The doings, from this point on, of a Roman people now free—in peace and in war—the annual magistracies, and the rule of laws more powerful than men: these I shall set forth. And it was the arrogance of the last king that had made this liberty the more welcome. For the earlier kings so reigned that all of them may, not undeservedly, be counted in turn as founders of at least those quarters of the city which they added as new dwelling-places for the population they themselves had enlarged. Nor is it doubted that this same Brutus, who won such glory by the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, would have done the state the gravest harm, had he, in a premature lust for liberty, wrested the kingship from any one of the earlier kings. For what would have come to pass, if that rabble of shepherds and vagrants, runaways from their own peoples, having found under the shelter of an inviolable sanctuary either liberty or at least impunity, freed from the fear of a king, had begun to be tossed by tribunician storms, and in a city not their own to sow quarrels with the Fathers, before the pledges of wives and children, and love of the very soil—to which one grows used only with long time—had knit their hearts into one? The commonwealth, not yet grown to manhood, would have been scattered by discord; whereas the tranquil moderation of its governance cherished it, and by nurturing brought it on to the point where, its strength now ripe, it could bear the good fruit of liberty. The origin of liberty, moreover, you would reckon to lie rather in this—that the consular command was made annual—than in any diminishment of the kingly power. The first consuls held all the rights, all the insignia of the office; only this one precaution was taken: that the terror should not seem doubled, if both should have the fasces. Brutus, by his colleague’s leave, had the fasces first; and he had been no keener as the avenger of liberty than thereafter he was its keeper. First of all, the people, greedy for its new liberty, lest later it might be bent by the entreaties or the gifts of the kings, he bound by an oath to suffer no man to be king at Rome. Next, that the senate might have the more strength from the fullness of its order, he filled up the number of the Fathers, thinned by the king’s slaughters, with leading men chosen from the equestrian rank, to the full sum of three hundred; and from this, men say, was handed down the custom that those should be summoned into the senate who were "Fathers" and those who were "Enrolled": the enrolled—the new senate, that is—they called the chosen men. It availed marvelously toward the harmony of the state, and toward the binding of the commons’ hearts to the Fathers.

Next, care was taken for the things of religion; and because certain public rites had been wont to be performed by the kings in person, that nowhere there might be a longing for the kings, they create a King of the Sacrifices (rex sacrorum). This priesthood they made subject to the pontifex, lest the honor attached to the name should anywhere stand in the way of liberty, whose safeguarding was then the first care of all. And I am not sure but that, in fencing it about on every side and in the very smallest matters, they exceeded due measure. For the name of one of the consuls, though he gave no other offense, was hateful to the state: the Tarquins, men said, had grown too used to kingship; the beginning had been made by Priscus; then Servius Tullius had reigned; nor even with that interval between had Tarquinius Superbus, as though it were another’s, forgotten the throne, but had reclaimed it, as the inheritance of his house, by crime and by force; now that Superbus was driven out, the command lay in the hands of a Collatinus; the Tarquins knew not how to live as private men. The name displeased; it was dangerous to liberty. This talk, of men feeling their way at first, was spread little by little through the whole state; and the commons, now uneasy with suspicion, Brutus summoned to assembly. There, first of all, he recites the people’s oath, that they would suffer no man to be king nor anything to exist at Rome from which there might be peril to liberty: this must be guarded with the utmost effort, nor must anything that bore upon it be held cheap. Against his will he spoke, he said, for the man’s sake, and would not have spoken at all, did not love of the commonwealth prevail: the Roman people did not believe that it had recovered a liberty entire and whole; a kingly stock, a kingly name, was still not only in the state but in the very magistracy; this stood in the way, this was an obstacle to liberty. "This fear, Lucius Tarquinius," said he, "do you of your own will remove. We remember—we confess it—you drove out the kings; complete your benefaction, take from here the kingly name. Your property your fellow citizens will not only restore to you, on my authority, but, if anything is lacking, will generously add to it. Depart a friend; relieve the state of a fear that is perhaps groundless; men are persuaded in their hearts that only with the Tarquin house will the kingship depart from here." To the consul, at first, astonishment at a thing so strange and sudden had locked his voice; then, as he began to speak, the foremost men of the state stand round him, and with many prayers ask the same. And the rest, indeed, moved him less; but after Spurius Lucretius, his elder in years and in dignity, and his father-in-law besides, began to ply him in turn, now begging, now urging, that he suffer himself to be overborne by the consent of the state, the consul—fearing lest afterward, as a private man, those same losses, with the forfeiture of his goods and some further disgrace heaped on besides, should fall upon him—abdicated the consulship, and, all his belongings removed to Lavinium, withdrew from the state. Brutus, by decree of the senate, proposed to the people that all of the Tarquin house should be exiles. As his colleague he had Publius Valerius elected, in the comitia centuriata—the man with whose help he had driven out the kings.

Although it was in doubt to no one that war was threatening from the Tarquins, that war came later than all had expected; meanwhile—a thing they had not feared—liberty was nearly lost by guile and treachery. There were among the Roman youth a number of young men, and these of no mean birth, whose appetites had ranged more freely under the monarchy, companions and comrades in age of the young Tarquins, themselves used to living in the royal style. Missing that license now that the rights of all were made equal, they fell to complaining among themselves that the liberty of others had been turned into their own servitude: a king was a man, from whom you might obtain what you needed, whether of right or of wrong; there was room with him for favor, room for kindness; he could be angry and could pardon, knew the difference between a friend and a foe; but the laws were a thing deaf and inexorable, more wholesome and better for the helpless than for the powerful, allowing no slack and no indulgence if once you overstepped the bound; and it was a perilous thing, amid so many human errors, to live by innocence alone. While their minds were thus already sick of their own accord, envoys from the kings come unlooked-for, asking only for the property, with no mention of return. When their words had been heard in the senate, the deliberation held men for several days, lest the property, if not given back, should be a cause of war, and, if given back, the means and the furtherance of it. Meanwhile the envoys were busy with other designs: openly demanding the property, in secret they weave plans for recovering the kingdom, and—as though canvassing for what seemed the business in hand—they sound out the minds of the young nobles. By those from whom their overture was quietly received, they have letters from the Tarquins delivered, and they confer about admitting the kings secretly, by night, into the city. To the Vitellii and the Aquilii, brothers, the matter was first entrusted. A sister of the Vitellii had been married to the consul Brutus, and there were already children of that marriage, young men, Titus and Tiberius; these too their uncles take into partnership in the plot. Besides, several other young nobles were taken in as accomplices, whose memory has perished with the lapse of time.

Meanwhile, when in the senate the opinion that the property should be restored had won the day, and the envoys held this very thing as their reason for staying on in the city—because they had obtained from the consuls a space of time for procuring wagons in which to carry off the kings’ goods—all that time they spend in consultation with the conspirators, and by their insistence they prevail that letters be given them addressed to the Tarquins: for otherwise how should the kings believe that no empty word was being brought them by the envoys on matters so great? The letters, given as a pledge of good faith, made the crime plain. For on the day before the envoys were to set out for the Tarquins, when there chanced to be a dinner at the house of the Vitellii, and the conspirators, the witnesses withdrawn, had there debated much among themselves about their new design, as men do, one of the slaves caught their talk—a man who already before this had perceived what was afoot, but had been waiting for the very occasion when the letters should be given to the envoys, which, once seized, might convict the affair. When he perceived that they had been handed over, he laid the matter before the consuls. The consuls, setting out from home to seize the envoys and the conspirators, crushed the whole business without an uproar; care was taken, above all, that the letters should not be lost. The traitors were straightway cast into chains; concerning the envoys there was a little hesitation, and although they were judged to have made themselves liable to be treated as enemies, yet the law of nations prevailed.

As to the royal property, which they had before voted to restore, the matter was referred afresh to the Fathers. There, conquered by anger, they forbade its restoration, forbade its passing into the public treasury: it was given to the commons to plunder, that, once they had touched the royal spoil, they might forever lose all hope of peace with the kings. The land of the Tarquins, which lay between the city and the Tiber, was consecrated to Mars and was thenceforth the Campus Martius. It chanced, men say, that there was then upon it a crop of spelt, ripe for the harvest. Since it was a thing of religious scruple to consume the produce of that field, a great throng of men, sent in all together, cut down the crop, straw and all, and flung it by the basketful into the Tiber, which flowed shallow then, as it is wont to do at the height of summer. So the heaps of grain, caught fast in the shallows and coated with mud, settled there; and from these, and from the other things which the river carried in by chance to the same place, an island was little by little formed. Afterward, I believe, embankments were added, and the work helped by men’s hands, so that the surface, thus raised high and made firm, might be able to bear up temples too and colonnades. After the goods of the kings had been plundered, the traitors were condemned and the penalty exacted—the more conspicuous in that the consulship laid upon a father the office of taking vengeance on his own children, so that he who ought to have been spared the very sight of it, him fortune appointed to exact the punishment. There stood bound to the stake young men of the noblest birth; but the consul’s sons turned all eyes upon themselves, away from the rest as from common heads; and men pitied them not for their punishment more than for the crime by which they had earned that punishment. To think that those men, in that very year above all others, had brought themselves to betray their fatherland newly set free, their father its liberator, the consulship arisen from the house of the Junii, the Fathers, the commons, all that there was at Rome of gods and of men, to one who had once been their proud king and was now their hostile exile! The consuls advanced to their seats, and the lictors were sent to do execution. They strip the young men, beat them with rods, and behead them with the axe; while through it all the father, and his look, and his face, were a spectacle, the father’s heart breaking through even as he ministered at the public punishment. After the penalty upon the guilty, that there might be a notable example, in either direction, for the deterring of crime, money from the treasury was given to the informer as his reward, with liberty and citizenship. He is said to have been the first to be freed by the vindicta; and some think that the very name of the vindicta was drawn from him, his own name having been Vindicius. After him it was observed as a rule that those so freed should be held to have been received into citizenship.

When all this had been reported to Tarquinius as it had befallen, inflamed not by grief alone for so great a hope fallen to nothing, but also by hatred and by anger, now that he saw the way of guile barred, he resolved that war must be set in motion openly, and went round as a suppliant to the cities of Etruria, beseeching above all the men of Veii and of Tarquinii not to suffer one sprung from themselves, of their own blood, an outcast and a beggar, lately of so great a kingdom, to perish before their eyes together with his young sons: others had been called from abroad to be kings at Rome; he, a king, while enlarging the Roman power by war, had been driven out by a wicked conspiracy of his nearest kin; they, because no single one of them had seemed worthy enough of the throne, had seized among themselves the several parts of the kingdom, and had given his goods to be plundered by the people, that no man might be without a share in the crime. His country and his kingdom he wished to recover, and to take vengeance on his ungrateful citizens. Let them bring help, let them aid him; let them go too to avenge their own old wrongs, their legions so often cut to pieces, their land taken away. These words moved the Veientes, and they growl threateningly, every man for himself, that the disgraces at least must be wiped away under a Roman leader, and what was lost in war recovered by war. The Tarquinienses the name moved, and the kinship: it seemed a fair thing that their own people should reign at Rome. So two armies, of two states, followed Tarquinius to reclaim the kingdom and to pursue the Romans with war. When they had come into Roman territory, the consuls go to meet the enemy: Valerius leads the foot in a hollow square; Brutus went ahead with the cavalry to reconnoiter. In the same way the enemy’s mounted force was at the head of their column; over it was set Arruns Tarquinius, the king’s son; the king himself followed with the legions. Arruns, when from the lictors he knew the consul from afar, and then, nearer now and with more certainty, recognized Brutus by his face as well, blazing with anger cried: "That is the man who drove us out, exiles from our fatherland. See, there he is, decked in our insignia, marching in his pride. Gods, avengers of kings, be at hand!" He spurs his horse and drives it straight at the consul himself. Brutus perceived that he was the mark. It was honorable in those days for the very leaders to take part in the fighting; so eagerly he offers himself to the encounter, and with spirits so hostile did they charge—neither, while he wounded his foe, mindful of guarding his own body—that, each transfixed by the other’s stroke through the shield, they slid dying from their horses, fixed upon the two spears together. At the same moment the rest of the cavalry battle, too, began, and not long after the foot come up as well. There the fighting went with shifting fortune, and as if on even terms: on either side the right wings conquered, the left were beaten. The Veientes, used to being beaten by the Roman soldier, were routed and put to flight; the Tarquinienses, a fresh enemy, not only stood their ground but even, on their part, drove the Roman back. When the battle had gone thus, so great a terror came upon Tarquinius and the Etruscans that, the enterprise abandoned as fruitless, the two armies, the Veientine and the Tarquinian, departed by night, each to its own homes. To this battle men add marvels: that in the stillness of the next night a mighty voice was sent forth from the Arsian wood; it was believed to be the voice of Silvanus; these were its words—that of the Etruscans one more had fallen in the line, and that the Roman was the victor in the war. So, at any rate, the Romans came away from there as conquerors, the Etruscans as conquered. For when day broke and not one of the enemy was in sight, the consul Publius Valerius gathered the spoils and returned thence to Rome in triumph. His colleague’s funeral he conducted with what magnificence he then could; but far the greater glory of his death was the public grief, made notable above all by this, that the matrons mourned him a whole year as a parent, because he had been so keen an avenger of violated chastity.

For the consul who survived, then—so changeable are the tempers of the crowd—out of favor there arose not only envy but even suspicion, and that with a dreadful charge. Report had it that he was aiming at kingship, because he had neither had a colleague chosen in Brutus’s place, and was building on the summit of the Velia: there, on a high and fortified site, an impregnable citadel was rising. That these things were said and believed by the common voice galled the consul’s spirit with the indignity of it; and, summoning the people to a council, he had the fasces lowered and went up to the platform. It was a welcome sight to the multitude—that the insignia of command had been lowered before them, and that confession made that the people’s majesty and might were greater than the consul’s. There, bidding them give ear, the consul fell to praising his colleague’s fortune: that he had died with his country freed, in the highest honor, fighting for the commonwealth, his glory ripe and not yet turning into envy; while he himself, outliving his own glory, was left over to accusation and to envy, and from the liberator of his country had sunk to the level of the Aquilii and the Vitellii. "Will there, then," he cried, "never be any worth, in your eyes, so well proved that it cannot be sullied by suspicion? Was I, of all men—that bitterest enemy of kings—to fear that I myself should incur the charge of coveting the kingship? Were I to dwell in the very citadel and on the Capitol, could I believe that I might be feared by my fellow citizens? On so light a thing does my good name hang with you? Is your trust so feebly founded that where I am matters more than what I am? The house of Publius Valerius shall not stand in the way of your liberty, Quirites; the Velia shall be safe for you. I will not only bring my house down to the level ground, but will set it below the hill, so that you may dwell above a citizen you have held suspect; let those build on the Velia to whom liberty is better entrusted than to Publius Valerius." All the materials were straightway brought down below the Velia, and the house was built at the very foot of the slope, where now is the temple of Vica Pota.

Then laws were passed, which not only acquitted the consul of the suspicion of seeking the kingship, but turned the matter so far the other way as even to make him popular; and from this the surname Publicola was given him. Above all, the laws concerning appeal to the people against the magistrates, and the devoting to the gods, along with his goods, of the life of any man who should form designs of seizing the kingship, were welcome to the multitude. And when he had carried these laws by himself alone, that the credit of them might be his and his only, then at last he held the comitia for the choosing of a colleague. There was elected as consul Spurius Lucretius, who, being far advanced in years and no longer of strength sufficient for discharging the consular duties, died within a few days. Marcus Horatius Pulvillus was put in Lucretius’s place. In some of the older authorities I do not find Lucretius as consul; they put Horatius next after Brutus; I believe that, because no exploit marked that consulship, the memory of it has perished. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol had not yet been dedicated. The consuls Valerius and Horatius drew lots which of them should dedicate it. The lot fell to Horatius: Publicola set out for the war with Veii. The kinsfolk of Valerius took it more ill than was fitting that the dedication of so renowned a temple should be given to Horatius. Having tried by every means to hinder it, and all other attempts having failed, while the consul was now grasping the doorpost, in the midst of his prayer to the gods, they strike upon him the foul tidings that his son was dead, and that with his household thus polluted he could not dedicate the temple. Whether he did not believe the thing had happened, or had so great a strength of soul, is neither handed down for certain nor easy to interpret; turned aside from his purpose by that message no further than to order the body carried out for burial, holding the doorpost still, he completes the prayer and dedicates the temple. These were the doings, at home and in the field, of the first year after the kings were driven out.

