Whether I shall accomplish anything worth the effort, if I set down in writing the history of the Roman people from the first beginnings of the city, I do not rightly know; and if I did know, I would not venture to say so—seeing, as I do, that the theme is not only old but well-worn, since new writers keep believing either that they will bring some greater certainty to the facts, or that they will surpass the rude antiquity of their predecessors in the art of writing. However that may be, it will still be a satisfaction to have done my own part, to the best of my power, for the memory of the deeds of the foremost people of the earth; and if, in so great a crowd of writers, my own renown should be left in obscurity, I may console myself with the nobility and greatness of those who will stand in the way of my name. The undertaking is, besides, one of vast labor, reaching back as it does beyond the seven-hundredth year, and tracing a state that, set out from slender beginnings, has grown until it now labors under its own greatness; and I have no doubt that to most readers the earliest origins, and what lies nearest to those origins, will afford less pleasure, as they hasten on toward these recent times in which the strength of a people long predominant is consuming itself. I, for my part, shall seek this further reward of my labor: to turn myself away from the sight of the evils which our age has watched for so many years—at least for the while that I am recalling, with my whole mind, those ancient days—free from every care that, though it could not bend the writer’s mind from the truth, might yet make it anxious. The traditions of what happened before the city was founded, or before its founding was so much as planned—handed down as they are with the grace of poetry rather than as the untarnished records of history—I have no intention either to affirm or to refute. This indulgence is granted to antiquity: that by mingling the human with the divine it may make the beginnings of cities more august; and if any people ought to be allowed to consecrate its origins and to trace its founders to the gods, such is the glory of the Roman people in war that, when it claims Mars in particular as its own parent and the parent of its founder, the nations of mankind may bear this with as good a grace as they bear our dominion. But these and the like, however they shall be regarded or judged, I shall not, for my part, count as of great moment. To these matters rather let each reader for himself keenly attend: what their life was, what their manners; through what men and by what arts, at home and in war, the empire was won and enlarged; then, as discipline gradually gave way, let him follow the manners in his mind, first as they sank little by little, then as they slipped more and more, then began to plunge headlong, until we reach these times of ours, in which we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies. This it is that is, above all, wholesome and fruitful in the study of history: that you behold the lessons of every example set upon a conspicuous monument; from there you may take, for yourself and for your commonwealth, what to imitate; from there, what to shun, foul in the undertaking and foul in the outcome. For the rest—unless love of the task I have undertaken deceives me—there has never been any commonwealth greater, or more righteous, or richer in good examples; nor any state into which avarice and luxury made their way so late, nor where so great and so long-lasting an honor was paid to poverty and thrift. So true is it that the less men had, the less they coveted. Of late, wealth has brought in avarice, and overflowing pleasures the craving—through luxury and lust—to ruin oneself and to bring all things to ruin. But complaints, which will not be welcome even then, when perhaps they will be necessary, let them at least be absent from the beginning of so great an undertaking. With good omens rather, and with vows and prayers to the gods and goddesses, we should—if it were our custom, as it is the poets’—more gladly make our beginning, that to such a work, once begun, they might grant a prosperous outcome.

In the first place, it is generally agreed that, when Troy was taken, the rest of the Trojans were treated with cruelty; but that against two, Aeneas and Antenor, the Achaeans refrained from every right of war, both by reason of an old tie of hospitality and because these two had always been advocates of peace and of the restoration of Helen. Then, through various chances, Antenor came—with a company of the Eneti, who, driven by faction from Paphlagonia, were seeking both a home and a leader, their king Pylaemenes having been lost at Troy—into the innermost recess of the Adriatic sea; and, the Euganei, who dwelt between the sea and the Alps, having been driven out, the Eneti and the Trojans took possession of those lands. And the place where they first disembarked is called Troy, and from this the district has the name Trojan; but the people as a whole were called Veneti. Aeneas, a fugitive from home after a like disaster, but led by the fates toward the founding of greater things, came first to Macedonia; thence, in his search for a settlement, was carried to Sicily; and from Sicily made for the Laurentine territory with his fleet. Troy is the name of this place too. There the Trojans disembarked; and as men to whom, after their almost measureless wandering, nothing was left but their arms and their ships, while they were driving off plunder from the fields, King Latinus and the Aborigines, who then held those places, came running, in arms, from city and countryside to beat back the violence of the newcomers. From here the tradition is twofold. Some relate that Latinus, beaten in battle, made peace with Aeneas, and afterward a marriage alliance; others, that when the battle lines had taken their stand and before the signals could sound, Latinus came forward among his foremost men and summoned the leader of the strangers to a parley; that he then asked what men they were, from where or by what chance they had set out from home, and what they sought in coming into the Laurentine land; and that, when he had heard that the multitude were Trojans, their leader Aeneas, son of Anchises and Venus, fugitives from a homeland burned to ashes and seeking a settlement and a site to found a city, he admired the nobility of the race and of the man, and a spirit ready alike for war or peace, and gave his right hand in pledge of the friendship to come. Thereupon a treaty was struck between the leaders, and a mutual salutation made between the armies; Aeneas was a guest in the house of Latinus; and there Latinus, before his household gods, joined a private treaty to the public one, by giving his daughter to Aeneas in marriage. This event, more than any other, confirms the Trojans in the hope of ending their wandering at last in a fixed and certain home. They found a town; Aeneas names it Lavinium, from his wife’s name. Before long there was male issue too of the new marriage, to whom the parents gave the name Ascanius.

War next fell upon the Aborigines and the Trojans together. Turnus, king of the Rutulians, to whom Lavinia had been betrothed before Aeneas came, taking it ill that a stranger was preferred before him, had made war at once on Aeneas and Latinus. Neither army came away rejoicing from that contest: the Rutulians were beaten; the victorious Aborigines and Trojans lost their leader Latinus. After this Turnus and the Rutulians, despairing of their cause, took refuge with the flourishing power of the Etruscans and their king Mezentius, who, ruling at Caere, then a wealthy town, had from the very first been by no means glad at the rise of the new city, and now, judging that the Trojan power was growing far more than was safe for its neighbors, joined his arms to the Rutulians’ without reluctance. Aeneas, that against the terror of so great a war he might win the hearts of the Aborigines to himself, and that both peoples might be not only under one law but also of one name, called both nations Latins. Nor thereafter did the Aborigines yield to the Trojans in zeal and loyalty toward King Aeneas. Relying on this temper of the two peoples, who day by day grew more into one, Aeneas—though Etruria was so mighty in resources that it had now filled with the fame of its name not the lands only but the sea too, along the whole length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian strait—although he might have repelled the war from his walls, led his forces out into the field. The battle that followed was favorable to the Latins; it was also the last of Aeneas’s mortal works. He lies buried—by whatever name it is right and lawful to call him—above the river Numicus: they call him Jupiter Indiges.

Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, was not yet ripe for rule; yet that rule remained safe for him until he came of age; meanwhile, under a woman’s guardianship—so strong was the native gift in Lavinia—the Latin state and the throne of his grandfather and father stood firm for the boy. I will not dispute—for who could affirm as certain a thing so old?—whether this was that Ascanius, or one older than he, born of his mother Creusa while Ilium yet stood, the companion thereafter of his father’s flight, whom the Julian clan names as the author of its name, calling him Iulus. This Ascanius—wherever and of whatever mother born (it is at least agreed that he was the son of Aeneas)—left to his mother, or his stepmother, the city of Lavinium, now flourishing and, as things then were, wealthy, its population overflowing; and himself founded another, a new one, beneath the Alban mount, which, from its situation, stretched out along a ridge, was called Alba Longa. Between the founding of Lavinium and the leading-out of the colony to Alba Longa some thirty years intervened. Yet its power had grown so great—chiefly after the rout of the Etruscans—that not even at the death of Aeneas, nor afterward during the woman’s guardianship and the first apprenticeship of a boy’s reign, did Mezentius and the Etruscans, or any other neighbors, dare to take up arms. Peace had been agreed on these terms: that the river Albula, which men now call the Tiber, should be the boundary between Etruscans and Latins. Next reigns Silvius, son of Ascanius, born by some chance in the woods. He begets Aeneas Silvius; he in turn Latinus Silvius. By him several colonies were led out, called the Old Latins. The surname Silvius remained thereafter to all who reigned at Alba. From Latinus was sprung Alba; from Alba, Atys; from Atys, Capys; from Capys, Capetus; from Capetus, Tiberinus, who, drowned in crossing the Albula river, gave the stream a name famous among later generations. Then Agrippa, son of Tiberinus; after Agrippa, Romulus Silvius reigns, having received the kingship from his father. He himself, struck by lightning on the Aventine, handed the kingdom on by succession. He was buried on that hill which is now part of the city of Rome, and gave the hill its name. Then Proca reigns. He begets Numitor and Amulius; to Numitor, who was the eldest of the stock, he bequeaths the ancient kingdom of the Silvian line. Yet force prevailed over the father’s will and the deference owed to age: Amulius, having driven out his brother, reigns. He adds crime to crime: he makes away with his brother’s male offspring; and to his brother’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, under the show of an honor—having chosen her a Vestal—he denies, by perpetual virginity, the hope of children.

But the origin of so great a city, and the founding of an empire second in power only to the gods’, was owed, I think, to the fates. The Vestal, ravished by force, when she had given birth to twin offspring, named Mars as the father of her uncertain stock—whether she truly believed it, or because a god was the more honorable author of her fault. But neither gods nor men shield either her or her offspring from the king’s cruelty: the priestess is bound and given into custody; the boys he orders to be cast into the running water. By some chance of heaven the Tiber, overflowed beyond its banks in sluggish pools, could nowhere be approached at the channel of its true course, and yet gave the bearers hope that the infants could be drowned, however still the water. And so, as though they had discharged the king’s command, they expose the boys in the nearest backwater—where now stands the Ruminal fig tree (men say it was called Romularis). In those places there were then vast solitudes. The tradition holds that, when the floating cradle in which the boys had been exposed was left aground by the receding water, a she-wolf, coming down thirsty from the surrounding hills, turned her course toward the children’s wailing; that she lowered her teats to the infants so gently that the keeper of the king’s herd found her licking the boys with her tongue—his name, they say, was Faustulus. By him they were given to his wife Larentia, at their steading, to be reared. There are those who think that Larentia, because she had prostituted her body, was called a she-wolf among the shepherds, and that this gave the opening for the marvelous tale. So born and so reared, as soon as their years grew ripe they were not idle in the steadings or about the herds, but ranged the glades in hunting. Gaining thereby a vigor of body and spirit, they now not only withstood wild beasts, but fell upon robbers laden with plunder, divided the spoils among the shepherds, and, with a band of young men that grew larger day by day, carried on their serious business and their sport together.

Even then, they say, this festival of the Lupercal was held on the Palatine hill, and the hill was called Pallantium, from Pallanteum, an Arcadian city, and afterward Palatium. There Evander, who, of that Arcadian stock, had held the place many ages before, had established the solemn rite, brought from Arcadia, that naked young men should run in worship of Lycaean Pan amid sport and wantonness—the god whom the Romans afterward called Inuus. While they were given over to this festival, the rite being well known, robbers, in anger at the loss of their plunder, lay in ambush; and though Romulus defended himself by force, they took Remus captive, and, handing over their captive to King Amulius, of their own accord laid an accusation against him. Their chief charge was that raids were being made upon Numitor’s lands; that from there the brothers, with a gathered band of young men, were driving off plunder in the manner of enemies. So Remus is delivered up to Numitor for punishment. From the very first Faustulus had cherished the hope that it was a royal stock being reared in his house; for he both knew that the infants had been exposed by the king’s order, and the time at which he himself had taken them up tallied exactly with it; but he had been unwilling to disclose the matter before it was ripe, save through opportunity or necessity. Necessity came first; and so, driven by fear, he discloses the matter to Romulus. By chance, too, Numitor—while he held Remus in custody, and had heard that the brothers were twins—comparing their age and their nature, anything but servile, had been touched by the memory of his grandsons; and by his questioning came to the same point, so that he was not far from recognizing Remus. Thus on every side a snare is woven for the king. Romulus, not with a body of young men—for he was no match for open force—but having ordered the shepherds to come to the palace by different routes at a fixed time, makes his attack upon the king; and from Numitor’s house Remus, with another band made ready, lends his aid. So they cut the king down.

Numitor, at the first uproar, kept crying that enemies had broken into the city and were assaulting the palace, and so drew off the Alban men of fighting age to hold the citadel with a garrison and arms; then, when he saw the young men coming toward him, the slaughter accomplished, to offer their congratulations, he straightway called a council, and laid bare his brother’s crimes against himself, the origin of his grandsons—how they had been born, how reared, how recognized—and then the killing of the tyrant, with himself as its author. The young men, advancing in column through the midst of the assembly, when they had saluted their grandfather as king, were followed by a shout of consent from the whole multitude, which made the king’s title and command secure. So, the Alban state being thus committed to Numitor, a desire seized Romulus and Remus to found a city in those places where they had been exposed and reared. And there was a surplus of Albans and Latins; to these the shepherds too had attached themselves, all of whom might readily raise the hope that Alba would be small, and Lavinium small, beside the city that should be founded. But there broke in upon these designs the ancestral curse, the lust for kingship, and from it a foul contest, arising from a beginning mild enough. Since they were twins, and respect for age could make no distinction between them, they take—that the gods to whose protection those places belonged might choose by augury who should give the new city its name, and who, once it was founded, should rule it with sovereign power—Romulus the Palatine, Remus the Aventine, as their precincts for taking the auspices.

