off the actors, most of whom were his own slaves, in the middle of the games. And so the nation which was devoted beyond all others to religious rites (and all the more because it excelled in the art of observing them) voted to refuse its help to the men of Veil, so long as they should obey a king. This vote the Veientes would not suffer to be mentioned, in their fear of the King, who had a way of treating the man by whom any such saying was reported as a leader in sedition, not as the bearer of an idle tale. Although the Romans got word that things were quiet in Etruria, still, because they heard that this question came up at all their meetings, they so constructed their works as to have a double fortification, one facing Veii, to oppose the sallies of the townsfolk, the other confronting Etruria, to shut off any assistance that might come from thence. As the Roman generals hoped more from a siege than from an assault, they even began the erection of winter quarters —a new thing to the Roman soldier —and planned to carry the campaign on, straight through the winter. When news of this came to Rome, to the plebeian tribunes, who had now for a long time been unable to hit upon any pretext for agitation, they hurried before the assembly and set to work upon the passions of the commons: So this was the reason that the soldiers had been granted pay! They had not been mistaken in thinking that this gift of their opponents would be smeared with poison. The liberty of the commons had been sold; the young men, having been permanently removed and banished from the City and from the state, were no longer free, even in winter and the stormy season, to see to their homes and their affairs. What, they asked, did their hearers suppose to be the reason for making the service continuous? They would assuredly find no other motive than this: lest, through the presence in large numbers of the young men in whom lay all the vigour of the commons, something might be accomplished for the people's good. Moreover, they were far more ruthlessly abused and trodden down than were the Veientes, who, for their part, spent the winter in their houses, safeguarding their city by means of strong walls and natural defences, whilst the Roman soldiers were enduring toil and danger, overwhelmed with snows and frosts, in tents, not even laying aside their weapons in the winter time, a season of respite from all wars both by land and by sea. Such slavery as this neither kings, nor the proud consuls who came before the establishment of the tribunician power, nor the stern authority of a dictator, nor harsh decemvirs, had laid upon them, — that they should wage perennial war. Pray what would those men do if they should become consuls or dictators, who had made the semblance of consular authority so savage and truculent? But the commons were only getting their deserts. There had been no room even amongst eight military tribunes for a single plebeian. Heretofore the patricians had been wont with the utmost exertion to fill three places in a year: now they were advancing eight abreast to make good their authority, and there was never a commoner hanging on to the crowd, were it only to remind his colleagues that their soldiers were not slaves but freemen and fellow citizens; whom, at least in winter, they were bound to bring back to the shelter of their houses, and to leave them some portion of the year to look after their parents, their children, and their wives, and to use their liberty and elect magistrates. As they shouted forth these and suchlike arguments, they found an opponent not unequal to them in Appius Claudius, whom his colleagues had left behind to repress sedition on the part of the tribunes. He was a man experienced from his youth up in contentions with the plebs, and I have related how, some years before, he had advised that the intervention of their colleagues be used to break the power of the tribunes. The man not only had a nimble wit but was already a practised orator, and he delivered on this occasion a speech to the following effect: "If it has ever been a question, Quirites, whether it was for your sake or their own that the tribunes of the commons have always encouraged sedition, I am certain that the doubt has this year been resolved; and not only do I rejoice that you have at length cleared up a long misunderstanding, but I congratulate both you, - and on your account the state as well, that it has: happened at a time, of all others, when your affairs are prospering. Or is there anyone who doubts that no wrongs which you have suffered, if haply such there have sometimes been, have ever so offended and stirred up the plebeian tribunes as has the boon which the Fathers bestowed upon the commons, when they granted pay for military service? What else do you believe they were afraid of then, or are seeking now to shatter, but the harmony of the orders, which they regard as very apt to overthrow the tribunician authority? Indeed they are like quack-salvers seeking employment, since they desire that there should always be some disease in the body politic, that there may be something which you may call them in to cure. Pray, are you tribunes defending the commons, or attacking them? Are you adversaries of the soldiers, or their advocates? Or perhaps this is your plea: 'Whatever the Fathers do displeases us, be it in behalf of the commons or against them'; and just as masters forbid outsiders to have aught to do with their slaves, and think it right that they should abstain alike from benefiting and from harming them, so you deny the Fathers intercourse with the commons, lest we by our friendliness and liberality encourage them, or they become dutiful and obedient to us. How much more, if you had in you the slightest —I say not patriotism, but —humanity, ought you rather to have favoured, and, so far as in you lay, to have encouraged the kindly spirit of the Fathers and the complaisance of the plebs? And if this harmony should last, who would not make bold to warrant that our empire would soon be the greatest among the neighbouring peoples? "I shall presently explain, in regard to this plan of my colleagues, who have not been willing to withdraw the army from Veii with its task unaccomplished, —how not merely profitable but even necessary it was. But first I wish to speak about the actual condition of the soldiers; and I think that if I should express my meaning not in your presence only but also in the camp, the army itself would judge it reasonable. Indeed, though I were unable to think of anything to urge myself, I could be quite content with the speeches of my opponents. They were lately insisting that pay ought not to be given to the men, because it never had been given. How then can they object, if to those who have gained some new advantage be allotted new labour also, in proportion. Nowhere, as a rule, is service given without recompense, nor recompense except for service; toil and pleasure, most unlike in nature, have been linked together in a sort of natural bond. Formerly the soldier was vexed that he must serve the state at his own cost; yet he was happy to be able, for a half of the year, to till his own field and gain the means of keeping himself and his family, whether he were at home or with the army. Now he is happy that the state affords him gain, and is glad to receive his pay. Let him therefore be resigned to remaining away a little longer from his home and his property, which is now under no heavy charges. Why, if the commonwealth should call him to a reckoning, would it not justly say, 'You have a year's stipend, render a year's service; do you think it right that for a campaign of six months you should receive the pay of twelve?' I dislike to dwell upon this point, Quirites; for it is thus that men who employ mercenaries ought to argue; we would deal as though with fellow citizens, and we think it only right that you deal with us as with your native country. Either we ought not to have undertaken the war, or we ought to conduct it as befits the Roman People, and end it as quickly as possible. And we shall end it, if we press our beleaguered foes, and quit them not till we have fulfilled our hopes and captured Veii. Truly, if there were no other reason, the very indignity of the thing should compel us to persist! Did all Greece once, for one woman's sake, war ten years against a city so far from home, with all those lands and seas between? And does it irk us, being less than twenty miles away and almost within sight of Rome, to maintain a siege for a single year? Doubtless our reason for fighting is a trivial one, and we have no proper and sufficient grievance to incite us to persevere! Seven times have they renewed the war; never have they kept faith in peace; our fields they have pillaged a thousand times; they forced the Fidenates to forsake us; our settlers there they put to death; it was they who instigated, in violation of the law of nations, the impious murder of our envoys; they sought to raise up all Etruria against us, and they are striving to this end to-day; when our ambassadors sought redress they well-nigh did them bodily injury. "With such enemies ought we to wage a fainthearted and dilatory war? If so just grounds of resentment have no power to move us, pray have the following considerations none? The city is hemmed in with vast siege-works, which confine the enemy within his walls; he has not cultivated his land, and what was cultivated has been laid waste in the war; if we bring our army back, who can doubt that not only a desire for revenge, but also necessity, constraining them to plunder others since they have lost their own possessions, will cause them to invade our territory? So we are not postponing the war, if we act on your advice, but are receiving it within our own borders. And what of that matter which specially concerns the soldiers, whom the worthy plebeian tribunes formerly wished to rob of their pay, but are now desirous of protecting? How does it stand with them? The rampart and the trench, each involving prodigious toil, they have carried all that distance; forts they erected only a few at first, but since then, with the growth of the army, they have built very many; they have thrown up earthworks, not only against the city, but also facing Etruria, if any aid should come from that side; what need to speak of towers, mantlets, penthouses, and the rest of the equipment for storming towns? When they have expended all this labour, and the end of their task is at last in sight, do you: vote for abandoning these things, that when summer comes they may sweat and toil again to produce them afresh? How much less effort it requires to guard what is already made, and to press on and persevere and put an end to our anxiety! For surely it is- a thing soon done, if we carry it through without stopping, and do not ourselves drag out our hopes with these interruptions and delays. I talk of the loss of time and labour; what of the danger that we run by putting off the war? Do -the frequent debates in Etruria about the dispatch of succours to Veii allow us to forget it? Just now they are angry and resentful, and declare that they will send none; for all they care, we may capture Veii. But who is to guarantee that if we postpone the campaign they will hereafter feel the same: since if you slacken, a greater and more numerous embassy will set out, and since what now offends the Etruscans —the setting up of a king at Veii —may be altered with the lapse of time or by agreement of the citizens, to the end that thereby they may regain the goodwill of Etruria; or with the consent of the King himself, who would not wish his sovereignty to hurt the safety of his people? See how many undesirable consequences attend that line of policy: the loss of works constructed with such effort; the imminent devastation of our fields; the Etruscans, instead of the Veientes only, aroused to war with us. It is thus, tribunes, that you would manage matters, much as though in dealing with a sick man, who if he would undergo a strict regimen might begin at once to recover, you should protract his illness and perhaps render it incurable, by .indulging his immediate desire for meat and drink. "If it were of no moment to this war, it was yet, I assure you, of the utmost importance for military discipline that our soldiers become accustomed not only to pluck a victory within their grasp, but if a campaign should be even more protracted, to put up with the tedium and await the outcome of their hopes, however long-deferred; and if a war be not finished in a summer, to stay for winter, nor, like birds of passage, cast about at once, on the approach of autumn, for shelter and covert. Do the eagerness, pray, and delight that men have in hunting carry them through snow and frost into the mountains and the forests; and shall not we use in the stress of war the same resolution which even sport and pleasure are wont to call out? Do we think the bodies of our soldiers so effeminate, their hearts so faint, that they cannot endure to be one winter in camp, away from home; that like sailors they must wage war with an eye on the weather, observing the seasons, incapable of withstanding heat or cold? They would certainly blush if anyone should charge them with this, and would maintain that manly endurance was in their souls and bodies, and that they could campaign as well in winter as in summer; that they had given the tribunes no commission to protect softness and idleness; and that they were mindful that their grandsires had not founded the tribunician power in the shade or under roofs. "It is due to the valour of your soldiers, it is due to the Roman name, that you should look not merely to Veii and this present war that is upon us, but should seek for the years to come a reputation that will serve you in other wars and amongst all other nations. Do you suppose there will be no great difference in men's opinion of us, whether our neighbours conclude the Roman People to be such, that if a city withstand the brunt of their first assault for a very brief time, it need thenceforward have no fears; or whether our name inspire such dread, that men believe that once a Roman army has sat down before a town, it will never budge, either from the weariness of a protracted siege or from the rigours of winter, that it knows no other end of war but victory, and relies in its campaigns not more on swiftness than on perseverance? For perseverance, needful in every kind of warfare, is especially so in besieging cities, since fortifications and natural advantages make most of them impregnable, and time itself subdues them, with hunger and thirst, and captures them, as it shall capture Veii, unless the plebeian tribunes help our enemies, and the Veientes find in Rome those succours which they are seeking to no purpose in Etruria. Could anything happen which would so please the Veientes as that factions should spring up, first in the City of Rome, and then, as though by contagion, in the camp? But our enemies, by Heaven, are so well disciplined that no weariness of the blockade nor even of kingly rule has occasioned the smallest revolt among them; neither has the Etruscans' denial of help provoked their spirit; for whosoever prompts sedition shall forthwith die the death; nor shall any man there have licence to say what is said with impunity to you. Death by cudgelling is the wage of him who forsakes the standards or quits his post; but those who advise the men to abandon their standards and desert the camp gain a hearing, not with one or two soldiers, but with whole armies, openly, in public meetings; so accustomed are you to hear with complacency whatever a tribune says, even if it tends to betray the City and to undo the state; and captivated by the charm of that authority, you suffer any wickedness whatsoever to lurk beneath it. It only remains for them to utter in camp and in the presence of the soldiers the view which they noisily publish here, and to corrupt the armies and not to suffer them to obey their leaders. For in the upshot liberty has come to mean at Rome, that a man respect neither senate nor magistrates, nor laws, nor ancestral customs, nor institutions of the fathers, nor military discipline. Appius was already holding his own with the tribunes of the plebs, even in public meetings, when a sudden disaster, from a source which could least have been anticipated, befell the army before Veii, giving Appius the advantage in the argument, while it increased the mutual good-will of the orders and their ardour for a more vigorous prosecution of the siege. For when they had pushed forward the terrace towards the town, and had all but brought the mantlets into contact with the walls, —more intent upon erecting their works by day than on guarding them by night, —the gate was suddenly flung open, and a vast horde, most of them armed with torches, hurled fire on the works, and in an hour's time terrace and mantlets, that had taken so long to make, were consumed in the flames; and many men perished by the sword or the fire, in vain efforts to save them. When the news of this came to Rome, it filled the City with sadness, the senate with anxiety and apprehension, lest they might now indeed be unable to check the disaffection, either in the City or the camp, and the tribunes might crow over the commonwealth as though they had overthrown it; when lo! those who were of equestrian rating, but had not received horses from the state, having first taken counsel together, came to the senate, and being granted a hearing, volunteered to serve on their own horses. These men had no sooner received a vote of thanks from the senate, in the most honourable terms, and the report of it had spread to the Forum and the City, than the plebeians suddenly ran together to the Curia, and: declared that it was now the turn of the foot-soldiers to proffer extraordinary service to the state, whether it would have them march to Veii, or anywhere else; if they should be led to Veii, they promised that they would not quit their ground until they had taken the enemy's city. Then indeed the senate could scarce control its already overflowing joy; for they did not, as with the knights, issue an order to the magistrates to thank them, nor did they call them into the Curia to receive an answer, neither did the senate keep within the House; but each for himself cried out from above, to the multitude standing in the Comitium, and by speech and gesture signified the general joy. Rome was blest, they said, and invincible and eternal, by reason of this noble harmony; they praised the knights, they praised the plebeians, they extolled the very day itself, and confessed that the courtesy and good-will of the senate had been surpassed. Fathers and commoners mingled their tears of joy, till the Fathers were recalled into the senate-house, and decreed that the military tribunes should hold an assembly and thank the infantry and the knights, and say to