Thereafter Publius Valerius, for the second time, and Titus Lucretius were made consuls. By now the Tarquins had taken refuge with Lars Porsenna, king of Clusium. There, mingling counsel with entreaty, they would now beg him not to suffer them, men sprung from the Etruscans, of the same blood and name, to live as needy exiles, and now would even warn him not to let the rising fashion of expelling kings go unpunished. Liberty, they said, had sweetness enough of its own; unless kings should defend their thrones with as great a force as states sought after it, the highest would be leveled with the lowest; there would be nothing lofty, nothing that towered above the rest, in states; the end was at hand of monarchy, the fairest thing among gods and men. Porsenna, judging it both a safeguard for the Etruscans to have a king at Rome, and a glory that the king should be of the Etruscan race, came against Rome with a hostile army. Never at any other time before had so great a terror seized the senate, so strong was the power of Clusium then, and so great the name of Porsenna. And they feared not the enemy only, but their own citizens too, lest the Roman commons, struck with dread, should admit the kings into the city and accept peace even at the price of bondage. Many blandishments, therefore, were granted to the commons by the senate in that time. Care was taken, first of all, for the grain-supply, and some were sent to the Volsci, some to Cumae, to buy corn. The monopoly of the sale of salt, too, because it was being sold at an extravagant price, was taken from private hands and made wholly a public charge; and the commons were relieved of port-dues and of the tribute, that the rich should contribute, who were equal to bearing the burden: the poor paid tax enough if they reared children. And so this indulgence of the Fathers held the state, amid the hardships that followed—in the siege and the famine—so concordant that the name of king was loathed by highest and lowest alike, nor was any one man thereafter so popular by base arts as the whole senate then was by good governance.

When the enemy were at hand, every man for himself moved from the fields into the city, and they hedge the city itself about with garrisons. Part seemed safe by its walls, part by the barrier of the Tiber. The Sublician bridge well-nigh gave the enemy a passage, had there not been one man, Horatius Cocles; him that day the fortune of the city of Rome had for her bulwark. He, posted by chance on guard at the bridge, when he had seen the Janiculum taken by a sudden rush and the enemy pouring down from it at speed, and his own men, a panic-stricken throng, throwing away their arms and their ranks, laying hold of them one by one, barring their way, calling on the faith of gods and men to witness, kept protesting that their flight, if they deserted their post, was in vain; if they left the bridge behind them passable, there would soon be more of the enemy on the Palatine and the Capitol than on the Janiculum. Therefore he charges them, he bids them, to break down the bridge with steel, with fire, with whatever force they can: he himself would take upon him the onset of the enemy, so far as it could be withstood by a single body. Then he strides to the head of the bridge, and—conspicuous among the backs of those plainly giving ground from the fight, his arms faced about to close, hand to hand—by the very marvel of his daring he struck the enemy with amazement. Yet shame held two with him, Spurius Larcius and Titus Herminius, both renowned in birth and in deeds. With these he withstood for a while the first storm of danger and the most tumultuous brunt of the fighting; then, as but a little of the bridge was left and those who were cutting it called them back, he forced even these two to withdraw to safety. Then, casting his fierce eyes round about, threatening, upon the Etruscan chiefs, now he would challenge them one by one, now rail at them all: slaves of proud kings, forgetful of their own liberty, come to assail another’s! They hesitated a while, each looking round upon the other to begin the fight. Then shame stirred the line, and a shout being raised, from every side they hurl their weapons at their single foe. When all these had stuck fast in his outheld shield, and he no less stubbornly with huge stride held the bridge, they were now trying to thrust the man down by a charge, when at once the crash of the broken bridge and at once a shout of the Romans, raised in the gladness of the work accomplished, checked their onset with sudden dismay. Then Cocles said: "Father Tiber, holy one, I pray thee, receive these arms and this thy soldier in thy propitious stream." So, armed as he was, he leaped down into the Tiber, and, though many weapons fell upon him from above, swam across unharmed to his own people—a deed that was to have more of fame with later generations than of belief. The state was grateful to so great a valor: a statue was set up in the comitium, and there was given him as much land as he could plow round in a single day. Private zeal, too, shone out amid the public honors; for in the midst of the great scarcity each man, according to his household store, contributed something to him, robbing himself of his own sustenance.

Porsenna, beaten back in his first attempt, his plans turned from storming the city to besieging it, placed a garrison on the Janiculum and pitched his own camp on the level ground and the banks of the Tiber, calling up ships from every quarter both to keep watch that no grain should be brought in to Rome, and to ferry his soldiers across the river to plunder, as occasion served, now at one point, now at another; and in a short while he made all the Roman countryside so dangerous that not only everything else, but the cattle too, were all driven into the city, nor did anyone dare to drive them outside the gates. This great license was allowed the Etruscans not so much out of fear as of design. For the consul Valerius, intent on a chance of falling unawares upon a large and scattered body of them, careless to avenge in small matters, was saving himself as a heavy avenger for greater ones. And so, to lure the plunderers out, he gives the order to his men to drive out the cattle in numbers, on the morrow, by the Esquiline gate, which was farthest from the enemy, supposing that the enemy would learn of it, because in the siege and the famine the slaves were deserting in their faithlessness. And learn it they did, by a deserter’s information, and in far greater numbers, as in hope of all the plunder together, they cross the river. Publius Valerius then orders Titus Herminius with a moderate force to take hidden post at the second milestone on the Gabine road, and Spurius Larcius with the light-armed youth to stand at the Colline gate till the enemy should pass by, and then to throw himself in their way, that there be no return to the river. Of the consuls, the other, Titus Lucretius, went out by the Naevian gate with several maniples of soldiers; Valerius himself led down chosen cohorts from the Caelian hill, and these first came into the enemy’s sight. Herminius, when he perceived the uproar, charges from his ambush, and, as the Etruscans turned upon Lucretius, cuts them down from behind; on the right hand and the left, here from the Colline gate, there from the Naevian, the shout was returned: so the plunderers were cut to pieces in the midst, neither a match in strength for fighting nor able to flee, all the ways being barred. And that was the end of the Etruscans’ ranging so far afield.

The siege went on nonetheless, and with it a scarcity of grain at a most extravagant price; and Porsenna held to the hope of taking the city by simply sitting before it, when Gaius Mucius, a young noble, to whom it seemed a shameful thing that the Roman people, in its servitude, when it was under kings, had been besieged in no war by any enemy, while now, that same people free, it was besieged by those very Etruscans whose armies it had so often routed—judging, therefore, that this indignity must be avenged by some great and daring deed, at first resolved of his own accord to make his way into the enemy’s camp; then, fearing lest, if he went without the consuls’ order and unknown to all, he might chance to be seized by the Roman sentries and dragged back as a deserter—the fortune of the city at that time lending color to the charge—he goes to the senate. "I wish, Fathers," he said, "to cross the Tiber, and to enter, if I can, the camp of the enemy—not as a plunderer, nor as an avenger in turn of their ravages: a greater deed is in my mind, if the gods help." The Fathers approve. Hiding a sword beneath his garment, he sets out. When he had come there, he took his stand in the thickest of the crowd, near the royal tribunal. There, when pay chanced to be given to the soldiers, and a scribe seated beside the king, in dress much like his own, was busy with many matters, and the soldiers commonly resorted to him, Mucius, afraid to ask which was Porsenna, lest by his ignorance of the king he should betray who he himself was, as fortune blindly led the deed, slew the scribe instead of the king. As he made off from there, through the affrighted crowd, by the way he had cut for himself with his bloody blade, when at the outcry the king’s guards had run together and seized and dragged him back, set before the king’s tribunal, even then, amid such menaces of fortune, more to be feared than fearing, "I am a Roman citizen," he said; "men call me Gaius Mucius. An enemy, I wished to slay an enemy, nor have I less spirit for death than I had for the killing: both to do and to suffer bravely is the Roman way. Nor am I the only one to have borne this spirit against you; behind me is a long line of men seeking the same honor. Gird yourself, therefore, for this peril, if it please you, so that hour by hour you must fight for your life, and have the sword and the enemy in the very vestibule of your palace. This is the war we, the Roman youth, declare upon you. No battle-line, no battle, need you fear: with you alone the matter shall be, and one against one." When the king, at once blazing with anger and aghast at the peril, threatening ordered fires to be heaped about him unless he should speedily disclose what plots of ambush he was darkly hinting at, "Look," said Mucius, "that you may see how cheap the body is to those who have a great glory in view"; and he thrust his right hand into a fire kindled for the sacrifice. And when he let it burn there as though his spirit were unconscious of the pain, the king, well-nigh thunderstruck at the marvel, leaped from his seat and bade the youth be removed from the altar. "Begone," he said, "you who have dared more hostile deeds against yourself than against me. I would call down a blessing on your valor, if that valor stood on the side of my country; now I dismiss you hence, by the right of war, free, untouched, and unharmed." Then Mucius, as if requiting the kindness, said: "Since with you valor has its honor, so that you have won by a benefaction what you could not win by threats, three hundred of us, the chief of the Roman youth, have sworn to assail you by this road. Mine was the first lot; the rest, each as his lot shall fall first, will be at hand, each in his own time, until fortune shall have given you up to us at an opportune hour."

The dismissal of Mucius—on whom afterward the surname Scaevola, from the loss of his right hand, was bestowed—was followed by envoys from Porsenna to Rome; so much had he been moved both by the hazard of the first peril, from which nothing but the assassin’s error had shielded him, and by the prospect of undergoing the struggle as many times over as there were conspirators left, that of his own accord he proposed terms of peace to the Romans. In the terms there was fruitless mention of restoring the Tarquins to the throne—more because he had been unable to refuse the Tarquins this than because he did not know it would be refused him by the Romans. The restoration of their land to the Veientes he did obtain; and the necessity of giving hostages to the Romans was wrung from them, if they wished the garrison withdrawn from the Janiculum. On these terms peace was made, and Porsenna led his army down from the Janiculum and departed from Roman soil. To Gaius Mucius the Fathers, for his valor, gave as a gift land across the Tiber, which were afterward called the Mucian Meadows. With valor so honored, women too were stirred to public deeds of glory; and the maiden Cloelia, one of the hostages, when the Etruscan camp chanced to be set not far from the bank of the Tiber, eluding the guards, at the head of a band of maidens swam the Tiber amid the enemy’s weapons and restored them all in safety to their kindred at Rome. When this was reported to the king, at first, inflamed with anger, he sent spokesmen to Rome to demand back Cloelia as a hostage: the rest he did not greatly value; then, turning to admiration, he declared that the deed surpassed those of the Coclites and the Mucii, and gave out that, as he would hold the treaty broken if the hostage were not surrendered, so, if she were given up, he would send her back to her own people untouched and inviolate. Good faith was kept on both sides: the Romans restored the pledge of peace according to the treaty, and with the Etruscan king valor found not safety only but honor too; for, praising the maiden, he said he gave her a part of the hostages as a gift, and let her choose whom she would. When all had been brought forth, she is said to have chosen the boys not yet of age—a thing both becoming to her maidenhood, and, by the agreement of the hostages themselves, fitting: that that age above all should be freed from the enemy which was most exposed to outrage. Peace renewed, the Romans rewarded this new valor in a woman with a new kind of honor, an equestrian statue: at the head of the Sacred Way was set a maiden seated on a horse.

With this so peaceful departure of the Etruscan king from the city there is at variance a custom, handed down from the ancients and abiding even to our own day among the other solemn forms—that of selling "the goods of King Porsenna." The origin of this custom must needs either have arisen during the war and not been dropped in peace, or have grown from a milder beginning than this title, "of selling goods in an enemy’s fashion," would suggest. The nearest to the truth, of what is handed down, is that Porsenna, on his departure from the Janiculum, made a gift to the Romans of his camp, well stocked with provisions brought together from the near and fertile fields of Etruria, the city being then in want after the long siege; and that these goods were then sold—lest, if the people were turned loose upon them, they should be plundered in an enemy’s fashion—and were called "the goods of Porsenna," the title marking gratitude for the gift rather than an auction of the king’s fortune, which was not even in the power of the Roman people. Porsenna, abandoning the war with Rome, that he might not seem to have led his army into those parts to no purpose, sent his son Arruns with part of the forces to besiege Aricia. At first the unexpected thing had dismayed the Aricians; then the auxiliaries summoned both from the Latin peoples and from Cumae gave them such hope that they ventured to decide the matter in the field. As the battle began, the Etruscans had charged with so headlong an onset that they routed the Aricians by the very shock; the Cumaean cohorts, using craft against force, gave ground a little, and, when the enemy had been carried past in disorder, wheeled their standards about and fell upon them from the rear. So the Etruscans, all but victors already, were cut down in the midst. A very small part, their leader lost, since there was no refuge nearer, were carried, unarmed, to Rome, both by their fortune and in the guise of suppliants. There they were kindly received and parceled out among the households. When their wounds were healed, some departed to their homes, heralds of the kindnesses of their hosts; many were held at Rome by affection for their hosts and for the city. To these a place to dwell in was given, which they afterward called the Tuscan Quarter.

Spurius Larcius next, and Titus Herminius—and then Publius Lucretius and Publius Valerius Publicola—were made consuls. In that year envoys came from Porsenna for the last time, about restoring Tarquinius to the throne. When the answer had been given them that the senate would send envoys to the king, there were straightway sent the most honored of the Fathers—not that a brief reply could not have been returned, that the kings would not be received, but rather chosen men of the Fathers were sent to him than that the reply should be given to his envoys at Rome, for this reason: that the mention of the matter might be brought to a perpetual end, and that amid such great mutual benefits their feelings might not be vexed each against the other, the one asking what was against the liberty of the Roman people, and the Romans, unless they wished to be complaisant to their own ruin, refusing him to whom they would wish to refuse nothing. The Roman people, they said, was not under a monarchy but under liberty; they had so resolved in their hearts that they would open their gates to enemies sooner than to kings; this was the prayer of all, that whatever should be the end of liberty in that city should be the end of the city too. Therefore, if he wished Rome to be safe, they begged him to suffer it to be free. The king, overcome by their modesty, said: "Since that is fixed and unshakable, I will neither weary you by pressing the same thing in vain, nor will I cheat the Tarquins with the hope of an aid that is not in my power. Let them seek elsewhere a place of exile, whether they have need of war or of repose, that nothing may keep my peace with you asunder." To his words he added deeds yet more friendly: what remained of the hostages he restored, and gave back the Veientine land, taken from them by the treaty struck at the Janiculum. Tarquinius, all hope of return cut off, went into exile at Tusculum, to his son-in-law Mamilius Octavius. With Porsenna the Romans had a loyal peace.

The consuls were Marcus Valerius and Publius Postumius. That year there was good fighting against the Sabines, and the consuls celebrated a triumph. The Sabines thereupon began to make ready for war on a greater scale; and to meet them—and lest at the same time some sudden peril should break out from Tusculum, where war, if not declared, was yet suspected—Publius Valerius, for the fourth time, and Titus Lucretius, for the second, were made consuls. A quarrel that arose among the Sabines between the partisans of war and of peace transferred no small part of their strength to the Romans. For Attius Clausus—who afterward at Rome bore the name Appius Claudius—being himself an advocate of peace and hard pressed by the makers of war, and no match for their faction, fled from Inregillum to Rome with a great train of dependents. To these were given citizenship and land across the Anio; and the old Claudian tribe, with new tribesmen added later from those who should come from that district, took its name from them. Appius, enrolled among the Fathers, before long rose to the rank of the foremost men. The consuls, marching with a hostile army into the Sabine country, so crushed the enemy’s power, first by laying waste the land and then in battle, that for a long time no renewal of the war need be feared from that quarter; and they returned in triumph to Rome. Publius Valerius—by the consent of all the first man in the arts of war and of peace—died the year after, in the consulship of Agrippa Menenius and Publius Postumius, with glory immense but with private means so slender that there was not enough to meet the cost of his funeral; it was paid from the public purse. The matrons mourned him as they had mourned Brutus. In the same year two Latin colonies, Pometia and Cora, went over to the Aurunci. War with the Aurunci was begun; and when their great army, which had boldly offered battle to the consuls as they entered its borders, had been routed, the whole war with the Aurunci was driven back upon Pometia. Nor was there any more sparing of slaughter after the battle than in it: those slain were a good deal more than those taken, and the captives they butchered wherever they found them; nor did the fury of war keep its hands even from the hostages, three hundred in number, who had been received. And this year too there was a triumph at Rome.