The augury, it is said, came first to Remus—six vultures; and when, the augury being now announced, twice that number had shown themselves to Romulus, each was saluted king by his own followers: the one claimed the kingship by priority of time, the other by the number of the birds. They met, then, in an altercation, and from the strife of angry words turned to bloodshed; there, in the press, Remus was struck and fell. The commoner tradition is that Remus, in mockery of his brother, leaped across the new walls; whereupon Romulus, in a rage, and adding the rebuke, “So perish hereafter whoever else shall leap across my walls,” struck him dead. So Romulus alone possessed the sovereignty; and the city, once founded, was called by its founder’s name. His first act was to fortify the Palatine, on which he himself had been reared. To the other gods he sacrifices by the Alban rite, but to Hercules by the Greek, as it had been established by Evander. Hercules, men relate, after slaying Geryon, had driven off into those parts cattle of marvelous beauty; and near the river Tiber, where, driving the herd before him, he had swum across, he lay down himself, weary from the road, in a grassy place, that he might refresh the cattle with rest and rich pasture. There, when sleep had overcome him, heavy with food and wine, a herdsman dwelling near that place, Cacus by name, fierce in his strength, taken with the beauty of the cattle and wishing to carry off that booty, dragged the finest of them—each chosen for its beauty—backward by the tails into his cave; for had he driven the herd in, the tracks themselves would have led the seeking owner there. Hercules, roused from sleep at the first light of dawn, when he had run his eyes over the herd and perceived that part was missing from the number, makes for the nearest cave, in case by chance the tracks led there. When he saw that all of them faced outward and led nowhere else, baffled and uncertain in mind he began to drive the herd onward away from the dangerous place. Then, as some of the cattle, being driven off, lowed—as happens—for longing of those left behind, an answering low from the cattle shut up within the cave turned Hercules back. And when Cacus tried to bar him by force as he made for the cave, struck by the club, calling on the herdsmen’s aid in vain, he met his death. Evander at that time, a fugitive from the Peloponnese, governed those parts by authority rather than by command—a man venerable for the marvel of letters, a thing new among men untrained in the arts, and more venerable still for the believed divinity of his mother Carmenta, whom those nations had marveled at as a prophetess before the coming of the Sibyl into Italy. This Evander, then, roused by the gathering of the herdsmen crowding in alarm about the stranger, the manifest author of a killing, after he had heard the deed and the cause of the deed, looking upon the bearing and form of the man, somewhat ampler and more august than a mortal’s, asks who he was. When he had learned his name, his father, and his country, he said: “Hercules, son of Jupiter, hail! You it is that my mother, the truthful interpreter of the gods, foretold would swell the number of the heavenly ones, and that here an altar would be dedicated to you which the most powerful people on earth should one day call the Greatest, and tend by your rite.” Hercules, giving his right hand, said that he accepted the omen and would fulfill the fates by founding and dedicating the altar. There, then, for the first time, a victim chosen from the herd was sacrificed to Hercules, with the Potitii and the Pinarii—the families that then chiefly dwelt in those parts—called in to the service and the feast. By chance it so fell out that the Potitii were present in time, and the entrails were set before them, while the Pinarii came, after the entrails were eaten, to the rest of the feast. From this the usage remained, as long as the Pinarian line endured, that they should not eat of the entrails at those rites. The Potitii, instructed by Evander, were the priests of that worship for many generations, until, the solemn ministry of their family being handed over to public slaves, the whole race of the Potitii perished. These rites, of all the foreign ones, Romulus alone took up, even then a friend to the immortality won by valor, to which his own fates were leading him.

The divine business duly accomplished, and the multitude called to a council—since it could be welded into the body of a single people by nothing but laws—he gave them statutes; and, judging these would be held sacred by a rustic breed of men only if he should make himself venerable by the insignia of command, he made himself more august both in his other dress and, above all, by taking twelve lictors. Others think he followed that number from the number of the birds which had foretold his kingship by augury; but I do not regret being of the opinion of those to whom it seems that both this kind of attendant was taken from the neighboring Etruscans—from whom the curule chair and the bordered toga were taken—and that the number itself was drawn from there, and that the Etruscans so had it because, when a king was created in common from their twelve peoples, each people gave one lictor. The city meanwhile kept growing as it took in one place after another with its fortifications, since they fortified more in hope of a future population than for the number of men that then was. Then, that the city’s size might not be empty, Romulus, to add to the population, followed the old device of the founders of cities, who, by gathering to themselves an obscure and lowly throng, used to pretend that an offspring had been born to them from the earth: he opens, as an asylum, the place which, now enclosed, lies between two groves as you go up. Thither fled from the neighboring peoples a whole crowd, without distinction whether free or slave, eager for a new order of things; and this was the first accession of strength to the greatness begun. When he had now no cause to regret his strength, he next provides counsel for that strength. He creates a hundred senators—whether because that number was enough, or because there were only a hundred who could be made Fathers. Fathers, at all events, they were called from their honor, and their progeny patricians.

The Roman state was now so strong that it was a match in war for any of the neighboring cities; but, for want of women, its greatness was bound to last a single generation, since they had neither hope of offspring at home nor the right of intermarriage with their neighbors. Then, on the advice of the Fathers, Romulus sent envoys round among the neighboring nations to seek alliance and the right of intermarriage for the new people: cities too, like all else, rise from the lowest beginnings; then those whom their own valor and the gods assist win for themselves great power and a great name; he knew well enough both that the gods had been present at Rome’s origin and that valor would not be wanting; let men therefore not scruple to mingle blood and stock with men. Nowhere was the embassy kindly heard; so much did they at once despise, and at once fear for themselves and their descendants, so great a mass growing up in their midst. By most they were dismissed with the repeated question whether they had opened any asylum for women too; for that, after all, would be a marriage of equals. The Roman youth bore this with ill grace, and beyond doubt the matter began to look toward violence. To give this a fit time and place, Romulus, dissembling his vexation of spirit, of set purpose prepares solemn games to Neptune of the Horse, and calls them the Consualia. He then orders the spectacle to be proclaimed to the neighbors, and with all the display they then knew or could command they make it splendid, to render the affair famous and looked-for. Many people gathered, from desire too of seeing the new city—especially those nearest, the Caeninenses, the Crustumini, and the Antemnates; the whole multitude of the Sabines too came, with their children and wives. Hospitably entertained from house to house, when they had seen the site, the walls, and the city thick with roofs, they marvel that the Roman state had grown so much in so short a time. When the time of the spectacle came, and minds and eyes alike were intent upon it, then by prearrangement the violence broke out, and at a given signal the Roman youth ran in all directions to seize the maidens. Most were carried off, each by the man on whom she chanced to fall; some, of surpassing beauty, marked out for the foremost of the Fathers, were carried to their houses by plebeians to whom the task had been assigned. One, far the most notable in form and beauty above the rest, was, they say, seized by the band of a certain Thalassius; and when many kept asking to whom they were bearing her, the cry was raised again and again that she was being borne to Thalassius, that none might molest her—whence this wedding-cry took its rise. The festival thrown into confusion by panic, the sorrowing parents of the maidens flee, denouncing the crime of violated hospitality and calling upon the god to whose solemn festival and games they had come, deceived under the show of religion and good faith. Nor had the ravished maidens better hope for themselves, nor less indignation. But Romulus himself went about among them and pointed out that it had been done through the pride of their fathers, who had refused intermarriage with their neighbors; yet they should be wedded wives, partners in all their fortunes and in the citizenship, and—than which nothing is dearer to the human race—in their children; let them only soften their anger, and to those to whom chance had given their bodies, give their hearts. Often, he said, out of an injury affection had afterward arisen; and they would find the better husbands for it, because each man would strive, for his own part, when he had discharged a husband’s duty, to make good besides the longing for parents and fatherland. To this were added the caresses of the men, excusing their deed by desire and love—pleas that are most effective upon a woman’s nature.

The minds of the ravished women were now quite soothed; but their parents, just then, in mourning dress and with tears and complaints, were rousing the states. Nor did they confine their indignation at home, but gathered from every side to Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, and embassies converged there, because Tatius’s name was greatest in those regions. The Caeninenses, the Crustumini, and the Antemnates were those to whom a share of the injury belonged. Tatius and the Sabines seemed to them to act too slowly; so the three peoples by themselves make ready war in common. Yet not even the Crustumini and the Antemnates bestir themselves briskly enough for the ardor and anger of the Caeninenses; and so the Caeninine people by itself makes an inroad into Roman territory. But as they ravaged at large, Romulus meets them with his army and, in a light engagement, teaches them that anger is vain without strength. He routs their army and puts it to flight, and pursues it in its rout; he cuts down their king in battle and strips him; their leader slain, he takes the city at the first assault. Then, leading back his victorious army, he—a man as magnificent in his deeds as he was no small displayer of them—mounted to the Capitol, bearing the spoils of the slain enemy leader fixed upon a frame fashioned aptly for the purpose; and there, when he had laid them down by an oak sacred to the shepherds, together with the gift he marked out the bounds for a temple of Jupiter and added a surname to the god: “Jupiter Feretrius,” he said, “to you I, Romulus the victorious king, bring these royal arms, and I dedicate a temple within the bounds I have just now measured out in my mind, a seat for the spoils of honor, the spolia opima, which posterity shall bring here, following my example, when they have slain the kings and leaders of the enemy.” This is the origin of the temple that was the first of all to be consecrated at Rome. So it afterward seemed good to the gods that the founder’s word, by which he proclaimed that posterity should bring spoils thither, should not fall idle, nor the glory of that gift be cheapened by a multitude who shared it. Twice only afterward, in all those years and all those wars, were the spolia opima won; so rare was the fortune of that distinction.

While the Romans were busy with these things, the army of the Antemnates, seizing the opportunity and the emptiness of the land, makes a hostile inroad into Roman territory. Against these too a Roman legion was hastily led, and caught them straggling in the fields. The enemy, then, were routed at the first charge and shout; their town was taken; and as Romulus exulted in his double victory, his wife Hersilia, worn down by the entreaties of the captured women, begs him to pardon their parents and receive them into the state, so that the commonwealth might grow together in concord. It was readily granted. Then he set out against the Crustumini, who were making war. There the struggle was even less, since their spirits had fallen at the disasters of others. To both places colonies were sent; more were found to give in their names for Crustumerium, on account of the richness of its soil. And from there there was frequent migration to Rome, chiefly by the parents and kinsfolk of the ravished women. Last of all arose the war with the Sabines, and that was much the greatest; for nothing was done in anger or greed, nor did they show their war before they made it. To counsel they added guile besides. Spurius Tarpeius commanded the Roman citadel. His maiden daughter Tatius corrupts with gold to admit armed men into the citadel; she had by chance gone out just then to fetch water for the sacrifices beyond the walls. Once admitted, they crushed her to death under their arms—whether that the citadel might rather seem taken by force, or to set an example, that no faith anywhere should be kept with a traitor. A further tale is added: that, because the Sabines commonly wore heavy golden armlets on the left arm and great handsome jeweled rings, she had bargained for what they wore on their left hands, and that therefore their shields were heaped upon her instead of the golden gifts. There are those who say that, by the very compact of handing over what was on their left hands, she demanded their arms outright; and that, seeming to act by treachery, she was slain by her own wages.

The Sabines, however, held the citadel; and from there, the next day, when the Roman army had filled the plain that lies between the Palatine and the Capitoline hill, they did not come down to the level until anger and the longing to recover the citadel, goading their spirits, brought the Romans up against the height. On either side the leaders stirred the battle—on the Sabine side Mettius Curtius, on the Roman, Hostius Hostilius. Hostius, on unfavorable ground, upheld the Roman cause at the front of the standards by spirit and daring. When Hostius fell, the Roman line at once gave way and was driven back to the old gate of the Palatine. Romulus himself, swept along by the throng of fleeing men, lifting his arms to heaven, said: “Jupiter, bidden by your birds, here on the Palatine I laid the first foundations of the city. The citadel the Sabines hold, bought by crime; from there, in arms, they press hither across the valley between. But do you, father of gods and men, drive back the enemy from here at least, take away their terror from the Romans, and stay their shameful flight! Here I vow to you a temple to Jupiter the Stayer, to be a monument to posterity that by your present help the city was saved.” Having uttered this prayer, as though he had felt his prayers were heard, he cried: “Here, Romans, Jupiter, greatest and best, bids you stand and renew the fight.” The Romans stood, as if bidden by a voice from heaven; Romulus himself dashes forward among the foremost. Mettius Curtius, the Sabine leader, had charged down from the citadel and driven the Romans before him over all the space the Forum covers. And he was now not far from the gate of the Palatine, crying: “We have beaten our treacherous hosts, our unwarlike foes; now they know that it is one thing to ravish maidens, another to fight with men.” As he boasted thus, Romulus charges him with a band of the fiercest young men. Mettius then chanced to be fighting on horseback; so it was the easier to drive him off. Driven off, the Romans pursue him; and the rest of the Roman line, kindled by the king’s daring, routs the Sabines. Mettius, his horse plunging in panic at the din of his pursuers, threw himself into a marsh; and even the Sabines were turned aside by the peril of so great a man. He indeed, his own men nodding and calling, and the favor of many lending him courage, makes his escape; and the Romans and Sabines renew the battle in the valley between the two hills. But the Roman side had the upper hand.

Then the Sabine women, from whose wrong the war had sprung, with hair streaming and garments torn, their woman’s fear overcome by their woes, dared to fling themselves amid the flying weapons, and, charging in from the flank, to part the hostile lines and part their wrath—beseeching on this side their fathers, on that their husbands, not to spatter themselves with unholy blood, father-in-law and son-in-law, nor to stain with parricide the children they had borne, grandsons to the one, sons to the other. “If you repent of the kinship between you, if of the marriage, turn your anger upon us; we are the cause of the war, we of the wounds and the slaughter of our husbands and our fathers; better we perish than live, widowed or orphaned, without one or the other of you.” The thing moves both the multitude and the leaders; silence and a sudden stillness fall; then the leaders come forward to make a treaty, and they make not peace only, but one state out of two. They share the kingship; they confer all sovereignty upon Rome. So, the city being doubled, that something might yet be granted the Sabines, the citizens were called Quirites, from Cures. As a monument of that battle, the place where the horse first, emerging from the deep marsh, set Curtius upon firm ground, they called the Lacus Curtius. From a war so grim, a peace so sudden and glad made the Sabine women dearer to their husbands and their parents, and above all to Romulus himself. And so, when he divided the people into thirty curiae, he set the women’s names upon the curiae. It is not handed down—though without doubt the number of the women was somewhat greater than this—whether those who gave their names to the curiae were chosen by age, or by their own rank or their husbands’, or by lot. At the same time three centuries of knights too were enrolled: the Ramnenses, named from Romulus; the Titienses, from Titus Tatius; the cause of the name and origin of the Luceres is uncertain. From then on the kingship was not only shared but harmonious between the two kings.

Some years later the kinsmen of King Tatius beat certain envoys of the Laurentines; and when the Laurentines sought redress by the law of nations, with Tatius the favor and the entreaties of his own people prevailed the more. And so he turned their punishment upon himself: for at Lavinium, when he had come there for a solemn sacrifice, a mob gathered and he was killed. This thing, they say, Romulus bore less grievously than was fitting—whether because of the disloyalty inherent in a shared kingship, or because he believed Tatius not unjustly slain. From war, at any rate, he abstained; yet, that the wrong done the envoys and the killing of the king might be expiated, the treaty between the cities of Rome and Lavinium was renewed. And with these, indeed, there was unlooked-for peace; but another war arose much nearer, almost at the very gates. The Fidenates, judging that a power too near them was growing too strong, make haste to make war before it should have all the strength it plainly would have. Sending in their armed youth, the land between the city and Fidenae is laid waste. Then, turning to the left—because the Tiber barred them on the right—they plunder amid great alarm of the countryfolk; and the sudden uproar carried from the fields into the city served for a messenger. Romulus, roused—for he could not brook delay in a war so near—leads out his army and pitches camp a mile from Fidenae. There, leaving a modest garrison, he marched out with all his forces, and ordered part of his soldiers to lie hidden in ambush in places dark with dense brushwood; then, setting out with the greater part and all the cavalry, by a disorderly and menacing kind of fight, riding up almost to the very gates, he drew the enemy out—the very thing he sought. The same cavalry skirmish gave a less surprising pretext for the flight that had to be feigned. And when, as if the cavalry wavered between the resolve to fight and to flee, the foot too began to give ground, the enemy, suddenly pouring out from the crowded gates, and the Roman line giving way before them, in their eagerness to press on and pursue are drawn toward the place of ambush. Thereupon the Romans, springing up of a sudden, fall upon the enemy’s line in the flank; the standards of those left in the garrison, moving out from the camp, add to the panic; so the Fidenates, struck with manifold terror, turn their backs almost before Romulus and those who had been seen to ride off with him could wheel their horses about; and far more headlong—since this was true flight—those who a little before had been pursuing men that only feigned made back for the town. Yet they did not escape the foe: the Romans, clinging to their rear, before the gates’ doors could be barred, burst in, as though in a single column.