them that the senate would remember their loyalty to their country, and that it was voted that all who had volunteered to serve out of their due order should receive pay. The knights, too, were granted a definite money allowance. Then for the first time cavalry-men began to serve on their own horses. The volunteer army, having marched to Veii, not only replaced the works that had been lost, but added new ones. The city dispatched provisions with more than its former zeal, that nothing might be lacking to an army that had deserved so well. The ensuing year had for consular tribunes Gaius Servilius Ahala (for the third time), Quintus Servilius, Lucius Verginius, Quintus Sulpicius, Aulus Manlius (for the second time), and Manius Sergius (for the second time). In their term of office, while everyone was intent on the war with Veii, the garrison at Anxur was neglected; soldiers were given furlough, Volscian traders were admitted without discrimination, and, the sentinels at the gates being suddenly overpowered, the town was taken. Not many soldiers perished, because they were all, except the sick, occupied, like sutlers, with trafficking in the country-side and the towns near by. Nor were things any better at Veii, which was at that time the nation's chief concern; for the Roman commanders showed more jealousy of one another than spirit in dealing with the enemy, whose forces moreover were enlarged by the unexpected accession of the Capenates and the Faliscans. These two Etruscan peoples, being nearest in situation, believed that if the Veientes were conquered it would be their turn next to face a Roman invasion. The Faliscans, besides, had incurred hostility on their own account, because they had been mixed up before in the war with Fidenae. So they exchanged embassies, bound themselves by an oath, and their armies suddenly appeared before Veii. It happened that they attacked the camp at that point where the tribune Manius Sergius was in command, and great was the terror they inspired, since the Romans thought that all Etruria had risen and was come with a mighty array against them. The same belief roused up the Veientes in the town. Thus a two-fold attack was directed against the camp. The soldiers rallied into groups, facing now this way and now that, yet were unable either quite to confine the Veientes within the siege-lines, or to ward off the attack upon their own defences and protect themselves from the enemy outside. Their only hope was if help should come from the larger camp, so that the legions might face different ways, some of them confronting the Capenates and Faliscans, and others the sortie of the townsfolk. But that camp was under the command of Verginius, who was privately hated by Sergius and returned his enmity. This man, though word was brought that many bastions had been stormed and the ramparts scaled, and that the enemy were attacking on both sides, held his troops under arms, saying that if his colleague needed help he would let him know. His pride found a match in the other's obstinacy, and Sergius, lest he should seem to have required any aid of his rival, preferred defeat at the hands of the enemy to victory gained through a fellow citizen. For a long time the Romans were slaughtered between the two attacking armies; finally they abandoned their works, and a very few escaped into the larger camp, while Sergius himself, with the chief part of his men, kept on to Rome. It was there decided, on his throwing all the blame upon his colleague, to summon Verginius from camp, and in the meanwhile put lieutenants in command of it. The affair was then debated in the senate and the colleagues heaped abuse on one another. There were but few who spoke for the commonwealth: most of them argued for one or the other disputant, according as each was swayed by private interest or favour. The leading senators held, that whether the: fault or the misfortune of the commanders were the cause of this shameful disaster, they ought not to await the regular time for elections, but proceed at once to choose new military tribunes, to begin their magistracy on the first of October. While the members were voting for this proposal, the other military tribunes raised no objection; but of all people Sergius and Verginius, the very men on account of whom it was evident that the senate was disgusted with the magistrates of that year, first begged to be spared the humiliation, then vetoed the senate's decree, declaring that they would not resign their authority before the thirteenth of December, the accustomed day for entering upon office. Whereupon the tribunes of the plebs, who so long as harmony prevailed and the affairs of the City prospered, had reluctantly held their tongues, suddenly broke out and threatened the tribunes of the soldiers, that unless they submitted to the senate they would send them to prison. Then Gaius Servilius Ahala, a military tribune, said: So far as concerns you, tribunes of the commons, and your menaces, I should indeed willingly put it to the proof how you have in your threats as little legality as courage; but it is impious to oppose the authority of the senate. Accordingly do you give over seeking in our quarrels occasion for working mischief, and my colleagues shall either do as the senate decrees, or if they persist in stubborn opposition, I will forthwith name a dictator, to compel them to lay down their authority. This speech was universally approved, and the Fathers rejoiced that they needed not the trumpery threats of the tribunician power, but had found another and a greater force to coerce the magistrates; and the latter, overborne by the unanimity of feeling, held an election of military tribunes, to begin service on October the first, and before that date resigned their office. The consular tribuneship of Lucius Valerius Potitus (for the fourth term), Marcus Furius Camillus (for the second ), Manius Aemilius Mamercus (for the third), Gnaeus Cornelius Cossus (for the second), Caeso Fabius Ambustus, and Lucius Julius Iulus, was a time of great activity both at home and in the field. For they made war at many points simultaneously, before Veii, at Capena, at Falerii, and in the Volscian country —to recover Anxur from the enemy; —and in Rome both the levy and the payment of the war-tax occasioned difficulties, a quarrel sprang up over the co-optation of plebeian tribunes, and the trials: of the two who had lately exercised consular powers aroused no small commotion. The first concern of the military tribunes was to levy troops, and they not only enrolled the younger men, but also compelled the seniors to enlist for service in guarding the City. But the more they increased the number of the soldiers, the more money they required for pay. This they tried to collect by taxation; but those who remained at home contributed with reluctance, because they had also in defence of the City to perform the labour of soldiers and serve the commonwealth. To make this obligation, heavy in itself, seem yet more grievous, the tribunes of the plebs delivered seditious speeches, in which they alleged that the senators had established pay for the troops for this reason, that they might ruin one half of the plebs with fighting and the other half with taxation. They were now drawing out a single war into its third year, and were purposely misconducting it, that they might conduct it the longer. Again, with one levy they had enrolled armies for four wars, and had haled away even boys and old men. Now they were confounding winter with summer, to allow no rest ever to the unhappy commons, on whom finally they had even imposed a tax; that when they should drag home their bodies spent with toil, with wounds, and at last with old age, and should then find all things gone to waste in the long absence of the owners, they might pay tribute out of their diminished property, and return to the state many times, as it were with usury, the wages they had received as soldiers. What with the levy and the tax and the weightier cares that preoccupied men's minds, they were unable on the day of election to return the full number of plebeian tribunes. An effort was then made to obtain the co-optation of patricians for the vacant places. When this failed, nevertheless, in order to invalidate the law, it was brought about that Gaius Lacerius and Marcus Acutius should be chosen tribunes, without doubt through patrician influence. It so happened that in that year one of the tribunes was Gnaeus Trebonius, whose name and family seemed to make it his duty to defend the Trebonian law. This man said that what the Fathers had formerly aimed at (and had been foiled on their first attempting), the tribunes of the soldiers had finally extorted; he asseverated that the Trebonian law had been done away with, and that the tribunes of the plebs had been appointed not by the votes of the people but at the dictation of the nobles; that things had come to such a pass, that they must perforce have either patricians or the satellites of patricians for tribunes of the plebs; their sacred laws were being taken away, the tribunician power wrested from them. This was done, he declared, by the knavery of the patricians, the rascality and the treason of his colleagues. Men were burning with resentment, not only against the patricians, but also against the tribunes of the plebs, both those who had been co-opted and those who had co-opted them, when three of the college, Publius Curatius, Marcus Metilius, and Marcus Minucius, being alarmed at their own situation, I fell violently upon Sergius and Verginius, the military tribunes of the previous year, and by appointing them a day for trial turned against them the anger and displeasure which the plebs had evinced towards themselves. They reminded their hearers, that those who were aggrieved by the levy, or the tax, or the protracted service and the long duration of the war, those who sorrowed for the calamity that befell at Veii, those whose houses were in mourning for the loss of sons, brothers, kinsmen or connexions, —that all those now had the right and the power, thanks to the speakers, of avenging the nation's grief and their own private sorrow on the two culprits; for of all their sufferings Sergius and Verginius were the cause; and this their accusers were not more forward to maintain than the defendants to confess, who, equally guilty, threw the blame on one another, Verginius taxing Sergius with his flight, while Sergius complained of Verginius's treachery. Their madness had been so incredible, that it was much more probable that they had done the thing upon agreement, with the collusion of the senators; who having before given opportunity to the Veientes to set fire to their works, in order to prolong the war, had now betrayed the army and delivered up a Roman camp to the Faliscans. They were doing everything to wear out the young men before Veii, and prevent the tribunes from bringing before the people the question of land and other advantages to the plebs, and from pushing their measures in well-attended assemblies and thwarting the conspiracy of the patricians. Judgment was already given against the accused both by the senate and by the Roman People, and also by their own college; for the senate had by its decree removed them from authority, and when they refused to abdicate their office, their colleagues had coerced them by threatening to appoint a dictator, and the Roman People had elected tribunes to assume their duties, not on the thirteenth of December, the usual date, but immediately, on October the first, believing that the state could endure no longer if the incumbents should remain in place; yet, in spite of all, these men, stigmatized and fore-judged by so many adverse verdicts, presented themselves for trial by the people, and fancied that they were quit and sufficiently mulcted because they were made private citizens two months before their time; not perceiving that they had then merely been deprived of the power to do further mischief, not punished, since their colleagues, too, were turned out of office, though they had certainly done no wrong. Let the Quirites call back the spirit they had shown when the recent calamity had occurred, when they had beheld the flight and confusion of their troops, as they stumbled, wounded and dismayed, through the City gates, accusing neither fortune nor any of the gods, but these their leaders. They were sure that there was not a man present in the assembly who had not on that day cursed and execrated the lives, the houses, and the fortunes of Lucius Verginius and Manius Sergius. It was not reasonable that their hearers, having a legal and moral right in the matter, should not use their power against those upon whom each one of them had invoked the wrath of Heaven. The gods themselves never laid hands upon the guilty; it was enough if they armed with an opportunity for vengeance those who had been wronged. Incited by these speeches, the plebs condemned the accused to pay each a fine of 10,000 pounds of bronze. It was in vain that Sergius blamed Fortune and the common chance of war, while Verginius begged that he might not be more unlucky at home than he had been in the campaign. On them the wrath of the people was poured out, and the co-optation of the tribunes and the evasion of the Trebonian law were almost forgotten. The victorious tribunes, that the plebs might have an immediate reward for its judgment, proposed a land-law and forbade the gathering of the war-tax, notwithstanding that pay was needed for so many armies, whose campaigning, though successful, yet failed to realize the desired end in any war. Thus, at Veii, they recovered the lost camp and strengthened it with fortresses and garrisons, led by the military tribunes Manius Aemilius and Caeso Fabius; Marcus Furius in the Faliscan country, and Gnaeus Cornelius in the territory of Capena, meeting no enemies afield, drove off booty, and burning farmhouses and crops, laid waste the land, but the towns they neither assaulted nor besieged; in the Volscian country, however, after ravaging the fields, they made a futile attack on Anxur, which was seated on an eminence, and finding force to be unavailing, began to invest it with a stockade and trench, under Valerius Potitus, who had got the command against the Volsci. While military affairs were in this posture, a quarrel that broke out at home aroused more energy than went to their making of wars; and since the tax could not be taken up, on account of the tribunes, and the generals were sent no money, while the soldiers were clamouring for their pay, the camp, too, was like to have been disrupted by the contagion of mutiny in the City. In the midst of this hostility which the plebs felt towards the patricians, though the plebeian tribunes said that the time was now come to establish liberty, and to transfer the highest office from such as Sergius and Verginius to stout and courageous commoners, yet they got no further than the election of one plebeian (by way of asserting their right), namely, Publius Licinius Calvus, to be military tribune with consular powers; the others chosen were patricians: Publius Manlius, Lucius Titinius, Publius Maelius, Lucius Furius Medullinus, Lucius Publilius Volscus. The plebeians themselves were amazed that they had gained so important a point, and not alone the man who had been chosen, one that had held no offices before, but was only a senator of long standing, now well on in years. There is no unanimity of opinion why he was selected as the first and fittest to taste of the new honours. Some think it was the favour of his cousin Gnaeus Cornelius, who as tribune of the soldiers the year before had granted triple pay to the cavalrymen, ' that got him his promotion to so great an office; others, that he himself made a timely speech on the harmony of the orders, which pleased both patricians and plebeians. Overjoyed at their victory in this election, the tribunes of the plebs withdrew that opposition to the tax which was the greatest obstacle to the business of the state, and it was obediently paid in and dispatched to the army. Anxur of the Volsci was speedily recaptured, a holiday having relaxed the vigilance of their guard. This year was remarkable for so cold and snowy a winter, that the roads were blocked and the Tiber became unnavigable. The price of corn, owing to the supply which they had brought in before, did not go up. Publius Licinius had obtained his magistracy without any disorders, rejoicing the commons more than he offended the patricians, and in the same spirit he conducted it; the people therefore became desirous of returning plebeians at the next election of consular tribunes. Marcus Veturius was the sole patrician candidate to get in; all the other military tribunes with consular authority were commoners, as the result of an all but unanimous vote of the centuries. Their names were Marcus Pomponius, Gnaeus Duillius, Volero Publilius, Gnaeus Genucius, Lucius Atilius The severe winter was succeeded, whether in consequence of the sudden change from such inclement weather to the opposite extreme, or for some other reason, by a summer that was noxious and baleful to all living creatures. Unable to discover what caused the incurable ravages of this distemper, or would put an end to them, the senate voted to consult the Sibylline Books. The duumvirs in charge of the sacred rites then celebrated the first lectisternium ever held in Rome, and for the space of eight days sacrificed to Apollo, to Latona and Diana, to Hercules, to Mercury and to Neptune, spreading three couches for them with all the splendour then attainable. They also observed the rite in their homes. All through the City, they say, doors stood wide open, all kinds of viands were set out for general consumption, all comers were welcomed, whether known or not, and men even exchanged kind and courteous words with personal enemies; there was a truce to quarrelling and litigation; even prisoners were loosed from their chains for those days, and they scrupled thenceforth to imprison men whom the gods had thus befriended. Meantime alarms were multiplied at Veii, where three wars were rolled into one. For, precisely as before, the Capenates and the Faliscans came suddenly to raise the siege, and the Romans fought about their works against three armies, which attacked them on both sides. What helped them most, was the recollection how Sergius and Verginius had been condemned. And so from the principal camp, where the delay had occurred on the former occasion, troops were dispatched by a short circuit and fell upon the Capenates in the rear, as they faced the rampart of the Romans. Beginning there, the battle carried terror even among the Faliscans, who were wavering, when a timely sally from the camp put them to flight. Then, as they retreated, the victors pursued them with great slaughter; and not long after a party that was raiding the territory of the Capenates happened to fall in with them