The consuls who followed, Opiter Verginius and Spurius Cassius, laid siege to Pometia, first by storm, then with mantlets and other siege-works. Against them the Aurunci—rising now more out of an implacable hatred than from any hope or opening—sallied out, more of them armed with fire than with steel, and fill all things with slaughter and burning. They set the mantlets ablaze, wounded and killed many of the enemy, and all but slew one of the consuls too—but which, the authorities do not add—thrown from his horse with a grievous wound. From there the Romans returned, the campaign gone ill. The consul was carried home among many wounded men, his life in doubt. Then, after no long interval—enough to tend the wounds and fill up the army—the assault on Pometia was renewed, with greater anger and with strength increased besides. And when, the mantlets rebuilt and the other engines of war brought up, the soldiers were now on the very point of mounting the walls, the surrender was made. Yet the Aurunci, for all their surrender, suffered no less foully than if their city had been taken by storm: the leading men were beheaded with the axe, the rest of the colonists sold under the crown; the town was razed, the land sold off. The consuls triumphed—more for the heavy avenging of their wrath than for the greatness of the war they had brought to an end.

The year that followed had as consuls Postumus Cominius and Titus Larcius. In that year at Rome, when during the games some courtesans were carried off in wantonness by the young men of the Sabines, there was, as men ran together, a brawl and well-nigh a battle; and out of that small matter it seemed to point toward a renewal of war. Over and above the fear of a Sabine war there had come this too: that thirty peoples, it was well established, had now sworn a league together, at the instigation of Octavius Mamilius. Amid such great suspense of expected events, the state being anxious, the first mention arose of creating a dictator. But neither in what year, nor under what consuls—because they were of the Tarquinian faction, and so, it is handed down, were little trusted—nor who was the first dictator created, is sufficiently certain. Among the oldest authorities, however, I find that Titus Larcius was made the first dictator, and Spurius Cassius master of the horse. They chose men of consular rank; so the law that was passed concerning the creating of a dictator commanded. This the more inclines me to believe that it was Larcius, a man of consular rank, rather than Manius Valerius, son of Marcus and grandson of Volesus, who had not yet been consul, that was set over the consuls as their governor and master; for indeed, had they wished above all to choose a dictator from that family, they would far rather have chosen the father, Marcus Valerius, a man of proven worth and of consular rank.

When the first dictator had been created at Rome, and men saw the axes borne before him, a great fear came upon the commons, so that they were the keener to obey his word. For there was not, as with consuls, who held equal power, the help of the one against the other, nor was there appeal, nor any aid anywhere save in heeding the command. Upon the Sabines too the creation of a dictator at Rome struck fear—the more so because they believed he had been created on their account. And so they send envoys to treat of peace. When these begged the dictator and the senate to grant pardon to young men for their error, the answer was that the young men could be forgiven, but not the old, who sowed wars out of wars. Yet the matter of peace was discussed, and would have been obtained, had the Sabines but brought themselves to make good—for this was the demand laid upon them—what the war had cost. War was declared; but an unspoken truce kept the year quiet. The consuls were Servius Sulpicius and Manius Tullius; nothing worthy of memory was done. Then came Titus Aebutius and Gaius Vetusius. Under these consuls Fidenae was besieged, Crustumeria taken, and Praeneste went over from the Latins to the Romans. Nor was the Latin war, which had been swelling now for several years, put off any longer. Aulus Postumius as dictator, and Titus Aebutius as master of the horse, set out with great forces of foot and horse, and at Lake Regillus, in Tusculan territory, met the enemy’s column; and because it was heard that the Tarquins were in the Latin army, their anger could not be held in from joining battle on the instant. Therefore the fight too was a good deal heavier and more savage than the rest. For the leaders were present not merely to direct the action by counsel, but, fighting with their own bodies, threw themselves into the struggle; and scarcely one of the chiefs, on this side or on that, came off without a wound, save only the Roman dictator. As Postumius, in the front line, was urging on and ordering his men, Tarquinius Superbus—though now grown heavier with age and failing strength—charged his horse against him; struck on the side, the king was caught up by a rush of his own men and brought to safety. And on the other wing Aebutius, the master of the horse, had driven at Octavius Mamilius; nor did his coming escape the Tusculan leader, who likewise spurs his horse against him. And so great was the force of their leveled spears as they met that Aebutius’s arm was run through, and Mamilius struck in the breast. Mamilius the Latins received into their second line; Aebutius, since with his wounded arm he could not hold a weapon, withdrew from the fight. The Latin leader, in no way daunted by his wound, rouses the battle; and because he saw his men shaken, he calls up the cohort of Roman exiles, which the son of Lucius Tarquinius commanded. This cohort, fighting with the greater fury for goods torn from them and a fatherland taken away, for a little while restored the battle.

As the Romans on that wing were now giving ground, Marcus Valerius, brother of Publicola, caught sight of the fierce young Tarquinius flaunting himself in the front rank of the exiles; and fired by his own house’s glory besides—that, as the expulsion of the kings had been that family’s honor, so the killing of them should be the honor of the same house—he sets spurs to his horse and makes for Tarquinius with leveled point. Tarquinius gave way before his hostile foe, back into the column of his own men. As Valerius drove rashly into the line of the exiles, one of them set upon him from the flank and ran him through; nor was the horse at all slowed by its rider’s wound, and the dying Roman slid down to the earth, his arms slipping over his body. When the dictator Postumius perceived that so great a man had fallen, that the exiles were charging fiercely in a hurrying column, and that his own men, shaken, were giving way, he gives the signal to his cohort—a chosen band he kept about him as a guard—that whomever of their own they should see in flight, they were to treat as an enemy. So, turned by a fear on either hand, the Romans faced from flight back upon the foe, and the line was restored. The dictator’s cohort then for the first time entered the battle; with bodies and spirits unspent they fall upon the weary exiles and cut them down. There another struggle arose among the chiefs. The Latin commander, when he saw the cohort of exiles all but surrounded by the Roman dictator, brought up with him from the reserves several maniples into the front line. As these came on in column, Titus Herminius, a lieutenant, caught sight of them, and recognizing among them Mamilius, conspicuous in dress and arms, joined battle with the enemy’s leader with far greater force than a little before the master of the horse had done—so that with a single stroke he ran Mamilius through the side and killed him, but, while he was stripping the body of his foe, was himself struck by a javelin; and though he was carried back victorious into the camp, he died at the first dressing of his wound. Then the dictator flies to the cavalry, beseeching them, since the infantry were now spent, to dismount and take up the fight. They obeyed: they leap down from their horses, dash forward into the front, and hold out their bucklers before the front-rankers. At once the line of foot took heart again, when they saw the nobles of the youth sharing their peril on equal terms of fighting. Then at last the Latins were driven back, and their shaken line gave way. The horses were brought up to the cavalry, that they might pursue the enemy; and the foot followed too. There the dictator, leaving out no help of gods or of men, is said to have vowed a temple to Castor, and to have proclaimed rewards for the soldier who first, and who second, should enter the enemy’s camp; and so great was the ardor that, by the very charge with which they had routed the foe, the Romans took the camp. In this manner was the battle fought at Lake Regillus. The dictator and the master of the horse returned to the city in triumph.

For the next three years there was neither settled peace nor war. The consuls were Quintus Cloelius and Titus Larcius, then Aulus Sempronius and Marcus Minucius. Under these consuls a temple was dedicated to Saturn, and the Saturnalia established as a festival day. Then Aulus Postumius and Titus Verginius were made consuls. It is only under this year that I find, in some authorities, the battle at Lake Regillus placed; and that Aulus Postumius, because his colleague was of doubtful loyalty, laid down his consulship, and was thereupon made dictator. So great are the errors that entangle the chronology—the magistracies being set in a different order by different writers—that you cannot make out, in such antiquity, either which consuls followed which, or what was done in each year: neither the events, nor even the authorities for them. Then Appius Claudius and Publius Servilius were made consuls. This year is notable for the news of Tarquin’s death. He died at Cumae, whither, after the breaking of the Latins’ power, he had betaken himself to the tyrant Aristodemus. At that news the Fathers were elated, and the commons elated; but among the Fathers the rejoicing was too unbridled, and toward the commons, who up to that day had been courted with the utmost effort, wrongs began to be done by the leading men. In the same year the colony of Signia, which King Tarquin had planted, was planted anew, its number of colonists filled up. At Rome twenty-one tribes were made. The temple of Mercury was dedicated on the Ides of May.

With the Volscian people, throughout the Latin war, there had been neither peace nor war; for the Volsci had got ready auxiliaries to send to the Latins, had the Roman dictator not been beforehand with them—and the Roman was beforehand, that he might not contend in a single battle with Latin and Volscian at once. In anger at this the consuls led the legions into Volscian territory. The Volsci, not fearing punishment for a mere intention, were dismayed by the unlooked-for stroke; forgetful of arms, they give three hundred hostages, children of the leading men of Cora and Pometia. So the legions were led back from there without a fight. But not long after, the Volsci, their fear lifted, returned to their own nature; once more they make ready a secret war, having taken the Hernici into a fellowship of arms. They send envoys, too, far and wide to stir up Latium; but the Latins, on whom the defeat lately suffered at Lake Regillus was fresh, in anger and hatred of anyone who should counsel war, did not even keep their hands from the envoys: they seized the Volsci and brought them to Rome. There they were handed over to the consuls, and it was disclosed that the Volsci and the Hernici were preparing war upon the Romans. When the matter was laid before the senate, it was so welcome to the Fathers that they both sent back to the Latins six thousand of their captives, and referred to the new magistrates the question of a treaty—a thing that had been all but refused forever. Then indeed the Latins rejoiced at what was done, and the advocates of peace stood in great glory. They send a golden crown to the Capitol as a gift to Jupiter. With the envoys and the gift there came a great throng poured round them, of those captives who had been sent back to their own people. They go to the houses of the men in whose service each had been; they give thanks for being generously treated and cared for in their misfortune; and thereupon they form bonds of hospitality. Never at any other time, before or since, was the Latin name more closely joined to the Roman dominion, in public and in private alike.

But a Volscian war too was threatening, and the state, at discord with itself, was ablaze with internal hatred between the Fathers and the commons—chiefly on account of those bound for debt. They murmured that, while abroad they fought for liberty and dominion, at home they were taken captive and oppressed by their own fellow citizens, and that the liberty of the commons was safer in war than in peace, among enemies than among citizens. This resentment, swelling of its own accord, the conspicuous misfortune of one man kindled into flame. A man well on in years flung himself into the Forum, bearing all the marks of his miseries. His clothing was caked with filth; the state of his body was fouler still, wasted with pallor and emaciation; and beyond this, his straggling beard and hair had given his face a savage look. Yet for all that disfigurement he was recognized; men said he had commanded companies, and aloud, pitying him, they kept naming the other honors of his service; while he himself displayed, as witnesses of several honorable fights, the scars upon his breast. When men asked whence came that condition, whence that squalor—the crowd by now poured round him almost in the manner of an assembly—he said that, while serving in the Sabine war, he had not only lost the produce of his land through the ravaging, but had had his farmhouse burned, all his goods plundered, his cattle driven off, and a war-tax laid on him at an unfavorable time; and so he had fallen into debt. That debt, swollen by interest, had first stripped him of his father’s and grandfather’s land, then of his other property; at last, like a wasting disease, it had reached his body: he had been led off by his creditor, not into slavery, but into a workhouse and a torture-house. Then he showed his back, foul with the fresh marks of stripes. At this sight and these words a huge outcry arose. The tumult no longer kept within the Forum, but spread everywhere through the whole city. Those bound for debt, in chains and out of them, burst forth on every side into the open, imploring the protection of the Quirites. Nowhere was there lacking a willing comrade for the rising; in many bands, by every road, men run with shouting into the Forum. At great peril to themselves, those of the Fathers who happened to be in the Forum fell in with that mob; and there would have been no staying of hands, had not the consuls, Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius, swiftly intervened to crush the uprising. But the multitude, turning upon them, displayed their chains and their other disfigurements: this, they cried, was what they had earned—each reproaching them with his own service in this place or that—and they demanded, far more in menace than in supplication, that the consuls summon the senate; and they themselves stood round the senate-house, meaning to be the arbiters and controllers of the public counsel. Only a very few of the Fathers, whom chance had thrown in the way, were gathered by the consuls; fear kept the rest away not from the senate-house only but from the Forum, and nothing could be transacted, the senate being too thin to act. Then indeed the multitude believed they were being mocked and put off—that the Fathers who were absent stayed away not by chance, not from fear, but to obstruct the business, and that the consuls themselves were shuffling, and that their miseries were beyond doubt a thing to be laughed at. It had nearly come to the point where not even the majesty of the consuls could check men’s anger, when, uncertain whether they drew greater peril by delaying or by coming, the senators at last come into the senate. And even when the house was full at last, there was not enough agreement either among the Fathers or even between the consuls themselves. Appius, a man of vehement temper, judged that the matter must be handled by the consular power: let one or two be seized, and the rest would be quiet. Servilius, more inclined to gentle remedies, thought that spirits so roused were both more safely and more easily bent than broken.

Amid all this came another and a greater alarm: Latin horsemen gallop up with the tumultuous news that the Volsci were coming with a hostile army to assault the city. The hearing of it—so far had discord made two states out of one—affected the Fathers and the commons in wholly opposite ways. The commons exulted with joy, and declared that the gods were at hand to avenge the arrogance of the Fathers; one man heartened another not to give in their names: they would perish, if perish they must, with all rather than alone; let the Fathers serve as soldiers, let the Fathers take up arms, that the perils of war might rest with the same men with whom its rewards rested. But the senate-house, gloomy and trembling under a twofold fear—of the citizen and of the enemy—besought the consul Servilius, whose temper was the more popular, to deliver the commonwealth, beset by terrors so great. Then the consul, dismissing the senate, comes forth into the assembly. There he showed that it was the Fathers’ care to look to the commons; but that, while they were deliberating about that—the largest part of the state, to be sure, yet still a part—fear for the whole commonwealth had broken in. Nor could anything, with the enemy nearly at the gates, take precedence of the war; and even were there some respite, it was neither honorable for the commons to have taken up arms for their fatherland only after a wage was first received, nor seemly enough for the Fathers to have looked to the broken fortunes of their fellow citizens through fear rather than afterward of their own free will. To the speech he then added the warrant of an edict, by which he proclaimed that no man should hold a Roman citizen in chains or under lock, so as to keep him from the power of giving in his name before the consuls; and that no one, so long as a soldier was in the camp, should take possession of his goods or sell them, or detain his children or grandchildren. This edict published, both the men bound for debt who were present at once entered their names, and from every quarter of the whole city there was a rush into the Forum—of men breaking out from confinement, since the creditor had no right to hold them—to take the military oath. Great was that band, nor did the valor and service of any others shine out more in the Volscian war. The consul leads his forces out against the enemy, and pitches camp with a small space dividing them.