The minds of the Veientes were kindled by the contagion of the Fidenate war—both by kinship, for the Fidenates too were Etruscans, and because the very nearness of the place goaded them, should Roman arms prove hostile to all their neighbors. They ran out into Roman territory, plundering rather than in the lawful fashion of war; and so, without pitching camp, without awaiting the enemy’s army, carrying off the booty snatched from the fields, they returned to Veii. The Roman, on the other hand, when he did not find the enemy in the fields, drawn up and intent for a final reckoning crosses the Tiber. When the Veientes heard that he was pitching camp and would advance upon their city, they came out to meet him, choosing rather to decide the matter in the field than, shut in, to fight from roofs and walls. There, with strength aided by no art, the Roman king conquered by the mere might of his veteran army; and having pursued the routed enemy to their walls, he held off from the city, strong in its walls and in its very situation. Their fields he lays waste as he returns, from desire of vengeance rather than of plunder; and the Veientes, subdued by that disaster no less than by their defeat in battle, send spokesmen to Rome to sue for peace. Fined a part of their land, they were granted a truce for a hundred years. These, in sum, were the things done at home and in war while Romulus reigned, of which none was inconsistent with the belief in his divine origin and the divinity ascribed to him after death—neither his spirit in recovering his grandfather’s kingdom, nor his design in founding the city, nor his establishing it by war and by peace. For it was by the strength he gave it that it afterward grew strong enough to enjoy, for the next forty years, a secure peace. Yet he was more pleasing to the multitude than to the Fathers, and far before all others most acceptable to the hearts of the soldiers; three hundred armed men he kept as a bodyguard, whom he called the Celeres, not in war only but in peace as well.

When he had wrought these immortal works, and was holding an assembly to review the army on the field by the Goat’s Marsh, of a sudden a storm arose with great crash and thunder, and wrapped the king in a cloud so dense that it took the sight of him from the assembly; nor thereafter was Romulus upon the earth. When the panic was at last allayed, and after so turbulent a day a clear and tranquil light returned, the Roman youth, seeing the royal seat empty—though they believed well enough the Fathers who had stood nearest, that he had been caught up on high by the storm—yet, as though stricken with the fear of bereavement, kept a mournful silence for a while. Then, a beginning made by a few, they all hail Romulus as a god, born of a god, king and father of the Roman city; with prayers they implore his favor, that, willing and gracious, he would forever keep safe his own offspring. There were, I believe, even then some who silently charged that the king had been torn apart by the hands of the Fathers; for this rumor too got abroad, but very obscurely; the other version the admiration of the man and the present dread made famous. And credit was added to the matter, it is said, by the device of a single man. For Proculus Julius, while the state was troubled with longing for the king and set against the Fathers, a weighty authority (so it is handed down) for any matter however great, comes forward into the assembly. “Romulus,” he said, “Quirites, the father of this city, at the first light today came down suddenly from the sky and showed himself to me. While I stood drenched with awe and full of reverence, praying that it might be lawful to look upon him face to face, he said: ‘Go, announce to the Romans that it is the will of heaven that my Rome shall be the capital of the world; therefore let them cherish the art of war, and let them know, and so hand down to posterity, that no human power can withstand Roman arms.’ This said,” he told them, “he departed on high.” It is wonderful what credit was given that man as he announced these things, and how the longing for Romulus among the commons and the army was soothed once belief in his immortality was established.

Meanwhile the Fathers’ minds were stirred by rivalry and the lust for the kingship. It had not yet come down to individuals, since no one stood out greatly in the new people: the struggle was carried on by factions among the orders. Those sprung from the Sabines, lest—because since Tatius’s death there had been no king from their side—they should lose their hold on the sovereignty in an equal partnership, wanted a king created from their own body; the old Romans spurned a foreign king. Amid these various wishes, all nevertheless wished to be under a king, the sweetness of liberty being not yet tasted. Then fear came upon the Fathers, lest some force from without should assail a state without government and an army without a leader, while the tempers of many surrounding cities were inflamed. And so it pleased them that there should be some head, yet no one could bring himself to yield to another. Thus the hundred Fathers share the matter among themselves, ten decuries being made, and single men chosen, one to each decury, to preside over the sum of affairs. Ten governed; one alone had the insignia of command and the lictors. Their authority was bounded by a space of five days, and passed in turn through them all; and for a year there was an interval of the kingship. From the thing itself it was called the interregnum—a name it keeps even now. Then the commons began to murmur that their servitude was multiplied, that a hundred masters had been made instead of one; and they seemed about to suffer no more than a king, and one created by themselves. When the Fathers perceived that such feelings were astir, judging it best to offer of their own accord what they were bound to lose, they win goodwill by entrusting the supreme power to the people, on terms that gave it no more right than they kept for themselves. For they decreed that, when the people had chosen a king, it should be ratified only if the Fathers gave their sanction. To this day the same right is exercised in the passing of laws and the choosing of magistrates, though its force is taken away: before the people enters upon its vote, while the outcome of the election is yet uncertain, the Fathers give their sanction. Then the interrex, having called an assembly, said: “May it be good, auspicious, and fortunate—Quirites, choose a king; so it has seemed good to the Fathers. The Fathers will then give their sanction, if you choose one worthy to be counted second from Romulus.” So pleasing was this to the commons that, not to seem outdone in generosity, they voted and ordered only this much: that the Senate should decree who was to reign at Rome.

Renowned in those days for justice and piety was Numa Pompilius. He dwelt at Cures among the Sabines, a man most deeply versed—so far as anyone in that age could be—in all law, divine and human. As the source of his learning, since no other is alleged, they falsely name Pythagoras of Samos; who, it is agreed, in the reign of Servius Tullius at Rome, more than a hundred years later, on the farthest shore of Italy, about Metapontum, Heraclea, and Croton, held gatherings of young men eager to follow his teaching. From those regions, even had he been of the same age, what report could have reached the Sabines? Or by what commerce of language could he have stirred anyone to a desire of learning? Or under what protection could one man have made his way through so many nations differing in speech and in manners? I am of the opinion, therefore, that his spirit was tempered to the virtues by his own native gift, and trained not so much by foreign arts as by the stern and austere discipline of the ancient Sabines, than which no breed of men was once more incorrupt. At the name of Numa the Roman Fathers, although it seemed that power would incline toward the Sabines if a king were taken from there, yet, since none dared prefer either himself, or another of his own faction, or in short any of the Fathers or citizens, to that man, decree with one accord that the kingship be conferred upon Numa Pompilius. Summoned to Rome, he bade—just as Romulus had won his kingship by augury at the founding of the city—that the gods be consulted concerning himself as well. Thereupon, led down to the citadel by an augur—to whom thereafter, in honor of this, that public priesthood was made perpetual—he sat down on a stone, facing south. The augur took his seat on Numa’s left, his head veiled, holding in his right hand a crook without a knot, curved at the top, which they called the lituus. Then, when he had taken in his view of the city and the country, and prayed to the gods, he marked out the regions from east to west, calling the parts to the south the right, those to the north the left; the landmark opposite, as far as his eyes could reach, he fixed in his mind. Then, shifting the lituus to his left hand and laying his right upon Numa’s head, he prayed thus: “Father Jupiter, if it is right that this Numa Pompilius, whose head I hold, be king at Rome, show us sure signs within the bounds I have made.” Then he set forth in words the auspices he wished to be sent. When they had been sent, Numa, declared king, came down from the precinct.

Having thus won the kingship, he prepares to found anew, upon law, statutes, and customs, a city founded by force and arms. And seeing that men could not grow used to these amid wars—since military life made their tempers savage—and judging that a fierce people must be softened by disuse of arms, he built, at the foot of the Argiletum, a temple of Janus as an index of peace and war: open, it signified that the state was under arms; shut, that all the peoples round about were at peace. Twice only since Numa’s reign has it been shut: once in the consulship of Titus Manlius, after the close of the First Punic War; the second time—which the gods granted our age to see—after the war of Actium, when peace had been won by land and sea by the commander Caesar Augustus. Having shut it, when by alliance and treaties he had bound to himself the goodwill of all the neighbors round about, and the cares of foreign perils were laid aside, lest minds which the fear of enemies and military discipline had held in check should run riot in idleness, he judged that, first of all, the fear of the gods must be instilled into them—a thing most effective with an ignorant multitude, rude as men were in those ages. Since this could not sink into their hearts without some fiction of a marvel, he pretends that he has nightly meetings with the goddess Egeria; that by her counsel he establishes the rites most acceptable to the gods, and sets over each of the gods his own priests. And first of all he divides the year, according to the courses of the moon, into twelve months; and because the moon does not fill out thirty days to each month, and eleven days are wanting to the full year that the sun completes in its solstitial round, he so adjusted it, by inserting intercalary months, that in the twentieth year the days should come round, the full spaces of all the years being complete, to the same goal of the sun from which they had set out. The same king made days unlawful and lawful for public business, since it would sometimes be useful that nothing be transacted with the people.

Then he turned his mind to the creating of priests, although he himself performed very many of the rites, especially those that now belong to the flamen Dialis. But because, in a warlike state, he thought there would be more kings like Romulus than like Numa, and that they would go in person to the wars, lest the rites of the king’s office should be forsaken, he created a flamen as a perpetual priest of Jupiter, and adorned him with a distinctive robe and the royal curule chair. To him he added two flamens, one for Mars, the other for Quirinus; and he chose virgins for Vesta—a priesthood originating from Alba and not foreign to the founder’s stock. To these, that they might be perpetual ministers of the temple, he appointed a stipend from the public purse, and made them venerable and holy by their virginity and other observances. The Salii, likewise, twelve in number, he chose for Mars Gradivus, and gave them the distinction of an embroidered tunic, and over the tunic a bronze covering for the breast; and he bade them bear the heavenly arms, which are called the ancilia, and go through the city singing their hymns with leaping and a solemn dance. Then he chose, from among the Fathers, as pontifex, Numa Marcius, son of Marcus, and to him he assigned all the sacred rites, written out and sealed: with what victims, on what days, at what temples the rites should be performed, and from what source the money for those costs should be drawn. All other rites too, public and private, he made subject to the rulings of the pontifex, that there might be one to whom the commons could come for counsel, lest anything of divine law be disordered by neglecting the rites of the fathers and taking up foreign ones; and that the same pontifex should teach not the rites of heaven only, but also due funeral observances and the appeasing of the spirits of the dead, and what prodigies sent by lightning or by any other sight should be accepted and dealt with. To draw out these things from the divine minds, he dedicated on the Aventine an altar to Jupiter Elicius, and consulted the god by augury as to what should be undertaken.

With the whole multitude turned from violence and arms to the considering and performing of these things, their minds were both occupied in having something to do, and the unbroken care of the gods—since the heavenly power seemed to take part in human affairs—had so steeped the breasts of all in piety that faith and the oath governed the state in place of the fear of laws and penalties. And while men shaped themselves to the manners of the king as to a unique model, the neighboring peoples too—who had before believed that not a city but a camp had been set in their midst to trouble the peace of all—were brought to such reverence that they thought it impious to do violence to a state wholly turned to the worship of the gods. There was a grove, through the midst of which a spring flowed from a dark cave with perennial water. Because Numa very often betook himself there without witnesses, as if to meet the goddess, he consecrated the grove to the Camenae, on the ground that there were the meetings of those goddesses with his consort Egeria; and he established a yearly rite to Faith. To that shrine he bade the flamens be carried in a two-horse arched car, and to perform the rite with the hand wrapped to the fingers, signifying that faith must be guarded, and that its seat is sacred even in the right hands of men. Many other sacrifices too, and places for performing the rites—which the pontiffs call the Argei—he dedicated. Yet of all his works the greatest was his guardianship, through the whole time of his reign, of a peace no less than of the kingdom. So two kings in succession, by different paths—the one by war, the other by peace—increased the state. Romulus reigned thirty-seven years, Numa forty-three. The state was both strong and tempered by the arts of war and of peace alike.

At Numa’s death the state reverted to an interregnum. Then the people made Tullus Hostilius king—grandson of that Hostilius whose battle against the Sabines, at the foot of the citadel, had been famous—and the Fathers gave their sanction. He was not only unlike the king before him, but even fiercer than Romulus. Both his age and his strength, and his grandfather’s glory too, spurred his spirit. Judging, then, that the state was growing old with idleness, he sought everywhere occasion for stirring up war. It chanced that Roman countryfolk drove off plunder from Alban territory, and the Albans from Roman, by turns. Gaius Cluilius then ruled at Alba. From both sides envoys were sent at about the same time to seek redress. Tullus had charged his men to do nothing before they delivered their commission; he knew well enough that the Alban would refuse, and that so war could be declared with a clear conscience. By the Albans the matter was handled more carelessly; received in hospitality by Tullus, kindly and graciously, they keep the king’s banquet in good fellowship. Meanwhile the Romans had both been first in seeking redress, and, when the Alban refused, had declared war within thirty days. This they report to Tullus. Then Tullus gives the envoys leave to say what they had come to ask. They, ignorant of all that had passed, first waste time in excuses: that they would say against their will anything that might displease Tullus, but that they were constrained by their orders; that they had come to seek redress; and that, if it were not given, they were bidden to declare war. To this Tullus said: “Announce to your king that the Roman king takes the gods to witness which people first spurned and dismissed the envoys who sought redress, that upon that people they may visit all the disasters of this war.”

These things the Albans report at home. And on both sides war was being made ready with the utmost effort, most like a civil war, almost between parents and children—both of Trojan stock, since Lavinium was from Troy, Alba from Lavinium, and the Romans were sprung from the line of Alba’s kings. Yet the outcome of the war made the struggle less pitiable, since there was no fighting in the field, and, only the buildings of one of the cities being thrown down, the two peoples were merged into one. The Albans first, with a huge army, made an inroad into Roman territory. They pitch camp not more than five miles from the city, and surround it with a trench; this, from the leader’s name, was for some ages called the Cluilian Trench, until, with the thing, the name too faded with age. In this camp Cluilius, the Alban king, dies; the Albans make Mettius Fufetius dictator. Meanwhile Tullus, grown fierce—above all at the king’s death—and crying again and again that the great power of the gods, beginning with the very head, would exact punishment upon the whole Alban name for the impious war, passes the enemy’s camp by night and marches with a hostile army into Alban territory. This drew Mettius from his standing camp. He leads as close to the enemy as he can. Then he bids a legate, sent ahead, announce to Tullus that before they fight there is need of a parley; if he will meet with him, he knows well that he will bring forward matters that concern the Roman cause no less than the Alban. Not scorning it, yet ready—should empty words be brought—to lead out his line, Tullus consents. The Albans too come out to meet him. When they stood marshaled on both sides, the leaders, with a few of the chief men, come forward into the midst. There the Alban begins: “Wrongs, and goods not restored according to the treaty though demanded back—these, and that our king Cluilius is the cause of this war, I seem to have heard; nor do I doubt, Tullus, that you allege the same. But if the truth is to be spoken rather than what is specious to say, it is the lust of empire that goads two kindred and neighboring peoples to arms. Whether rightly or wrongly, I do not judge; let that have been the deliberation of him who took up the war; me the Albans made leader for the waging of it. This I would have you warned of, Tullus: how great the Etruscan power is about us, and chiefly about you—the nearer you are, the better you know it. They are strong on land, strongest at sea. Remember that, the moment you give the signal for battle, these two lines of ours will be a spectacle to them, so that they may fall upon victor and vanquished together, wearied and spent. And so, if the gods love us—since, not content with assured liberty, we go to the doubtful hazard of empire or slavery—let us enter upon some path by which it may be decided which shall rule the other, without great slaughter, without much blood of either people.” The proposal does not displease Tullus, though by temper, and by hope of victory, he was the fiercer. As both sides cast about, a plan is hit upon, for which Fortune herself supplied the matter.