and destroyed such as had survived the battle. Of the Veientes likewise, many, as they fled back to the town, were slain before the gates, when their friends, fearing lest the Romans should burst in along with them, had closed the portals, and barred out the hindmost of their own people. Such were the events of this year. And now the time drew near for choosing military tribunes and the Fathers were almost more concerned about the election than about the war, perceiving that the highest authority had been not merely shared with the plebs, but well-nigh lost to themselves. They therefore arranged that their most distinguished members should stand, —men whom they believed the electors would be ashamed to pass over, —and at the same time they themselves, as if they had all been candidates, left no stone unturned, and called to their aid not only men, but the gods as well, by raising a religious scruple anent the election held two -years before. In the year before the last, they said, there had been an intolerable winter, like a warning from Heaven. Last year had come not prodigies but actual realities: a pestilence had descended upon the fields and the City, clearly proceeding from the anger of the gods, whom they must propitiate in order to avert the plague, as the fateful Books had indicated; it had seemed to the gods an affront that an election held under their auspices should prostitute honours and confound family distinctions. The people were awed not only by the dignity of the candidates, but by the fear of Heaven, and to be military tribunes with consular powers chose all patricians, and chiefly the most illustrious among them, as follows: Lucius Valerius Potitus (for the fifth time), Marcus Valerius Maximus, Marcus Furius Camillus (for the second time), Lucius Furius Medullinus (for the third), Q. Servilius Fidenas (for the second), Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus (for the second). These tribunes achieved absolutely nothing noteworthy at Veii, but employed all their strength in pillaging. The two chief commanders, Potitus and Camillus, —one at Falerii, the other at Capena, —carried off huge spoils and left nothing untouched that iron or fire could destroy. Meanwhile many portents were reported, most of which, because they had only one witness each to vouch for them, obtained no credence and were slighted; and, besides, when the Etruscans, whose services they employed to avert evil omens, were at war with them, they had no soothsayers. One thing occasioned universal anxiety, namely that the lake in the Alban Wood, without any rains or other cause to make it less than a miracle, rose to an unwonted height. To inquire what the gods could possibly foretell by that prodigy, envoys were sent to the Delphic oracle. But a nearer interpreter of the fates presented himself, an old man of Veii, who, while the Roman and Etruscan soldiers were scoffing at one another as they stood guard at the outposts, declared in a prophetic strain that until the water should be drawn off from the Alban Lake the Romans never could take Veii. At first they made light of this as an idle taunt; then they began to talk it over; presently one of the Roman outpost inquired of the townsman nearest him (for owing to the long continuance of the war they had now got into the way of conversing together) who that man was who threw out mysterious hints regarding the Alban Lake. When he heard that he was a soothsayer, being himself not without a touch of superstition, he alleged a desire to consult him about the averting of a domestic portent, if he could spare the time, and so enticed the seer to a conference. And when they had walked a little way apart from the friends of both, unarmed and fearing nothing, the stalwart young Roman laid hold of the feeble old man in the sight of them all, and despite an unavailing hubbub raised by the Etruscans, bore him off to his own fellows. There they had him before the general, who sent him on to Rome, to the senate. When the Fathers questioned him what it was he had meant about the Alban Lake, he answered that the gods must surely have been incensed at the people of Veii on the day when they put it into his: mind to reveal the destruction destined to befall his native city; and so what he had then uttered under divine inspiration, he could not now unsay and recall; and perhaps in concealing what the immortal gods wished to be published guilt was incurred no less than by disclosing what should be hid. Thus then it was written in the books of fate, thus handed down in the lore of the Etruscans, that when the Alban water should overflow, if then the Romans should duly draw it off, they would be given the victory over the Veientes; until that should come, to pass, the gods would not abandon the walls of Veii. He then went on to explain the appointed method of draining it. But the senators, making slight account of his authority, as not sufficiently trustworthy in so grave a matter, determined to wait for their deputies with the response of the Pythian oracle. But before these envoys could return from Delphi or an expiation be devised for the Alban portent, new military tribunes with consular authority came in; these were Lucius Julius Iulus, Lucius Furius Medullinus (for the fourth time), Lucius Sergius Fidenas, Aulus Postumius Regillensis, Publius Cornelius Maluginensis, and Aulus Manlius. In that year a new enemy arose in the Tarquinienses, who seeing the Romans beset with many wars at once, —against the Volsci, who were laying siege to the garrison at Anxur, against the Aequi, who were attacking the Roman colony at Labici, and also against the men of Veii, of Falerii, and of Capena, — and perceiving that affairs within the City were no less troubled, owing to contentions betwixt the patricians and the plebs, believed that in these circumstances they had an opportunity to do the Romans a hurt, and sent out light-armed detachments to raid their territory; for they thought that either the Romans would put up with the wrong, to avoid the burden of another war, or would take the field with a small and therefore inadequate army. The indignation of the Romans was greater than their concern for the damage wrought by the Tarquinienses; so they neither made strenuous efforts to prepare, nor deferred taking action to a distant date. Aulus Postumius and Lucius Iulus, without holding a regular levy —for this the plebeian tribunes hindered —but with a company consisting almost solely of volunteers whom they had induced to join by their exhortations, marched out by cross-country ways through the territory of Caere, and surprised the Tarquinienses as they were returning from their depradations laden with booty. Many men they slew, all they stripped of their baggage; and having recovered the spoils of their own fields, returned to Rome. Two days were allowed the owners to identify their property; on the third all that had not been recognized —chiefly things belonging to the enemy themselves —was sold under the spear and the proceeds divided amongst the soldiers. The other campaigns, especially the one at Veii, were indecisive. And now the Romans, despairing of human aid, were looking to destiny and the gods, when the deputies returned from Delphi, bringing the oracle's response, which corresponded with the utterance of the captive seer: Roman, see that thou suffer not the Alban water to be confined within the lake, nor to fret its own channel to the sea; thou shalt draw it forth and water the fields withal, and spread it abroad till it be lost in rivulets; after that press boldly on against the walls of the foe, and know that over that city which thou dost beleaguer for so many years, the fates now disclosed have given thee the victory. When thou hast ended the war with conquest, bring to my temple an ample gift, and repeat and accomplish in customary wise the ancestral rites thou hast neglected. The captive soothsayer began from that moment to be held in great repute, and the military tribunes, Cornelius and Postumius, set out to employ him about the expiation of the Alban prodigy and the due appeasement of the gods. At length it was discovered wherein the gods taxed them with neglecting ceremonies or omitting a festival: it was assuredly nothing else than that magistrates in whose election there had been a flaw had improperly proclaimed the Latin games and the sacrifice on the Alban Mount ; only one atonement for these errors was open to them, to make the tribunes of the soldiers resign their office, to take the auspices afresh, and to begin an interregnum. By decree of the senate these things were done. There were three successive interreges, Lucius Valerius, Quintus Servilius Fidenas, Marcus Furius Camillus, In the meantime there were continuous disturbances, and the plebeian tribunes blocked the election, until it had first been agreed that the majority of the military tribunes should be chosen out of the commons. While this was going on, the Etruscans met in council at the Fane of Voltumna; where the Capenates and Faliscans proposed that all the nations of Etruria should unite in a common resolution 'and design to raise the siege of Veii. The council made answer that they had before refused the Veientes this request, on the ground that they had no right to ask help from those whom they had not cared to look to for advice in so weighty a matter. Just then, however, the plight of their country itself denied the petition. There was now in the greatest part of Etruria a strange race, new settlers, with whom they were neither securely at peace nor yet certain to have war. Nevertheless, out of regard for the blood and the name and the present perils of their kinsmen, they would grant that if any of their young men wished to serve in that war, they might do so without let or hindrance. Of such recruits it was said at Rome that a great number had come in; and so domestic differences began to subside, as generally happens, in the face of a common danger. It occasioned the Fathers no displeasure when the prerogative centuries chose Publius Licinius Calvus tribune of the soldiers, without his seeking office; he was a man whose moderation had been proven in his former term, but was now become superannuated. It was clear that all who had been his colleagues in that same year would also be returned, one after the other, to wit: Lucius Titinius, Publius Maenius, Gnaeus Genucius, Lucius Atilius. But before they were declared to the duly assembled tribes, Licinius spoke as follows, having obtained permission of the interrex: It is an omen of harmony, as I perceive, Quirites, a thing most needful at this juncture, that you seek for the ensuing year, when in your voting you remember our former magistracy; but whereas in my colleagues you are choosing again the same men, and all the better for experience, in me you see no longer the same Publius Licinius, of whom but the shadow and the name are left. My strength of body is decayed, my sight and hearing dulled, memory fails me, and the vigour of my mind is impaired. Here, he cried, laying hold of his son, here is a young man, the effigy and likeness of him you formerly chose for military tribune first of all plebeians. Him have I bred up in my own principles, and in my stead I give and dedicate him to the state, and I pray you, Quirites, who without my seeking have offered me the office, that you grant it to him, who seeks it, and to the prayers I have added in his behalf. The father was granted his request, and the son, Publius Licinius, was declared military tribune with consular powers, together with those I have named above. Titinius and Genucius, tribunes of the soldiers, having marched against the Faliscans and Capenates, brought more spirit than generalship to their conduct of the war, and plunged into an ambush. Genucius, atoning for his rashness by an honourable death, fell fighting among the foremost, in front of the standards; Titinius rallied his men, who had been thrown into great confusion, on a little eminence, and made a stand, yet he would not risk an engagement on level ground. The disgrace outweighed the defeat, which had almost proved disastrous, so great was the panic which it caused, not only in Rome, where a greatly exaggerated report of the affair had been received, but also in the camp before Veii. There the soldiers could hardly be restrained from flight, for a rumour had run through the camp that the victorious Capenates and Faliscans, having slaughtered the Roman commanders and their army, were close at hand, with all the manhood of Etruria. Accounts even more alarming had been credited at Rome: that the camp at Veii was already under attack; that already a division of the enemy was marching to assail the City. There was a rush to the walls, and the women, drawn from their houses by the general consternation, betook themselves to prayer in the temples, and besought the gods to ward off destruction from the houses and shrines of the City and from the walls of Rome, and to turn that panic against Veii, if the sacred rites had been duly renewed and the portents expiated. And now the games and the Latin Festival had been repeated, now the water had been let out from the Alban Lake upon the fields, and the doom of Veii drew on apace. Accordingly the commander destined to destroy that city and to save his country, Marcus Furius Camillus, was appointed dictator, and named Publius Cornelius Scipio as his master of the horse. The change in the command at once made a change in all things else; there was new hope and a new spirit, and even the fortune of the City seemed to be renewed. The dictator's first act was to visit military punishment upon those who had fled from Veil in the panic there, and to teach his men that the enemy was not the worst thing they had to fear. He then fixed the levy for a certain day, and in the interval hastened to Veii to encourage his soldiers; thence he returned to Rome to enroll the new army, and found no one who refused to serve. Even foreign troops, Latins and Hernicans, came with promises to help in this war, and the dictator thanked them in the senate. All things being now in readiness for the campaign, Camillus vowed, in pursuance of a senatorial decree, to celebrate the great games, if he should capture Veii, and to restore and dedicate anew the temple of Mater Matuta, which in time gone by had been consecrated by King Servius Tullius. Marching out from the City, where he left a greater feeling of suspense than of confidence, he first engaged the Faliscans and Capenates, in the Nepesine country. There all his measures, being executed with consummate skill and prudence, were attended, as generally happens, with good fortune. Not only did he rout the enemy in battle, but he also deprived them of their camp and got possession of enormous booty, the chief part of which was made over to the quaestor, and no great quantity given to the soldiers. He then led his army to Veii, where he increased the number of redoubts, and withdrawing the troops from the skirmishes which frequently took place, on the spur of the moment, in the space between the town wall and the stockade, by an edict forbidding any man to fight without orders, he employed them in digging. Of all the works, much the greatest and most laborious was a mine they began to drive into the enemy's citadel. That this work might not be interrupted nor the same men become exhausted by perpetually toiling under ground, he divided the workers into six parties and assigned them six-hour shifts in rotation; night and day the work went on unceasingly, till they had made a way into the citadel. The dictator saw that victory was at last within his grasp, and that a city of great wealth was on the point of being taken, with booty more than if all previous wars had been put together. Lest, therefore, he might incur either the resentment of the soldiers, in consequence of a niggardly division of the spoils, or the ill-will of the Fathers, if he were lavish in sharing them out, he wrote to the senate, that thanks to the favour of the immortal gods, his own direction, and the patient efforts of his troops, Veii would presently be in the power of the Roman People, and asked what disposition they proposed making of the plunder. The senate was divided between two opinions; the aged Publius Licinius, who was the first, they say, that his son called upon to speak, advised making public proclamation that the people decreed that whoso desired a share in the spoils should proceed to the camp at Veii; the other plan was that of Appius Claudius, who declared that such largess was without example, reckless, unfair, and ill-advised; if they were persuaded once for all that it was wicked that money captured from the enemy should lie in the treasury, which had been exhausted by the wars, he urged them to pay the soldiers out of it, that the plebs might have so much the less war-tax to contribute ; this was a boon of which all families alike would feel the benefit, nor would the hands of idle city-folk, greedy of pillage, pluck away the rewards of valiant fighting men —since it commonly turned out that in proportion as a man was prone to seek a leading share of toil and danger, he was slow in plundering. Licinius argued, on the other hand, that this money would breed endless suspicion and hate, and would furnish grounds for accusations before the plebs, and so for agitation and revolutionary laws; it was better, therefore, to win over by this gift the sympathies of the commons, to succour them, exhausted and impoverished as they were by so' many years' taxation, and to let them enjoy the spoils and fruits of that war in which they had well-nigh grown old men; there would in every instance be more satisfaction and pleasure in what a man took with his own hand from the enemy and brought home, than if he received many times its value at the discretion of another; the dictator himself would fain avoid the enmity and charges arising from this business, and therefore had handed it over to the senate; the senate, likewise, in its turn, should refer the question to the plebs, and let every man keep what the fortune of war might give him. This policy seemed the safer, since it would make the senate popular. Accordingly, proclamation was made that all who liked might go to the dictator in camp, to share in the plunder of Veii. A vast throng went out, and filled the camp. Then the dictator, after taking the auspices, came forth and commanded the troops to arm. Under thy leadership, he cried, Pythian Apollo, and inspired by thy will, I advance to destroy the city of Veii, and to thee I promise a tithe of its spoils. At the same time I beseech thee, Queen Juno, that dwellest now in Veii, to come with us, when we have gotten the victory, to our City —soon to be thine, too —that a temple meet for thy majesty may there receive thee. These prayers uttered, he set forward with overwhelming numbers to assault the town on every side, that the inhabitants might