The next night the Volsci, relying on the Roman discord, made trial of the camp, in case some crossing-over or betrayal might be worked in the dark. The sentries perceived it; the army was roused; at the signal there was a running together to arms; and so that attempt of the Volsci came to nothing. The rest of the night was given to rest on both sides. At first light the next day the Volsci, having filled the trenches, assault the rampart; and now on every side the defenses were being torn up, when the consul—though all on every hand, and the men bound for debt before the rest, were shouting for him to give the signal—waited a little, to make trial of the soldiers’ spirit, and then, when their immense ardor was plain enough, gave at last the signal to sally, and sent forth the soldiery eager for the fight. At the very first onset the enemy were driven back; as they fled, their backs were cut down so far as the foot could pursue, and the cavalry drove the panic-stricken right up to their camp. Soon the camp itself, the legions thrown round it, was taken and plundered, when terror had driven the Volsci even from there. The next day the legions were led to Suessa Pometia, whither the enemy had fled, and within a few days the town was taken, and given over, once taken, to plunder. From this the needy soldiery was somewhat refreshed. The consul leads his victorious army back to Rome with the greatest glory to himself. As he was leaving for Rome, envoys of the Ecetran Volsci, fearing for their own fortunes after the capture of Pometia, approach him. To these, by decree of the senate, peace was given, and their land taken away.

Straightway the Sabines too alarmed the Romans—though it was more truly a sudden tumult than a war. In the night word was brought to the city that a Sabine army, bent on plunder, had reached the river Anio, and that there the farmhouses were everywhere being pillaged and burned. Aulus Postumius, who had been dictator in the Latin war, was sent thither at once with the whole force of cavalry; the consul Servilius followed with a chosen body of foot. The horsemen surrounded most of the scattered raiders, and the Sabine legion made no stand against the column of foot as it came up: worn out both with the march and with the night’s ravaging, and in great part stuffed with food and wine in the farmhouses, they had scarcely strength enough for flight. In a single night the Sabine war was both heard of and finished. The next day, when there was now high hope of peace won on every side, envoys of the Aurunci come before the senate, declaring war unless the Romans should withdraw from Volscian land. With the envoys an Auruncan army had at the same time set out from home; and the report of it, sighted now not far from Aricia, stirred up the Romans with so great a tumult that neither could the Fathers be consulted in due order, nor could men who were themselves taking up arms give a peaceful answer to those bearing arms against them. They march in hostile column to Aricia, and not far from there, the standards joined with the Aurunci, the war was finished in a single battle.

The Aurunci routed, the Roman—victor in so many wars within a few days—was looking for the consul’s promises and the senate’s pledge to be kept, when Appius, both from the arrogance bred in his soul and to make his colleague’s word a lie, gave judgment on debts as harshly as he could. Thereafter both those who had been bound for debt before were handed over to their creditors, and others were bound besides. Whenever this befell a soldier, he appealed to the other consul. There was a running to Servilius; they flung his promises in his face; each reproached him with his own services in war and the scars he had got. They demanded that he either lay the matter before the senate, or stand by his fellow citizens as consul, by his soldiers as their commander. These things moved the consul, but the circumstances forced him to shuffle: so headlong toward the other side was not his colleague only, but the whole faction of the nobles. And so, by steering a middle course, he neither escaped the hatred of the commons nor won favor with the Fathers: the Fathers thought him a soft consul and a seeker of popularity, the commons a deceiver; and it soon appeared that he had come to be hated as much as Appius. A contest had fallen out between the consuls, which of them should dedicate the temple of Mercury. The senate referred the matter from itself to the people, ordaining that whichever of them the people’s command should grant the dedication, he should preside over the corn-supply, establish a guild of merchants, and undertake the solemn rites in the pontifex’s stead. The people give the dedication of the temple to Marcus Laetorius, a centurion of the first rank—a thing in which it was easy to see that it was done not so much for his honor, to whom a charge above his station had been given, as for the consuls’ disgrace. Thereupon the one consul and the Fathers raged the more; but the commons’ spirits had risen, and they went about it now by a far different way than they had set out upon at first. For, despairing of help from the consuls and the senate, whenever they saw a debtor being led off to judgment, they flew together from every side. Neither could the consul’s decree be heard for the din and the shouting, nor, when he had decreed, did anyone obey. Force was the rule; and all the fear and the danger, now that under the consul’s own eyes single men were being roughly handled by many, had shifted from the debtors to the creditors. On top of this came the fear of a Sabine war; and when a levy was decreed, no man gave in his name—Appius raging and railing at his colleague’s bid for popularity, who was betraying the commonwealth by a demagogue’s silence, and adding, to the fact that he had given no judgment on debts, that he would not even hold the levy as the senate had decreed: yet the commonwealth, he said, was not wholly abandoned, nor the consular authority thrown away; he alone would be the champion both of his own majesty and of the Fathers’. When the daily mob, kindled by license, stood round him, he ordered one notable ringleader of the seditions to be seized. As the man was now being dragged off by the lictors, he appealed; nor would the consul have yielded to the appeal—since the people’s verdict was not in doubt—had not his obstinacy been, with difficulty, overcome rather by the counsel and authority of the leading men than by the people’s outcry; so great was the spirit left in him for bearing up under hatred. From then the evil grew day by day—not only in open clamor, but, what was far more ruinous, in secession and secret conferences. At last the consuls, hateful to the commons, go out of office: Servilius dear to neither party, Appius marvelously dear to the Fathers.

Then Aulus Verginius and Titus Vetusius enter upon the consulship. The commons now, uncertain what manner of consuls they were to have, took to holding nightly gatherings, some on the Esquiline, some on the Aventine, lest in the Forum they should be flustered by sudden counsels and do everything rashly and at hazard. The consuls, judging this practice—as indeed it was—a dangerous one, lay it before the Fathers; but, once laid before them, it could not be debated in order, so tumultuously was it received, with shouting on all sides and the Fathers’ indignation that the consuls should throw upon the senate the odium of a thing that ought to be carried out by the consular power. Assuredly, they said, if there were magistrates in the commonwealth, there would have been no assembly at Rome but the public one; as it was, the commonwealth was scattered and broken up into a thousand councils and meetings. One man, by Hercules—for that was more than a consul—such as Appius Claudius had been, would have scattered those gatherings in a moment. The consuls, taken to task, when they asked what then the Fathers would have them do—for they would act in nothing more slackly or softly than was the Fathers’ pleasure—decree that they should hold a levy as sharp as could be: it was idleness that made the commons wanton. The senate dismissed, the consuls mount the tribunal and call up by name the men of military age. When no one answered to his name, the multitude, crowded round in the fashion of an assembly, denied that the commons could be cheated any longer: never would they have a single soldier unless the public faith were made good; liberty must be restored to each man before arms were given him, that they might fight for fatherland and fellow citizens, not for masters. The consuls saw what had been enjoined them by the senate; but of those who within the walls of the senate-house had talked so fiercely, not one was at hand to share their odium; and it was plain that a savage struggle with the commons lay before them. So, before they should try the last extremities, they resolved to consult the senate again. Then indeed the youngest of the Fathers came hurrying to the consuls’ chairs, bidding them lay down the consulship and put off an authority which they had not the heart to maintain.

Both courses now sufficiently tried, the consuls at last spoke: "That you may not deny you were forewarned, Conscript Fathers, a vast sedition is upon us. We demand that those who most loudly cry out against cowardice stand at our side while we hold the levy. We will conduct the matter, since so it pleases you, by the will of the fiercest among you." They go back to the tribunal, and deliberately order one of those who were in their sight to be called up by name. When he stood silent, and a knot of men had taken their stand about him, lest he be set upon, the consuls send a lictor to him. He being thrust back, those of the Fathers who stood by the consuls, crying out that it was a shameful deed, fly down from the tribunal to come to the lictor’s aid. But when the lictor was hindered from nothing more than making the arrest, and the assault was turned upon the Fathers, the brawl was stilled by the consuls’ intervention—a brawl in which, however, with no stone and no weapon, there had been more of shouting and of anger than of hurt. The senate, summoned in tumult, is consulted with more tumult still, those who had been jostled demanding an inquiry, and every fiercest spirit deciding the matter no more by votes than by shouting and uproar. At last, when the heat had settled, and the consuls were reproaching them that there was no more soundness in the senate-house than in the Forum, the consultation began in order. There were three opinions. Publius Verginius would not make the relief general; he held that they must deal only with those who, trusting the faith of the consul Publius Servilius, had served in the Volscian, Auruncan, and Sabine war. Titus Larcius held that this was no time merely to pay off deserts: the whole commons was sunk in debt, and there was no stopping it unless all were provided for; nay, if the lot of some differed from that of others, discord would be kindled rather than quenched. Appius Claudius—harsh by nature, and made savage on the one hand by the hatred of the commons, on the other by the praises of the Fathers—said that the riots had been roused not by miseries but by license alone, and that the commons were wanton rather than aggrieved. This evil, indeed, had sprung from the right of appeal: for the consuls’ power was mere threats, not authority, where it was permitted to appeal to those who had transgressed along with one. "Come," said he, "let us create a dictator, from whom there is no appeal; then this fury, by which now everything is ablaze, will fall silent. Let him then strike a lictor, who knows that the right over his own back and life rests with that one man whose majesty he has violated."

To many, as well it might, Appius’s opinion seemed grim and savage; those of Verginius and Larcius, on the other hand, set a baneful precedent—especially that of Larcius, which would have done away with all credit. The counsel of Verginius was held to be the most middle and moderate between the two extremes; but through faction, and regard for private interests—which always have stood, and will stand, in the way of public counsels—Appius prevailed, and it was within a little of his being himself created dictator; which thing, above all, would have alienated the commons at a most perilous moment, when the Volsci, the Aequi, and the Sabines all chanced to be under arms at once. But the consuls and the elder Fathers took care that a magistracy so violent in its power should be entrusted to one of gentle temper. They create Manius Valerius, son of Volesus, dictator. The commons, although they saw a dictator created against themselves, yet, since they held the right of appeal by the law of his brother, feared nothing harsh or arrogant from that family. Then an edict, set forth by the dictator and well-nigh in agreement with the edict of the consul Servilius, confirmed their spirits; and, thinking it better to trust both the man and his power, they gave over the contest and gave in their names. An army such as never before—ten legions—was raised; three apiece were given to the consuls, four the dictator took for his own use.

And now the war could be put off no longer. The Aequi had invaded Latin territory. The Latin spokesmen begged the senate either to send help, or to let them take up arms themselves to defend their borders. It seemed safer to defend the Latins unarmed than to suffer them to take up arms again. The consul Vetusius was sent; and that was the end of the ravaging. The Aequi withdrew from the plains, and, trusting to the ground rather than to their arms, kept themselves safe on the highest mountain ridges. The other consul set out against the Volsci; and, that he too might not waste the time, by laying waste their fields above all, he drew the enemy out to bring their camp nearer and to fight in the line. On the plain midway between the camps they took their stand, each before his own rampart, with hostile standards. In numbers the Volsci were somewhat the stronger; and so, loosely and in contempt, they began the fight. The Roman consul neither advanced his line nor suffered the shout to be returned, but bade his men stand with their javelins planted: when the enemy should have come to close quarters, then they were to rise up and do the work with all their might, with the sword. The Volsci, spent with running and shouting, when they had flung themselves on the Romans as though these were stupefied with fear, after they felt the charge made against them and the swords flashing before their eyes, in confusion turned their backs, no otherwise than as if they had fallen into an ambush; and they had not strength enough even for flight, because they had gone into battle at a run. The Romans, on the other hand, because at the opening of the fight they had stood at rest, vigorous of body, easily overtook the weary, and took the camp by storm; and pursuing the enemy, stripped of his camp, to Velitrae, in a single column the victors burst into the town along with the vanquished; and there more blood was shed, in the indiscriminate slaughter of every kind, than in the battle itself. Pardon was given to the few who came unarmed to surrender.

While these things were being done among the Volsci, the dictator routs the Sabines—where by far the greatest part of the war had lain—and strips them of their camp. Loosing his cavalry, he had thrown the enemy’s center into disorder, which, while the wings spread themselves too widely, they had braced too loosely with ranks toward the inside; and he fell upon the disordered foot. By the same charge the camp was taken and the war finished. Since the battle at Lake Regillus there was no fight more famous in those years. The dictator rides into the city in triumph. Beyond the customary honors, a place in the Circus was granted to him and his posterity for the viewing of the games, and a curule chair was set there. From the conquered Volsci the Veliternine land was taken; colonists were sent from the city to Velitrae, and a colony planted. With the Aequi there was, some time after, a battle—against the consul’s will, indeed, because the approach to the enemy was over unfavorable ground; but the soldiers, charging that the matter was being dragged out so that the dictator might lay down his office before they themselves returned to the city, and that his promises, like the consul’s before, might fall through unfulfilled, drove him to lead the column up, at hazard and rashly, against the mountains opposite. This thing, ill-ventured, the enemy’s cowardice turned to good: for, before it came to the casting of a spear, they—dumbfounded at the Romans’ boldness—left the camp, which they had held in places most strongly fortified, and leaped down into the valleys behind. There was plunder enough, and a bloodless victory. So, with the war well waged on three fronts, the care for the outcome of affairs at home had departed from neither the Fathers nor the commons. With great cunning, as well as influence, the moneylenders had so prepared their ground as to thwart not the commons only but the dictator himself. For Valerius, after the consul Vetusius’s return, made the first of all his motions in the senate on behalf of the victorious people, and laid before them what should be done about those bound for debt. When the motion was rejected, "I do not please you," said he, "as the author of concord; before long, so help me, you will wish that the Roman commons had patrons like me. For my part, I will neither cheat my fellow citizens any further, nor will I myself be dictator in vain. It was internal discord and a foreign war that made the commonwealth need this magistracy: peace abroad has been won, at home it is thwarted; I will be present at the sedition as a private man rather than as dictator." So he went out of the senate-house and abdicated the dictatorship. The reason was plain to the commons—that he had laid down his office in indignation on their behalf; and so, as though the pledge had been paid in full, since it had not been through him that it failed to be made good, they escorted him as he departed to his home, with goodwill and praises. Then a fear came upon the Fathers, lest, if the army were disbanded, secret gatherings and conspiracies should begin again. And so, although the levy had been held by the dictator, yet, because the soldiers had sworn into the consuls’ words, holding that the soldier was bound by his oath, on the pretext of a war renewed by the Aequi they ordered the legions led out of the city. By this act the sedition was hastened on. And at first, it is said, there was talk of murdering the consuls, that they might be freed of their oath; then, taught that no religious bond is loosed by a crime, on the advice of one Sicinius, without the consuls’ order, they seceded to the Sacred Mount—it lies across the river Anio, three miles from the city. (This account is the more common; though Piso has it that the secession was made to the Aventine.) There, with no leader, in a camp fortified with rampart and ditch, they kept quiet, taking nothing but what was needful for sustenance, and for several days, neither provoked nor provoking, held their ground. There was great panic in the city, and all things hung in mutual fear. The commons, left behind by their own, dreaded the violence of the Fathers; the Fathers dreaded the commons remaining in the city, uncertain whether they would rather stay or go. And how long would the multitude that had seceded stay quiet? What would happen next, if some foreign war should arise in the meantime? Assuredly they reckoned there was no hope left but in the concord of the citizens, and that this must be restored to the state by fair means or foul. It was resolved, therefore, to send as a spokesman to the commons Menenius Agrippa, an eloquent man, and dear to the commons because he was himself sprung from them. He, admitted into the camp, is said to have told them nothing more than this, in that old and rough manner of speaking: In the time when the parts of a man did not, as now, all agree in one, but each several limb had its own counsel and its own speech, the other parts were indignant that by their care, their labor, and their service everything was sought for the belly, while the belly, quiet in their midst, did nothing but enjoy the delights given it; and so they conspired that the hands should carry no food to the mouth, nor the mouth take what was given, nor the teeth grind what they received. While in this anger they wished to subdue the belly by hunger, the limbs themselves and the whole body together wasted away to the last extremity. From this it appeared that the belly’s service too was no idle one—that it was no more nourished than nourishing, sending back into all parts of the body that by which we live and thrive, the blood, ripened by the digesting of the food, parceled out alike into the veins. By comparing herewith how like the body’s inward sedition was to the anger of the commons against the Fathers, he bent men’s minds. Then a beginning was made of treating for concord, and it was granted, upon these terms: that the commons should have magistrates of their own, inviolable, who should have the right of bringing aid against the consuls, and that no man of the Fathers might hold that magistracy. So two tribunes of the plebs were created, Gaius Licinius and Lucius Albinus. These chose three colleagues for themselves; among them was Sicinius, the author of the sedition. As to the other two, who they were is less agreed. There are those who say that only two tribunes were created on the Sacred Mount, and that there the sacred law was passed.