It chanced that there were then in the two armies triplet brothers, not ill-matched in age or strength. That they were the Horatii and the Curiatii is agreed well enough, nor is almost any tale of antiquity more renowned; yet, in a matter so famous, an uncertainty of names remains—of which people the Horatii were, of which the Curiatii. Authorities draw it both ways; but I find more who call the Romans Horatii; to follow these my mind inclines. The kings treat with the triplets, that each should fight with the sword for his own fatherland: there the dominion should be where the victory had been. There is no refusal; time and place are agreed. Before they fought, a treaty was struck between Romans and Albans on these terms: that whichever people’s citizens should win in that contest, that people should rule the other in good peace. Treaties differ, one in this clause, another in that; but they are all made in the same fashion. Thus, then, we have received that it was done, nor is there an older memory of any treaty. The fetial put this question to King Tullus: “Do you bid me, king, strike a treaty with the pater patratus of the Alban people?” The king bidding it, he said: “I demand of you, king, the sacred herbs.” The king said: “Take them pure.” The fetial brought from the citadel a pure stalk of grass. Then he questioned the king thus: “King, do you make me the royal envoy of the Roman People of the Quirites, with my vessels and my companions?” The king answered: “So far as may be done without harm to me and to the Roman People of the Quirites, I do.” The fetial was Marcus Valerius; he made Spurius Fusius pater patratus, touching his head and hair with the sacred branch. The pater patratus is made for the swearing of the oath—that is, for the sanctioning of the treaty—and he goes through it with many words, set forth in a long formula which it is not worth while to record. Then, the terms read out, he said: “Hear, Jupiter; hear, pater patratus of the Alban people; hear, you, the Alban people. As those terms, first to last, have been read aloud from those tablets or wax, without ill intent, and as here today they have been most rightly understood, from those terms the Roman people shall not be the first to fall away. But if it shall first fall away, by public counsel and with ill intent, then do you, Diespiter, on that day so strike the Roman people as I here today shall strike this pig; and strike the more, by so much as you have the more power and might.” When he had said this, he struck the pig with a flint stone. The Albans likewise performed their own formulas and their own oath, by their dictator and their priests.

The treaty struck, the triplets, as had been agreed, take up arms. While each side urged on its own—their fathers’ gods, their fatherland and parents, all the citizens at home, all in the army, looking now upon their arms, now upon their hands—fierce both by their own temper and full of the voices of those who cheered them on, they advance into the midst between the two lines. The two armies had taken their seats, each before its own camp, free rather from present danger than from care; for it was empire that was at stake, set upon the valor and fortune of so few. And so, on edge and in suspense, they strain their minds upon a spectacle in no way pleasing. The signal is given, and with hostile arms, like battle lines, the three young men on each side rush together, bearing the spirit of great armies. Neither the one set nor the other has its own peril before its mind, but the public dominion or servitude, and the fortune of the fatherland thereafter, which they themselves would make. As, at the very first encounter, the arms clashed and the flashing swords gleamed, a mighty shudder grips the onlookers; and, with hope inclining to neither side, voice and breath were numb. Then, when they had come to grips, and now not the mere movement of bodies and the wavering play of weapons and arms, but wounds too and blood were the spectacle, two of the Romans, one upon the other, fell expiring, three of the Albans being wounded. At their fall, when the Alban army had shouted for joy, all hope—though not yet all anxiety—had now forsaken the Roman legions, breathless for the lot of the one whom the three Curiatii had ringed about. He chanced to be unhurt; so that, while no match at all for them all together, against them one by one he was fierce. Therefore, to sunder their fighting, he takes to flight, judging that they would follow as each man’s body, weakened by its wound, allowed. He had now fled some little space from the place where they had fought, when, looking back, he sees them following at great intervals—one not far behind him. Upon him he turned back with a great rush; and while the Alban army shouts to the Curiatii to bring aid to their brother, already Horatius, the foe slain, was making for a second fight, a victor. Then, with a shout such as bursts from men who favor beyond hope, the Romans cheer on their soldier; and he hastens to have done with the fight. And so, before the next—who was not far off—could come up, he dispatches the second Curiatius too. And now, the combat made even, single men were left, but matched neither in hope nor in strength. The one, his body untouched by the steel, and his doubled victory, went fierce to the third contest; the other, dragging a body spent with its wound, spent with running, and beaten beforehand by the slaughter of his brothers before his eyes, is flung against his victorious foe. Nor was that a fight. The Roman, exulting, cries: “Two I have given to the shades of my brothers; the third I will give to the cause of this war, that the Roman may rule the Alban.” As the man scarce held up his arms, he drives his sword down from above into his throat, and strips him as he lies. The Romans, exulting and giving thanks, receive Horatius, with the greater joy the nearer the thing had been to fear. They turn then to the burial of their dead, by no means with even spirits, since the one people was enlarged with empire, the other made subject to another’s sway. The tombs stand where each fell: the two Roman in one place, nearer Alba; the three Alban toward Rome, but parted in their sites, as the fight too had been.

Before they parted from there, when Mettius asked, according to the treaty struck, what he commanded, Tullus orders him to keep the young men under arms: he would use their service, should there be war with the Veientes. So the armies were led off from there to their homes. Horatius went first, bearing before him the threefold spoils; and his maiden sister, who had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii, met him before the Capene Gate; and recognizing upon her brother’s shoulders the war-cloak of her betrothed, which she herself had made, she loosed her hair and with weeping called by name upon her dead betrothed. It stirred the fierce young man’s spirit, this wailing of his sister amid his own victory and amid so great a public joy. And so, drawing his sword, while at the same time he rebuked her with words, he runs the girl through. “Go hence, with your untimely love, to your betrothed,” he said, “you who have forgotten your brothers, the dead and the living, forgotten your fatherland. So perish whatever Roman woman shall mourn an enemy.” A foul deed it seemed to Fathers and commons alike, but his recent merit stood against the deed. Nevertheless he was haled into court before the king. The king, that he might not himself be the author of so grim and unwelcome a judgment, and of the punishment that would follow the judgment, called an assembly of the people and said: “I appoint duumvirs to judge Horatius for treason, according to the law.” The law was of dreadful wording: “Let the duumvirs judge for treason; if he appeal from the duumvirs, let the matter be contested by the appeal; if they prevail, veil his head; hang him by a rope from the barren tree; scourge him, whether within the pomerium or without the pomerium.” By this law duumvirs were appointed; and they, thinking that by that law they could not acquit even an innocent man, when they had condemned him, then one of them said: “Publius Horatius, I judge you guilty of treason. Go, lictor, bind his hands.” The lictor had come up and was throwing the noose. Then Horatius, at the prompting of Tullus, a merciful interpreter of the law, said: “I appeal.” And so by the appeal the matter was contested before the people. Men were moved in that trial above all by Publius Horatius the father, who cried aloud that he judged his daughter rightly slain; were it not so, he would have used a father’s right upon his son. Then he begged that they would not make him, whom a little before they had seen with a glorious offspring, childless of his children. Amid this the old man, embracing the young one, and pointing to the spoils of the Curiatii fixed in the place which is now called the Horatian Spears, said: “Can you bear, Quirites, to see bound beneath the fork, amid scourging and torment, this man whom but now you saw advancing decked and exulting in victory?—a sight so hideous that scarce could Alban eyes endure it. Go, lictor, bind the hands that but now, in arms, won empire for the Roman people. Go, veil the head of the liberator of this city; hang him on the barren tree; scourge him, whether within the pomerium—but among those spears and the spoils of the enemy—or without the pomerium—but among the tombs of the Curiatii. For whither can you lead this young man where his own honors do not redeem him from so great a foulness of punishment?” The people bore neither the father’s tears nor the young man’s own spirit, equal in every peril, and acquitted him, more from admiration of his valor than by the justice of his cause. And so, that a manifest killing might yet be atoned by some expiation, the father was bidden to expiate his son at the public cost. He, certain expiatory sacrifices being made, which were thereafter handed down to the Horatian clan, set a beam across the street, and sent the young man, his head covered, as it were under the yoke. This remains even today, always restored at public charge: they call it the Sister’s Beam. For Horatia a tomb of squared stone was built in the place where she had fallen, struck down.

Nor did the Alban peace long endure. The ill-will of the mob, that the public fortune had been entrusted to three soldiers, corrupted the dictator’s shallow nature; and, since honest counsels had not turned out well, he began to win back the hearts of his countrymen by crooked ones. Therefore, as before in war he had sought peace, so now in peace he sought war; and because he saw that his own state had more spirit than strength, he stirs up other peoples to wage war openly and by formal declaration, while for his own men he reserves treachery under the show of alliance. The Fidenates, a Roman colony, with the Veientes taken into the plot, are roused to war and arms by a compact that the Albans should go over to them. When Fidenae had openly revolted, Tullus, summoning Mettius and his army from Alba, leads against the enemy. When he had crossed the Anio, he places his camp at the confluence. Between that spot and Fidenae the army of the Veientes had crossed the Tiber. These, in the line of battle, held the right wing near the river; on the left the Fidenates take their stand nearer the hills. Tullus draws up his men against the Veientine foe, and places the Albans opposite the legion of the Fidenates. The Alban had no more courage than good faith. So, daring neither to stand nor to go over openly, he edges off little by little toward the hills; then, when he judged he had drawn off far enough, he raises his whole line, and, wavering in mind, to waste time deploys his ranks. His plan was to incline his strength to the side on which Fortune should grant the day. At first it was a marvel to the Romans who had stood nearest, when they perceived their flanks laid bare by the withdrawal of their allies; then a horseman, his horse at the gallop, announces to the king that the Albans were going off. In the alarm Tullus vowed twelve Salii, and shrines to Pallor and Panic. Rebuking the horseman in a loud voice, that the enemy might overhear, he bids him return to the battle: there was no need of alarm; the Alban army was being led round by his own order, to fall upon the bared backs of the Fidenates; he also orders the horsemen to raise their spears. This done, it screened from a great part of the Roman infantry the sight of the departing Alban army; and those who had seen it, believing what had been heard from the king, fight all the more keenly. The terror passes over to the enemy; they too had heard the words spoken aloud, and a great part of the Fidenates, as men to whom Roman colonists had been added, knew Latin. And so, lest by a sudden charge of the Albans down from the hills they should be cut off from the town, they turn their backs. Tullus presses on; and having routed the wing of the Fidenates, he returns the fiercer against the Veientes, smitten with a panic not their own. Nor did they withstand the onset; but from their headlong flight the river, set at their backs, barred them. When their flight had inclined thither, some, foully flinging away their arms, rushed blindly into the water; others, while they hesitate on the banks, were overwhelmed between the resolve to fly and to fight. No Roman battle before that was more savage.

Then the Alban army, a spectator of the contest, was brought down into the plain. Mettius congratulates Tullus on the enemy’s defeat; in return Tullus addresses Mettius kindly. That it might turn out well, he bids the Albans join their camp to the Roman camp; he makes ready a purificatory sacrifice for the next day. When it grew light, all being ready as is usual, he bids both armies be called to an assembly. The heralds, beginning from the farthest, summoned the Albans first. These, moved also by the novelty of the thing—to hear the Roman king address the assembly—took their stand nearest. By prearrangement the armed Roman legion is set about them; to the centurions the task had been given to carry out their orders without delay. Then Tullus thus begins: “Romans, if ever before in any war there was cause for you to give thanks first to the immortal gods, and then to your own valor, it was yesterday’s battle. For the struggle was not so much with the enemy as—a struggle greater and more perilous—with the treachery and perfidy of allies. For, lest a false opinion hold you, it was without my order that the Albans went off to the hills; nor was that any command of mine, but a device and a pretense of command, that the resolve to fight might not, while you knew nothing, be turned aside by your sense of being deserted, and that terror and flight might be cast upon the enemy, who thought themselves surrounded from the rear. Nor is the guilt I charge the guilt of all the Albans: they followed their leader, as you too would have done, had I wished to turn the column aside anywhere. Mettius there is the leader of this march; Mettius the contriver of this war; Mettius the breaker of the treaty between Rome and Alba. Let another hereafter dare such things, unless in this man I give a signal lesson to mankind.” The armed centurions stand about Mettius; and the king goes through the rest as he had begun: “May it be good, auspicious, and fortunate for the Roman people, and for me and for you, Albans—it is my mind to bring the whole Alban people across to Rome, to give citizenship to the commons, to enroll the chief men among the Fathers, to make one city, one commonwealth. As the Alban state was once divided from one into two peoples, so now let it return into one.” At this the Alban youth, unarmed and ringed by armed men, in various wishes, yet constrained by a common fear, keep silence. Then Tullus said: “Mettius Fufetius, if you could yourself have learned to keep faith and treaties, that discipline would have been applied to you by me while you lived; but now, since your nature is past cure, do you at least by your punishment teach mankind to believe sacred the things which by you have been violated. As, then, a little while ago you bore a spirit divided between the Fidenate and the Roman cause, so now you shall give your body to be torn this way and that.” Thereupon, two four-horse teams being brought up, he binds Mettius, stretched out, to their cars; then the horses were driven in opposite directions, carrying off in each car the mangled body, where the limbs had clung to the bonds. All turned their eyes away from a spectacle so foul. That was the first and the last punishment among the Romans of a kind too little mindful of the laws of humanity: in other matters we may boast that no nation has been content with milder penalties.

Meanwhile horsemen had already been sent ahead to Alba to bring the multitude across to Rome. Then the legions were led off to raze the city. When they entered the gates, there was not indeed that uproar and panic which is wont to attend captured cities, when, the gates broken or the walls laid low by the ram, or the citadel taken by storm, the hostile shout and the rush of armed men through the city confound all with sword and flame; but a grim silence and a mute sorrow so fixed the minds of all that, in their fear—losing all counsel as to what they should leave, what carry with them, and asking one another again and again—now they stood upon their thresholds, now wandered through their houses to see them that last time. But when now the shout of the horsemen bidding them go pressed hard, when now the crash of the houses that were being pulled down was heard in the farthest parts of the city, and the dust, risen from scattered places, had filled all things as with a drawn cloud, hastily carrying out what each could, and leaving the household god and the Penates and the roofs under which each had been born and reared, they went forth; and now an unbroken column of migrants filled the roads, and the sight of one another renewed their tears by mutual pity, and pitiable cries too were heard—of the women especially—when they passed the august temples beset by armed men, and left their gods, as it were, captive. When the Albans had gone out from the city, the Roman levels to the ground all the buildings, public and private alike; and in a single hour he gave to destruction and ruin the work of the four hundred years through which Alba had stood. Yet the temples of the gods—for so the king had ordered—were spared.