not perceive the danger pressing upon them from the mine. The Veientes, unconscious that they were already given up by their own soothsayers, and by foreign oracles, that some of the gods had already been invited to share in their despoiling, while others having been entreated to quit their city were beginning to look to new homes in the temples of their enemies, and that this was the last day they were themselves to live, feared nothing less than that their defences were undermined and their citadel already filled with foemen, and, each for himself, took up arms and ran out to the ramparts; marvelling what it meant that whereas for so many days not a Roman had stirred from his post, they should now, as though they had suddenly gone mad, be rushing blindly against the walls. At this point men introduce a tale, how, as the King of the Veientes was sacrificing, the Roman soldiers in the mine overheard the soothsayer declare that to him who should cut up the inwards of that victim would be given the victory, and were moved to open the mine and seize the entrails, which they bore off to the dictator. But in matters of so great antiquity I should be content if things probable were to be received as true: this story, more fit to be displayed on the stage, that delights in wonders, than to be believed, it is worth while neither to affirm nor to refute. The mine, which was then filled with picked troops, suddenly discharged its armed men into the temple of Juno, on the Veientine citadel; some of them assailed the backs of their enemies, who were on the walls; others wrenched off the bars that made fast the gates; others, when the women and slaves cast down stones and tiles from roofs, fetched fire against them. The air resounded with shouts; discordant threats of the attackers and despairing shrieks of the defenders were blended with the wailing of women and children. In a moment the armed soldiers were everywhere hurled from the walls, and the gates thrown open. A part of the Romans poured through them in a body, others scaled the deserted walls; the city was overrun with enemies; the battle raged in every quarter; then, when there had already been great carnage, the fighting began to flag, and the dictator bade the heralds proclaim that those without arms should be spared. This ended the slaughter. The unarmed began to give themselves up, and the Romans scattered, with the dictator's permission, in quest of booty. When this was brought before him, and he saw that it was considerably larger and comprised effects of greater value than he had hoped or thought, it is said that he raised his hands to heaven and prayed that if any god or man deemed his good fortune and that of the Roman People to be excessive, it might be granted him to appease that envy with the least harm to his own private interests and to the public welfare of the Roman People. As he turned, while making this prayer, tradition states that he slipped and fell, and that this omen was seen (when men came later to gather its meaning from the event) to point to the condemnation of Camillus himself, and in the second place, to the capture of Rome, a disaster which befell a few years afterwards. So that day was spent in the slaughter of enemies and the sack of a most opulent city. On the following day the dictator sold the free-born inhabitants into slavery. This was the only money that went into the state treasury, but the commons were angry about it; as for the booty they brought back themselves, they gave the credit not to their commander, who had referred to the Fathers, that they might support his niggardliness, a matter which had lain within his own discretion, nor yet to the senators, but- to the house of the Licinii, whose son had brought to a vote in the senate that popular measure which his father had proposed. When the wealth that belonged to men had now been carried away out of Veii, they began to remove the possessions of the gods and the gods themselves, but more in the manner of worshippers than of pillagers. For out of all the army youths were chosen, and made to cleanse their bodies and to put on white garments, and to them the duty was assigned of conveying Queen Juno to Rome. Reverently entering her temple, they scrupled at first to approach her with their hands, because this image was one that according to Etruscan practice none but a priest of a certain family was wont to touch; when one of them, whether divinely inspired or out of youthful jocularity, asked, Wilt thou go, Juno, to Rome? —whereat the others all cried out that the goddess had nodded assent. It was afterwards added to the story that she had also been heard to say that she was willing. At all events we are told that she was moved from her place with contrivances of little power, as though she accompanied them voluntarily, and was lightly and easily transferred and carried safe and sound to the Aventine, the eternal home to which the prayers of the Roman dictator had called her; and there Camillus afterwards dedicated to her the temple which he himself had vowed. Such was the fall of Veii, the wealthiest city of the Etruscan race, which gave evidence of its greatness even in its final overthrow; since after a blockade of ten continuous summers and winters, during which time it had inflicted considerably heavier losses than it had sustained, it yet was ultimately taken, when at last even destiny fought against it, by siege-works and not by force. When word came to Rome that Veii was taken, although the portents had been averted and the answers of the soothsayers and the Pythian oracle were known; and though they had done all that human wisdom could do to help, in choosing Marcus Furius Camillus, greatest of all generals, to lead them; nevertheless, because they had warred there so many years with varying fortune and had suffered many a reverse, their joy, as though unexpected, knew no bounds; and ere the senate could act, the temples were all thronged with Roman matrons giving thanks to the gods. The senate decreed supplications for four days, a longer period than in any former war. Moreover, as the dictator drew near, all sorts and conditions of men ran forth to meet him in such numbers as had never welcomed a general before, and the triumph far exceeded the measure of honour usual on that day. He was himself the most conspicuous object in it, as he rode into the City on a chariot drawn by white horses; an act which struck men as being not only undemocratic, but irreverent, for they were troubled at the thought that in respect to his steeds the dictator was made equal to Jupiter and the sun-god; and the triumph, chiefly for this one reason, was more brilliant than popular. He then let the contract for the temple of Queen Juno on the Aventine, and dedicated one to Mater Matuta; and having fulfilled these obligations to gods and men, laid down the dictatorship. The next thing to be discussed was the gift to Apollo, to whom Camillus said that he had solemnly promised a tenth part of the spoils. The pontiffs ruled that the people must discharge this obligation, but it was not easy to devise a method for compelling them to return the booty, that out of it the due proportion might be set apart for the sacred object. They finally resorted to what seemed the least oppressive plan, namely, that whosoever wished to acquit himself and his household of obligation on the score of the vow, should appraise his own share of the spoils, and pay in a tenth part of its value to the public treasury, to the end that it might be converted into an offering of gold befitting the grandeur of the temple and the power of the god and corresponding to the majesty of the Roman People. This contribution still further alienated the affections of the commons from Camillus. In the midst of these affairs came envoys from the Volsci and the Aequi seeking peace, and their suit was granted, more that the state, worn out with so long a war, might be at rest, than because the petitioners deserved it. The year which followed the capture of Veii had six consular tribunes, to wit, the two Publii Cornelii, Cossus and Scipio, Marcus Valerius Maximus (for the second time), Caeso Fabius Ambustus (for the third), Lucius Furius Medullinus (for the fifth), Quintus Servilius (for the third). To the Cornelii was allotted the Faliscan war, to Valerius and Servilius the war with Capena. They attempted no cities, either by assault or by siege, but wasted the countryside and despoiled the farmers of their possessions, leaving not one fruit-tree in the land nor any productive plant. This devastation overcame the resistance of the Capenates; they begged for peace and it was granted. In the Faliscan country the war went on. At Rome, meanwhile, there were disturbances of many sorts, to quiet which the senate had voted to plant a colony on the Volscian frontier, and to enroll for that destination three thousand Roman citizens, to each of whom a board of three, appointed for the purpose, had proposed to assign three iugera and seven-twelfths. This donation men were disposed to spurn, regarding it as a sop intended to divert their hopes from greater things: for why should the plebs be banished to the Volscian country, when the fair city of Veii and the Veientine lands (more fertile and extensive than those of Rome) were there in plain sight? The city, too, they preferred to the City of Rome, whether for situation, or for the splendour of its public and private buildings and its places. Nay, they even mooted the plan which certainly had a great following later, when the Gauls had captured Rome, of migrating to Veii. For the rest, they intended that half of the plebs and half of the senate should dwell in Veii, regarding it as possible for the Roman people to inhabit two cities with a common polity. This proposal the patricians opposed with such vehemence as to declare that they would sooner die in the sight of the Roman People than suffer anything of the sort to come to a vote; for when there was already so much dissension in a single city, what would it be in two? Was it possible that any man should prefer a vanquished to a victorious city, and suffer Veii captured to enjoy a greater fortune than Veii free? In fine, it was conceivable that they should be left behind in their native city by their fellow Romans; but to forsake their country and their fellow-citizens no violence should ever force them; they had no mind to follow Titus Sicinius —the tribune of the plebs who had proposed the bill —to Veii, as their founder, abandoning the god Romulus, the son of a god, the Father and Author of the Roman City. These differences gave rise to disgraceful contentions —for the Fathers had won over some of the plebeian tribunes to their opinion —and the only thing that compelled the plebs to stay their hands was this, that as often as they raised a shout, in order to begin a riot, the leaders of the senate were the first to confront the mob, bidding them visit blows, wounds, and death on them. The grey hairs of these men, their distinctions, and their honours, they shrank from outraging, and shame thwarted their rage in all similar attempts. Camillus harangued the people constantly, and in all places. It was no wonder, he said, that the citizens had gone mad, since, bound though they were to carry out their vow, they were more concerned about everything else than about the discharge of their obligation. He would say nothing of their penny contribution —a truer name for it than tithe —since in this regard each man had bound himself as an individual, and the state was freed; but there was one thing his conscience would not suffer him to pass over in silence; to wit, that the tithe should be defined as consisting of that part only of the booty which was movable; and that nothing should be said of the captured city and its territory, which were likewise included in the vow. Unable to agree on this point, the senate referred it to the pontiffs, who decided, after consulting with Camillus, that so far as these things had belonged to the Veientes before the vow was made, and had subsequently come into the possession of the Roman People, a tithe thereof was sacred to Apollo. Thus the city and the land came into the estimate. Money was drawn from the treasury, and the tribunes of the soldiers with consular rank were directed to purchase gold with it; and there being not enough of this metal, the matrons held meetings to consider the need, and binding themselves by a common resolution to supply the tribunes with gold, brought in all their ornaments to the treasury. No act was ever more acceptable to the senate, and to honour the matrons for their generosity, it is said to have voted that they might drive in four-wheeled carriages to festivals and games, and in two-wheeled cars on holy and working days. When the gold received from each had been appraised, in order that the moneys might be repaid, it was determined to make a golden bowl and carry it to Delphi as an offering to Apollo. No sooner had they eased their minds of the vow, than the tribunes of the commons began again their agitation, inflaming the populace against all the nobles, but especially against Camillus, whom they charged with having reduced to naught the spoils of Veii, by devoting them to the state and to religion. If any of the leaders were absent, they were fiercely denounced; being present they outfaced their angry critics and shamed them into silence. As soon as the people saw that the question would be carried over from that year, they worked for the re-election of the tribunes of the plebs who were backing the measure; and the patricians exerted themselves to do the same for its opponents. So, for the most part, the same tribunes were returned to office. At the voting for military tribunes, the senators with much ado obtained the election of Marcus Furius Camillus. The need of a commander for the wars was their pretext, but what they really wanted was a man who would combat the lavishness of the tribunes. With Camillus were elected to that office, Lucius Furius Medullinus (for the sixth time), Gaius Aemilius, Lucius Valerius Publicola, Spurius Postumius, and (for the second time) Publius Cornelius. At the outset of the year the tribunes of the commons made no move, until Marcus Furius Camillus should march against the Faliscans, for to him this war had been committed. Then came delays, and men's enthusiasm waned, while Camillus, the opponent whom they chiefly feared, won fresh renown in the Faliscan country. For though at first the enemy kept within their walls, deeming this their safest course, he compelled them, by ravaging their fields and burning their farm-houses, to come out of their city. Still, they were afraid to advance very far, and pitched their camp about a mile from the town, trusting that it was quite safe, without other reason than the difficulty of approaching it; for the ground about it was rough and broken, and the roads were either narrow or steep. But Camillus, employing a prisoner taken in that very region for his guide, broke camp in the dead of night, and showed himself at earliest dawn in a considerably superior position. The Romans, divided into three shifts, began to build a rampart, the soldiers who were not working standing by in readiness to fight. There, when the enemy sought to hinder the work, he defeated and routed them; and so great was the panic that came over the Faliscans, that they fled in disorder past their camp, which was the nearer refuge, and made for the town; and many were slain or wounded, before, in their terror, they could rush in through the gates. The camp was taken, and the booty was paid over to the quaestors. This incensed the troops, but they were overborne by the strictness of the discipline, and admired, while they detested, their general's probity. Then came a blockade of the town, and the construction of siege works; and sometimes, when opportunity offered, the townsfolk would raid the Roman outposts and skirmishes would ensue. Time wore on, without bringing hope to either side; the besieged had corn and other supplies, which they had laid up beforehand in greater abundance than the besiegers; and it began to seem as though the struggle would be as long drawn out as at Veii, had not Fortune, at one stroke, given the Roman general an opportunity to display the magnanimity already familiar from his exploits in war, and an early victory. It was customary amongst the Faliscans to employ the same person as teacher and attendant of their children, and they used to intrust a number of lads at the same time to the care of one man, a practice which still obtains in Greece. The children of the chief men, as is commonly the case, were under the tuition of one who was regarded as their foremost scholar. This man had in time of peace got into the way of leading the boys out in front of the city for play and exercise, and during the war made no change in his routine, but would draw them sometimes a shorter, sometimes a longer distance from the gate, with this and that game and story, until being farther away one day than usual, he seized the opportunity to bring them amongst the enemy's outposts, and then into the Roman camp, to the headquarters of Camillus. He then followed up his villainous act with an even more villainous speech, saying that he had given Falerii into the hands of the Romans, having delivered up to them the children of those whose fathers were in power there. On hearing this Camillus answered: Neither the people nor the captain to whom you are come, you scoundrel, with your scoundrel's gift, is like yourself. Between us and the Faliscans is no fellowship founded on men's covenants; but the fellowship which nature has implanted in both sides is there and will abide. There are rights of war as well as of peace, and we have learnt to use them justly no less than bravely. We bear no weapons against those tender years which find mercy even in the storming of a city, but against those who are armed themselves, who, without wrong or provocation at our hands, attacked the Roman camp at Veii. Those people you have done your best to conquer by an unheard-of crime. I shall conquer them, as I conquered Veii, in the Roman way, by dint of courage, toil, and arms. He then had the fellow stripped, his hands bound behind his back, and gave him up to the boys to lead back to Falerii, providing them with rods to scourge the traitor as they drove him into town. To behold this spectacle, there was at first a great gathering together of the people, and presently the magistrates called a meeting of the senate about the strange affair, and men underwent such a revulsion of feeling, that those who a short time before, in the fury of their hate and resentment would almost have preferred the doom of Veii to the peace of Capena, were now calling for peace, with the voice of an entire city. The honesty of the Romans, and the justice of their general, were praised in market-place and senate-house, and, with