During the secession of the commons, Spurius Cassius and Postumus Cominius entered upon the consulship. Under these consuls a treaty was struck with the Latin peoples. To strike it, the one consul remained at Rome; the other, sent to the Volscian war, routs and puts to flight the Antiate Volsci, and, pursuing them, driven into the town of Longula, makes himself master of its walls. Thence at once he took Polusca, likewise a Volscian town; then with great force he assailed Corioli. There was then in the camp, among the foremost of the young men, Gnaeus Marcius, a youth ready both in counsel and in hand, who afterward bore the surname Coriolanus. When suddenly, as the Roman army was besieging Corioli and intent upon the townsmen whom it held shut up within, with no fear of any war threatening from without, the Volscian legions, setting out from Antium, fell upon it, and at the same moment the enemy burst out from the town, Marcius chanced to be on guard. He, with a chosen band of soldiers, not only beat back the charge of those bursting out, but dashed fiercely in through the open gate, and, having made slaughter in the nearest part of the city, snatched up fire at random and flung it on the buildings overhanging the wall. The cry of the townsmen thereupon, mingled with the wailing of women and children, raised first—as it commonly is—for terror, both heightened the Romans’ spirit and dismayed the Volsci, the city being taken to whose aid they had come. So the Antiate Volsci were routed, and the town of Corioli taken; and by his own renown Marcius so overshadowed the consul’s fame that, had not the treaty with the Latins, graven on a column of bronze, stood as a monument that it was struck by Spurius Cassius alone, because his colleague was absent, it would have passed from memory that Postumus Cominius had waged the war with the Volsci. In the same year Agrippa Menenius dies—a man through all his life dear alike to the Fathers and to the commons, and after the secession made dearer still to the commons. To this interpreter and arbiter of the citizens’ concord, this envoy of the Fathers to the commons, this restorer of the Roman commons to the city, there was lacking the cost of a funeral; the commons buried him, each contributing a sixth of an as a head.

Next, Titus Geganius and Publius Minucius were made consuls. In that year, when all abroad was quiet from war and the discord at home had been healed, another and far graver evil fell upon the state: first a dearness of grain, from the fields left untilled during the secession of the commons, then a famine such as befalls the besieged. And it would have come to the death of the slaves at least, and of the commons, had not the consuls provided against it, sending men in all directions to buy up corn—not into Etruria only, by the coasts to the right of Ostia, and to the left, by sea through the Volsci as far as Cumae, but seeking it even in Sicily; so far had the hatred of their neighbors forced them to seek aid from afar. When the corn had been bought up at Cumae, the ships were held back, in lieu of the property of the Tarquins, by the tyrant Aristodemus, who was their heir; among the Volsci and in the Pomptine country it could not even be bought; the corn-buyers themselves were in danger besides from the violence of the people; from the Tuscans corn came down the Tiber, and by that the commons was sustained. In a war so ill-timed they would have been harassed, their supplies so straitened, had not a great pestilence fallen upon the Volsci, who were already setting their arms in motion. By that disaster the enemy’s spirits were so cowed that—even where the plague had abated, they were held by some lingering terror—the Romans both increased the number of colonists at Velitrae, and sent a new colony into the mountains to Norba, to be a citadel in the Pomptine country.

Next, in the consulship of Marcus Minucius and Aulus Sempronius, a great quantity of grain was brought from Sicily, and it was debated in the senate at what price it should be given to the commons. Many thought the time had come to press the commons hard, and to recover the rights that had been wrested from the Fathers by the secession and by force. Foremost among them, Marcius Coriolanus, an enemy of the tribunician power, said: "If they want grain at the old price, let them give back to the Fathers their old rights. Why do I see plebeian magistrates, why a Sicinius in power—I, who have been sent under the yoke, and ransomed, as it were, from brigands? Am I to endure these indignities longer than I must? I who would not bear Tarquin as king, am I to bear Sicinius? Let him secede now, let him call away the commons; the road lies open to the Sacred Mount and the other hills. Let them rob the grain from our fields, as in the third year they robbed it; let them enjoy the dearth that by their own madness they made. I dare to say that, tamed by this hardship, they will sooner till the fields themselves than, in arms and by secession, keep them from being tilled." It is not so easy to say whether it ought to have been done, as I think it might have been brought about, that on the terms of relieving the dearth the Fathers should free themselves both of the tribunician power and of all the rights laid upon them against their will. To the senate this opinion seemed too savage, and it well-nigh armed the commons in anger: they were now being assailed by hunger, they cried, as if they were enemies, cheated of food and sustenance; the foreign grain—the only nourishment that fortune had unexpectedly given—was being snatched from their mouths, unless the tribunes were handed over in chains to Gnaeus Marcius, unless satisfaction were made out of the backs of the Roman commons. A new executioner had risen up for them, who bade them either die or be slaves. An assault would have been made on him as he left the senate-house, had not the tribunes, most opportunely, appointed him a day for trial. At that the anger was checked; each man saw himself made the judge, the master of life and death, over his enemy. At first Marcius listened in contempt to the tribunes’ threats: the right given to that power, he said, was of bringing aid, not of inflicting punishment, and they were tribunes of the commons, not of the Fathers. But the commons had risen so fiercely that the Fathers had to discharge their debt by the punishment of one man. Yet they resisted, against the hatred, and used, each man his own strength, and the strength of the whole order. And at first the attempt was made, whether, by posting their clients to frighten off single men, they could break up the gatherings and assemblies. Then they came forward all together—you would have said all the Fathers were on trial—begging the commons with prayers to grant them one citizen, one senator: if they would not acquit him as innocent, to give him to them as guilty. He himself, when on the appointed day he did not appear, the anger held its course. Condemned in his absence, he went into exile among the Volsci, threatening his fatherland and bearing even then a hostile spirit. The Volsci received him kindly as he came, and tended him more kindly day by day, the greater the anger that showed itself against his own people, and the more frequent the complaints, now the threats, that were heard from him. He lodged with Attius Tullius, who was then by far the first man of the Volscian name, and ever an enemy to the Romans. So, when an old hatred goaded the one and a fresh anger the other, they lay their plans together for war with Rome. They did not easily believe that their own commons could be driven to take up the arms so often tried with ill fortune: their spirits were broken, they judged, by many wars, and at last by the loss of their young men in the pestilence; in a hatred now grown stale with age they must work by craft, that men’s minds might be exasperated by some fresh resentment.

It chanced that great games were being prepared at Rome, by way of renewal. The cause of the renewal had been this. On the morning of the games, before the show was begun, a certain head of a household had driven through the middle of the Circus a slave whom he was scourging under the fork; then the games were begun, as though that matter had nothing to do with religion. Not long after, Titus Latinius, a man of the commons, had a dream: Jupiter seemed to tell him that the lead dancer at the games had displeased him; that, unless those games were renewed in magnificent style, there would be peril to the city; that he should go and report this to the consuls. Although his mind was by no means free of religious scruple, yet shame before the majesty of the magistrates, and the fear of becoming a laughingstock in men’s mouths, prevailed. That hesitation cost him dear; for within a few days he lost his son. And lest the cause of so sudden a calamity should be in doubt, to his stricken mind that same apparition seemed, in his sleep, to ask whether he had been paid a great enough wage for slighting the godhead: a greater was at hand, unless he went quickly and reported to the consuls. The matter was nearer now. Yet, while he still delayed and put it off, a great force of sickness fell upon him, with a sudden palsy. Then indeed the gods’ anger gave its warning. Worn out, therefore, by afflictions past and present, he took counsel of his kinsmen; and when he had set forth the things seen and heard, and how Jupiter had so often appeared to him in sleep, the threats and angers of heaven made plain in his own misfortunes, by the undoubted consent of all who were present he is carried on a litter into the Forum, to the consuls. Thence, by the consuls’ order, he was borne into the senate-house; and when he had told those same things to the Fathers, to the great wonder of all, behold another marvel: he who had been carried into the senate-house crippled in all his limbs is recorded to have returned home on his own feet, his duty done.

The senate decreed that the games should be held as splendid as could be. To those games, at the instigation of Attius Tullius, a great multitude of the Volsci came. Before the games were begun, Tullius—as had been arranged at home with Marcius—comes to the consuls, and says there are things touching the commonwealth which he wishes to treat of in private. The witnesses withdrawn, "It is against my will," he said, "that I speak the worse of my own countrymen. Yet I come not to charge them with any wrong committed, but to take precaution that they commit none. The tempers of our people are more changeable than I could wish. We have learned it by many disasters—seeing that we are safe not by our own desert, but by your forbearance. There is here now a great throng of the Volsci; the games are on; the whole state will be intent upon the show. I remember what was done by the young men of the Sabines, on a like occasion, in this very city; my mind shudders lest something be done rashly and without counsel. These things, for our sake and yours, I thought ought first to be said to you, consuls. For my own part, it is in my mind to go home from here at once, lest I be tainted, by my presence, with the contagion of any deed or word." Having said this, he went off. When the consuls had laid before the Fathers a doubtful matter on a sure authority, the authority, as commonly happens, more than the matter itself moved them to take precaution, even beyond need; and a decree of the senate being passed that the Volsci should depart from the city, heralds are sent out to bid them all set forth before nightfall.

At first a huge panic struck them, as they ran this way and that to their lodgings to gather up their belongings; then, as they set out, indignation arose that they should be driven off—as guilty and polluted men—from the games, on festival days, from what was, in a manner, a gathering of men and gods. As they went in a column nearly unbroken, Tullius, having gone on ahead to the source of the Ferentina, received their leading men, each as he came, with complaint and indignation; and, leading these very men—who eagerly listened to words that seconded their anger—and through them the rest of the multitude, down into a plain that lay below the road, he there began a speech in the manner of an assembly. "Though you forget," he said, "all else—the old wrongs of the Roman people and the disasters of the Volscian race—with what temper, pray, do you bear this insult of today, by which they have opened their games through our disgrace? Have you not felt that today a triumph has been celebrated over you? that you, as you departed, were a spectacle to all—citizens, strangers, so many neighboring peoples? that your wives, your children, were paraded before men’s eyes? What do you suppose those who heard the herald’s voice, those who saw us departing, those who met this ignominious column, thought—save that there is surely some abomination in us, such that, were we present at the show, we should profane the games and earn the need of an expiation, and that for this we are driven off from the seat of the pious, from their gathering and assembly? What then? Does this not occur to you—that we are alive only because we made haste to depart?—if this is a departure and not a flight. And do you not reckon this a city of enemies, where, had you tarried a single day, you must all have died? War has been declared upon you—to the great hurt of those who declared it, if you are men." So, both filled of their own accord with anger and further goaded, they departed thence to their homes; and each, by inciting his own people, brought it about that the whole Volscian name revolted.

The commanders chosen for that war, by the vote of all the peoples, were Attius Tullius and Gnaeus Marcius, the Roman exile, in whom considerably the greater hope was placed. And that hope he in no way disappointed, so that it was easily plain that the Roman state was stronger in its leaders than in its army. Setting out for Circeii, he first drove out the Roman colonists from there and handed over that city, free, to the Volsci; then he took from the Romans Satricum, Longula, Polusca, and Corioli—towns newly theirs; thence he recovered Lavinium; thence, crossing by cross-tracks onto the Latin Way, he took next, one after another, Corbio, Vetelia, Trebium, Labici, and Pedum. Last he leads from Pedum against the city, and, pitching camp at the Cluilian trenches five miles from Rome, from there ravages the Roman land, sending guards among the ravagers to keep the patricians’ fields untouched—whether the more hostile to the commons, or that from this discord might arise between the Fathers and the commons. And arise it assuredly would have—so far were the tribunes already goading the commons, fierce enough of themselves, by accusing the leading men of the state—but the fear from without, the strongest bond of concord, joined their minds, suspicious and hostile to one another as they were. This only they did not agree upon: that the senate and the consuls placed their hope nowhere but in arms, while the commons preferred anything to war. Spurius Nautius and Sextus Furius were now consuls. As they were reviewing the legions and posting garrisons along the walls and at the other places where it had been decided that pickets and watches should be, a great throng demanding peace first terrified them with a seditious outcry, and then forced them to call the senate and to lay before it the sending of envoys to Gnaeus Marcius. The Fathers accepted the motion, when it appeared that the commons’ resolve was wavering; and spokesmen were sent to Marcius to treat of peace. They brought back a savage answer: if the land were given back to the Volsci, there could be a treating of peace; but if they wished to enjoy the spoils of war at their ease, he, mindful both of the wrong done him by his fellow citizens and of the kindness of his hosts, would strive to make it plain that his spirit had been sharpened, not broken, by his exile. When the same men were sent a second time, they are not received into the camp. The priests too, veiled in their insignia, are recorded to have gone as suppliants to the enemy’s camp; but they bent his mind no more than the envoys had.

Then the matrons gather in throngs to Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, and to Volumnia his wife. Whether it was a public counsel or a women’s fear, I do not sufficiently find; but they prevailed, at any rate, that both Veturia, a woman well on in years, and Volumnia, carrying with her the two little sons she had borne to Marcius, should go into the enemy’s camp, and that, since the men could not defend the city with arms, the women should defend it with prayers and tears. When they had come to the camp, and it was announced to Coriolanus that a great company of women was at hand, he—who had been moved neither by the public majesty in the envoys, nor by so great a religious awe spread before his eyes and mind in the priests—was far more obstinate against the women’s tears. Then one of his intimates, who had marked Veturia, conspicuous in her grief, standing between her daughter-in-law and her grandsons, said: "Unless my eyes deceive me, your mother and your wife and children are here." Coriolanus, like a man almost beside himself, started up in dismay from his seat, and was bringing an embrace to his mother as she met him, when the woman, turned from prayers to anger, said: "Before I take your embrace, let me know whether I have come to an enemy or to a son, whether I am a captive or a mother in your camp. Has a long life and an unhappy old age dragged me to this—to see you first an exile, then an enemy? Could you lay waste this land that bore and nursed you? Did not your anger fall away as you set foot within the borders, however hostile and threatening you had come? Did it not come to you, when Rome was in sight: ‘Within those walls are my home and my household gods, my mother, my wife, my children’? Then, had I not borne you, Rome would not be besieged; had I no son, I should have died free, in a free fatherland. But I now can suffer nothing more shameful to you, nothing more wretched to myself; nor, wretched as I am, shall I be so for long: look you to these, whom, if you persist, either an untimely death or a long slavery awaits." Then his wife and children embraced him; and the weeping that arose from the whole crowd of women, and their lament for themselves and their fatherland, broke the man at last. He embraced his family and sent them away; and himself moved his camp back from the city. Then, when he had withdrawn his legions from Roman territory, he perished, men say—crushed by the odium of the thing—by one death or another. In Fabius, by far the most ancient authority, I find that the same man lived on into old age; he records, at any rate, that Coriolanus in his last years often used this saying: that exile is far more wretched for an old man. The men of Rome did not begrudge the women their praise—so free from disparagement of another’s glory was the life then lived—and, that there might be a memorial of it, a temple to Women’s Fortune was built and dedicated. Afterward the Volsci, with the Aequi joined to them, returned into Roman territory; but the Aequi would no longer endure Attius Tullius as their leader. From this—from the strife whether the Volsci or the Aequi should give the commander to the combined army—a quarrel arose, and then a savage battle. There the fortune of the Roman people destroyed two armies of the enemy in a struggle no less ruinous than stubborn.