Rome meanwhile grows by the ruins of Alba. The number of citizens is doubled; the Caelian hill is added to the city, and, that it might be the more thickly inhabited, Tullus chooses that for the site of his palace, and thereafter dwelt there. The chief men of the Albans he enrolled among the Fathers, that this part of the state too might grow—the Julii, the Servilii, the Quinctii, the Geganii, the Curiatii, the Cloelii; and for the order he had enlarged he built a temple, the Senate-house, which down to the age of our fathers was called the Curia Hostilia. And that something might be added to the strength of every order from the new people, he chose ten squadrons of knights from the Albans, filled out the old legions with the same reinforcement, and enrolled new ones. In this confidence of strength Tullus declares war on the Sabines, a nation in that age, next after the Etruscans, the most powerful in men and arms. Wrongs had been done on both sides, and redress sought in vain. Tullus complained that Roman traders had been seized at the crowded market by the shrine of Feronia; the Sabines, that their own men had first taken refuge in the grove and been detained at Rome. These were the alleged causes of the war. The Sabines, by no means forgetting that part of their own strength had been planted at Rome by Tatius, and that the Roman state had lately been enlarged too by the addition of the Alban people, look about them likewise for outside aid. Etruria was near; the nearest of the Etruscans were the Veientes. From there, their spirits stirred to revolt above all by the lingering angers of past wars, they drew off volunteers, and among certain vagabonds of the needy commons even hire prevailed. By public aid they were helped by none; and among the Veientes—for as to the rest it is less to be wondered at—the faith of the truce pledged with Romulus prevailed. While both sides were making ready war with the utmost effort, and the matter seemed to turn on which should be first to bear arms, Tullus forestalls them by crossing into Sabine territory. There was a savage battle by the Wood of Malice, where the Roman line was strongest both in the might of its foot and, above all, in its cavalry, lately increased. By a sudden charge of the horsemen the Sabine ranks were thrown into disorder; and thereafter neither could their battle stand firm nor their flight be carried through without great slaughter.

The Sabines conquered, while the reign of Tullus and the whole Roman state stood in great glory and great wealth, it was announced to the king and the Fathers that on the Alban mount it had rained stones. Since this could scarcely be believed, when men were sent to look into the prodigy, before their eyes, just as when the winds drive close-packed hail upon the earth, thick stones fell from the sky. They seemed also to hear a mighty voice from the grove on the topmost peak, bidding the Albans perform their rites by the rite of their fathers—rites which, as though they had given over their gods too, together with their fatherland, to oblivion, they had consigned to forgetfulness, and had either taken up the Roman rites, or, angry at their fortune, as happens, had abandoned the worship of the gods. By the Romans too, from the same prodigy, a nine days’ rite was publicly undertaken—whether at a heavenly voice sent from the Alban mount (for that too is handed down), or at the warning of the haruspices; at all events it remained a fixed observance that, whenever the same prodigy was announced, holy days should be kept for nine days. Not long after, they were afflicted with a pestilence. And though from it a reluctance for military service arose, yet no rest from arms was granted by the warlike king, who believed that young men’s bodies were even healthier in the field than at home—until he himself too was entangled in a lingering sickness. Then those fierce spirits of his were so broken, together with his body, that he who had before thought nothing less kingly than to give his mind to sacred things now, of a sudden, lived a slave to every superstition, great and small, and filled the people too with scruples. Men now commonly, longing for that state of things which had been under King Numa, believed that the one help left for their sick bodies was that peace and pardon should be won from the gods. They relate that the king himself, turning over the commentaries of Numa, when he had found there certain secret sacrifices made to Jupiter Elicius, hid himself away to perform those rites; but that the rite was not duly entered upon or carried out, and that not only was no heavenly vision vouchsafed him, but that, by the wrath of Jupiter, provoked by the faulty observance, he was struck by lightning and burned up together with his house. Tullus reigned, in great glory of war, thirty-two years.

Tullus being dead, the government had reverted, as had been the practice from the very beginning, to the Fathers, and they had named an interrex. He holding the assembly, the people made Ancus Marcius king; the Fathers gave their sanction. Ancus Marcius was the grandson of King Numa Pompilius, sprung from his daughter. When he began to reign, mindful both of his grandfather’s glory, and because the last reign, in other respects excellent, had been on one side not prosperous enough—the rites being either neglected or wrongly performed—he judged it far the most important thing to perform the public rites as they had been instituted by Numa; and he orders the pontifex to copy them all out from the king’s commentaries onto a whitened board and set them up in public. From this both the citizens, eager for peace, and the neighboring states conceived a hope that the king would revert to his grandfather’s ways and institutions. And so the Latins, with whom a treaty had been struck in Tullus’s reign, had taken heart; and, having made an inroad into Roman territory, they return a haughty answer to the Romans seeking redress, thinking that the Roman king would idly pass his reign among chapels and altars. But there was a middle temper in Ancus, mindful both of Numa and of Romulus; and besides that he believed peace had been more necessary in his grandfather’s reign, with a people both new and fierce, he reckoned also that the leisure which had fallen to Numa, without injury, he himself would not easily keep: his patience was being tried, and, once tried, despised; and the times were fitter for a king like Tullus than for one like Numa. Yet, since Numa had instituted the rites of religion in peace, that by himself the ceremonies of war might be handed down, and that wars might not only be waged but also declared by some rite, he transcribed, from the ancient nation of the Aequicoli, the law—which the fetials now have—by which redress is sought. When the envoy comes to the borders of those from whom redress is sought, his head veiled with a fillet—the veil is of wool—he says: “Hear, Jupiter; hear, you boundaries”—he names the nation, whichever it is—“let Right hear. I am the public herald of the Roman people; justly and piously I come as envoy, and let faith be given to my words.” Then he sets forth his demands. Thereafter he makes Jupiter his witness: “If I unjustly and impiously demand that those men and those goods be given up to me, then suffer me never to be a partaker of my fatherland.” These words he recites when he crosses the boundaries; these to whatever man first meets him; these as he enters the gate; these when he has entered the forum—a few words of the formula and of the framing of the oath being changed. If those whom he demands are not surrendered within thirty-three days—for so many are the appointed days—he declares war thus: “Hear, Jupiter, and you, Janus Quirinus, and all you gods of heaven, and you of earth, and you of the underworld, hear. I call you to witness that this people”—he names whichever it is—“is unjust and does not render what is due. But of these matters we will consult the elders at home, in what way we may obtain our right.” Then the herald returns to Rome to take counsel. Forthwith the king consulted the Fathers in words nearly these: “Of the things, the disputes, the causes whereof the pater patratus of the Roman People of the Quirites has given notice to the pater patratus of the Old Latins and to the men of the Old Latins—which things they have neither given, nor paid, nor done, which things ought to have been given, paid, done—say,” he said to the one he asked first for his opinion, “what think you?” Then the other: “I judge that they should be sought by pure and pious war, and so I consent and vote.” Then the rest were asked in order; and whenever the greater part of those present went into the same opinion, war was agreed. It was customary that the fetial should carry to their borders a spear iron-tipped, or fire-hardened and blood-red, and, in the presence of not fewer than three grown men, say: “Whereas the peoples of the Old Latins, and the men of the Old Latins, have offended and done wrong against the Roman People of the Quirites; whereas the Roman People of the Quirites has ordered that there be war with the Old Latins, and the Senate of the Roman People of the Quirites has resolved, agreed, and voted that war be made with the Old Latins—for this cause I, and the Roman people, declare and make war upon the peoples of the Old Latins and the men of the Old Latins.” When he had said this, he would hurl the spear into their borders. In this fashion, then, redress was sought of the Latins, and war declared; and that custom posterity received.

Ancus, having committed the care of the rites to the flamens and the other priests, set out with a new army enrolled, and took by storm Politorium, a city of the Latins; and, following the practice of the former kings, who had enlarged the Roman state by receiving enemies into the citizenship, he brought the whole multitude across to Rome. And since around the Palatine, the seat of the old Romans, the Sabines had filled the Capitol and the citadel, and the Albans the Caelian hill, the Aventine was given to the new multitude. Added to the same quarter not long after, when Tellenae and Ficana were taken, were new citizens. Politorium was then again attacked in war, because the Old Latins had occupied it empty; and this was the reason for the Romans’ destroying that city, that it might not be forever a refuge for the enemy. At last, the whole Latin war being driven together to Medullia, there for some while the fighting was with doubtful issue and varying fortune; for the city was safe in its fortifications and strengthened with a stout garrison, and, the Latin army being encamped in the open, several times it had joined standards hand to hand with the Romans. At the last, Ancus, straining with all his forces, conquers first in the field; thence, master of huge plunder, he returns to Rome, then too with many thousands of Latins received into citizenship, to whom, that the Aventine might be joined to the Palatine, dwellings were given by the altar of Murcia. The Janiculum too was added—not from want of room, but lest that height should one day be a stronghold of the enemy. It was resolved not only to fortify it, but also, for the convenience of passage, to join it to the city by a pile-bridge, then for the first time made over the Tiber. The Trench of the Quirites too—no small defense on the side where the approach is more level—is the work of King Ancus. The state being enlarged with vast growth, since in so great a multitude of men, the distinction between right and wrong being blurred, deeds were done in secret, a prison is built, to overawe the increasing boldness, in the midst of the city, overhanging the forum. Nor did the city only grow under this king, but the territory and borders too. The Maesian Wood was taken from the Veientes; the dominion was carried to the sea; and at the mouth of the Tiber the city of Ostia was founded; salt-works were made round about; and, for deeds excellently done in war, the temple of Jupiter Feretrius was enlarged.

In the reign of Ancus, Lucumo, a man of energy and powerful in riches, migrated to Rome, chiefly from desire and hope of great office, the means of attaining which had not been his at Tarquinii—for there too he was sprung of foreign stock. He was the son of Demaratus of Corinth, who, a fugitive from home because of factions, had chanced to settle at Tarquinii; and, having there taken a wife, begot two sons. Their names were Lucumo and Arruns. Lucumo survived his father, heir of all his goods; Arruns died before his father, leaving his wife with child. Nor does the father long survive his son; who, since, not knowing his daughter-in-law to be with child, he had died unmindful of his grandson in his will, to the boy, born after his grandfather’s death to no share of the goods, the name Egerius was given, from his neediness. To Lucumo, on the other hand, heir of all the goods, since riches now lent him spirit, this was increased by his marriage with Tanaquil, a woman of the highest birth, and one who would not easily allow that into which she had married to be humbler than the rank in which she had been born. The Etruscans scorning Lucumo, sprung from a banished stranger, she could not bear the indignity; and, forgetting the inborn love of fatherland, provided only she might see her husband honored, she formed the plan of migrating from Tarquinii. Rome seemed the most suitable for this: in a new people, where all nobility is sudden and won by merit, there would be room for a brave and energetic man; Tatius the Sabine had reigned, Numa had been summoned to the kingship from Cures, and Ancus was sprung of a Sabine mother and noble by the single image of Numa. She easily persuades a man eager for office, and to whom Tarquinii was a fatherland only on his mother’s side. And so, their goods taken up, they remove to Rome. They had chanced to come to the Janiculum. There, as he sat in his carriage with his wife, an eagle, gently swooping down on poised wings, snatches off his cap, and, flying with a great clangor above the carriage, sets it again fitly upon his head, as though sent by divine ministry; then departed on high. This omen Tanaquil is said to have received with joy, a woman skilled, as the Etruscans commonly are, in heavenly portents. Embracing her husband, she bids him hope for high and lofty things: that such a bird, from that quarter of the sky and as the messenger of that god, had come; that it had made its augury about the very crown of a man; that it had lifted the adornment set upon a human head, to restore it by divine will to the same. Bearing these hopes and thoughts with them, they entered the city; and, a dwelling there being procured, they gave out his name as Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. To the Romans his newness and his riches made him conspicuous; and he himself helped on his fortune by kindly address, by the courtesy of his invitations, and by winning to himself with benefits whom he could, until report of him was carried even to the palace. And that acquaintance he had in a short time, by performing his services generously and adroitly, brought to the rights of an intimate friendship, so that he took part alike in public and private counsels, in war and at home; and, tried in all things, was at last even appointed by will guardian to the king’s children.

Ancus reigned twenty-four years, the equal of any of the former kings in the arts and the glory of war and peace alike. His sons were now near the age of manhood. The more on that account did Tarquinius press that the assembly for choosing a king should be held as soon as possible; and when it had been proclaimed, just at the time he sent the boys away to hunt. He is said to have been the first both to have canvassed for the kingship and to have delivered a speech composed to win the hearts of the commons: that he sought no new thing, since he—not the first, which anyone might resent or wonder at, but the third foreigner—aimed at the kingship at Rome; that Tatius had been made king not from a foreigner only, but even from an enemy; and that Numa, ignorant of the city and not seeking it, had been summoned to the kingdom of his own accord; that he, from the time he was his own master, had migrated to Rome with his wife and all his fortunes; that the greater part of that span of life in which men discharge civil offices he had lived at Rome rather than in his old fatherland; that at home and in war, under no contemptible master, King Ancus himself, he had learned the Roman laws, the Roman rites; that in submission and deference toward the king he had vied with all men, and in kindness toward others with the king himself. As he recounted these things, not falsely, the Roman people, with vast consent, bade him reign. Therefore the man, in other things excellent, was followed even in his reign by the same canvassing he had used in seeking it; and, mindful no less of strengthening his own rule than of enlarging the commonwealth, he chose a hundred into the Fathers, who were thereafter called the Fathers of the lesser clans—a faction beyond doubt the king’s, by whose favor they had come into the Senate-house. He waged war first with the Latins, and there took by storm the town of Apiolae; and, bringing back from it more plunder than the report of the war had promised, he held games more richly and splendidly furnished than the former kings. Then for the first time a site was marked out for the circus now called the Greatest. Places were assigned to the Fathers and the knights where each might make stands for themselves; these were called fori. They watched from scaffolds that supported the stands raised twelve feet from the ground on forked beams. The show was horses and boxers, summoned chiefly from Etruria. Thereafter the games remained an annual solemnity, called variously the Roman and the Great Games. By the same king places about the forum were divided out to private persons to build on; porticoes and shops were made.