the consent of all, envoys proceeded to Camillus in his camp, and thence, by his permission, to the Roman senate, to surrender Falerii. Being introduced into the Curia they are said to have spoken as follows: Conscript Fathers, you and your general have won a victory over us which no one, whether God or man, could begrudge you, and we give ourselves into your hands, believing (than which nothing can be more honourable to a victor) that we shall be better off under your government than under our own laws. The outcome of this war has afforded the human race two wholesome precedents: you have set fair-dealing in war above immediate victory; and we, challenged by your fair-dealing, have freely granted you that victory. We are under your sway; send men to receive our arms and hostages, and our city, the gates of which stand open. Neither shall you be disappointed in our fidelity nor we in your rule. Camillus was thanked both by his enemies and by his fellow citizens. The Faliscans were commanded to pay the soldiers for that year, that the Roman People might be exempted from the war tax. Peace being granted, the Roman army was led home. Camillus, having returned to the City distinguished by a far better kind of glory than when he had entered it in triumph drawn by white horses —for he had conquered his enemies by justice and fair-dealing —uttered no reproaches, but the senators were ill-at-ease till they should free him, without delay, from the obligation of his vow. And so, to carry the golden bowl as a gift to Apollo at Delphi, they appointed Lucius Valerius, Lucius Sergius, and Aulus Manlius, who, being dispatched in a single warship, were captured by Liparaean pirates not far from the Sicilian Straits and carried to Liparae. It was the manner of that people to divide up the booty which they had obtained by a kind of public piracy, but it chanced that year that one Timasitheus was chief magistrate, a man more resembling the Romans than his own countrymen; who, himself revering the title of the envoys and their gift, as well as the god to whom it was being sent and the cause of the oblation, imbued also the people, who are almost always like their ruler, with a due sense of religious awe; and after entertaining the ambassadors in the guest-house of the state, even sent ships to convoy them to Delphi, and thence brought them safely back to Rome. A covenant of hospitality was made with him by decree of the senate, and gifts were presented him in the name of the state. The same year there was a war with the Aequi, of so varied fortune that it was not clear, either at the front itself or in Rome, whether the upshot had been victory or defeat. The Roman generals were two of the military tribunes, Gaius Aemilius and Spurius Postumius. At first they exercised the command conjointly; afterwards, when they had routed the enemy in battle, they arranged that Aemilius should hold Verrugo with a garrison, while Postumius should lay waste the country. As he was leading his troops in irregular formation, somewhat carelessly in consequence of his success, the Aequi fell upon them and throwing them into confusion drove them to the nearest hills, whence the panic spread even to Verrugo, to the other army. Postumius having rallied his men in a position of safety, called them together and chid them for their alarm and flight, telling them they had been discomfited by the most craven and fugitive of foes. Whereat the army cried out as one man, that they deserved his reproaches, and confessed the enormity of their misconduct, but promised that they would themselves mend it, and that their enemies' joy should be short-lived. Demanding to be led forthwith against the camp of the Aequi — which was in full sight in the plain where they had pitched it —they professed themselves willing to undergo any punishment if they should not have stormed it before nightfall. Postumius commended them and bade them sup and be ready at the fourth watch. The enemy, too, that they might cut off any retreat by night along the road to Verrugo, from the hill where the Romans lay, were afield and met them, and the battle began before daylight, but there was a moon all night. They could see to fight as well as in the daytime; but the shouts were heard in Verrugo, the soldiers believed the Roman camp was being attacked, and so great was their consternation that, despite the efforts of Aemilius to check them and despite his appeals, they fled in a scattered rout to Tusculum. From thence a rumour was carried to Rome that Postumius and the army were destroyed. But Postumius, as soon as the first rays of light had removed all fear of ambuscades in case of a wide-spread pursuit, rode down the line, reminding his men of the promises they had given him, and inspired such ardour that the Aequi could no longer withstand their charge, and were slaughtered while they fled (as happens when rage is more concerned than valour), till their army was clean destroyed; and the gloomy tidings from Tusculum which had thrown the City into a needless fright, were succeeded by a laurel-wreathed letter from Postumius, announcing the victory of the Roman People and the annihilation of the Aequian army. The measures introduced by the tribunes of the plebs being still undecided, the commons strove to prolong the tenure of the supporters of the bill, and the patricians to re-elect the tribunes who had vetoed it; but in the election of their own magistrates the plebeians proved the stronger, a disappointment which the Fathers avenged by passing a resolution in the senate providing for the election of consuls —a magistracy odious to the plebs. There had been no consuls for fifteen years, when they elected Lucius Lucretius Flavus, and Servius Sulpicius Camerinus. In the beginning of this year, the tribunes united in a spirited attempt —for none of the college was disposed to object —to carry the bill; and the consuls, for that very reason, were quite as active in opposing them. While the whole body politic was absorbed in this one concern, Vitellia, a Roman colony, was captured by the Aequi, in whose territory it was situated. The greatest part of the settlers escaped, for the place was taken by treachery at night and their flight through the opposite quarter of the town was unopposed, and made their way to Rome in safety. To Lucius Lucretius the consul fell the command in this affair. Marching out with his army, he defeated the enemy in a battle and returned victorious to the City, where he found a far more serious struggle impending. A day of trial had been appointed for the plebeian tribunes of two years before, namely Aulus Verginius and Quintus Pomponius, to defend whom the senate, as the patricians all agreed, was in honour bound; for no man brought any charge against their lives or the conduct of their office, except their having, out of complaisance to the Fathers, opposed the tribunician law. But the influence of the senators was out-weighed by the resentment of the plebs, and a shameful precedent was set, when the innocent men were condemned each to pay a fine of 10,000 asses. This roused the indignation of the senate. Camillus frankly denounced the depravity of the commons, who having turned against their own representatives, failed to perceive that they had by their wicked judgment of the tribunes done away with the veto, and that in doing away with the veto they had overthrown the tribunician power. For if they supposed that the unbridled licence of that office would be tolerated by the Fathers, they were mistaken; if tribunician violence could not be resisted by the help of tribunes, the senators must find some other weapon. He rebuked the consuls also, because they had, without protesting, allowed those tribunes who had followed the guidance of the senate to suffer for their reliance on the guarantee of state protection. By such sentiments, publicly expressed in speeches, he angered the people more and more from day to day. As to the senate, he ceased not to encourage it in opposing the law: they must go down into the Forum, when the day should arrive for voting on it, in no other spirit than that of men who realized that they had to fight for hearth and home, for the temples of their gods, and for the soil of their birth. So far, indeed, as the question touched his private interest, it would actually be an honour to him, if it were not sinful to be thinking of his own renown while his country was struggling for life, that the city he had, won should be thronged with people; that he should daily be reminded of his glory, and have before his eyes the town which had figured in his triumph; that all men should tread in the footsteps of his fame. But he thought it an offence against Heaven that a city deserted and forsaken by the immortal gods should be inhabited, and that the Roman People should dwell on conquered soil, exchanging their victorious City for a vanquished one. These earnest words of their leading member so stirred the senators, old men as well as young, that on the day the law was proposed they formed in a body and came into the Forum, where they dispersed among the tribes, and canvassing every man his own tribesmen, began with tears to beseech them, that they would not forsake that City for which both they and their fathers had fought with the greatest courage and good fortune. They pointed to the Capitol, to the shrine of Vesta, and to the other temples standing all about them; they begged them not to drive the Roman People, an exile, and a wanderer from its native land and its household gods, to the city of its enemies, nor to carry things so far that it would be better that Veii had not been taken, so that Rome might not be deserted. Since the patricians used not force but entreaties, and in their entreaties made many a reference to the gods, the greater part felt the prick of conscience, and the law was rejected by one more tribe than voted in its favour. And so greatly did this victory rejoice the Fathers, that next day, at the instance of the consuls, a decree was passed by the senate, that seven iugera of the Veientine land should be apportioned to every plebeian, and not alone to the heads of families, but so as to reckon in all the free-born members of the household, that with such a prospect before them men might be willing to rear children. Appeased by this largess, the plebs made no objection to an assembly for the election of consuls, and the choice fell on Lucius Valerius Potitus and Marcus Manlius, afterwards surnamed Capitolinus. These consuls celebrated the Great Games, which Marcus Furius the dictator had vowed in the war with Veii. This year saw also the dedication of a temple to Queen Juno, vowed by the same dictator in the same war; and tradition relates that the ceremony was attended by throngs of enthusiastic matrons. A campaign in no way memorable was fought with the Aequi on Mount Algidus, the enemy being routed before they had well begun to fight. Valerius was the more persistent in cutting them down as they fled, and to him was decreed a triumph; Manlius was allowed to enter the City in an ovation. In this year also a new war broke out, namely with the people of Volsinii. Owing to a famine and pestilence which arose in the Roman territories on account of drought and excessive heat, it was impossible to send an army against them; and in consequence of this the Volsinienses, having added the Sappinates to their forces, were puffed up with pride and made an incursion themselves into the fields of the Romans. War was then declared against both nations. Gaius Julius, the censor, died, and Marcus Cornelius was substituted in his place, a circumstance which was afterwards thought to have offended the gods, because in this lustrum Rome was captured; nor from that day has a censor ever been appointed in the room of one who has died. The consuls, too, caught the plague, and it was voted that fresh auspices should be obtained by means of an interregnum. Accordingly, when the consuls, in obedience to the senate's decree, had abdicated, Marcus Furius Camillus was appointed interrex, and named as his successor Publius Cornelius Scipio, who, in turn, named Lucius Valerius Potitus interrex; under whom they elected six military tribunes of consular rank, so that even if any of them should fall ill the state might still have magistrates. On the first day of July they entered office, to wit, Lucius Lucretius, Servius Sulpicius, Marcus Aemilius, Lucius Furius Medullinus (for the seventh time), Furius Agrippa, and (for the second time) Gaius Aemilius. Of these, Lucius Lucretius and Gaius Aemilius were assigned the war with Volsinii as their province, while the Sappinates fell to Agrippa Furius and Servius Sulpicius. The Volsinienses were encountered first, in a campaign of great magnitude in respect to the enemy's numbers, though the engagement with them was no very sharp affair. Their line broke at the first assault, and in the rout eight thousand soldiers were cut off by the cavalry, and laying down their arms, surrendered. When the Sappinates heard of this campaign, they refused to risk a battle, but retired within their walls and prepared to defend themselves. The Romans plundered right and left, both the lands of Sappinum and those of Volsinii, without finding any to resist their force, until the Volsinienses wearied of the war; and upon their agreeing to restore the goods of the Roman People and furnish pay for the army for that campaign, they were granted a truce of twenty years. The same year Marcus Caedicius, a plebeian, reported to the tribunes, that in the Nova Via, where the chapel now stands above the temple of Vesta, he had heard in the silence of the night a voice more distinct than a man's, which bade him tell the magistrates that the Gauls were approaching. This portent was neglected, as often happens, because of the informant's humble station, and because that race was remote and therefore not well known. And not only did they reject the warnings of Heaven, as their doom drew nearer, but they even sent away from the City the only human assistance present with them, in the person of Marcus Furius. He had been indicted by Lucius Apuleius, tribune of the plebs, on account of the spoils of Veii, just at the time of losing his youthful son. Summoning to his house his fellow tribesmen and his clients (who formed a good part of the plebs), he sounded their feelings, and having been answered that they would make up such an amount as he might be fined, but that they could not acquit him, he departed into exile, beseeching the immortal gods that if he were an innocent man to whom that wrong was done they would speedily make his thankless fellow citizens wish to have him back. He was fined in his absence in the sum of 15,000 asses. After the expulsion of that citizen whose presence, if anything in this life is certain, would have made the capture of Rome impossible, disaster approached the ill-fated City with the arrival of envoys from the men of Clusium seeking help against the Gauls. The story runs that this race, allured by the delicious fruits and especially the wine —then a novel luxury —had crossed the Alps and possessed themselves of lands that had before been tilled by the Etruscans; and that wine had been imported into Gaul expressly to entice them, by Arruns of Clusium, in his anger at the seduction of his wife by Lucumo. This youth, whose guardian he had been, was so powerful that he could not have chastised him without calling in a foreign force. He it was who is said to have guided the Gauls across the Alps, and to have suggested the attack on Clusium. Now I would not deny that Arruns or some other citizen brought the Gauls to Clusium, but that those who besieged Clusium were not the first who had passed the Alps is generally agreed. Indeed it was two hundred years before the attack on Clusium and the capture of Rome, that the Gauls first crossed over into Italy; neither were the Clusini the first of the Etruscans with whom they fought; but long before that the Gallic armies had often given battle to those who dwelt between the Apennines and the Alps. The Tuscan sway, down to the rise of the Roman domination, stretched over a wide expanse of land and sea. How great their power was on the upper and the lower seas, by which Italy is surrounded like an island, is apparent from the names, since the Italian races have called one of them Tuscan, the general designation of the race, and the other Hadriatic, from Hatria, an Etruscan colony; and the Greeks know the same seas as Tyrrhenian and Adriatic. In the lands which slope on either side towards one of these seas, they had twice twelve cities; first the twelve on this side the Apennines, towards the lower sea; to which afterwards they added the same number beyond the Apennines, sending over as many colonies as there were original cities, and taking possession of all the transpadane region (except the angle belonging to the Veneti who dwell about the gulf) as far as the Alps. The Alpine tribes have also, no doubt, the same origin, especially the Raetians; who have been rendered so savage by the very nature of the country as to retain nothing of their ancient character save the sound of their speech, and even that is corrupted. Concerning the migration of the Gauls into Italy we are told as follows: While Tarquinius Priscus reigned at Rome, the Celts, who make up one of the three divisions of Gaul, were under the domination of the Bituriges, and this tribe supplied the Celtic nation with a king. Ambigatus was then the man, and his talents, together with his own and the general good fortune, had brought him great distinction; for Gaul under his sway grew so rich in corn and so populous, that it seemed hardly possible to govern so great a multitude. The king, who was now an old man and wished to relieve his kingdom of a burdensome throng, announced that he meant to send Bellovesus and Segovesus, his sister's sons, two enterprising young men, to find such homes as the gods might assign to them by augury; and promised them that they should head as large a number of emigrants as they themselves desired, so that no tribe might be able to prevent their settlement. Whereupon to Segovesus were by lot assigned the Hercynian highlands ; but to Bellovesus the gods proposed a far pleasanter road, into Italy. Taking out with him the surplus population of his tribes, the Bituriges, Arverni, Senones, Haedui, Ambarri, Carnutes, and Aulerci, he marched with vast numbers of infantry and cavalry into the country of the Tricastini. There the Alps stood over against them; and I for one do not wonder that they seemed insuperable, for as yet no road had led across them —as far back at all events as tradition reaches —unless one chooses to believe the stories about Hercules. While they were there fenced in as it were by the lofty mountains, and were looking about to discover where they might cross, over heights that reached the sky, into another world, superstition also