The consuls were Titus Sicinius and Gaius Aquilius. To Sicinius fell the Volsci as his province, to Aquilius the Hernici—for these too were in arms. That year the Hernici were thoroughly beaten; with the Volsci the issue was drawn on even terms. Then Spurius Cassius and Proculus Verginius were made consuls. A treaty was struck with the Hernici; two-thirds of their land was taken from them. Of this the consul Cassius meant to divide one half among the Latins, one half among the commons. To this gift he was adding a good deal of land which, he charged, though public, was held in possession by private men. This indeed alarmed many of the Fathers, the very holders, with the peril to their property; but the Fathers had a public anxiety too—that by his largesse the consul was building up power dangerous to liberty. Then for the first time an agrarian law was promulgated—never thereafter, down to within our own memory, stirred without the greatest upheavals of the state. The other consul resisted the largesse, with the Fathers backing him, and not with the whole commons against him; for they had begun, at the first, to disdain the gift, since it was being made common to allies along with citizens; and then they would often hear the consul Verginius in the assemblies, prophesying, as it were, that his colleague’s gift was a pestilent one—that those lands would bring slavery on the men who received them, that a way was being opened to monarchy. For why else, he asked, were allies and the Latin name taken into the gift? What had been the point of giving back a third part of the captured land to the Hernici, lately enemies, unless that these peoples might have Cassius for their leader in place of Coriolanus? The dissuader and blocker of the agrarian law was now beginning to be the popular man. Then each consul, as if in rivalry, set himself to indulge the commons. Verginius said he would suffer the lands to be assigned, provided they were assigned to none but a Roman citizen; Cassius, because in his agrarian largesse he had courted the allies, and was therefore cheaper in the citizens’ eyes, that he might win back their hearts by another gift, ordered the money received for the Sicilian grain to be repaid to the people. But this the commons spurned as nothing other than a present payment for a throne; so deep was the suspicion, bred in them, of monarchy, that—as though all things were theirs in abundance—his gifts were rejected. As soon as he had gone out of office, it is agreed that he was condemned and put to death. There are those who report that his father was the author of that punishment: that he, having tried the case at home, scourged and killed him, and consecrated his son’s private savings to Ceres; and that from these a statue was made and inscribed, "Given from the Cassian family." I find in some authorities—and this is nearer belief—that a day of trial for treason was appointed him by the quaestors Caeso Fabius and Lucius Valerius, that he was condemned by the people’s verdict, and his house razed at the public charge. That is the open space before the temple of Tellus. But whether the trial was a domestic or a public one, he was condemned in the consulship of Servius Cornelius and Quintus Fabius.

The people’s anger against Cassius was not long-lived. The sweetness of the agrarian law, of itself, with its author removed, was stealing into their minds; and this craving was the more kindled by the meanness of the Fathers, who, when the Volsci and the Aequi had been beaten that year, cheated the soldiery of the plunder. Whatever was taken from the enemy, the consul Fabius sold and turned into the public treasury. The name of Fabius was hateful to the commons because of that last consul; yet the Fathers prevailed, so that Caeso Fabius was made consul with Lucius Aemilius. The commons, made the more hostile by this, stirred up a foreign war by their domestic sedition; and then by the war the civil discords were broken off. With one mind, Fathers and commons, under the leadership of Aemilius, beat the rebelling Volsci and Aequi in a successful battle. Yet the flight consumed more of the enemy than the battle, so stubbornly did the cavalry pursue the routed. In the same year the temple of Castor was dedicated, on the Ides of Quintilis. It had been vowed in the Latin war by the dictator Postumius; his son, created duumvir for that very purpose, dedicated it. In that year too the minds of the commons were tempted by the sweetness of the agrarian law. The tribunes of the plebs sought to make their popular power famous by a popular law; the Fathers, believing there was more than enough of gratuitous madness in the multitude, shuddered at largesses and the enticements of rashness. The consuls were the keenest leaders of the Fathers in resisting. And so that party of the commonwealth won, and gave the state—not for the present only, but for the coming year as well—Marcus Fabius, Caeso’s brother, as consul, and, as the other consul, Lucius Valerius, the more hated by the commons for his accusation of Spurius Cassius. In that year too there was a struggle with the tribunes. The law was empty, and empty the authors of the law, who by their vaunting made the gift come to nothing. From then the Fabian name was held great, after three consulships in unbroken succession, all passed, as it were, in one steady course through the tribunician struggles; and so, as if well placed, the honor remained for some while in that family. Then a war with Veii was begun, and the Volsci rebelled; but there was strength almost to spare for foreign wars, and they squandered it in contending among themselves. There were added, to the now sickly minds of all, prodigies in the heavens, displaying menaces almost daily in city and country; and when the powers above were thus stirred, the seers—consulted publicly and privately, now by entrails, now by birds—chanted no other cause than that the rites were not being duly performed. These terrors came at last to this: that Oppia, a Vestal virgin, was condemned for unchastity and paid the penalty.

Next, Quintus Fabius and Gaius Julius were made consuls. In that year the discord at home was no slacker, and the war abroad fiercer. The Aequi took up arms; the Veientes too went into the very land of the Romans, laying it waste. As the anxiety over these wars grew, Caeso Fabius and Spurius Furius become consuls. The Aequi were attacking Ortona, a Latin city; the Veientes, now glutted with ravaging, threatened that they would assault Rome itself. These terrors, which ought to have checked the commons, did but raise their spirits the more; and the habit of refusing military service was coming back to the commons—not of its own accord, but because Spurius Licinius, a tribune of the plebs, judging that the time had come to force the agrarian law upon the Fathers through the utmost necessity, had taken upon himself the obstructing of the war-effort. Yet all the odium of the tribunician power was turned upon its author, and against him the consuls rose up no more sharply than did his own colleagues; and by their aid the consuls hold the levy. For two wars at once an army is enrolled: it is given to Fabius to lead against the Aequi, to Furius against the Veientes. Against the Veientes nothing worthy of memory was done; but among the Aequi, Fabius had considerably more trouble with his own citizens than with the enemy. That one man, the consul himself, upheld the commonwealth, which the army, so far as in it lay, was betraying out of hatred for the consul. For when the consul—besides the other commander’s arts, of which he showed very many in the preparing and the waging of the war—had so drawn up the line that, by sending out the cavalry alone, he routed the enemy’s army, the foot would not pursue the routed; nor could even their own disgrace and the present public shame—if not the exhortation of a hated leader—nor, afterward, the peril, should the enemy’s courage return, force them to quicken their step, or, if nothing else, to stand in their ranks. Without orders they carry back the standards, and, downcast—you would think them the beaten—now cursing their commander, now the work done by the cavalry, they return to camp. Nor were any remedies sought by the commander against an example so pestilent: so much sooner will the art of governing a citizen fail even excellent natures than the art of overcoming an enemy. The consul returned to Rome, his glory in war not so much increased as the soldiers’ hatred against him provoked and embittered. Yet the Fathers prevailed that the consulship should remain in the Fabian house: they create Marcus Fabius consul, and Gnaeus Manlius is given to Fabius as colleague.

This year too had a tribune for author of an agrarian law. It was Tiberius Pontificius. He, entering upon the same path, as though it had served Spurius Licinius well, for a little while obstructed the levy. When the Fathers were again thrown into confusion, Appius Claudius declared that the tribunician power had been beaten the year before—for the moment, in the event; for all time, in the precedent—since it had been found that it could be undone by its own strength. For there would never be lacking one who would wish to win for himself both a victory over a colleague and the favor of the better party, to the public good; and more tribunes, if more were needed, would be ready to aid the consuls, while one even against all was enough. Let the consuls only, and the leading Fathers, take pains to win over to the commonwealth and the senate some of the tribunes, if not all. Warned by Appius’s counsels, the Fathers, both all together addressed the tribunes with courtesy and kindness, and the men of consular rank—each according as he had privately some claim upon individual tribunes—partly by favor, partly by authority, prevailed that they should wish the strength of the tribunician power to be wholesome for the commonwealth; and, by the aid of four tribunes against one obstructer of the public good, the consuls hold the levy.

From there they set out for the war with Veii, whither auxiliaries had gathered from every part of Etruria—roused not so much for the Veientes’ sake as because the hope had arisen that the Roman state might be dissolved by its internal discord. And the leading men, in the councils of all the peoples of Etruria, kept clamoring that the power of Rome was everlasting, unless she should rage against herself in her own seditions: this was the one poison, this the canker, found out for wealthy states, to make great empires mortal. Long had that evil been held off, partly by the counsels of the Fathers, partly by the patience of the commons; now it had come to the last extremity. Two states had been made out of one; each party had its own magistrates, its own laws. At first they had been wont to rage at the levies, yet the same men in war had obeyed their leaders; whatever the condition of the city, so long as military discipline endured, a stand could be made; but now the habit of not obeying the magistrates was following the Roman soldier even into the camp. In the last war, in the very line, in the very struggle, by the consent of the army, victory had been freely handed over to the beaten Aequi: the standards deserted, the commander left in the line, a return to camp without orders. Assuredly, if pressure were applied, Rome could be conquered by her own soldiery. Nothing else was needed than that war be declared and shown; the rest the fates and the gods would do of their own accord. These hopes had armed the Etruscans, conquered and conquerors by turns through many vicissitudes. The Roman consuls, too, dreaded nothing else than their own strength, their own arms. The memory of the worst of examples in the last war frightened them from committing the matter to a place where two battle-lines at once must be feared. And so they kept within the camp, turning away from a peril so twofold: the day, and perhaps time itself, would soften their angers and bring soundness to their minds. The Veientine enemy and the Etruscans pressed the more headlong on that account: they provoked them to battle, first by riding up to the camp and challenging, and at last, when they could move them in nothing, by railing now at the consuls themselves, now at the army—that a pretense of internal discord had been devised as a remedy for fear, and that the consuls distrusted rather than misdoubted their own soldiers; a new kind of sedition, this silence and idleness among armed men. To this they added taunts, true and false, about the newness of their stock and origin. While they bawled all this under the very rampart and gates, the consuls bore it without much trouble; but in the untaught multitude now indignation, now shame turned their hearts about and drew them away from their domestic evils: they would not have the enemy go unpunished, would not have the success fall to neither the Fathers nor the consuls; hatred without and hatred within strove together in their minds. At last the foreign hatred prevailed, so haughtily and insolently did the enemy mock them. They throng to the headquarters; they demand battle, they call for the signal to be given. The consuls, as though deliberating, put their heads together and confer a long while. They desired to fight; but the desire had to be called back and hidden, that by opposing and delaying they might add force to the soldiery once roused. The answer is returned that the matter is being pressed too soon, that it was not yet time for battle: let them keep within the camp. They then proclaim that the men abstain from fighting: if anyone should fight without orders, they would punish him as an enemy. The men so dismissed, the less they believe the consuls willing, the more the ardor for fighting grows. The enemy, besides, fired them far more fiercely, when it was learned that the consuls had resolved not to fight: for, said they, they should insult them with impunity; arms were not trusted to the soldiery; the matter would burst out into the utmost sedition, and the end had come to the Roman dominion. Relying on this, they run up to the gates, heap on reproaches, and scarcely keep from assaulting the camp. But indeed the Roman could bear the insult no longer; from the whole camp, on every side, men run to the consuls; not now bit by bit, as before, through the chief centurions, but everywhere all of them press the matter with shouts. The thing was ripe; yet still they hang back. Then Fabius, as the uproar grew, his colleague now yielding for fear of mutiny, when he had made silence with the trumpet, said: "I know, Gnaeus Manlius, that these men can conquer; that they will, they have themselves made me not know. And so it is fixed and resolved not to give the signal, unless they swear that they will return victorious from this battle. The Roman soldier has once deceived his consul in the line; the gods he will never deceive." There was a centurion, Marcus Flavoleius, among the foremost in demanding the fight. "Victorious, Marcus Fabius," he said, "will I return from the line"; and if he should fail of it, he calls down upon himself the wrath of Jupiter the Father, and Gradivus Mars, and the other gods. Then each man of the whole army in turn swears the same upon himself. To the men so sworn the signal is given; they take up arms; they go into the fight, full of anger and of hope. Now they bid the Etruscans hurl their taunts, now—armed at last—each calls for the enemy, so ready of tongue, to be set before him. On that day the valor of all, of commons and of Fathers alike, was extraordinary; the Fabian name shone out the most. By that battle they resolve to win back to themselves the hearts of the commons, made hostile by many civil struggles.

The line is drawn up, and the Veientine enemy and the Etruscan legions do not decline it. There was an almost certain hope that they would fight no harder against them than they had fought against the Aequi; and that, in spirits so provoked and on an occasion so doubtful, some greater stroke too was not to be despaired of. The event fell out far otherwise; for in no war before had the Roman gone into battle more hostile—so far had the enemy with their taunts, and the consuls with their delay, exasperated him on either side. The Etruscans scarcely had room to deploy their ranks, when, the javelins flung down in the first confusion rather than hurled, the fight had come now to handstrokes, now to swords, where Mars is most savage. Among the foremost, the Fabian house was a sight and an example to the citizens. Of these, Quintus Fabius—who had been consul two years before—as he advanced foremost against the close-packed Veientes, was run through the breast with a sword by a Tuscan fierce in strength and in the art of arms, who caught him off his guard as he turned among many bands of the enemy; the weapon drawn out, Fabius fell headlong upon the wound. Both lines felt the fall of the one man, and the Roman was thereupon giving ground, when Marcus Fabius the consul leaped over the fallen body, and, holding out his buckler before it, "Was this your oath, soldiers," he cried, "that you would return to camp in flight? Do you so fear the most cowardly of enemies more than Jupiter and Mars, by whom you swore? But I, who took no oath, will either return victorious, or fall fighting here, beside you, Quintus Fabius." Then said Caeso Fabius, consul of the year before, to the consul: "Do you believe, brother, that by such words you will get them to fight? The gods will get it, by whom they swore; and let us, as befits chiefs, as is worthy of the Fabian name, kindle the soldiers’ spirits by fighting rather than by exhorting!" So with leveled spears the two Fabii dash to the front, and drew the whole line with them.

The battle restored on the one side, no less briskly on the other wing did the consul Gnaeus Manlius rouse the fight, where almost a like fortune turned. For, as on the other wing the men had followed Quintus Fabius, so on this they had eagerly followed the consul Manlius himself, as he drove the enemy now all but routed; and when he, struck by a grievous wound, withdrew from the line, thinking him slain they fell back; and they would have given ground, had not the other consul, borne to that part at a gallop with several troops of horse, crying out that his colleague lived, and that he himself was at hand victorious, the other wing routed, upheld the tottering cause. Manlius too presents himself in person, to restore the line. The faces of the two consuls, recognized, kindle the soldiers’ spirits. At the same time the enemy’s line was now the thinner, since, trusting to their overflowing numbers, they had drawn off their reserves and sent them to assault the camp. There, an attack made without much struggle, while they wasted the time, mindful of plunder rather than of battle, the Roman triarii, who had not been able to withstand the first inrush, sending messengers to the consuls to tell in what case things stood, gather in a body, return to the headquarters, and of their own accord renew the fight. And the consul Manlius, carried back to the camp, had closed the way to the enemy by setting soldiers at all the gates. That despair kindled in the Tuscans frenzy rather than daring. For when, charging wherever hope showed an outlet, they had gone several times in a vain assault, one band of young men rushes upon the consul himself, conspicuous in his arms. The first weapons were caught by those standing round; then the force could not be withstood. The consul, struck by a mortal wound, falls, and all about him are scattered. The Tuscans’ boldness grows; terror drives the Romans, panic-stricken, through the whole camp; and it would have come to the last extremity, had not the lieutenants, snatching up the consul’s body, opened a way for the enemy by one gate. Out they burst; and going off in a disordered column, they fall in with the other consul, the victor. There again they were cut down and scattered everywhere. A splendid victory was won, yet a sad one, for two funerals so illustrious. And so the consul, when the senate decreed a triumph, replied that he would readily allow it, if the army could triumph without its commander, for its extraordinary service in that war; but that he himself—his family in mourning for his brother Quintus Fabius’s death, the commonwealth in part bereaved by the loss of the other consul—would not take a laurel made unsightly by public and private grief. The triumph laid aside was more glorious than any triumph held: so does glory, spurned in season, sometimes come back the more heaped up. He then conducts in turn the two funerals, of his colleague and his brother, himself the eulogist of each; and, by yielding to them his own praises, he himself bore the greatest part of them. And, not unmindful of what he had taken to heart at the beginning of his consulship—the winning back of the commons’ hearts—he distributes the wounded soldiers among the Fathers to be tended. Most were given to the Fabii, and nowhere were they cared for with greater pains. From then the Fabii were already popular, and that by no art but a wholesome one for the commonwealth.