He was preparing also to gird the city with a stone wall, when the Sabine war broke in upon his beginnings. And so sudden was that matter that the enemy crossed the Anio before the Roman army could go to meet them and bar the way. And so there was alarm at Rome; and at first, with victory in doubt, the fighting was with great slaughter on both sides. Then, the enemy’s forces being led back into camp, and space given the Romans to make ready the war afresh, Tarquinius, judging that cavalry above all was wanting to his strength, resolved to add other centuries to the Ramnenses, Titienses, and Luceres which Romulus had enrolled, and to leave them marked with his own name. Because Romulus had done this after taking the auspices, Attus Navius, a famous augur in that age, denied that it could be changed, or anything new established, unless the birds had given assent. At this the king’s anger was stirred; and, mocking the art (as they tell), he said: “Come now, you diviner, take the auspices whether what I now conceive in my mind can be done.” When the other, having tried the matter by augury, said that it surely would come to pass, “But this,” he said, “is what I had in mind: that you should cut a whetstone in two with a razor. Take these, and do what your birds portend can be done.” Then, they say, he cut the whetstone in two without hesitation. A statue of Attus, with veiled head, stood in the place where the thing was done, in the comitium, on the very steps to the left of the Senate-house; the whetstone too, they record, was set in the same place, to be a monument of that marvel to posterity. To augury, at all events, and to the priesthood of the augurs, so great honor accrued that thereafter nothing was done in war or at home but after taking the auspices: assemblies of the people, the calling out of armies, the highest matters, were broken off where the birds did not allow them. Nor did Tarquinius then change anything as to the centuries of knights; he added only as many again in number, so that there were eighteen hundred knights in the three centuries. The later ones, who had been added, were called only by the same names; and these, because they were doubled, they now call the six centuries.

This part of his forces being increased, there is a second clash with the Sabines. But besides that the Roman army had grown in strength, guile too is added in secret, men being sent to throw into the river a great mass of timber that lay on the bank of the Anio, set ablaze; and, with the wind helping, the kindled timber, much of it driven against the rafts and clinging to the piles, sets the bridge on fire. This thing too brought terror upon the Sabines in the battle, and, when they were routed, hindered their flight; and many men, though they had escaped the enemy, perished in the river itself; whose floating arms, recognized at Rome in the Tiber almost before the news could come, made the victory famous. In that battle the chief glory was the cavalry’s; posted on both wings, when now the line of their own infantry in the center was being driven back, they so charged from the flanks, they say, that they not only stayed the Sabine legions fiercely pressing upon the yielding Romans, but suddenly turned them to flight. The Sabines made for the hills in headlong course, and few held them; the greatest part, as has been said, were driven by the horsemen into the river. Tarquinius, judging that the panic-stricken must be pressed, having sent the plunder and the captives to Rome, and the spoils of the enemy—this was a vow to Vulcan—being set ablaze in a huge heap, goes on to lead his army farther into Sabine territory; and although the matter had gone ill, and they could not hope to fare better, yet, because the situation gave no time for deliberation, the Sabines go to meet him with hastily levied troops; and, routed there again, with their cause now well-nigh lost, they sued for peace.

Collatia, and all the land this side of Collatia, was taken from the Sabines; and Egerius—he was the king’s brother’s son—was left in garrison at Collatia. And the Collatini were surrendered, so I find, and this is the formula of the surrender. The king asked: “Are you the envoys and spokesmen sent by the people of Collatia to surrender yourselves and the people of Collatia?” “We are.” “Is the people of Collatia in its own power?” “It is.” “Do you surrender yourselves and the people of Collatia—city, lands, water, boundary-marks, shrines, utensils, all things divine and human—into my power and the power of the Roman people?” “We surrender them.” “And I receive them.” The Sabine war finished, Tarquinius returns in triumph to Rome. Then he made war on the Old Latins. There, since it nowhere came to a struggle of the whole issue, by carrying his arms round against the several towns he subdued the entire Latin name. Corniculum, Old Ficulea, Cameria, Crustumerium, Ameriola, Medullia, Nomentum—these were the towns taken from the Old Latins, or from such as had gone over to the Latins. Then peace was made. Thereafter the works of peace were begun with a greater spirit than the mass of the wars he had waged, so that the people had no more rest at home than it had had in the field; for he prepares both to gird with a stone wall, where he had not yet fortified it, the city—the work begun on which had been broken off by the Sabine war—and to drain the lowest places of the city, about the forum and the other valleys set between the hills, by leading down drains, sloped to the Tiber, since from the level places they could not easily carry off the waters; and he occupies with foundations the area for the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, which he had vowed in the Sabine war, his mind already foreboding the future greatness of the place.

At that time, in the palace, there was a prodigy wonderful in the seeing and in the issue. As a boy lay sleeping, whose name was Servius Tullius, his head, they say, blazed with fire, in the sight of many. At the great outcry, then, that arose at the marvel of so great a thing, the king and queen were roused; and when one of the household was bringing water to quench it, he was held back by the queen, who, the tumult stilled, forbade that the boy be moved until he should wake of his own accord. Soon, with his sleep, the flame too departed. Then, drawing her husband aside, Tanaquil said: “Do you see this boy whom we are rearing in so humble a style? You may know that he will one day be a light to our doubtful fortunes, and a defense to the afflicted royal house; therefore let us nurture, with all our indulgence, this stock of great distinction to come, alike for the state and for ourselves.” From then the boy began to be held in the place of a free son, and to be trained in the arts by which men’s spirits are roused to the cultivation of a great fortune. It came easily to pass, since it was dear to the gods. The youth turned out of a truly royal nature; nor, when a son-in-law was sought for Tarquinius, could any of the Roman youth be compared with him in any quality, and the king betrothed his daughter to him. That so great an honor was paid him, for whatever cause, forbids us to believe that he was born of a slave-woman and himself, as a child, a slave. I am rather of the opinion of those who relate that, when Corniculum was taken, the wife of Servius Tullius—who had been the chief man in that city—being with child, her husband slain, and, when she was recognized among the rest of the captives, on account of her singular nobility kept from slavery by the Roman queen, gave birth at Rome, in the house of Tarquinius Priscus; that from this the friendship between the women was increased by so great a kindness, and the boy, as one reared in the house from his infancy, was held in affection and honor; and that the fortune of his mother—in that, her fatherland taken, she came into the enemy’s hands—caused him to be believed born of a slave.

In about the thirty-eighth year from the time Tarquinius had begun to reign, Servius Tullius stood in far the greatest honor, not with the king only, but with the Fathers and the commons. Then the two sons of Ancus, although before they had always counted it most unworthy that they had been driven from their father’s kingdom by their guardian’s fraud, and that a stranger should reign at Rome, of a stock not even neighboring, nay not even Italian—now the indignity grew the more bitterly upon them, if not even from Tarquinius should the kingship return to themselves, but should fall headlong from there to slaves; so that in the same city, about a hundred years after Romulus, sprung of a god and himself a god, had held the kingship while he was on earth, a slave, the son of a slave-woman, should possess it. They thought it would be a disgrace common to the Roman name, and chiefly to their own house, if, the male stock of King Ancus being safe, the kingship at Rome should lie open not only to strangers but even to slaves. With the sword, then, they resolve to ward off that outrage. But both the smart of the wrong goaded them against Tarquinius himself rather than against Servius, and because, if he survived, the king would be a graver avenger of murder than a private man; and then, Servius slain, whatever other son-in-law he should choose, he was likely to make him the same heir of the kingdom—for these reasons a plot is laid against the king himself. Two of the herdsmen, the fiercest, were chosen for the deed, each armed with the rustic iron tools he was used to; and in the vestibule of the palace, with all the uproar they could raise, under show of a quarrel, they turn upon themselves all the king’s attendants; then, when both were calling upon the king, and their shouting had reached deep within the palace, they are summoned and go before the king. At first both kept clamoring and vied in shouting each other down; checked by the lictor and bidden to speak in turn, they at last leave off interrupting; one begins the matter as had been agreed. While the king, intent upon him, turned wholly away, the other, raising his axe, brought it down upon his head; and, leaving the weapon in the wound, both fling themselves out of doors.

When those who were about him had caught up the dying Tarquinius, the lictors seized the men as they fled. Then there was an outcry and a running together of the people, marveling what the matter was. Tanaquil, amid the tumult, bids the palace be shut, and casts out the bystanders. At once she busily makes ready what is needed for tending the wound, as though hope remained; at once, should hope fail, she contrives other safeguards. Servius being hastily summoned, when she had shown him the man almost lifeless, holding his right hand she begs him not to suffer his father-in-law’s death to go unavenged, nor his mother-in-law to be a mockery to her enemies. “Yours, Servius,” she said, “if you are a man, is the kingship—not theirs, who by others’ hands wrought a most wicked deed. Rouse yourself, and follow the gods as guides, who once foretold, by the divine fire poured about it, that this head would be illustrious. Now let that heavenly flame stir you; now wake in earnest. We too reigned, though strangers; consider what you are, not whence you are born. If at this sudden chance your own counsels are numb, then follow mine.” When the shout and onrush of the multitude could scarce be borne, Tanaquil addresses the people from the upper part of the house, through the windows that face the New Street—for the king dwelt by the temple of Jupiter Stator. She bids them be of good cheer: the king had been stunned by a sudden blow; the steel had not gone deep into the body; he had already come to himself; the wound, the blood wiped away, had been examined; all was sound; she trusted they would see the king himself before long; meanwhile she bade the people be obedient to Servius Tullius, who would render judgments and discharge the other offices of the king. Servius comes forth in the trabea and with the lictors, and, sitting in the royal seat, decides some matters, and as to others pretends that he will consult the king. And so for several days, when Tarquinius had already breathed his last, the death being concealed, under show of discharging another’s office, he strengthened his own power. Then at last it was made known, a wailing arising in the palace. Servius, fenced about with a strong guard, was the first to reign without the people’s order, by the will of the Fathers. The children of Ancus, even then—when the agents of the crime had been seized, and it was announced that the king lived and that the power of Servius was so great—had gone into exile at Suessa Pometia.

And now Servius set to fortify his power by private no less than by public counsels; and, that the temper of Tarquinius’s sons toward himself might not be such as that of Ancus’s sons had been toward Tarquinius, he joins his two daughters to the young princes, Lucius and Arruns Tarquinius. Yet he did not by human counsels break the necessity of fate, but the envy of the kingship made all things, even among his own household, faithless and hostile. Very opportunely for the quiet of the present state, war was taken up with the Veientes—for now the truce had run out—and with other Etruscans. In that war both the valor and the fortune of Tullius shone forth; and, a huge army of the enemy routed, an undoubted king, whether he tried the temper of the Fathers or of the commons, he returned to Rome. And then he sets about by far the greatest work of peace, so that, as Numa had been the author of divine law, so posterity might celebrate Servius by report as the founder of every distinction in the state, and of the orders by which something is marked off between the degrees of rank and of fortune. For he instituted the census, a most wholesome thing for an empire that was to be so great, from which the burdens of war and peace should be borne not man by man, as before, but according to the measure of wealth; then he distributed the classes and centuries, and this order, from the census—a thing seemly alike for peace and for war.

Of those who had a rating of a hundred thousand asses or a greater, he made up eighty centuries, forty each of seniors and juniors; all were called the First Class; the seniors were to be at hand for the guarding of the city, the juniors to wage the wars abroad. The arms ordered for these were helmet, round shield, greaves, cuirass—all of bronze, these to be coverings for the body; their weapons against the foe were the spear and the sword. To this class were added two centuries of artificers, who should serve without arms; the duty given them was to make the engines in war. The Second Class was established within a hundred thousand down to seventy-five thousand, and from these, seniors and juniors, twenty centuries were enrolled. The arms ordered were an oblong shield in place of the round, and, except for the cuirass, all the same. He willed the rating of the Third Class to be fifty thousand; the same number of centuries, and these made with the same distinction of ages. Nor was anything changed as to the arms, save that the greaves were taken away. In the Fourth Class the rating was twenty-five thousand; the same number of centuries was made; the arms were changed—nothing given but the spear and the javelin. The Fifth Class was larger; thirty centuries were made; these carried with them slings and stones for hurling. With these were reckoned the horn-blowers and trumpeters, distributed into two centuries. At eleven thousand was this class rated. Below this rating was the rest of the multitude; and from it a single century was made, exempt from military service. The infantry army being thus equipped and distributed, he enrolled twelve centuries of knights from the chief men of the state. Six other centuries likewise—three having been instituted by Romulus—he made under the same names by which they had been consecrated. For the buying of horses, ten thousand asses each were given from the public purse; and to maintain the horses, widows were assigned, who should pay two thousand asses each year. All these burdens were shifted from the poor onto the rich. Then honor was added; for the suffrage was not given man by man, with the same force and the same right to all in common, as had been handed down from Romulus and kept by the other kings, but grades were made, that no one might seem shut out from the vote, and yet all the force might rest with the chief men of the state. For the knights were called first; then the eighty centuries of the First Class; there, if it varied—which rarely happened—it was the practice that the Second Class should be called; and scarcely ever did they descend so low as to reach the lowest. Nor ought one to wonder that this order, which now exists, since the completing of the five-and-thirty tribes—the number of their centuries of juniors and seniors being doubled—does not agree with the sum established by Servius Tullius. For, the city being divided into four parts, by the regions and the hills that were inhabited, he called those parts tribes, from the tribute, as I judge; for the method of contributing it equally according to the census was also begun by him; nor had those tribes anything to do with the distribution and number of the centuries.

The census finished, which he had hastened by the fear of a law passed concerning the unregistered, with threats of chains and of death, he proclaimed that all Roman citizens, knights and footmen, should be present, each in his own century, on the Campus Martius at first light. There he purified the whole army, drawn up, with the suovetaurilia; and this was called the “closing of the lustrum,” because that was the end made to the taking of the census. Eighty thousand citizens are said to have been registered in that lustrum; Fabius Pictor, the oldest of the writers, adds that that was the number of those who could bear arms. For so great a multitude the city too seemed to need enlarging. He adds two hills, the Quirinal and the Viminal; then in turn he enlarges the Esquiline, and there himself dwells, that the place might gain dignity. With rampart and ditches and wall he surrounds the city; thus he extends the pomerium. The pomerium, looking only to the force of the word, men interpret as “behind the wall”; but it is rather a “going-about-the-wall,” the space which, in founding cities, the Etruscans of old used—where they meant to draw the wall—to consecrate by augury within fixed bounds on either side, so that on the inner side the buildings should not be carried up to the walls (which now men even commonly join), and on the outside some breadth of soil should lie clear of human tillage. This space, which it was unlawful either to inhabit or to plow, the Romans called the pomerium, no more because it was behind the wall than because the wall was behind it; and, as the city grew, by just so much as the walls were to advance, by just so much were these consecrated boundary-marks moved forward.

The state being enlarged by the size of the city, and all things being shaped for the uses both of war and of peace at home, that power might not always be won by arms, he tried to enlarge the dominion by counsel, and at the same time to add some adornment to the city. Even then the temple of Diana at Ephesus was renowned; it had been built, report ran, in common by the states of Asia. That concord, and the gods held in common, Servius would wondrously praise among the chiefs of the Latins, with whom he had of set purpose joined, in public and in private, ties of hospitality and friendship. By often repeating the same thing he prevailed at last that the Latin peoples, together with the Roman people, should build at Rome a temple of Diana. That was a confession that Rome was the head of things—the very point about which it had so often been contended in arms. Yet, though this now seemed let go from the care of all the Latins, after a thing so often tried unhappily in arms, to one man among the Sabines chance seemed to offer the means, by a private scheme, of recovering the dominion. A cow, it is said, was born in the Sabine country to a certain head of a household, of marvelous size and beauty; for many ages its horns, fixed in the vestibule of the temple of Diana, were a monument of the marvel. The thing was held, as it was, for a prodigy; and the seers had sung that in whatever state’s citizen should sacrifice that cow to Diana, there should be the dominion; and this prophecy had reached the keeper of the temple of Diana. The Sabine, when the first day seemed fit for the sacrifice, drives the cow to Rome, leads it down to the temple of Diana, and sets it before the altar. There the Roman keeper, when the size of the victim, famous by report, had moved him, mindful of the response, thus addresses the Sabine: “What is this you are preparing, stranger?” he said. “To make sacrifice to Diana unpurified? Why do you not first bathe in a living stream? At the bottom of the valley the Tiber flows past.” The stranger, touched by religious scruple, who wished all things rightly done, that the issue might answer to the prodigy, at once goes down to the Tiber. Meanwhile the Roman sacrifices the cow to Diana. This was wondrously pleasing to the king and to the state.