held them back, because it had been reported to them that some strangers seeking lands were beset by the Salui. These were the Massilians, who had come in ships from Phocaea. The Gauls, regarding this as a good omen of their own success, lent them assistance, so that they fortified, without opposition from the Salui, the spot which they had first seized after landing. They themselves crossed the Alps through the Taurine passes and the pass of the Duria; routed the Etruscans in battle not far from the river Ticinus, and learning that they were encamped in what was called the country of the Insubres, who bore the same name as an Haeduan canton, they regarded it as a place of good omen, and founded a city there which they called Mediolanium. Presently another band, consisting of Cenomani led by Etitovius, followed in the tracks of the earlier emigrants; and having, with the approval of Bellovesus, crossed the Alps by the same pass, established themselves where the cities of Brixia and Verona are-now. After these the Libui came and settled, and the Salluvii —taking up their abode hard by the ancient tribe of the Laevi Ligures, about the river Ticinus. Then, over the Poenine Pass, came the Boii and Lingones, who finding everything taken up between the Po and the Alps, crossed the Po on rafts, and drove out not only the Etruscans, but also the Umbrians from their lands; nevertheless, they kept on the further side of the Apennines. Then the Senones, the latest to come, had their holdings from the river Utens all the way to the Aesis. This was the tribe, I find, which came to Clusium and from thence to Rome, but whether alone or assisted by all the peoples of Cisalpine Gaul, is uncertain. The men of Clusium, alarmed by this strange invasion, when they beheld the numbers and the unfamiliar figures of the men and their novel weapons, and heard that on many afield, this side the Po and beyond it, they had put to flight the levies of Etruria; though they had no rights of alliance or of friendship with the Romans, except that they had refused to defend their kinsmen the Veientes against the Roman People; did yet dispatch envoys to Rome to ask help of the senate. As for the help, they were unsuccessful; but the three sons of Marcus Fabius Ambustus were sent as ambassadors to remonstrate with the Gauls, in the name of the senate and the Roman People, against their attack on those who had done them no wrong, and were the Roman People's allies and friends. The Romans, they said, would be obliged to defend them, even going to war, if circumstances should make it necessary; but it had seemed preferable that the war itself should, if possible, be avoided, and that they should make the acquaintance of the Gauls — a new race to them —in a friendly rather than in a hostile manner. It was a peaceful embassy, had it not been for the violence of the ambassadors, who were more like Gauls than Romans. To them, when they had made known their mission in the council, the Gauls replied, that although they then heard for the first time the name of Roman, they could yet believe them to be stout-hearted men, since the Clusini had sought their aid in time of danger; and inasmuch as they had chosen to defend their allies by negotiation rather than by the sword, they would not, for their own part, spurn the peace which the Romans proposed, if the men of Clusium, who possessed more land than they could till, would surrender to the Gauls, who needed land, a portion of their territory; on no other terms could they consider granting peace. They added that they desired to be answered in the presence of the Romans, and that if land were refused them, it was under the eyes of these same Romans that they meant to fight, that they might be able to tell their friends how greatly the Gauls excelled all other men in prowess. When the Romans asked what conceivable right they had to demand land of its occupants under threat of war, and what business Gauls had in Etruria, they were truculently informed, that the new-comers carried their right at the point of the sword and that all things belonged to the brave. So, angry passions being kindled on both sides, they ran to their weapons and joined battle; and the envoys, impelled by the fate which was even then urging Rome to its doom, took up arms, in defiance of the law of nations. Nor could it pass unnoticed, when in the very fore-front of the Tuscan line there were fighting three of the noblest and most valiant of the Roman youth, so conspicuous was the strangers' bravery. Nay, Quintus Fabius even rode out in front of the line, and meeting the Gallic leader as he charged boldly at the very standards of the Etruscans, ran his spear through his side and killed him. As he was engaged in despoiling his man, the Gauls recognized him, and the word passed through all the army that it was the Roman envoy. Thereupon, they gave over their anger at the Clusini and sounded the retreat, uttering threats against the Romans. Some were for marching at once on Rome; but the older men brought them over to send envoys first to complain of their wrongs, and to demand the surrender of the Fabii, in satisfaction for their violation of the law of nations. When the Gallic emissaries had stated their mission according to instructions, the senate disapproved of the conduct of the Fabii and felt the demands of the barbarians to be just; but private interest could not suffer them, in the case of men of such exalted station, to decree what they approved. And so, that the blame might not rest with the senate, if a Gallic war should chance to bring disaster, they referred the demands of the Gauls to the people for consideration; and with them wealth and influence carried so much more weight, that the men whose punishment was under discussion were elected consular tribunes for the ensuing year. At this the Gauls were enraged, as they had every right to be, and returned to their people with open threats of war. The tribunes of the soldiers chosen with the three Fabii were Quintus Sulpicius Longus, Quintus Servilius (for his fourth term), and Publius Cornelius Maluginensis. Now that so heavy a calamity drew towards,-such is the blindness Fortune visits on men's minds when she would have her gathering might meet with no check, —that state which against the Fidenates and Veientes and other neighbouring tribes had on many occasions resorted to the last expedient and named a dictator —that state, I say, though now an enemy never yet seen or heard of was rousing up war from the ocean and the remotest corners of the world, had recourse to no unusual authority or help. The tribunes whose rashness had brought on the war were in supreme command; they conducted the levy with no greater care than had usually been employed in preparing for ordinary campaigns, and even disparaged the rumoured seriousness of the danger. The Gauls, meanwhile, on learning that honours had actually been conferred on men who had violated the rights of mankind and that their embassy had been made light of, were consumed with wrath (a passion which their race is powerless to control), an straightway catching up their standards, set their column in rapid motion. As they marched swiftly and noisily on, the terrified cities armed in haste, and the peasants fled; but they signified with loud cries, wherever they came, that Rome was their goal, and their horse and foot in an extended line covered a vast tract of ground. Yet, though rumour and the report of the Clusini preceded them, and after that successive messages from other peoples, the utmost consternation was wrought in Rome by the enemy's swiftness, which was such that the army, albeit levied as it were en masse and hurriedly led out, barely covered eleven miles before confronting him, at the point where the river Allia descends in a very deep channel from the Crustuminian mountains, and mingles, not far south of the highway, with the waters of the Tiber. The Gauls had already overrun all the ground in front and on both sides, and —the race being naturally given to vainglorious outbursts —their wild songs and discordant shouts filled all the air with a hideous noise. There the tribunes of the soldiers, without having selected a place for a camp or fortified a position to which they might retreat, and, forgetting even the gods, to say nothing of men, without auspices or sacrificial omens, drew up their line with the wings extended to prevent being outflanked by the numbers of the enemy; yet could not stretch their front as wide as his, though they thinned it till the centre was weak and scarce held together. There was a little eminence on the right which they decided to occupy with their reserves, a measure which, though it was the beginning of their panic and flight, was also the sole salvation of the fugitives. For Brennus, the Gallic chieftain, seeing the Romans to be so few, was especially apprehensive of a stratagem. He supposed that they had seized the higher ground' for this purpose, that when the Gauls had made a frontal attack on the battle-line of the legions, the reserves might assail them in the flank and rear. He therefore directed his assault against the reserves, not doubting that, if he could dislodge them, it would be easy for his greatly superior numbers to obtain a victory in the plain. Thus not only luck but generalship as well were on the side of the barbarians. In the other army there was no resemblance to Romans, either amongst officers or private soldiers. Terror and dismay had got hold of their spirits, and such complete forgetfulness of everything that a much greater number fled to Veii, a hostile city, though the Tiber was across their way, than by the straight road to Rome, to their wives and children. For a little while the reserves were protected by their position. In the rest of the field, no sooner had those who were nearest heard the shouting on their flank, and those who were farthest the outcry in their rear, than — fresh and unhurt —they ran away from their strange enemies, almost before they had caught sight of them; and so far were they from risking a combat, that they did not even return their battle-cry. None were slain in fight; but they were cut down from behind as they blocked their escape by their own struggles in the disordered rout. On the bank of the Tiber, whither the whole left wing had fled, after throwing away their arms, there was great slaughter, and many who could not swim, or lacked the strength, weighed down by their corslets and other armour, sank beneath the flood. Nevertheless, the chief part got safely to Veii, whence they not only sent no succours to Rome, but dispatched not even a messenger to tell of the defeat. From the right wing, which had stood at a distance from the river and closer to the foot of the mountain, the fugitives all made for Rome, and without stopping even to shut the city gates, sought refuge in the Citadel. The very Gauls themselves, stunned by the marvellous victory they had so suddenly gained, at first stood rooted to the spot with amazement, like men that knew not what had happened; then they feared an ambush; after that they fell to collecting the spoils of the slain and erecting piles of arms, as their custom is; then at last having discovered no hostile movement anywhere, they began their march, and a little before sunset reached the environs of Rome. There, when the cavalry had reconnoitred and had reported that the gates were not closed, that no out-guards were watching before the gates, that no armed men were on the walls, astonishment held them spell-bound as before; and fearful of the night and the lie of the unknown : City, they went into camp between Rome and the Anio, after sending off patrols about the walls and the rest of the gates, to find out what the enemy in their desperate case could possibly be at. As for the Romans, inasmuch as more, on escaping from the battle, had fled to Veii than to Rome, and no one supposed that any were left alive except those who had found refuge in the City, they mourned for all alike, both the living and the dead, and well nigh filled the City with lamentation. But presently their personal griefs were overwhelmed in a general panic, with the announcement that the enemy was at hand; and soon they could hear the dissonant howls and songs of the barbarians, as their squadrons roamed about the walls. During all the time that intervened before the following morning their hearts were. in, such. suspense, that each moment they anticipated an immediate attack:. on the first arrival of the enemy, because they had come close to the City —for they would have stopped at the Allia, had this not been their design; —again, towards sundown, because there was little daylight left, they thought that they would enter the City before nightfall; then they concluded that they had put it off till night, to strike more fear into them. Finally the approach of dawn put them beside themselves, and close upon these restless apprehensions came the evil they were dreading, when the hostile forces entered the city gates. Yet neither that night nor the following day did the citizens at all resemble those who had fled in such consternation at the Allia. For having no hopes that they could protect the City with so small a force as remained to them, they resolved that the men of military age and the able-bodied senators should retire into the Citadel and the Capitol, with their wives and children; and, having laid in arms and provisions, should from that stronghold defend the gods, the men, and the name of Rome; that the flamen and the priestesses of Vesta should remove the sacred objects pertaining to the State far from the bloodshed and the flames, nor should their cult be abandoned till none should be left to cherish it. If the Citadel and the Capitol, where dwelt the gods; if the senate, the source of public wisdom; if the young men capable of bearing arms survived the impending destruction of the City, they could easily bear to lose the crowd of old men left behind them, who were bound to die in any case. And in order that the multitude of commoners might endure it with the more composure, the old men who had triumphed and those who had been consuls declared publicly that they would perish with those others, nor burden with bodies incapable of bearing arms in defence of the country the scanty stores of the fighting men. Such were the consolations which the old men appointed to die exchanged among themselves; then, directing their encouragement to the band of youths whom they were escorting to the Capitol and the Citadel, they committed to their valour and their young strength whatever fortune might yet be in store for a City that for three hundred and sixty years had been victorious in every war. On the departure of those who carried with them all hope and help, from those who had resolved not to survive the capture and destruction of their City, though the separation was a pitiful thing to see, yet the tears of the women, as they, ran distractedly up and down, and following now these, -now those, demanded of husbands and sons to what fate they were consigning them, supplied the final touch of human wretchedness. Still, the greater part of them followed their sons into the Citadel, though none either forbade or encouraged it, since what would have helped the besieged to lessen the number of non-combatants would have been inhuman. Another host —consisting chiefly of plebeians —too large for so small a hill to receive, or to support with so meagre a supply of corn, streamed out of the City as though forming at last one continuous line, and took their way towards Janiculum. Thence some of them scattered through the country-side, and others made for the towns near by. They had neither leader nor concerted plan; each followed the promptings of his own hopes and his own counsels, in despair of the: commonwealth. Meanwhile the flamen of Quirinus and the Vestal virgins, with no thought for their own belongings, were consulting which of the sacred things they should carry with them, and which, because they were not strong enough to carry them all, they must leave behind, and, finally, where these objects would be safe. They judged it best to place them in jars and bury them in the shrine adjoining the flamen's house, where it is now forbidden to spit; the rest of the things they carried, sharing the burden amongst them, along the road which leads by the Sublician Bridge to Janiculum. As they mounted the hill they were perceived by a plebeian named Lucius Albinius, who had a waggon in which he was conveying his wife and children, amidst the throng of those who, unfit for war, were leaving the City. Preserving even then the distinction between divine and human, and holding it sacrilege that the priestesses of his country should go afoot, bearing the sacred objects of the Roman People, while his family were seen in a vehicle, he commanded his wife and children to get down, placed the virgins and their relics in the waggon, and brought them to Caere, whither the priestesses were bound. At Rome meantime such arrangements for defending the Citadel as the case admitted of were now fairly complete, and the old men returned to their homes to await the coming of their enemies with hearts that were steeled to die. Such of them as had held curule magistracies, that they might face death in the trappings of their ancient rank and office, as beseemed their worth, put on the stately robes which are worn by those who conduct the tensae or celebrate a triumph, and, thus habited, seated themselves on ivory chairs in the middle of their houses. Some historians record that Marcus Folius, the pontifex maximus, led in the recitation of a solemn vow, by which they devoted themselves to death, in behalf of their country and the Roman Quirites. The Gauls found their lust for combat cooled by the night which had intervened. At no point in the battle had they been pushed to desperate exertions, nor had they now to carry the City by assault. It was therefore without rancour or excitement that they entered Rome, on the following day, by the Colline Gate (which lay wide open), and made their way to the Forum, gazing about them at the temples of the gods and at the Citadel, which alone presented some show of war. Thence, after leaving a moderate guard to prevent any attack upon their scattered forces from Citadel or Capitol, they dispersed in quest of booty through streets where there was none to meet them, some rushing in a body into whatever houses were nearest, while others sought out the most remote, as though supposing that only such would be intact and full- of plunder. But being frightened out of these by their very solitude, lest the enemy should by some ruse entrap them as they wandered apart, they came trooping back to the Forum and the places near it. There they found the dwellings of the plebeians fastened up, but the halls of the nobles open; and they hesitated almost more to enter the open houses than the