And so, by the zeal of the commons no less than of the Fathers, Caeso Fabius was made consul with Titus Verginius; and he set himself to no care—neither of war, nor of the levy, nor any other—before this: that, now that some hope of concord had been begun, the hearts of the commons should at the first opportunity grow together again with the Fathers. And so at the beginning of the year he gave his opinion that, before any tribune should rise up as author of an agrarian law, the Fathers themselves should forestall him and do his office, distributing the captured land to the commons as evenly as might be: for it was right that those should have it by whose blood and sweat it had been won. The Fathers spurned the proposal; and some even complained that the once vigorous spirit of Caeso was running riot, and fading, through too much glory. Thereafter there were no city factions. The Latins were being harassed by the inroads of the Aequi. Caeso, sent thither with an army, crosses over to lay waste the land of the Aequi themselves. The Aequi withdrew into their towns and kept within their walls; and so there was no memorable battle there. But from the Veientine enemy a defeat was suffered, through the rashness of the other consul; and it would have been all over with the army, had not Caeso Fabius come up in time with succor. From that time there was neither peace nor war with the Veientes; the business had come very near to the form of brigandage. They would give way before the Roman legions into the city; when they had perceived that the legions were withdrawn, they would raid the fields, eluding war by quiet and quiet by war in turn. So the whole matter could neither be let go nor brought to an end. And other wars too were pressing—either at hand, like the wars with the Aequi and the Volsci, who kept quiet no longer than the fresh smart of their late defeat should pass; or plainly soon to be stirred, by the ever-hostile Sabines and all Etruria. But the Veientine enemy, persistent rather than heavy, more often vexed their spirits with insults than with peril, since at no time could it be neglected, nor did it suffer them to be turned elsewhere. Then the Fabian house came before the senate. The consul speaks for his house: "The Veientine war, Conscript Fathers, as you know, needs a persistent rather than a great defense. Do you look to the other wars, and give the Fabii to the Veientes for their enemies. We are sureties that the majesty of the Roman name shall be safe there. That war, as if it were our own family’s, it is in our mind to wage at our private charge: let the commonwealth be spared, there, both soldiers and money." Vast thanks were given. The consul, going out of the senate-house, with a column of the Fabii attending him—who had stood in the vestibule of the senate-house awaiting the decree—returns home. Bidden to be present in arms the next day at the consul’s threshold, they thereupon depart to their homes.

The rumor spreads through the whole city; they bear the Fabii to the sky with praises: that one family had taken up the burden of the state, that the Veientine war had been turned into a private charge, into private arms. If there were two clans of the like strength in the city, let the one demand the Volsci for itself, the other the Aequi, and—the Roman people keeping an untroubled peace—all the neighboring peoples might be subdued. The Fabii, on the next day, take up arms; they assemble where they had been bidden. The consul, going forth in his general’s cloak, sees in the vestibule his whole clan in a marshaled column; received into the midst, he orders the standards borne forward. Never did an army go through the city smaller in number, nor more illustrious in the fame and the wonder of men. Three hundred and six soldiers, all patricians, all of one clan, no one of whom you would scorn as a leader, a senate to do excellent service in any age, went on, threatening the Veientine people with ruin by the strength of a single family. There followed a throng—partly their own, of kinsmen and comrades, who turned over in their minds nothing moderate, neither hope nor anxiety, but all things measureless; partly stirred by public solicitude, dazed with favor and wonder. They bid them go brave, go fortunate, and make the issue match the undertaking; from it to hope for consulships and triumphs, all rewards, all honors from themselves. As they passed the Capitol and the citadel and the other temples, whatever of the gods met their eyes, whatever met their mind, they prayed that they would send forth that column propitious and fortunate, and soon restore them safe to their fatherland, to their parents. In vain were the prayers sent up. By an ill-omened road, the right archway of the Carmental gate, they set out, and come to the river Cremera. That seemed a suitable place for fortifying a stronghold.

Next, Lucius Aemilius and Gaius Servilius were made consuls. And so long as the matter went no further than ravaging, the Fabii were enough not only to guard their own stronghold, but, throughout the whole region where the Tuscan land lies next to the Roman, they made all that was their own safe, and all that was the enemy’s exposed, as they ranged over both borders. Then there was no great interval to the ravaging, while both the Veientes, an army summoned from Etruria, assault the Cremera stronghold, and the Roman legions, brought up by the consul Lucius Aemilius, fight hand to hand with the Etruscans in the line—though the Veientes scarcely had room to dress their line; so far, amid the first confusion, while the ranks filed in behind the standards and posted their reserves, did a wing of Roman cavalry, suddenly driven in upon the flank, take from them the room not only for beginning the battle but for standing their ground. So, routed back to the Red Rocks—there they had their camp—they sue as suppliants for peace; and, having got it, from the fickleness bred in their minds they repented of it before the Roman garrison was withdrawn from the Cremera. Once more the Veientine people had its struggle with the Fabii, without any apparatus of a greater war; nor were there only inroads upon the fields, or sudden attacks upon the raiders, but several times the fight was waged on the level field, with standards joined; and one clan of the Roman people often bore off the victory from the most opulent of Etruscan states, as things then stood. This at first seemed bitter and unworthy to the Veientes; then a plan was born of the circumstances, of catching the over-bold enemy by an ambush: they were glad, indeed, that with their many successes the daring of the Fabii was growing. And so cattle were several times driven across the raiders’ path, as if by chance; the fields were left waste by the flight of the country folk; and the bands of armed men sent to ward off the ravaging more often fled in feigned than in real panic. And now the Fabii had come so to despise the enemy that they believed their own unconquered arms could be withstood in no place and at no time. This hope carried them so far that, at sight of cattle far off from the Cremera across a great stretch of plain, though the enemy’s arms appeared here and there, they ran down to them. And when, improvident, in headlong course, they had passed the ambushes set about the very road, and, scattered everywhere, were seizing the straying cattle, as men do when panic is thrown among them, suddenly the men rise up from ambush, and the enemy were both in front and on every side. At first the shout, carried round, terrified them; then the weapons fell upon them from every quarter; and as the Etruscans closed in, fenced now by an unbroken column of armed men, the more the enemy pressed upon them, the more they too were forced to gather into a ring within a narrower space—a thing which made both their own fewness conspicuous and the multitude of the Etruscans, their ranks multiplied in the strait. Then, abandoning the fight which they had kept up equally on every side, they all incline toward one point. Pushing thither with their bodies and their arms, they broke a way in a wedge. The way led to a hill that rose gently. There at first they made a stand; and soon, when the higher ground gave them room to take breath and to recover their spirit from so great a panic, they even drove back those who came up; and the few were winning, by the help of the place, had not a body of Veientes, sent round by the ridge, made its way to the hill’s top. So the enemy was made the higher again. The Fabii were cut down, all to a man, and the stronghold stormed. That three hundred and six perished is well enough agreed; that one, nearly of age, was left, to be the stock of the Fabian house, and often, in the doubtful fortunes of the Roman people, at home and in war, its very greatest help.

When this disaster was suffered, Gaius Horatius and Titus Menenius were already consuls. Menenius was sent at once against the Tuscans, elated with their victory. Then too the fighting went ill, and the enemy seized the Janiculum; and the city would have been besieged—with famine pressing it on top of the war, for the Etruscans had crossed the Tiber—had not the consul Horatius been recalled from the Volsci. And that war pressed so close upon the very walls that there was fighting first at the temple of Hope, on even terms, and again at the Colline gate. There, though by a small margin the Roman cause had the upper hand, yet that struggle—the soldier’s old spirit recovered—made him a better soldier for the battles to come.

Aulus Verginius and Spurius Servilius are made consuls. After the defeat suffered in the last battle, the Veientes kept off from the open line; they ravaged, and, as if from a citadel, the Janiculum, made attacks here and there upon Roman land; nowhere were the cattle safe, nor the country folk. They were then caught by the very art by which they had caught the Fabii. Following the cattle, driven everywhere to the lures on purpose, they plunged headlong into the ambushes. The more they were, the greater the slaughter. From this disaster a fierce anger was the cause and the beginning of a greater one. For, crossing the Tiber by night, they set about assaulting the camp of the consul Servilius. Routed thence with great slaughter, they hardly made their way back to the Janiculum. The consul straightway crosses the Tiber himself too, and fortifies a camp at the foot of the Janiculum. The next day at dawn, somewhat emboldened both by the previous day’s good fortune in the fight—but more because the scarcity of grain drove his counsels even to headlong courses, so they were the speedier—he rashly drew up his line up the slope of the Janiculum against the enemy’s camp, and, beaten back thence more foully than the day before he had beaten them, he and his army were saved by his colleague’s intervention. Between the two lines the Etruscans, as they turned their backs now to these, now to those, were cut down to the last man. So the Veientine war was crushed by a lucky rashness. To the city, with peace, came an easier grain-supply too, both by corn brought from Campania, and—after each man’s fear of future want was gone—by the bringing forth of what had been hidden away. Then from plenty and from idleness the spirits grew wanton again, and sought at home the old evils which abroad were now lacking. The tribunes harried the commons with their own poison, the agrarian law; and they stirred them up against the Fathers who resisted—not against all together only, but against single men. Quintus Considius and Titus Genucius, the authors of the agrarian law, appoint a day of trial for Titus Menenius. The loss of the Cremera garrison was held against him, since the consul had kept his standing camp not far from there; and this crushed him, although the Fathers had striven for him no less than for Coriolanus, and the favor felt for his father Agrippa had not yet faded. The tribunes were moderate in the penalty: though they had pressed a capital charge, they set on him, when condemned, a fine of two thousand asses. That turned to his death: they say he could not bear the disgrace and the grief, and was thereupon consumed by sickness.

Next another stood accused—Spurius Servilius, who, when he had gone out of the consulship, in the consulship of Gaius Nautius and Publius Valerius, at the very beginning of the year had a day of trial appointed him by the tribunes Lucius Caedicius and Titus Statius; and he bore the tribunes’ assaults not, like Menenius, with prayers of his own or of the Fathers, but with much confidence in his innocence and his favor. To him too the battle with the Tuscans at the Janiculum was charged as a crime. But, a man of fiery spirit, as before in the public peril, so now in his own, by refuting in a fierce speech not the tribunes only but the commons, and by reproaching them with the condemnation and death of Titus Menenius—by whose father’s gift the commons, restored of old, held those very magistracies and those laws by which they then raged against him—he broke up the peril by his boldness. His colleague Verginius helped too, brought forward as a witness, sharing his praises with him; yet it was the verdict on Menenius—so far had men’s minds changed—that helped him the more. The struggles at home were ended; a war with Veii broke out, to which the Sabines had joined their arms. The consul Publius Valerius, with the auxiliaries of the Latins and the Hernici called up, was sent with an army to Veii, and straightway attacks the Sabine camp, which had been pitched before the walls of their allies, and threw such confusion into it that, while scattered men ran out maniple by maniple, this way and that, to ward off the enemy’s force, the gate at which he had first borne the standards was taken. Within the rampart there was then slaughter rather than battle. The tumult penetrates from the camp into the city too; and as though Veii were taken, so the Veientes, panic-stricken, run to arms. Part go to the aid of the Sabines, part fall upon the Romans, who were bent with their whole force upon the camp. For a little while these were turned and thrown into confusion; then they too, facing their standards both ways, make a stand; and the cavalry, sent in by the consul, routs and puts the Tuscans to flight; and in the same hour two armies, two of the most powerful and greatest of the neighboring peoples, were overcome.

While these things were being done at Veii, the Volsci and the Aequi had pitched camp in Latin territory and laid waste the borders. These the Latins, by themselves, with the Hernici taken in, without either Roman leader or Roman aid, stripped of their camp; and they got, beside the recovery of their own goods, immense plunder. Yet a consul, Gaius Nautius, was sent from Rome against the Volsci; the custom, I suppose, did not please, that allies should wage wars by their own forces and counsels, without a Roman leader and army. Every kind of calamity and insult was inflicted upon the Volsci, yet they could not be driven to fight in the line. Then Lucius Furius and Gaius Manlius were consuls. To Manlius the Veientes fell as his province; yet there was no war: a truce of forty years was granted them at their request, with grain and pay imposed. Upon the peace abroad, discord at home is at once continued. The commons raged, under the tribunes’ goads, for the agrarian law. The consuls, in no way deterred by the condemnation of Menenius nor by the peril of Servilius, resist with the utmost force. As they were going out of office, Gnaeus Genucius, a tribune of the plebs, arraigned them.

Lucius Aemilius and Opiter Verginius enter upon the consulship; though in some annals I find Vopiscus Julius as consul in Verginius’s place. This year—whatever consuls it had—Furius and Manlius, on trial before the people, go round in mourning garb, courting the younger Fathers no less than the commons. They counsel them, they warn them, to abstain from offices and from the administration of the commonwealth; to reckon the consular fasces, the bordered toga and the curule chair as nothing other than the trappings of a funeral; that, veiled in those bright insignia as in the fillets of a victim, they were marked out for death. But if the consulship held so great a sweetness, let them even now take it to heart that the consulship was captured and crushed under the tribunician power; that the consul, like a tribune’s beadle, must do everything at the nod and command of a tribune; that if he stirred, if he looked toward the Fathers, if he believed there was anything in the commonwealth but the commons, he should set before his eyes the exile of Gnaeus Marcius, the condemnation and death of Menenius. Fired by these speeches, the Fathers thereafter held their counsels not in public, but in private, withdrawn from the knowledge of the many. There, since this alone was agreed—that the accused must be rescued, by right or by wrong—every most savage proposal pleased the most, nor was there lacking an author for even the boldest of crimes. And so, on the day of trial, while the commons stood in the Forum, on tiptoe with expectation, they wondered at first that the tribune did not come down; then, as the delay grew more suspect, they believed him frightened off by the leading men, and lamented the public cause deserted and betrayed; at last those who had been waiting at the tribune’s vestibule announce that he had been found dead at home. When this rumor was carried through the whole assembly, then—just as a battle-line is scattered when its leader is slain—so they slipped away, this man one way, that man another. A peculiar dread had fallen upon the tribunes, warned by their colleague’s death how little aid the sacred laws held in them. Nor did the Fathers bear their joy with much moderation; and so far was anyone from repenting of the guilt that even the innocent wished to seem to have done it, and it was openly said that the tribunician power must be tamed by harsh means.

In the wake of this victory of the worst example, a levy is proclaimed; and, the tribunes cowering, the consuls carry the matter through without any intercession. Then indeed the commons grew angry, more at the tribunes’ silence than at the consuls’ command, and said that it was all over with their liberty, that there had been a return to the old days, that with Genucius the tribunician power had died and was buried along with him. Something else must be done and thought of, how to resist the Fathers; and the one plan was this—that the commons, since they had no other aid, should defend themselves. Four-and-twenty lictors attended the consuls, and these very men were men of the commons; nothing was more contemptible or weaker, if there were those to despise it; but each man, for himself, made these things great and terrible. When with such words they had spurred one another on, a lictor was sent by the consuls to Volero Publilius, a man of the commons, because, having commanded companies, he denied that he ought to be made a common soldier. Volero appeals to the tribunes. When no one brought aid, the consuls order the man stripped and the rods made ready. "I appeal," said he, "to the people, I, Volero—since the tribunes would rather a Roman citizen were beaten with rods before their eyes than that they themselves should be butchered in their beds by you." The more fiercely he cried out, the more savagely the lictor tore off his clothing and stripped him. Then Volero—both powerful himself, and with his supporters helping—thrust back the lictor, and, where the cry of those indignant on his behalf was fiercest, withdrew there into the thickest of the crowd, crying out: "I appeal, and I implore the protection of the commons. Be at hand, citizens; be at hand, fellow soldiers; there is nothing for which you should wait upon the tribunes, who themselves have need of your aid." The men, roused, make themselves ready as for battle; and it was plain that the whole crisis was at hand, that nothing would be held sacred by anyone, neither public right nor private. When the consuls had set themselves against so great a storm, they easily learned by experience that majesty is little safe without strength. The lictors mishandled, the fasces broken, they are driven from the Forum into the senate-house, uncertain how far Volero would press his victory. Then, as the tumult died down, when they had ordered the senate to be summoned, they complain of the wrongs done them, of the violence of the commons, of Volero’s boldness. After many fierce opinions had been spoken, the elder men prevailed, who would not have the anger of the Fathers contend against the rashness of the commons.