Servius, although he had now beyond doubt held the kingship by use, yet, because he sometimes heard voices flung out by the young Tarquinius, that he reigned without the people’s order, having first won the goodwill of the commons by land taken from the enemy and divided man by man, ventured to bring before the people whether they willed and ordered that he should reign; and he was declared king with such consent as no other before him. Nor did this lessen Tarquinius’s hope of grasping the kingship; rather the more keenly—because he had perceived that the matter of the land for the commons had gone against the will of the Fathers—he judged that occasion was given him of accusing Servius before the Fathers and of growing in the Senate-house, himself too a young man of ardent spirit, and at home his wife Tullia goading his restless mind. For the Roman palace too furnished an instance of tragic crime, that, through weariness of kings, liberty might come the riper, and that the last reign might be the one won by crime. This Lucius Tarquinius—whether he was the son or the grandson of King Tarquinius Priscus is not clear enough; yet, following the more numerous authorities, I would set him down a son—had had a brother, Arruns Tarquinius, a young man of mild nature. To these two, as has been said before, the two Tulliae, the king’s daughters, had been married, themselves too far different in character. It had chanced so to fall out that the two violent natures were not joined in marriage—by the fortune, I believe, of the Roman people, that the reign of Servius might be the longer, and the manners of the state might be settled. The fierce Tullia chafed that there was no stuff in her husband, either for desire or for daring; turned wholly to the other Tarquinius, she admired him, called him a man and one sprung of royal blood: she despised her sister, that, having got a man, she failed of a woman’s daring. Likeness quickly draws them together, as commonly happens—evil best suited to evil; but the beginning of confounding all things arose from the woman. She, grown used to secret talks with another’s husband, spared no insults of words—of her husband to his brother, of her sister to her sister’s husband; and she contended that it had been better that she herself were widowed, and he unwed, than to be joined with an unequal, so that she must languish through another’s sloth. If the gods had given her the husband she deserved, she would soon see at home the kingship she saw in her father’s hands. Quickly she fills the young man with her own rashness. With funerals well-nigh continuous, when they had made their houses empty for a new marriage, they are joined in wedlock—Servius rather not forbidding it than approving.

Then indeed, day by day, the old age of Tullius began to be more beset, his reign more beset. For now the woman looked from one crime to another, and suffered her husband to rest neither by night nor by day, lest the past murders should be in vain: it was not a man to be called husband that she had lacked, she said, nor one with whom to be a silent slave; she had lacked one who should judge himself worthy of the kingship, who should remember that he was the son of Tarquinius Priscus, who would rather have the kingship than hope for it. “If you are he to whom I think myself married, then I call you both husband and king; but if not, then the case is now changed for the worse, in that with you cowardice is joined to crime. Why do you not gird yourself? It is not from Corinth or from Tarquinii, as for your father, that you must contrive a foreign kingdom for yourself: your fathers’ and household gods, your father’s image, the royal house, the royal throne within the house, and the name Tarquinius make and call you king. Or, if for this you have too little spirit, why do you cheat the state? Why do you suffer yourself to be gazed on as a prince? Be off hence to Tarquinii or to Corinth; sink back to your stock, liker your brother than your father.” Goading the young man with these reproaches and others, she herself could not rest, if Tanaquil, a foreign woman, had been able to plan so greatly in her spirit as to give two reigns in succession—to her husband, and then to her son-in-law—while she herself, sprung of royal seed, made no weight in the giving and the taking of a kingdom. Driven by these womanish furies, Tarquinius began to go about and solicit the Fathers, chiefly of the lesser clans; to remind them of his father’s benefit and claim gratitude for it in return; to allure the young men with gifts; both by promising vast things of himself, and by charges against the king, to grow in all quarters. At last, when the time for action seemed come, hedged about with a band of armed men he burst into the forum. Then, all being stricken with terror, sitting in the royal seat before the Senate-house, he bade the Fathers be summoned by a herald to King Tarquinius in the Senate-house. They came together at once—some already prepared beforehand for this, others from fear lest it should harm them not to have come—astounded by the strangeness and the marvel, and thinking it now all over with Servius. There Tarquinius, beginning his reviling from the man’s remotest origin: that a slave, and the son of a slave-woman, after the unworthy death of his own parent—no interregnum being entered, as before, no assembly held, no vote of the people, no sanction of the Fathers—had seized the kingship by a woman’s gift. So born, so made king, a favorer of the lowest class of men, from which he himself came, out of hatred of another’s rank he had snatched the land from the chief men and divided it among the basest; all the burdens which had once been common he had shifted upon the chief men of the state; he had instituted the census, that the fortune of the richer might be marked out for envy, and had made ready a source from which, whenever he pleased, he might lavish upon the neediest.

When Servius, roused by an alarming message, had broken in upon this speech, at once from the vestibule of the Senate-house he cried with a great voice: “What is this, Tarquinius? With what boldness have you dared, while I live, to summon the Fathers, or to sit in my seat?” When the other fiercely replied to this—that he held his father’s seat, that a king’s son was a far better heir of the kingdom than a slave, that long enough had Servius, playing the wanton through license, insulted his masters—a shout arises from the partisans of each, and there was a running together of the people into the Senate-house, and it was plain that he would reign who won. Then Tarquinius, the very necessity now compelling him to the last daring, far stronger both in age and in strength, seizes Servius round the middle, and, carrying him out of the Senate-house, flung him down the steps into the lower part; then he returned into the Senate-house to assemble the Fathers. There is a flight of the king’s attendants and companions; he himself, almost lifeless, as he was withdrawing home without his royal retinue, is killed by those who, sent by Tarquinius, had overtaken him in his flight. It is believed—because it is not out of keeping with the rest of her crime—that the deed was done at Tullia’s prompting. At all events, she was carried in her carriage into the forum—which is agreed well enough—and, not awed by the gathering of men, called her husband out of the Senate-house and was the first to hail him king. Bidden by him to withdraw from so great a tumult, when she was returning home and had come to the top of the Cyprian Street, where the shrine of Diana lately stood, as she turned the carriage to the right into the Urbian slope, to be borne up to the Esquiline hill, the driver of the beasts halted in terror and reined them in, and pointed out to his mistress Servius lying slain. There is handed down a deed foul and inhuman, and the place is its monument—they call it the Street of Crime—where Tullia, frenzied, the furies of her sister and her husband driving her on, is said to have driven the carriage over her father’s body, and, herself defiled and bespattered, to have carried part of the blood and slaughter of her father, on the gory vehicle, to her own household gods and her husband’s; with whom angered, by the like ill beginning of the reign, like ends should before long follow. Servius Tullius reigned forty-four years, in such a manner that even for a good and moderate king to succeed him would have been a hard rivalry. This too was added to his glory, that with him perished just and lawful kingship. That rule itself, so mild and so moderate, some authorities are that he had it in mind to lay down, because it was the rule of one man, had not domestic crime broken in upon him as he was revolving plans for the freeing of his fatherland.

Then Lucius Tarquinius began to reign, on whom his deeds fastened the surname Superbus, the Proud, because he, a son-in-law, forbade his father-in-law burial, declaring that Romulus too had perished unburied; and he slew the chief of the Fathers, whom he believed to have favored Servius’s cause; then, aware that the precedent of seeking the kingship by crime could be taken from himself against himself, he hedged his person about with armed men. For he had no claim to the kingship except force, as one who reigned neither by the people’s order nor by the sanction of the Fathers. To this was added that, placing no hope in the affection of the citizens, he must guard his kingship by fear. To strike this into the more, he conducted trials of capital matters by himself alone, without advisers; and on that pretext he could put to death, drive into exile, fine in their goods, not only the suspected or the hated, but those from whom he could hope nothing else but plunder. Above all, the number of the Fathers being thus thinned, he resolved to choose no one into their number, that the order might be the more contemptible by its very fewness, and might less resent that nothing was done through it. For this king was the first to break the custom, handed down from his predecessors, of consulting the Senate on all matters: he administered the state by domestic counsels; war, peace, treaties, alliances he himself made and unmade, with whom he would, without the order of the people and the Senate. The nation of the Latins above all he sought to win to himself, that by foreign strength too he might be the safer among the citizens; and he joined with their chief men not ties of hospitality only, but marriage alliances as well. To Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum—he was far the foremost of the Latin name, and, if we trust report, sprung from Ulysses and the goddess Circe—to this Mamilius he gives his daughter in marriage, and through that marriage wins to himself many of the man’s kinsmen and friends.

Great now was Tarquinius’s authority among the chiefs of the Latins, when he proclaims that on a fixed day they should meet at the grove of Ferentina: there were things he wished to treat of concerning the common interest. They come together in numbers at first light; Tarquinius himself indeed kept the day, but came a little before the sun set. Much had there been bandied that whole day in the council, in talk of many kinds. Turnus Herdonius, from Aricia, had fiercely inveighed against the absent Tarquinius: it was no wonder that the surname “the Proud” had been fastened on him at Rome—for now they so called him, muttering it secretly indeed, yet commonly. Was anything prouder than thus to mock the whole Latin name? The chief men had been summoned far from their homes, and the very man who had proclaimed the council was not present. Surely their patience was being tried, that, if they took the yoke, he might press them as his subjects. To whom was it not plain that he aimed at dominion over the Latins? If his own citizens had trusted him well—or if that had been a trust, and not a thing snatched by parricide—the Latins too ought to trust him, though even so as foreigners; but if his own people repented of him, since they were butchered one after another, went into exile, lost their goods, what better hope was held out to the Latins? If they would hear him, they would all go off home from there, and observe the day of the council no more than he who had proclaimed it observed it. These things, and others to the same purport, as the seditious and crime-stained man—who by such arts had won power at home—was most loudly arguing, Tarquinius came in. That was the end of the speech; all turned to salute Tarquinius. When silence was made, warned by those nearest to clear himself for having come at that hour, he says that he had been chosen arbiter between a father and a son, and that the care of reconciling them had detained him; and because that matter had used up the day, he would the next day transact what he had purposed. Not even this, they say, did he bear from Turnus in silence; for Turnus said that no trial was shorter than that between father and son, and that it could be settled in a few words: unless the son obeyed his father, he would come to grief.

Hurling these reproaches at the Roman king, the man of Aricia left the council. Tarquinius, bearing the thing somewhat more grievously than he showed, at once contrives Turnus’s death, that he might cast upon the Latins the same terror with which he had crushed the spirits of the citizens at home. And because he could not lawfully, by open authority, have him put to death, he overwhelmed the innocent man by a false charge laid against him. Through certain Aricians of the opposite faction he corrupted with gold a slave of Turnus, to suffer a great mass of swords to be secretly brought into his lodging. These things being accomplished in a single night, Tarquinius, a little before light, summoning to him the chiefs of the Latins as though disturbed by some new thing, says that his delay of yesterday, brought about as it were by some providence of the gods, had been the safety of himself and of them. By Turnus, he said, death was being prepared for himself and the foremost men of the peoples, that he might hold the dominion of the Latins alone. He would have attacked them yesterday in the council; the matter had been put off because the author of the council, whom he chiefly sought, was absent. From this had arisen that railing at the absent man, because by delaying he had cheated his hope. He did not doubt that, if true reports were brought, at first light, when they came into the council, Turnus would come arrayed and armed with a band of conspirators. It was said that a vast number of swords had been carried to him. Whether this was empty or no could be known at once. He begged them to come thence with him to Turnus. The thing was made suspect both by Turnus’s fierce temper, and by his speech of yesterday, and by Tarquinius’s delay—because it seemed that on its account the slaughter could have been put off. They go, their minds indeed inclined to belief, yet meaning to count all the rest empty unless the swords were found. When they had come there, the guards set about Turnus, roused from sleep; and his slaves being seized, who from love of their master were preparing resistance, when the hidden swords were dragged forth from every corner of the lodging, then indeed the thing seemed manifest, and chains were thrown upon Turnus; and at once the council of the Latins is summoned with great uproar. There so fierce an indignation arose, the swords being set in the midst, that, his cause unheard, by a new kind of death he was cast down into the spring of Ferentina, a hurdle laid over him and stones heaped on, and so drowned.

Then, the Latins being recalled to the council, and those praised who had visited upon Turnus, plotting revolution, the punishment his manifest parricide deserved, he spoke thus: that he could indeed proceed by ancient right, since, as all the Latins were sprung from Alba, they were held by that treaty whereby, from Tullus’s time, the whole Alban state, with its colonies, had passed under Roman sway; but that he judged it rather, for the advantage of all, that that treaty be renewed, and that the Latins, as partners, should enjoy the prosperous fortune of the Roman people, rather than forever either look for or suffer the destruction of cities and the wasting of fields, which they had endured, first under Ancus, then under his own father’s reign. The Latins were persuaded without difficulty, although in that treaty the Roman side stood higher; but they saw both that the heads of the Latin name stood and felt with the king, and each had a fresh lesson of his own peril, had he opposed. So the treaty was renewed; and it was proclaimed to the juniors of the Latins that, according to the treaty, on a fixed day they should be present, armed and in numbers, at the grove of Ferentina. When, at the Roman king’s edict, they had come together from all the peoples, that they might have neither their own leader, nor a separate command, nor standards of their own, he mingled the maniples out of Latins and Romans, so as to make single ones out of pairs and pairs out of single ones; and, the maniples being thus doubled, he set centurions over them.

Nor was he, though an unjust king in peace, therefore a bad leader in war; nay, he would have equaled the former kings in that art, had not his degeneracy in other things marred this distinction too. He first stirred up war with the Volsci, which was to last more than two hundred years after his age, and took from them by storm Suessa Pometia. There, when by selling off the plunder he had raised forty talents of silver, he conceived in his mind that greatness of the temple of Jupiter which should be worthy of the king of gods and men, worthy of the Roman empire, worthy of the majesty of the place itself. The captured money he set apart for the building of that temple. Then a war took him up that went more slowly than he had hoped, in which, having attacked Gabii, a neighboring city, by force in vain, and, when, beaten back from the walls, the hope even of besieging the city had been taken from him, he assailed it at last by a method least Roman—by fraud and guile. For while, as though laying war aside, he feigned to be intent on laying the foundations of the temple and on other works of the city, Sextus, his son, who was the youngest of the three, went over by arrangement to Gabii, complaining of his father’s intolerable cruelty toward himself: that now he had turned his pride from strangers upon his own, and was weary even of the multitude of his own children; that, as he had made a solitude in the Senate-house, so he was making one at home too, to leave no stock, no heir of the kingdom. He himself, slipped from among his father’s weapons and swords, had believed nothing anywhere safe for him save among the enemies of Lucius Tarquinius. “For—lest they be deceived—the war that is feigned laid aside remains for them, and he will fall upon them unawares as occasion offers. But if among you there is no place for suppliants, I will wander through all Latium, and seek thence the Volsci and the Aequi and the Hernici, until I come to those who know how to shield children from the cruel and impious punishments of fathers. Perhaps too I shall find some ardor for war and arms against a most proud king and a most savage people.” Since, if they made any delay, he seemed about to go off thence further in his wrath, he is kindly received by the Gabini. They bid him not wonder if, such as he had been toward citizens, such toward allies, such he was at last toward his own children; in the end he would rage against his very self, if other objects failed. To them, indeed, his coming was welcome, and they believed it would come to pass before long that, with his help, the war would be carried from the gates of Gabii under the walls of Rome.