shut, —so nearly akin to religious awe was their feeling as they beheld seated in the vestibules, beings who, besides that their ornaments and apparel were more splendid than belonged to man, seemed also, in their majesty of countenance and in the gravity of their expression, most like to gods. While they stood reverentially before them, as if they had been images, it is related that a Gaul stroked the beard of one of them, Marcus Papirius, — which he wore long, as they all did then, —whereat the Roman struck him over the head with his ivory mace, and, provoking his anger, was the first to be slain; after that the rest were massacred where they sat; and when the nobles had been murdered, there was no mercy then shown to anyone; the houses were ransacked, and after being emptied were given to the flames. But whether it was that not all the Gauls desired to destroy the City, or that their leaders had resolved to make a certain show of burning, to inspire alarm, in hopes that the besieged might be driven to capitulate by affection for their homes, but not to burn up all the houses, in order that they might hold whatever remained of the City as a pledge to work on the feelings of their enemies — however this may have been, the fire spread by no means so freely or extensively on the first day as is commonly the case in a captured town. As the Romans looked down from their fastness and saw the City full of enemies running up and down in all the streets, while first in one quarter and then in another some new calamity would be occurring, they were unable, I do not say to keep their heads, but even to be sure of their ears and eyes. Wherever the shouting of the invaders, the lamentations of the women and children, the crackling of the flames, and the crash of falling buildings drew their attention, trembling at each sound, they turned their thoughts and their gaze that way, as though Fortune had placed them there to witness the pageant of their dying country. Of all their possessions nothing was left them to defend save their persons alone; and so much more wretched was their plight than that of all others who have ever been beleaguered, that they were cut off from their native City and confined where they could see all that belonged to them in the power of their enemies. Nor was the night more tranquil, after a day of such distress; and the night was followed by a restless day, with never a moment that had not still some fresh calamity to unfold. Yet, oppressed as they were, or rather overwhelmed, by so many misfortunes, nothing could alter their resolve; though they should see everything laid low in flames and ruins, they would stoutly defend the hill they held, however small and naked, which was all that Liberty had left. And now that the same events were occurring every day, like men grown used to grief, they had ceased to feel their own misfortunes, looking solely to their shields and the swords in their right hands as their only remaining hope. The Gauls likewise, having vainly for some days waged war against only the buildings of Rome, when they saw that there was nothing left amidst the smouldering ruins of the captured City but armed enemies, who for all their disasters were not a jot appalled nor likely to yield to anything but force, took a desperate resolution to attack the Citadel. At daybreak the signal was made; and the entire host, having formed up in the Forum, gave a cheer, and raising their shields above their heads and locking them, began the ascent. The defenders on the other hand did nothing rashly or in confusion. At all the approaches they had strengthened the guard-posts, and where they saw the enemy advancing they stationed their best soldiers, and suffered them to come up, persuaded that the higher they mounted up the steep the easier it would be to drive them down. They made their stand about the middle of the declivity, and there, launching their attack from the higher ground, which seemed of itself to hurl them against the foe, dislodged the Gauls, with such havoc and destruction that they never attempted to attack in that manner again, with either a part or the whole of their strength. So, relinquishing all hope of getting up by force of arms, they prepared for a blockade. Having never till that moment considered such a thing, they had destroyed all the corn in the City with their conflagrations, and what was in the fields had all been hurriedly carried off, within the last few days, to Veil. They therefore arranged to divide their army, and employ part of it to pillage the neighbouring nations and part to invest the Citadel, in order that those who held the lines might be provisioned by the foragers. When the Gauls departed from the City, Fortune's own hand guided them to Ardea, that they might make trial of Roman manhood. Camillus was languishing there in exile, more grieved by the nation's calamity than by his own; and as he sorrowfully inveighed against gods and men, and asked, with wonder and humiliation, where those heroes were who had shared with him in the capture of Veii and Falerii, and whose gallantry in other wars had ever outrun their success, of a sudden he heard that the army of the Gauls was coming, and that the Ardeates in alarm were deliberating what to do about it. With an inspiration nothing less than divine, he pushed into the midst of their conference, —though before accustomed to avoid these councils —and there, Men of Ardea, he said, my ancient friends, and of late my fellow citizens, —since your goodness would have it so and my own fortune has made it necessary, —let none of you suppose me to have come forward in forgetfulness of my condition; but circumstances and our common peril oblige every man at this crisis to contribute what he can to the general defence. And when shall I show gratitude for your great kindnesses to me, if I am backward now? Or when shall you have need of me, if not in war? 'Twas by this art that I stood secure in my native City: unbeaten in war, I was driven out in time of peace by the thankless citizens. But you, men of Ardea, have now an opportunity of requiting the Roman People for such great benefits as you yourselves are mindful of, —nor need I cast upto you things which you remember; —and your city has an opportunity to win from our common enemy great renown in war. That people now drawing near in loose array has been endowed by nature with bodily size and courage, great indeed but vacillating; which is the reason that to every conflict they bring more terror than strength. This may be seen in their defeat of the Romans. They captured the City, which lay wide open; but a handful of men in the Citadel and the Capitol are holding them at bay; already, oppressed by the tedium of the siege, they are departing and roaming aimlessly through the country-side. They greedily gorge themselves with food and wine, and when night approaches they erect no rampart, and without pickets or sentries, throw themselves down anywhere beside a stream, in the manner of wild beasts. Just now success has rendered them even more careless than they are wont to be. If you have a mind to protect your city and not to suffer all this country to become Gaul, arm yourselves in the first watch, and follow me in force, not to a battle but a massacre. If I do not deliver them up to you fast asleep, to be butchered like cattle, I am ready to submit at Ardea to the same fate that I endured at Rome. Well-wishers and opponents were alike persuaded that there was no such warrior in those days anywhere. Breaking up the council, they supped, and waited intently for the signal. On its being given, in the silence of the early night, they presented themselves before Camillus at the gates. They had not left the city very far behind them, when they came to the camp of the Gauls, unguarded, just as he had prophesied, and open on every side, and, giving a loud cheer, rushed upon it. There was no resistance anywhere: the whole place was a shambles, where unarmed men, relaxed in sleep, were slaughtered. Those, however, who were farthest off were frightened from the places where they lay, and ignorant of the nature of the attack or its source, fled panic-stricken, and some ran unawares straight into the enemy. The most of them were carried into the territory of Antium, where they wandered about until the townspeople sallied out and cut them off. A similar overthrow was experienced, in the region of Veii, by the Etruscans. So far were they from pitying a City that had been their neighbour for close upon four hundred years, and was now overwhelmed by an enemy never seen or heard of before, that they chose that time to make incursions into the lands of the Romans; and laden with spoils, even meditated an attack on Veii and its garrison, the last hope of the Roman name. The Roman soldiers had seen them, as they ranged through the fields and afterwards, gathering in a body, drove the booty off before them, and could descry their camp, which was pitched not far from Veii. This made them at first to compassionate themselves; then they were seized with resentment, which soon gave way to rage: were even the Etruscans, whom they had saved from the Gauls by incurring war themselves, to make sport of their calamities? They could hardly curb an impulse to assail them on the instant; but being restrained by the centurion Quintus Caedicius, whom they had chosen to be their commander, they postponed the affair till dark. The only thing wanting was a leader like Camillus; in all else the order followed was the same, and the same success was achieved. Indeed, under the guidance of captives who had survived the nocturnal massacre, they set out on the following night and came to another band of Etruscans, at the salt-works, whom they surprised and defeated with even greater carnage; and so, rejoicing in their double victory, returned to Veii. At Rome meanwhile the siege was for the most part languishing and all was quiet on both sides, the Gauls being solely concerned with preventing the escape of any enemy through their lines, when suddenly a young Roman attracted the wondering admiration of fellow citizens and foes. There was an annual sacrifice to be made on the Quirinal Hill by the family of the Fabii. To celebrate it Gaius Fabius Dorsuo, in the Gabinian cincture, with the sacred vessels in his hands, descended from the Capitol, passed out through the midst of the enemy's pickets, and regardless of any words or threats, proceeded to the Quirinal, where he duly accomplished all the rites. He then returned by the same way, with the like resolute countenance and gait, in the full assurance of the favour of the gods whose service not even the fear of death could cause him to neglect, and rejoined his friends on the Capitol, leaving the Gauls dumbfounded by his astonishing audacity, or perhaps even moved by religious awe, a sentiment to which that race is far from indifferent. At Veii, all this while, they were gathering from day to day, not courage merely, but strength as well. Not only were Romans coming in from the country-side, —men who had been wanderers since the defeat, or the capture of the City, —but volunteers were also pouring in from Latium, that they might share in the spoils. It seemed therefore that the time was now ripe to return to their native City and wrest it from the hands of the enemy; but their strong body lacked a head. The place itself reminded men of Camillus, and there were many of the soldiers who had fought successfully under his leadership and auspices. Moreover, Caedicius declared that he would suffer neither god nor man to put an end to his authority, but, remembering his station, would himself demand the appointment of a general. With the consent of all they resolved to send for Camillus from Ardea, but not till the senate at Rome had been consulted; so modest were they in their conduct of everything, preserving the proper distinctions even in their well-nigh desperate case. It was necessary at enormous risk to pass the enemy's outposts. This an active youth named Pontius Cominus undertook to do, and supporting himself on a strip of cork, floated down the Tiber to the City. Once there, he passed by the shortest way from the bank up a cliff so steep that the enemy had neglected to guard it, to the Capitol, and being brought before the magistrates delivered to them the message from the army. Then, on the senate's resolving that the curiate comitia should recall Camillus from exile, and that, even as the people commanded he should straightway be appointed dictator, and the soldiers have the general they desired, the messenger returned by the same route and came in haste to Veii; whence envoys were despatched to Ardea for Camillus, and fetched him to Veii; or rather —as I prefer to believe that he did not quit Ardea until he had learnt that the law was passed, since he could not change his residence without the People's command, nor take the auspices in the army till he had been appointed dictator-the curiate law was passed and Camillus declared dictator, in his absence. While this was going on at Veii, the Citadel of Rome and the Capitol were in very great danger. For the Gauls had noticed the tracks of a man, where the messenger from Veii had got through, or perhaps had observed for themselves that the cliff near the shrine of Carmentis afforded an easy ascent. So on a starlit night they first sent forward an unarmed man to try the way; then handing up their weapons when there was a steep place, and supporting themselves by their fellows or affording support in their turn, they pulled one another up, as the ground required, and reached- the summit, in such silence that not only the sentries but even the dogs —creatures easily troubled by noises in the night —were not aroused. But they could not elude the vigilance of the geese, which, being sacred to Juno, had, notwithstanding the dearth of provisions, not been killed. This was the salvation of them all; for the geese with their gabbling and clapping of their wings woke Marcus Manlius, —consul of three years before and a distinguished soldier, —who, catching up his weapons and at the same time calling the rest to arms, strode past his bewildered comrades to a Gaul who had already got a foothold on the crest and dislodged him with a blow from the boss of his shield. As he slipped and fell, he overturned those who were next to him, and the others in alarm let go their weapons and grasping the rocks to which they had been clinging, were slain by Manlius. And by now the rest had come together and were assailing the invaders with javelins and stones, and presently the whole company lost their footing and were flung down headlong to destruction. Then after the din was hushed, the rest of the night —so far as their excitement would permit, when even a past peril made them nervous —was given up to sleep. At dawn the trumpet summoned the soldiers to assemble before the tribunes. Good conduct and bad had both to be requited. First Manlius was praised for his courage and presented with gifts, not only by the tribunes of the soldiers, but by agreement amongst the troops, who brought each half a pound of spelt and a gill of wine to his house, which stood in the Citadel. It is a little thing to tell, but the scarcity made it a great token of affection, since everyone robbed himself of his own sustenance and bestowed what he had subtracted from his physical necessities to do honour to one man. Then the watchmen of the cliff which the enemy had scaled without being discovered were called up. Quintus Sulpicius, the tribune, announced his intention to punish them all in the military fashion; but deterred by the cries of the soldiers, who united in throwing the blame upon a single sentinel, he spared the others. This man was guilty beyond a doubt, and was flung from the rock with the approval of all. From that time the guards on both sides were more alert: the Gauls, because it had been put about that messengers were passing between Veii and Rome, the Romans, from their recollection of the peril of the night. But worse than all the evils of the blockade and the war was the famine with which both armies were afflicted. The Gauls suffered also from a pestilence, being encamped between hills on low ground, parched and heated by the conflagration, where the air was filled with ashes, as well as dust, whenever a breeze sprang up. These annoyances were intolerable to a race accustomed to damp and cold, and when, distressed by the suffocating heat, they began to sicken of diseases that spread as though the victims had been cattle, they were soon too slothful to bury their dead singly, and piling the bodies up in promiscuous heaps, they burned them, causing the place to be known from that circumstance as the Gallic Pyres. A truce was afterwards made with the Romans, and the commanders allowed their soldiers to talk together. Since in these conversations the Gauls used frequently to taunt their enemies with their famished state, and call on them to yield to that necessity and surrender, the Romans are said, in order to do away with this opinion, to have cast bread down from the Capitol in many places, into the outposts of the enemy. Yet at last they could neither dissemble their hunger nor endure it any longer. The dictator was now holding a levy of his own at Ardea, and having ordered the master of the horse, Lucius Valerius, to bring up his army from Veii, was mustering and drilling a force with which he might cope with the Gauls on equal terms. But the army on the Capitol was worn out with picket duty and mounting guard; and though they had got the better of all human ills, yet was there one, and that was famine, which nature would not suffer to be overcome. Day after day they looked out to see if any relief from the dictator was at hand; but at last even hope, as well as food, beginning to fail them, and their bodies growing almost too weak to sustain their armour when they went out on picket duty, they declared that they must either surrender or ransom themselves, on whatever conditions they could make; for the Gauls were hinting very plainly that no great price would be required to induce them to raise the siege. Thereupon the senate met, and instructed the tribunes of the soldiers to arrange the terms. Then, at a conference between Quintus Sulpicius the tribune and the Gallic chieftain Brennus, the affair was settled, and a thousand pounds of gold was agreed on as the price of a people that was destined presently to rule the nations. The transaction was a foul disgrace in itself, but an insult was added thereto: the weights brought by the Gauls were dishonest, and on the tribune's objecting, the insolent Gaul added his sword to the weight, and a saying intolerable to Roman ears was heard, —Woe to the conquered! But neither gods nor men would suffer the Romans to live ransomed. For, by some chance, before the infamous payment had been consummated, and when the gold had not yet, owing to the dispute, been all weighed out, the dictator appeared and commanded the gold to be cleared away and the Gauls to leave. They objected vehemently, and insisted on the compact; but Camillus denied the validity of that compact which, subsequently to his own appointment as dictator, an inferior magistrate had made without his authorization, and warned them to prepare for battle. His own men he ordered to throw their packs in a heap, make ready their weapons, and win their country back with iron instead of gold; having before their eyes the temples of the gods, their wives and their children, the soil of their native land, with the hideous marks of war upon it, and all that religion called upon them to defend, recover, or avenge. He then drew up his line, as well as the ground permitted, on the naturally uneven surface of the half-ruined City, and saw to it that his soldiers had every advantage in choice of position and in preparation which the art of war suggested. The Gauls were taken aback; they armed, and, with more rage than judgment, charged the Romans. But now fortune had turned; now the might of Heaven and human wisdom were engaged in the cause of Rome. Accordingly, at the first shock the Gauls were routed with as little effort as they had themselves put forth to conquer on the Allia. They afterwards fought a second, more regular engagement, eight miles out on the Gabinian Way, where they had rallied from their flight, and again the generalship and auspices of Camillus overcame them. Here the carnage was universal; their camp was taken; and not a man survived to tell of the disaster. The dictator, having recovered his country from her enemies, returned in triumph to the city; and between the rough jests uttered by the soldiers, was hailed in no unmeaning terms of praise as a Romulus and Father of his Country and a second Founder of the City. His native City, which he had saved in war, he then indubitably saved a second time, now that peace was won, by preventing the migration to Veil: though the tribunes were more zealous for the plan than ever, now that the City lay in ashes, and the plebs were of themselves more inclined to favour it. This was the reason of his not resigning the dictatorship after his triumph, for the senate besought him not to desert the state in its hour of uncertainty. His first act, in conformity with his scrupulous attention to religion, was to lay before the senate such matters as pertained to the immortal gods, and to obtain the passage of a decree that all shrines, in so far as they had been in the enemy's possession, should be restored, their boundaries established, and rites of purification celebrated, and that the duumvirs should search the Books for the proper rites; that a covenant of hospitality should be entered into by the state with the people of Caere, because they had received the holy things of the Roman People and its priests, and thanks to their good offices worship of the immortal gods had not been interrupted; that Capitoline Games should be held, because Jupiter Optimus Maximus had protected his own abode and the Citadel of the Roman People in its time of danger; and that Marcus Furius the dictator should to that end constitute a board consisting of men who lived on the Capitol and the Citadel. A proposal was made, too, for propitiating the voice which was heard in the night to foretell disaster before the Gallic War, and was disregarded, and a temple was ordered to be built in the Nova Via to Aius Locutius. The gold which had been carried away from the Gauls and that which had been collected from other temples during the alarm and carried into the shrine of Jupiter, since there was no clear recollection where it ought to be returned, was all adjudged to be sacred and ordered to be deposited under the throne of Jupiter. Even before this the scrupulousness of the citizens had been apparent in this connexion, for when the gold in the public coffers was insufficient to make up to the Gauls the stipulated sum, they had accepted what the matrons got together, that they might not touch the sacred gold. For this a vote of thanks was given to the matrons, and they were granted the honour of having eulogies pronounced at their funerals, as in the case of the men. After these measures, which related to the gods and lay within the competence of the senate, had been enacted, then, and only then, heeding the importunity of the tribunes, who were urging the plebs unceasingly to quit their ruins and emigrate to a city ready to their hand at Veii, Camillus went up into the assembly, attended by the entire senate, and discoursed as follows: "So painful to me, Quirites, are these controversies with the tribunes of the plebs, that my most bitter exile knew no other solace but this, all the time that I lived at Ardea, that I was far away from these contentions. And they are likewise the cause that though you had a thousand times recalled me by resolution of the senate and the people's vote, I intended never to return. Nor have I now been induced to do so by any change in my desires, but by the alteration in your fortunes. For the issue was this, that my countrymen should abide in their own home, not that I, at any or all costs, should be with my countrymen. Even now I would gladly stop and hold my peace, were not this too the quarrel of my country; whom to fail while life endures is in other men disgraceful, but in Camillus impious. For why did we seek to win her back, why rescue her, when besieged, from the hands of the enemy, if, now that she is recovered, we voluntarily abandon her? And although, while the Gauls were victorious and in possession of the entire City, the Capitol nevertheless and the Citadel were held by the gods and men of Rome, shall we now, when the Romans are victorious and the City is regained, desert even Citadel and Capitol? Shall our prosperity make Rome more desolate than our adversity has done? Indeed, if we had no religious rites established with the founding of the City and by tradition handed down, yet so manifest has at this time the divine purpose been in the affairs of Rome, that I for one should suppose it no longer possible for men to neglect the worship of the gods. For consider these past few years in order, with their successes and reverses; you will find that all things turned out well when we obeyed the gods, and ill when we spurned them. First of all, the war with Veii. How many years we fought, and with what painful exertion! And the end came not, until, admonished by Heaven, we drew the water off from the Alban Lake. What, I beseech you, of this strange disaster that lately overwhelmed our City? Did it come before we disregarded the voice from Heaven that announced the approach of the Gauls? before the law of nations was violated by our envoys? before we, that ought to have punished their fault, had passed it by, with the same indifference towards the gods? Therefore were we conquered, led captive, and put to ransom; and suffered such punishments at the hands of gods and men as to be a warning to all the world. Adversity then turned our thoughts upon religion. We fled for refuge to the Capitol and its gods, to the seat of Jupiter Optimus Maximus; of our holy things, some, in the ruin of our fortunes, we concealed in the earth, others we removed to neighbouring cities out of sight of our enemies; in the worship of the gods, albeit forsaken of gods and men, yet were we unceasing. Therefore have they given us our native land again, and victory, and our ancient renown in war that we had forfeited; and against our enemies, who, blinded with greed, broke treaty and troth in the weighing of the gold, have they turned dismay and rout and slaughter. "As you consider these momentous effects upon the affairs of men, of serving the deity and of neglecting him, do you begin, Quirites, to perceive how, though yet scarce clear of the wreckage of our former guilt and calamity, we are headed towards a grievous sin? We have a City founded with due observance of auspice and augury; no corner of it is not permeated by ideas of religion and the gods; for our annual sacrifices, the days are no more fixed than are the places where they may be performed. Do you intend, Quirites, to abandon all these gods, both of state and of family? How squares your conduct with that of the noble young man Gaius Fabius in the recent siege, which the enemy beheld with no less astonishment and admiration than yourselves, when he descended from the Citadel through the missiles of the Gauls and offered the annual sacrifice of the Fabian clan on the Quirinal Hill? What? Would you suffer no interruption, even in war, of family rites, but desert the national worship and the gods of Rome in time of peace? Would you have the pontiffs and the flamens less careful of the ceremonies of the state religion than a private citizen has been of the anniversary of his clan? Perhaps someone may say that we shall either do these things at Veii, or thence dispatch our priests to Rome to do them; but of these courses neither can be followed without violation of the sacred usages. For, not to enumerate all the kinds of rites and all the gods, is it possible at the feast of Jupiter that the couch should be spread elsewhere than in the Capitol? Why need I speak of Vesta's eternal fires, and the image which is preserved as a pledge of empire in her temple? or of your sacred shields, O Mars Gradivus and Quirinus our Father? All these holy things would you leave behind on unconsecrated ground —things coeval with the City, and some more ancient than its origin? "And mark what a difference between us and our forefathers! They handed down to us certain rites to be solemnized on the Alban Mount and in Lavinium. But if we scrupled to transfer sacred rites from hostile cities to ourselves in Rome, can we shift them without sin from Rome to Veii, city of our enemies? Recollect, I beg you, how often sacrifices are renewed because some point of antique ritual has been, through carelessness or accident, omitted. What was it, a while ago, after the portent of the Alban Lake, that brought relief to the commonwealth —then in the throes of war with Veii —if not a renewal of the sacred rites and auspices? But, more than that, like men mindful of their old religious fervour, we have both brought in foreign deities to Rome and established new ones. Queen Juno was lately conveyed from Veii and enshrined on the Aventine, and how notable was that day, for the zeal of the matrons and the throng! We have ordered a temple to be built for Aius Locutius because of the voice from heaven, clearly heard in the Nova Via. We have added Capitoline Games to the other annual festivals, and by authority of the senate have established a new college for this purpose. Was there any of these things we needed to have undertaken, if we meant to retire from Rome along with the Gauls; if we remained not voluntarily in the Capitol, through so many months of siege, but constrained by fear of the enemy? We talk of sacred rites and temples; pray, what about the priests? Do you never think what a sacrilege you are about? The Vestals surely have but that one dwelling-place, from which nothing ever caused them to remove but the capture of the City; the Flamen Dialis may not lie for a single night outside the City, without sin. Will you make these priests Veientine instead of Roman? Shall thy Virgins forsake thee, Vesta, and the Flamen, as he dwells abroad, bring, night after night, such guilt upon himself and the republic? What about the other matters nearly all of which we transact, after taking auspices, within the pomerium? To what oblivion and neglect do we consign them? The curiate comitia which deals with the business of war, the centuriate comitia, where you elect the consuls and military tribunes —where can these be held, with due observance of the auspices, save in the customary places? Shall we transfer them to Veii? Or shall the people, for the sake of the comitia assemble with enormous inconvenience in this City, forsaken of god and man? "'But,' you will say, 'while it is obvious that everything will be polluted beyond all possibility of purification, yet the situation itself compels us to leave a City which fires and falling buildings have made a wilderness, and emigrate to Veii, where everything is untouched, nor vex the helpless commons with building here.' But that this is rather a pretext than a true reason is, I think, apparent to you, Quirites, without my saying so; for you remember how, before the coming of the Gauls, when our roof-trees, public and private, were unharmed and our City stood uninjured, that this same proposal was urged, of migrating to Veii. And consider, tribunes, how wide is the difference between my view and yours. You think that even if then it ought not to have been done, yet now at any rate it ought; I on the contrary —and be not astonished at this, till you have heard what my meaning is, —even if it had been right to migrate then, with the City all intact, should not think it right to abandon these ruins now. For then our victory would have been a reason for migrating to a captured city —a reason glorious to ourselves and our posterity; but now such a removal is for us a wretched and humiliating course, and a glory to the Gauls. For we shall not seem to have left our country as victors, but to have lost it as men vanquished. It will be thought that the rout on the Allia, the capture of the City, the blockade of the Capitol, have compelled us to forsake our family gods, and sentence ourselves to banishment and exile from that place which we were powerless to defend. Have Gauls then been able to cast Rome down; and must Romans appear unable to have raised her up? What remains, if they should presently come with fresh forces —for all agree that their numbers are scarce to be believed, — and should wish to dwell in this City which they have captured and you have abandoned, but that you should suffer them? What if not the Gauls but your ancient foes the Volsci and Aequi should migrate to Rome? Should you like them to be Romans, and yourselves Veientes? Or should you not prefer this to be your wilderness, rather than the city of your enemies? For my part I do not see what could be more abominable. Are you ready to stomach these outrages, these infamies, because it irks you to build? If in all the City no house could be put up better or bigger than is the famous Hut of our Founder, would it not be better to live in huts, as shepherds and rustics do, amongst our sacred monuments and our household gods, than to go forth as a nation into exile? Our ancestors refugees and herdsmen, at a time when there was nothing in this region but forests and marshes, built quickly a new City; and are we loath, though Capitol and Citadel are untouched and the temples of the gods are standing, to rebuild what has been destroyed by fire? And what each would have done for himself, if his house had been burned, shall we refuse to do together after this common conflagration? Or suppose that by crime or chance a fire should break out at Veii, and that the wind should spread the flames, as may easily happen, until they consume a great part of the city; are we to quit it, and seek out Fidenae, or Gabii, or any other town you like, and migrate thither? Have the soil of our native City and this land which we call our mother so slight a hold on us? Is our love of country confined to buildings and rafters? And in truth I will confess to you —though: like not to recall the wrong you did me —that as often, during my absence, as I thought of my native place, all these objects came into my mind: the hills and the fields and the Tiber and the region familiar to my eyes, and this sky beneath which I had been born and reared. And I wish these things may rather move you now with love, Quirites, to make you abide in your own home, than afterwards, when you have left it, torment you with vain regrets. Not without cause did gods and men select this place for establishing our City —with its healthful hills; its convenient river, by which crops may be floated down from the midland regions and foreign commodities brought up; its sea, near enough for use, yet not exposing us, by too great propinquity, to peril from foreign fleets; a situation in the heart of Italy —a spot, in short, of a nature uniquely adapted for the expansion of a city. This is proved by the very greatness of so new a place. It is now, Quirites, in its three hundred and sixty-fifth year. Amongst all these ancient nations you have for so long a time been waging wars; and all this while — to say nothing of single cities —neither the Volsci joined with the Aequi, and all their powerful towns, nor all Etruria, with its enormous strength on land and water, and its occupancy of the entire breadth of Italy from sea to sea, has been a match for you in war. Since this is so, what a plague is the reason why you that have experienced these things should experiment with others? Granting that your valour may go elsewhere, yet surely the fortune of this place could not be taken along! Here is the Capitol, where men were told, when of old they discovered there a human head, that in that place should be the head of the world and the seat of empire; here, when the Capitol was being cleared with augural rites, Juvent as and Terminus, to the vast joy of your fathers, refused to be removed; here are Vesta's fires, here the shields that were sent down from heaven, here are all the gods propitious, if you remain. The speech of Camillus is said to have moved them, particularly where he touched upon religion; but the doubtful issue was resolved by a word that was let fall in the nick of time. It was while the senate, a little later, was deliberating about these matters in the Curia Hostilia; some cohorts returning from guard-duty were marching through the Forum, and as they came to the Comitium a centurion cried out, Standard-bearer, fix your ensign; here will be our best place to remain. Hearing this sentence the senators came out from the Curia and shouted their acceptance of the omen, and the commons gathering round them signified approval. The bill was then rejected, and people began in a random fashion to rebuild the City. The state supplied tiles, and granted everybody the right to quarry stone and to hew timber where he liked, after giving security for the completion of the structures within that year. In their haste men were careless about making straight the streets, and paying no attention to their own and others' rights, built on the vacant spaces. This is the reason that the ancient sewers, which were at first conducted through the public ways, at present frequently run under private dwellings, and the appearance of the City is like one where the ground has been appropriated rather than divided.

Perseus Latin. CTS URN phi0914.phi0015.perseus-eng1. Via the Perseus Digital Library / Open Greek and Latin TEI corpora. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.