The commons, embracing Volero with their favor, at the next elections make him tribune of the plebs, for the year that had Lucius Pinarius and Publius Furius for consuls. And, contrary to the expectation of all—who believed that he would use his tribunate for harrying the consuls of the year before—setting the public cause above his private grievance, and without so much as a word against the consuls, he brought before the people a proposal that the plebeian magistrates should be created in the tribal assembly. No small matter was being carried under a title that at first sight seemed by no means savage, but one that would take from the patricians all power of creating, through the votes of their clients, whatever tribunes they wished. To this measure, most welcome to the commons, the Fathers resisted with the utmost force; nor could the one means of resistance—that some one of the college should interpose his veto—be brought about, either by the consuls’ or by the leading men’s authority; yet the matter, weighty of its own effort, is drawn out by struggles into the next year. The commons re-elect Volero tribune; the Fathers, judging that the affair would come to the last extremity of conflict, make Appius Claudius, son of Appius, hated and hostile to the commons ever since his father’s struggles, consul. As his colleague Titus Quinctius is given him.

At the very beginning of the year, nothing was treated of before the law. But, as Volero was the inventor of the law, so Laetorius, his colleague, was its champion—both newer to it and the fiercer. He was made bold by his great glory in war, since no one of his age was readier of hand. He, while Volero spoke of nothing but the law, abstaining from any attack upon the consuls, himself launched into an accusation of Appius and of a family most arrogant and most cruel toward the Roman commons, contending that it was not a consul but an executioner that had been created by the Fathers to harry and to mangle the commons; but, the tongue of a soldierly man being unschooled, his words were not equal to his freedom of spirit and his courage. And so, his speech failing him, "Since I do not speak so easily, Quirites," he said, "as I make good what I have spoken, be here tomorrow. I will either die here in your sight, or carry the law through." The tribunes occupy the consecrated ground the next day; the consuls and the nobility take their stand in the assembly to hinder the law. Laetorius orders all to be removed save those who were to give their vote. The young nobles stood, yielding nothing to the attendant. Then Laetorius orders some of them to be seized. The consul Appius denied that a tribune had any right over anyone but a plebeian: for he was a magistrate not of the people but of the plebs; and that not even he himself could remove the crowd by virtue of his power, in the manner of their forefathers—for the formula ran, "If it seem good to you, depart, Quirites." Easily, by discoursing contemptuously on the law, he could throw Laetorius into confusion. And so, blazing with anger, the tribune sends his attendant to the consul, the consul a lictor to the tribune, crying that he was a private man, without command, without magistracy; and the tribune would have been mishandled, had not the whole assembly risen fiercely for the tribune against the consul, and a running of men into the Forum, of a multitude roused from the whole city, taken place. Yet Appius held out by his obstinacy against so great a storm; and it would have been fought out in no bloodless battle, had not Quinctius, the other consul, having given the men of consular rank the task of leading his colleague by force, if they could not otherwise, out of the Forum, himself now soothed the raging commons with prayers, now begged the tribunes to dismiss the assembly: let them give anger room; time would not take their strength from them, but would add counsel to strength; the Fathers would be in the people’s power, and the consul in the Fathers’.

The commons were soothed by Quinctius with difficulty—the other consul by the Fathers much more hardly. The assembly of the commons dismissed at last, the consuls hold the senate. There, when fear and anger had varied the opinions by turns, the more they were called off, by the interval of time, from impulse to deliberation, the more their spirits shrank from the contest, so that they gave thanks to Quinctius, because by his work the discord had been softened. Of Appius it was asked that he would consent that the consular majesty should be just so great as it could be in a state at concord: while tribunes and consuls each dragged everything to himself, no strength was left in the common middle; the commonwealth was torn apart and mangled; men asked rather in whose hand it was than how it might be kept whole. Appius, on the other hand, called gods and men to witness that the commonwealth was being betrayed and forsaken through fear; that it was not the consul who failed the senate, but the senate the consul; that harsher terms were being accepted than had been accepted on the Sacred Mount. Yet, overborne by the consent of the Fathers, he held his peace. The law is carried through in silence. Then for the first time the tribunes were created in the tribal assembly. That three were even added to the number, as though there had been two before, Piso is the authority; and he names the tribunes too—Gnaeus Siccius, Lucius Numitorius, Marcus Duillius, Spurius Icilius, Lucius Maecilius. A Volscian and Aequian war had arisen amid the Roman sedition. They had laid waste the fields, so that, if any secession of the commons should occur, it might have a refuge with them; then, when things were composed, they moved their camp back. Appius Claudius was sent against the Volsci; to Quinctius the Aequi fell as his province. The same savagery of Appius that there was at home was in his soldiering—the freer because it was without the tribunician fetters. He hated the commons with more than his father’s hatred: had he, then, been beaten by them—he, the one consul elected against the tribunician power, while the law was carried through which earlier consuls had hindered with a smaller effort, and with by no means so great a hope from the Fathers? This anger and indignation goaded his fierce spirit to harry the army with savage command. Nor could it be tamed by any force, so great a contest had they drunk into their spirits. Slackly, idly, carelessly, defiantly they did everything; neither shame nor fear restrained them; if he wished the column to march faster, they purposely went the slower; if an encourager of the work were at hand, they all of their own accord let slacken the industry they had been stirred to; in his presence they cast down their faces, and silently cursed him as he passed by, so that that spirit, unconquered by the commons’ hatred, was at times moved. With every harshness tried in vain, he had no more dealings with the soldiers; he said the army had been corrupted by the centurions, and, jeering, called them sometimes tribunes of the plebs, sometimes Voleros. None of this was unknown to the Volsci, and they pressed the harder, hoping that the Roman army would keep the same contest of spirit against Appius that it had kept against the consul Fabius. But it was far more violent against Appius than against Fabius: for it not only refused to conquer, as the Fabian army had, but wished to be conquered. Led out into the line, it makes for the camp in shameful flight, nor halted before it saw the Volscian bringing his standards up to the defenses, and the foul slaughter of the rearmost. Then force to fight was wrung from it, so that the enemy, victorious already, was thrust back from the rampart; yet it appeared plainly enough that the Roman soldier had been unwilling only that the camp should be taken, and that for the rest he rejoiced in his own defeat and disgrace. By none of which was the fierce spirit of Appius broken; and when he wished to rage still further, and called an assembly, the lieutenants and tribunes run together to him, warning him by no means to wish to put to the test a command whose whole strength lay in the consent of those who obey. The soldiers commonly said they would not go to the assembly, and everywhere were heard the voices of men demanding that the camp be moved out of Volscian land: the victorious enemy had a little before been almost within the gates and the rampart, and not the suspicion only but the open semblance of a vast disaster hovered before their eyes. Overcome at last—since indeed they would gain nothing but a respite for their guilt—the assembly dismissed, when he had ordered the march proclaimed for the next day, at first light he gave the signal to set out with the trumpet. Just as the column was deploying out of the camp, the Volsci, as if roused by the same signal, fall upon the rearmost. The tumult, carried thence to the foremost, threw the standards and the ranks into such panic that neither could the orders be heard nor the line be formed. No one was mindful of anything but flight. So, in a streaming column, over a heap of bodies and arms, they made their escape, the enemy ceasing to pursue before the Roman ceased to flee. At last, the soldiers gathered from their scattered flight, the consul, when he had followed his men, recalling them in vain, pitched camp in peaceful territory; and, calling an assembly, he inveighed—not falsely—against an army that had betrayed military discipline, a deserter of its standards, asking each man where his standards, where his arms were; the unarmed soldiers, the standard-bearers who had lost their standards, and besides these the centurions and the double-pay men who had quitted their ranks, he had beaten with rods and beheaded with the axe; of the rest of the multitude, one in every ten was chosen by lot for punishment.

Against this, among the Aequi, the contest between the consul and his soldiers was one of courtesy and of kindnesses. Quinctius was both gentler by nature, and his colleague’s unhappy savagery had made him take the more pleasure in his own disposition. To so great a concord of leader and army the Aequi did not dare to offer themselves, but suffered the enemy to range ravaging through their fields; nor in any war before was plunder driven off from there more widely. All of it was given to the soldiery. There were added praises too, in which the soldiers’ spirits rejoice no less than in reward. Both to its leader, and for its leader’s sake to the Fathers also, the army returned the more reconciled, declaring that the senate had given it a father, and the other army a master. With its varying fortune of war, its savage discord at home and abroad, the year that was spent is made notable above all by the tribal assembly—a matter greater in the victory of the contest taken up than in its practical use; for more of dignity was taken from the assemblies themselves, by the removal of the Fathers from the council, than of strength was either added to the commons or taken from the Fathers.

A more turbulent year followed, in the consulship of Lucius Valerius and Titus Aemilius, both because of the struggles of the orders over the agrarian law, and because of the trial of Appius Claudius, to whom—the fiercest adversary of the law, upholding the cause of the holders of public land as though he were a third consul—Marcus Duillius and Gnaeus Siccius appointed a day. Never before was so hateful a defendant brought before the people’s judgment, full of his own angers and of his father’s. The Fathers, too, strove for no one else so readily: the champion of the senate, the avenger of its majesty, set against all the tumults of tribunes and commons, who had merely exceeded due measure in the contest—he was being thrown to an angry commons. One man alone among the Fathers, Appius Claudius himself, counted the tribunes, and the commons, and his own trial as nothing. Neither the commons’ threats nor the senate’s prayers could ever drive him—not only to change his garb, or as a suppliant to clasp men’s hands, but not even, when his cause was to be pleaded before the people, to soften and lower anything of his accustomed harshness of speech. The same set of his face, the same defiance in his look, the same spirit in his speech there was, so that a great part of the commons feared Appius the defendant no less than they had feared him the consul. Once he pleaded his cause, in the manner in which he had always been wont to do everything—with the spirit of an accuser; and by his very steadfastness he so astounded both the tribunes and the commons that of their own will they put off the day for him, and then suffered the matter to drag on. There was no great while of time in the meantime; yet before the appointed day came, he dies of sickness. When the tribunes of the plebs tried to hinder his eulogy, the commons would not have the last day of so great a man cheated of its customary honor, and heard his eulogy, dead, with as fair ears as they had heard the accusation of him living; and they thronged to his funeral.

In the same year the consul Valerius, having set out with an army against the Aequi, when he could not draw the enemy out to battle, set about assaulting their camp. A foul storm, flung down from the sky with hail and thunder, prevented it. Then it heightened the wonder that, when the signal for retreat was given, so tranquil a clearness returned that to assault a second time a camp defended, as it were, by some divinity became a thing of religious scruple. All the anger of the war turned to ravaging the land. The other consul, Aemilius, waged war among the Sabines. There too, because the enemy kept within his walls, the fields were laid waste. Then the Sabines, roused by the burning—not of the farmhouses only, but of the villages too, which were thickly inhabited—met the raiders, and, having come off from a drawn battle, the next day moved their camp back to safer places. This seemed to the consul reason enough to leave the enemy as good as beaten, and he withdrew from a war still unfinished.

Amid these wars, the discord at home abiding, Titus Numicius Priscus and Aulus Verginius were made consuls. It seemed the commons would bear no longer the putting-off of the agrarian law, and the last resort of violence was being made ready, when it was learned, from the smoke of burning farmhouses and the flight of the country folk, that the Volsci were at hand. That circumstance checked a sedition now ripe and all but bursting out. The consuls, forced at once by the senate, by leading the men of military age out of the city to war made the rest of the commons quieter. And the enemy indeed, having done nothing but drench the Romans in a groundless fear, go off at a quick march: Numicius set out to Antium against the Volsci, Verginius against the Aequi. There, from an ambush, after a defeat all but great had been suffered, the valor of the soldiers restored a cause let slip by the consul’s negligence. Among the Volsci there was better command: the enemy were routed in the first battle and driven in flight into the city of Antium, the most opulent, as things then stood. This the consul did not dare to assault, but took from the Antiates Caeno, another town by no means so opulent. While the Aequi and the Volsci held the Roman armies engaged, the Sabines came on, ravaging up to the very gates of the city. Then they themselves, a few days after, when both consuls in anger had entered their borders, suffered from the two armies more disasters than they had inflicted.

At the end of the year there was some peace, but, as always otherwise, troubled by the struggle of the Fathers and the commons. The angry commons would not take part in the consular elections; through the Fathers and the Fathers’ clients there were created as consuls Titus Quinctius and Quintus Servilius. They have a year like the one before—seditious in its beginnings, then quiet through a foreign war. The Sabines, having crossed the Crustumine plains at a quick march, when they had wrought slaughter and burning about the river Anio, were driven back—nearly from the Colline gate and the walls—yet drove off vast booty of men and cattle. These the consul Servilius pursued with a hostile army; the column itself, indeed, he could not overtake on level ground, but he made the ravaging so wide that he left nothing untouched by the war, and returned with plunder taken many times over. And among the Volsci the commonwealth’s affairs were excellently managed, by the work both of the leader and of the soldiers. First the fight was on the level field, with standards joined, with great slaughter on both sides, with much blood. And the Romans, because their fewness was the nearer to feeling the loss, would have given ground, had not the consul, by a wholesome falsehood, crying that on the other wing the enemy were fleeing, roused the line. The charge made, while they think they are conquering, they conquered. The consul, fearing lest by pressing too hard he should renew the struggle, gave the signal for retreat. A few days came between—a quiet taken on both sides, as by a tacit truce—through which a vast force of men, from all the Volscian and Aequian peoples, came into the camp, not doubting that the Romans, if they perceived it, would go off by night. And so, at about the third watch, they come to assault the camp. Quinctius, when he had stilled the tumult that the sudden terror had stirred up, and had bidden the soldier keep quiet in his tents, leads out a cohort of the Hernici to the outpost, and orders the horn-blowers and trumpeters, set upon horses, to sound before the rampart, and to keep the enemy anxious until daylight. For the rest of the night all was so tranquil in the camp that the Romans had even their fill of sleep. The Volsci—the sight of armed foot, whom they supposed both to be more in number and to be Romans, and the noise and the neighing of the horses, which raged both at the unwonted rider sitting them and at the sound that beset their ears besides—it held intent, as if for an attack of the enemy.

When it grew light, the Roman, fresh and sated with sleep, led out into the line, at the first onset struck down the Volscian, weary with standing and with watching; though the enemy gave ground rather than were beaten, because behind them were slopes, into which, behind the front, with ranks unbroken, they made a safe retreat. The consul, when the ground became unfavorable, halts the line. The soldier was held back with difficulty; he shouts, and demands that he be allowed to press the broken enemy. The cavalry act more fiercely; crowded round their leader, they cry out that they will go before the standards. While the consul hesitates, trusting to the soldiers’ valor, but trusting the ground too little, they shout all together that they will go, and the deed followed the shout. Their javelins fixed in the earth, that they might climb the steep the lighter, they come on at a run. The Volscian, his missile weapons poured out at the first onset, heaves the stones lying at his feet upon those climbing, and, when they are thrown into disorder, presses them with blow on blow from the higher ground. So the Romans’ left wing was nearly overwhelmed, had not the consul, as they were now giving ground, by upbraiding them at once with rashness and with cowardice, shaken off their fear by shame. At first they stood fast with stubborn spirits; then, as, holding their ground, they returned force for force, they dare even to advance, and with the shout renewed they set the line in motion; then once more, the charge taken up, they strive on and surmount the unfavorableness of the place. They had nearly made their way out onto the topmost ridge of the slope, when the enemy turned their backs, and, in a streaming run, in well-nigh a single column, fleeing and pursuing alike fell into the camp. In that panic the camp is taken. Those of the Volsci who could escape make for Antium. To Antium too the Roman army was led. Besieged a few days, it surrenders—by no fresh force of the besiegers, but because, ever since the unlucky battle and the loss of their camp, their spirits had fallen.