Then he was admitted to the public councils. There, while as to other matters he said that he agreed with the old Gabini, to whom they were better known, he himself again and again was the proposer of war, and in this took to himself a special prudence, that he knew the strength of both peoples, and knew that the royal pride was surely hateful to the citizens, which not even his own children had been able to bear. So, when by degrees he was inciting the chief men of the Gabini to renew the war, and himself with the readiest of the young men went out to plunder and on forays, and, all his words and deeds being framed for deceiving, a vain confidence grew, he is at last chosen leader of the war. There, the multitude being ignorant of what was afoot, while small battles took place between Rome and Gabii, in which for the most part the Gabine side had the upper hand, then, high and low alike, the Gabini vied in believing that Sextus Tarquinius had been sent them as leader by the gift of the gods. And among the soldiers, by sharing dangers and toils alike, by lavishly bestowing plunder, he was held in such affection that not Tarquinius the father was more powerful at Rome than the son at Gabii. And so, after he saw strength enough gathered for all attempts, he then sends one of his own men to Rome, to his father, to ask what he would have him do, since the gods had given him that he alone might do all things at Gabii in the state. To this messenger, because, I suppose, he seemed of doubtful faith, no answer was given by word; the king, as though deliberating, passes into the garden of the house, the son’s messenger following; there, walking up and down in silence, he is said to have struck off the tallest heads of the poppies with his staff. The messenger, wearied with asking and waiting for an answer, returns to Gabii as if his errand were unaccomplished; he reports what he had himself said and what he had seen: that, whether from anger, or hatred, or the pride inborn in his nature, the king had uttered no word. When it was clear to Sextus what his father wished, and what he enjoined by those silent riddles, he made away with the chief men of the state, some by accusing them before the people, others laid open by their own unpopularity. Many were killed openly, some—in whose case the accusation would have been less plausible—secretly. Flight was left open to certain who wished it, or they were driven into exile, and the goods of the absent, no less than of the slain, were given over for division. Then came largesses and plunder; and, by the sweetness of private gain, the sense of public ills was taken away, until, bereft of counsel and of aid, the Gabine state was handed over, without any struggle, into the hand of the Roman king.

Gabii being taken, Tarquinius made peace with the nation of the Aequi, and renewed the treaty with the Etruscans. Then he turned his mind to the affairs of the city; of which the first was that he should leave the temple of Jupiter on the Tarpeian mount as a monument of his reign and name: that the two Tarquinian kings had built it—the father vowed it, the son finished it. And that the whole area might be free from other religious claims, and wholly Jupiter’s and his temple’s that was to be built upon it, he resolved to deconsecrate the shrines and chapels, several of which stood there—first vowed by King Tatius in the very crisis of his battle against Romulus, and afterward consecrated and inaugurated. Among the first beginnings of founding this work, the gods, it is handed down, exerted their power to mark the mass of so great an empire. For while the birds allowed the deconsecration of all the chapels, in the shrine of Terminus they did not give assent; and this omen and augury was so received: that the seat of Terminus not being moved, and he alone of the gods not being called out from the bounds consecrated to him, portended that all things would be firm and stable. This auspice of permanence being received, there followed another prodigy, portending the greatness of the empire: a human head, with its face entire, is said to have appeared to those opening the foundations of the temple. This sight portended, with no ambiguity, that this would be the citadel of empire and the head of things; and so the seers sang—both those who were in the city and those whom they had summoned from Etruria to consult on the matter. The king’s mind was raised toward the expense. And so the Pometine spoils, which had been destined for carrying the work to its top, scarcely sufficed for the foundations. The more therefore would I trust Fabius—besides that he is the older authority—that those were forty talents only, than Piso, who writes that forty thousand pounds of silver were set apart for that purpose: a sum of money neither to be hoped for from the plunder of one city then, nor one that would not exceed the foundations of any even of these works of ours.

Intent on finishing the temple, with workmen summoned from all over Etruria, he used for it not only the public money, but the labor of the commons as well. And though this toil, no small one in itself, was added to military service, yet the commons was less burdened in building with its own hands the temples of the gods than afterward, when they were drawn off to other works too—in show smaller, but of toil somewhat greater—the making of the rows of seats in the circus, and the carrying underground of the Great Sewer, the receptacle of all the city’s filth; to which two works this new magnificence of ours could scarcely make anything equal. The commons being worn out with these labors—because he thought a multitude, where there was no use for it, a burden to the city, and wished the borders of the empire to be occupied more widely by the sending out of colonies—he sent colonists to Signia and Circeii, to be defenses for the city by land and sea. As he was doing these things, a terrible portent appeared: a snake, gliding out from a wooden pillar, when it had caused terror and flight in the palace, struck the king’s own breast, not so much with sudden fear as filling it with anxious cares. And so, since for public prodigies Etruscan seers only were employed, terrified by this as it were domestic sight, he resolved to send to Delphi, to the most famous oracle on earth; and not daring to entrust the responses of the lots to any other, he sent two sons through lands then unknown, and seas more unknown, into Greece. Titus and Arruns set out. There was added to them as companion Lucius Junius Brutus, born of Tarquinia, the king’s sister—a young man of a nature far other than that whose semblance he had put on. He, when he had heard that the chief men of the state, among them his own brother, had been killed by his uncle, resolved to leave in his own spirit nothing for the king to fear, nor in his fortune anything to covet, and to be safe through contempt, where in justice there was too little protection. Therefore, of set purpose made over to the imitation of folly, while he suffered himself and his goods to be the king’s prey, he did not even refuse the surname Brutus, the Dullard, that under the cover of that surname the spirit that was to free the Roman people might lie hidden and await its own time. He, then, led by the Tarquinii to Delphi, a plaything rather than a companion, is said to have carried as a gift to Apollo a golden rod enclosed within a staff of cornel-wood, hollowed out for the purpose—by riddle, an image of his own nature. When they had come thither, and the father’s commands were performed, a desire seized the spirits of the young men to ask to which of them the kingship of Rome would come. From the lowest recess of the cave, they say, a voice was returned: “He shall hold the supreme power at Rome, young men, who of you shall first give a kiss to his mother.” The Tarquinii, that Sextus, who had been left at Rome, ignorant of the response, might have no part in the power, bid the matter be kept secret with all their might; and between themselves they leave it to lot which of them, when he had returned to Rome, should first give his mother a kiss. Brutus, thinking that the Pythian voice looked another way, as if he had stumbled and fallen, touched the earth with a kiss—because she, of course, is the common mother of all mortals. The return was then to Rome, where war against the Rutulians was being made ready with the utmost effort.

The Rutulians held Ardea, a nation, for that region and that age, pre-eminent in wealth. And this itself was the cause of the war: that the Roman king, exhausted by the magnificence of his public works, was eager both to enrich himself and to soothe the temper of the commons with plunder—who, besides his other pride, were hostile to his reign also because they resented having been held so long by the king at the tasks of artificers and at servile labor. The attempt was made, whether Ardea could be taken at the first assault. When that went but little forward, the enemy began to be pressed by siege and by works. In this standing camp, as happens in a war long rather than sharp, furloughs were free enough, yet more for the chief men than for the soldiers; and the young princes, indeed, sometimes passed their leisure among themselves in banquets and revels. It chanced, as they were drinking at Sextus Tarquinius’s, where Collatinus Tarquinius, the son of Egerius, was also dining, that mention fell upon their wives; each praised his own wondrously. Then, the contention being kindled, Collatinus says there is no need of words; in a few hours, indeed, it could be known how far his own Lucretia surpassed the rest. “Come, if the vigor of youth is in us, let us mount our horses and look in person upon the natures of our wives. Let this be to each his surest proof, what shall meet his eyes at the unlooked-for coming of the husband.” They had grown hot with wine. “Come on, then!” all cry; with horses spurred they fly off to Rome. When they had come thither, the first shadows now drawing on, they go on from there to Collatia, where they find Lucretia by no means as the king’s daughters-in-law, whom they had seen passing the time in banquet and luxury with their companions, but, late at night, given over to her wool, sitting amid her maids who worked by lamplight in the middle of the house. The glory of the women’s contest was Lucretia’s. Her husband, arriving, and the Tarquinii were kindly received; the victorious husband courteously invites the young princes. There an evil lust to ravish Lucretia by force seizes Sextus Tarquinius; both her beauty and her proven chastity goad him. And then, for that time, they return from their nightly youthful sport to the camp.

A few days after, Sextus Tarquinius, without Collatinus’s knowledge, came to Collatia with a single companion. There, received kindly by those ignorant of his design, when after dinner he had been led to the guest-chamber, burning with love, after all around seemed safe enough and all asleep, with drawn sword he came to the sleeping Lucretia, and, pressing down the woman’s breast with his left hand, “Be silent, Lucretia,” he said; “I am Sextus Tarquinius; the steel is in my hand; you shall die, if you utter a sound.” When the woman, in terror, roused from sleep, saw no help, and death close upon her, then Tarquinius confessed his love, entreated, mingled threats with prayers, turned the woman’s spirit every way. When he saw her obstinate, and not bent even by the fear of death, he adds disgrace to fear: he says that, when she was dead, he would lay beside her the naked body of a slave with his throat cut, so that she might be said to have been slain in base adultery. When by this terror his lust, victorious as it were by force, had conquered her stubborn chastity, and Tarquinius had gone off from there exulting in the storming of a woman’s honor, Lucretia, in grief at so great a calamity, sends the same message to Rome to her father and to Ardea to her husband: that they should come, each with one faithful friend; so it must be done, and quickly; a dreadful thing had befallen. Spurius Lucretius came with Publius Valerius, son of Volesus; Collatinus with Lucius Junius Brutus, with whom, as he was returning to Rome, he had chanced to be met by his wife’s messenger. They find Lucretia sitting in her chamber in grief. At the coming of her own, tears welled up; and to her husband asking, “Is all well?”—“By no means,” she said; “for what can be well with a woman who has lost her chastity? The traces of another man, Collatinus, are in your bed; yet the body only has been violated, the spirit is guiltless; death shall be my witness. But give me your right hands and your faith that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. It is Sextus Tarquinius, who, an enemy in the guise of a guest, last night bore off hence by armed force a joy deadly to me, and—if you are men—to himself.” They all in turn give their faith; they console her, sick at heart, by turning the guilt away from her, the victim of force, upon the author of the offense: that it is the mind that sins, not the body, and that where intent was wanting, guilt is wanting. “It is for you to see,” she said, “what is due to him; as for me, though I acquit myself of fault, I do not free myself from punishment; nor hereafter shall any unchaste woman live by Lucretia’s precedent.” The knife which she had hidden beneath her garment she drives into her heart, and, sinking forward upon the wound, fell dying. Her husband and her father cry aloud.

Brutus, while they were taken up with grief, drawing the knife from Lucretia’s wound and holding it before him, dripping with gore, said: “By this blood, most chaste before the wrong done by a prince, I swear—and you, gods, I make my witnesses—that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, with his wicked wife and all the stock of his children, with sword, with fire, with whatever force at last I can, and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to reign at Rome.” The knife he then hands to Collatinus, then to Lucretius and Valerius, astounded at the marvel of the thing—whence this new nature in Brutus’s breast. As had been prescribed, they swear; and, turned wholly from grief to wrath, they follow Brutus, who now calls them to the overthrow of the kingship, as their leader. The body of Lucretia, carried out from the house, they bear into the forum, and rouse men, as happens, by the marvel of a thing so new, and by its outrageousness. Each for himself complains of the royal crime and violence. The father’s grief moves them, and Brutus too, chiding their tears and idle complaints, and urging them to take up arms, as men, as Romans, against those who had dared the deeds of enemies. Each fiercest of the young men comes forward of his own will, in arms; the rest of the youth follows too. Then, the father being left to keep guard at Collatia, and sentinels set, that no one might report that movement to the kings, the rest, armed, with Brutus as leader, set out for Rome. When they had come there, wherever the armed multitude advanced, it caused panic and tumult; again, when men see the chief men of the state going before, they reckon that, whatever it is, it is not without cause. Nor at Rome did a thing so dreadful make less stir of spirit than it had made at Collatia. So from all quarters of the city men run together into the forum. When they had come thither, a herald summoned the people to the Tribune of the Celeres—in which magistracy Brutus then chanced to be. There a speech was delivered, by no means of that heart and nature which had been feigned until that day, concerning the violence and lust of Sextus Tarquinius, the unspeakable rape of Lucretia and her piteous death, the bereavement of Tricipitinus, to whom the cause of his daughter’s death was more shameful and pitiable than the death itself. There was added the king’s own pride, and the miseries and toils of the commons, sunk in draining ditches and sewers; that Roman men, conquerors of all the surrounding peoples, had been made artificers and stonecutters in place of warriors. The unworthy slaughter of King Servius Tullius was recalled, and the daughter who had driven over her father’s body in her impious carriage; and the gods, avengers of parents, were invoked. By these things, and others more dreadful, I believe—which the present outrage of the case suggests, by no means easy for writers to set down—he so inflamed the multitude that he drove them to take away the king’s authority and to bid that Lucius Tarquinius, with his wife and children, be exiles. He himself, the juniors who gave in their names of their own accord being chosen and armed, set out for the camp at Ardea, to stir up the army thence against the king; the command in the city he leaves to Lucretius, who had been appointed prefect of the city already before by the king. Amid this tumult Tullia fled from her house, men and women cursing her wherever she went, and calling down upon her the furies of her parents.

When the news of these things had been carried to the camp, the king, alarmed at the strange turn, set out for Rome to crush the disturbances; but Brutus—for he had perceived his coming—turned his road aside, that he might not meet him; and at about the same time, by different routes, Brutus came to Ardea, Tarquinius to Rome. To Tarquinius the gates were shut, and exile proclaimed; the liberator the glad camp received, and the king’s children were driven out from it. Two followed their father, who went into exile at Caere among the Etruscans. Sextus Tarquinius, having set out for Gabii as if to his own kingdom, was killed by the avengers of the old feuds which he had himself stirred up against himself by his slaughters and his plunderings. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned twenty-five years. The kingship at Rome lasted, from the founding of the city to its liberation, two hundred and forty-four years. Two consuls were then chosen, in the centuriate assembly, by the prefect of the city, from the commentaries of Servius Tullius: Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus.