With Antium taken, Titus Aemilius and Quintus Fabius are made consuls. This was the Fabius who alone had survived the clan blotted out at the Cremera. Already in his earlier consulship Aemilius had been the mover for granting land to the commons; and so in his second consulship too the land-party had raised themselves to the hope of the law, and the tribunes—reckoning that a measure so often attempted against the consuls could now be carried, with a consul at any rate to help—take it up; and the consul held to his resolve. The holders of public land and a great part of the Fathers, complaining that the foremost man of the state was flaunting himself in tribunician agitations and was making himself the people’s darling by largesse out of what belonged to another, had turned the odium of the whole affair away from the tribunes and onto the consul. A fierce contest was at hand, had not Fabius cleared the matter by a plan bitter to neither side: that under the leadership and auspices of Titus Quinctius a fair amount of land had been taken from the Volsci the year before; that Antium, a convenient and seaboard city close at hand, could have a colony planted in it; thus, without complaints from the holders, the commons would go out onto the land, and the state would be at concord. This proposal was accepted. As land-commissioners (triumviri) for the granting of the land he names Titus Quinctius, Aulus Verginius, and Publius Furius; those who wished to receive land were bidden to give in their names. At once, as commonly happens, abundance bred disdain, and so few gave in their names that, to fill out the number, Volscian colonists were added; the rest of the multitude preferred to demand land at Rome rather than receive it elsewhere. The Aequi sued Quintus Fabius—he had come there with an army—for peace, and then themselves made it void by a sudden raid into Latin territory.

Quintus Servilius in the year following—for he was consul with Spurius Postumius—being sent against the Aequi, kept his standing camp in Latin territory. A rest made necessary held the army, entangled in sickness. The war was dragged out into a third year, in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Titus Quinctius. To Fabius, out of the regular order—because, as victor, he had granted the Aequi peace—that command was given. He set out in no doubtful hope that the fame of his name would pacify the Aequi, and bade his envoys, sent into the council of the nation, announce that Quintus Fabius the consul declared he had carried peace from the Aequi to Rome, and was bringing war from Rome to the Aequi, with the same right hand, now armed, which he had before given them in peace; by whose treachery and perjury this came to pass, the gods were now the witnesses, and would soon be the avengers. Yet he himself, however it stood, even now would rather the Aequi repented of their own accord than suffer what an enemy must. If they repented, a safe refuge would lie open to the clemency they had proved; but if they took joy in their perjury, they would wage war against gods angrier than their foes. These words so far moved no one that the envoys were all but assaulted, and an army was sent to the Algidus against the Romans. When this was reported at Rome, the indignity of the thing, more than the danger, called the other consul out from the city. So two consular armies came up against the enemy, their line drawn up to fight at once. But since by chance not much of the day was left, one man from the enemy’s outpost calls out: "This is to make a show of war, Romans, not to wage it. You draw up your line against the oncoming night; we need a longer daylight for the struggle that presses upon us. Tomorrow at sunrise come back into the line; there will be chance enough to fight; never fear." Provoked by these words, the soldier is led back into camp till the morrow, thinking that a long night was coming which would put off the contest. Then indeed they tend their bodies with food and sleep; when the next day dawned, the Roman line took its stand a good while the first; at last the Aequi too came forward. The battle was fierce on both sides, since the Roman fought with anger and hatred, while the Aequi the consciousness of a danger drawn down by their own fault, and the despair of any future trust in them thereafter, drove to dare and to try the utmost. Yet the Aequi did not hold against the Roman line; and when, beaten, they had withdrawn into their own borders, with spirits no whit more inclined to peace the fierce multitude fell to reviling their leaders, because the matter had been committed to a pitched line—the very art of fighting in which the Roman excels; the Aequi, they said, were better at raids and forays, and many bands scattered here and there waged wars more soundly than the great mass of a single army.

And so, leaving a garrison in the camp, they went out and burst into Roman territory with such an uproar that they carried terror to the city itself. The thing, unlooked-for, made the more panic, because nothing could be feared less than that an enemy beaten and all but besieged in his camp should be mindful of ravaging; and the countryfolk, in their fright tumbling in at the gates, kept crying that it was no mere raid nor small bands of plunderers, but—magnifying everything with groundless fear—that armies and legions of the enemy were at hand and were rushing upon the city in a hostile column. From these, the nearest men carried to others reports uncertain and therefore the emptier. The running and the shouting of men calling to arms was not far from the panic of a captured city. By chance the consul Quinctius had returned to Rome from the Algidus. This was the remedy for the fear; and when the uproar was stilled, chiding them that beaten men should be feared, he set garrisons at the gates. Then, the senate being summoned and a suspension of public business (iustitium) proclaimed on the Fathers’ authority, he set out to guard the borders, leaving Quintus Servilius as prefect of the city—and found no enemy in the fields. By the other consul the thing was done splendidly; for he, where he knew the enemy would come, fell upon them as they marched heavy with booty and therefore in a more encumbered column, and made their ravaging deadly to themselves. Few of the enemy escaped the ambush; all the booty was recovered. So the return of the consul Quinctius into the city put an end to the iustitium, which had lasted four days. Then a census was held and the lustrum closed by Quinctius. The number of citizens assessed is said to have been one hundred and four thousand seven hundred and fourteen, apart from orphans and widows. Among the Aequi nothing memorable was done thereafter; they withdrew into their towns, suffering their own fields to be burned and ravaged. The consul, when he had passed several times in a hostile column, laying waste, through the whole territory of the enemy, returned to Rome with vast glory and booty.

Next the consuls were Aulus Postumius Albus and Spurius Furius Fusus.—Some have written the Furii as "Fusii"; this I note, lest anyone think it a change of the men themselves, which is one of names.—There was no doubt that one of the consuls would wage war with the Aequi. And so the Aequi sought a garrison from the Ecetran Volsci; which being eagerly offered—so persistently did these states vie in their unending hatred of the Romans—war was being prepared with all force. The Hernici perceive it and forewarn the Romans that the Ecetran had gone over to the Aequi. The colony of Antium too was suspected, because a great force of men had fled thence to the Aequi when the town was taken; and that soldiery, throughout the Aequian war, had been the very keenest; then, when the Aequi had been driven into their towns, that multitude, dispersing and returning to Antium, of its own accord estranged from the Romans the colonists, already disloyal. And while the affair was not yet ripe, when word reached the senate that a defection was being prepared, the task was laid on the consuls to summon the chief men of the colony to Rome and inquire what the matter was. They came without reluctance, and, brought in by the consuls before the senate, so answered the questions put to them that they were dismissed more suspect than they had come. Thereafter the war was held beyond doubt. Spurius Furius, the one of the consuls to whom that command had fallen, having set out against the Aequi, found the enemy ravaging in the territory of the Hernici; and, ignorant of their numbers—because they had nowhere been seen all together—he rashly committed to battle an army unequal in force. Beaten at the first encounter, he withdrew within his camp. Nor was that the end of the danger; for both the following night and the next day the camp was beset and assaulted with such force that not even a messenger could be sent from it to Rome. The Hernici reported that the fighting had gone ill and that the consul and his army were besieged, and struck such terror into the Fathers that—by that form of decree of the senate which has always been held the resort of the last necessity—the charge was given to Postumius, the other consul, that he see to it the commonwealth take no harm. It seemed best that the consul himself remain at Rome to enroll all who could bear arms, and that as proconsul Titus Quinctius be sent to the relief of the camp with an allied army; to bring it to full strength the Latins and Hernici and the colony of Antium were bidden to give Quinctius emergency soldiers—subitarii, as they then called sudden levies.

Many movements were made in those days, and many onsets from this side and that, because the enemy, superior in numbers, set about plucking the Roman strength to pieces in many places at once, as though it would not suffice for everything; at the same time the camp was assaulted, at the same time a part of the army was sent to ravage Roman territory and—should any chance offer it—to attempt the city itself. Lucius Valerius was left for the protection of the city, the consul Postumius sent to ward off the ravaging of the borders. Nothing was relaxed of care or of toil on any side: watches in the city, posts before the gates, garrisons set along the walls, and—what was needful in so great an uproar—a iustitium kept for several days. Meanwhile in the camp the consul Furius, after at first quietly enduring the siege, burst out by the rear gate upon the unwary enemy, and, though he could pursue, halted for fear that some assault might be made on the camp from another quarter. The legate Furius—the consul’s own brother—his charge carried too far; and he, in his zeal for the pursuit, saw neither his own men returning nor the enemy’s rush upon his rear. So, cut off, after many attempts often vainly made to force himself a way back to the camp, fighting fiercely he fell. And the consul, turned to the fight by news of his brother surrounded, while he flung himself into the midst of the fray more rashly than warily, having taken a wound and with difficulty rescued by those about him, both threw his own men’s spirits into confusion and made the enemy the fiercer; who, kindled by the slaying of the legate and the wounding of the consul, could thereafter be held back by no force, so that the Romans, driven into their camp, were besieged again, a match neither in hope nor in strength; and the sum of all would have come into peril, had not Titus Quinctius come to the rescue with foreign troops, a Latin and Hernican army. He, falling on the rear of the Aequi—intent upon the Roman camp and fiercely flaunting the legate’s head—at the same moment, a sally being made from the camp at a signal he gave from afar, hemmed in a great force of the enemy. Less of the slaughter, but a more headlong flight of the Aequi, was in Roman territory; on them, as they scattered and drove off booty, Postumius made his charge in several places where he had set garrisons to advantage. These, fleeing in a broken column and straggling, fell in with Quinctius the victor as he returned with the wounded consul; then the consular army in a splendid fight avenged the consul’s wound and the slaughter of the legate and the cohorts. Great were the disasters dealt and taken to and fro in those days. It is hard to affirm with credit, in a matter so ancient, how many fought or fell by exact reckoning; yet Valerius Antias ventures to frame the totals: that the Romans fell in Hernican territory to the number of five thousand eight hundred; that of the Aequian raiders who roamed ravaging within Roman borders two thousand four hundred were cut down by the consul Aulus Postumius; that the rest of the multitude, driving off booty, who fell in with Quinctius, by no means came off with an equal slaughter—four thousand were killed there, and, working out the number minutely, he says two hundred and thirty. When the army had returned to Rome and the iustitium was remitted, the sky was seen to blaze with much fire, and other portents either passed before men’s eyes or showed empty shapes to the terrified. To turn aside these terrors a festival of three days was proclaimed, throughout which all the shrines were thronged with men and women begging the peace of the gods. Then the Latin and Hernican cohorts, thanks being rendered them by the senate for their zealous service, were sent home. The thousand Antiate soldiers, because they had brought their aid too late, after the battle, were dismissed all but in disgrace.

The comitia were then held; the consuls elected were Lucius Aebutius and Publius Servilius. On the Kalends of Sextilis, as the year then began, they enter on the consulship. The season was heavy, and by chance that year was pestilent for the city and the fields, and for beasts no less than for men; and they increased the force of the disease by taking flocks and country-folk into the city out of fear of ravaging. That medley of living creatures of every kind, jumbled together, distressed the townsfolk with its strange stench, and the countryman, packed under cramped roofs, with the heat and the sleeplessness; and the services men did for one another, and the very contact, spread the sickness abroad. While they were scarcely bearing up under the pressing disasters, suddenly Hernican envoys announce that in their territory the Aequi and Volsci, with forces joined, had pitched camp, and from it were laying waste their borders with a vast army. Apart from the fact that the thinness of the senate was itself a token to the allies that the state was stricken with pestilence, they carried back a sorrowful answer too: that the Hernici must protect their own affairs by themselves, together with the Latins; that the city of Rome, by a sudden anger of the gods, was being ravaged by disease; if any respite from that evil came, they would bring help to their allies, as in the year before, as always otherwise. The allies departed, carrying home tidings sadder than the sad ones they had brought, since they must now sustain by themselves a war which they had scarcely sustained when propped by Roman strength. No longer did the enemy keep within Hernican country; he pushes on from there in hostility into Roman territory, already laid waste even without the injury of war. There, when no one came to meet them—not even unarmed—and they passed through a whole land stripped not only of garrisons but even of country tillage, they reached the third milestone on the Gabine Way. Aebutius the Roman consul was dead; his colleague Servilius was dragging out his life in slender hope; most of the leading men were stricken, the greater part of the Fathers, almost the whole of the military age, so that they had strength not only not enough for the expeditions which the crisis in so great an alarm demanded, but scarcely enough for quiet pickets. The duty of the watches the senators who by age and health were able discharged in person; the rounds and the charge of them belonged to the aediles of the plebs; to these had come the sum of affairs and the majesty of the consular command.

All abandoned, without a head, without strength—the guardian gods and the fortune of the city kept it safe, which put into the Volsci and Aequi the mind of plunderers rather than of warriors. For so utterly did their spirit conceive no hope—not of taking, but not even of approaching the Roman walls—and the roofs seen from afar and the overhanging hills so turned their minds aside, that, a murmur arising everywhere through the whole camp—why in a waste and deserted countryside, amid the rotting of beasts and men, they should idly wear away the time without booty, when they could make for untouched places, the Tusculan land rich in stores—they suddenly pluck up the standards and, by cross-routes through the Labican fields, pass over into the Tusculan hills. Thither all the violence and tempest of the war was turned. Meanwhile the Hernici and Latins, moved by shame too, not by pity alone—seeing that they had neither withstood the common enemy as he made in a hostile column for the city of Rome, nor borne any help to their besieged allies—push on to Rome with army joined. When they had not found the enemy there, following report and his tracks they meet him as he comes down from the Tusculan into the Alban valley. There the fight was by no means an even one, and their good faith was, for the present, too little blessed to their allies. No smaller is the slaughter made at Rome by disease than what had been wrought by the sword among the allies. The consul who alone survived dies; others too of renown died—Marcus Valerius and Titus Verginius Rutulus, the augurs, and Servius Sulpicius, the chief curio; and through unknown folk far and wide the force of the disease ranged; and the senate, destitute of human help, turned the people and its prayers to the gods. They were bidden go with their wives and children to make supplication and to beg the peace of the gods; and—to that which each man’s own woes were already compelling—summoned now by public authority, they fill all the shrines. Everywhere the matrons, sweeping the temples with their hair, beg pardon for the wrath of heaven and an end to the plague.

Then little by little—whether the peace of the gods was won, or the heavier season of the year was now gone round—bodies released from disease began to grow healthier; and men’s minds being now turned to public care, when several interregna had passed, Publius Valerius Publicola, on the third day after he had entered upon the interregnum, holds the election of consuls: Lucius Lucretius Tricipitinus and Titus Veturius Geminus—or was it Vetusius? On the third day before the Ides of Sextilis they enter on the consulship, the state being now strong enough not only to ward off war but even to carry it abroad of its own accord. So, the Hernici announcing that the enemy had crossed into their borders, help was eagerly promised. Two consular armies were enrolled. Veturius was sent against the Volsci to carry war to them; Tricipitinus, set to ward off ravaging from the allies’ land, advances no farther than into the Hernican country. Veturius routs and puts the enemy to flight in the first battle; Lucretius, while he sits among the Hernici, was given the slip by a band of raiders led over the Praenestine mountains and then brought down into the plains. They laid waste the Praenestine and Gabine fields; from the Gabine they turned aside into the Tusculan hills. To the city of Rome too a great terror was offered, more from the suddenness of the thing than because there was too little strength to ward off the assault. Quintus Fabius was in charge of the city; he, by arming the young men and posting garrisons, made all safe and quiet. And so the enemy, having snatched booty from the nearest places and not daring to approach the city, when they were returning with their column wheeled about—the farther they withdrew from the enemy’s city, the more careless their watch—fell in with the consul Lucretius, drawn up, his routes explored beforehand, and bent on a contest. So, with spirits ready, attacking men struck by a sudden panic, the considerably fewer rout and put to flight the vast multitude, and, driving them into hollow valleys where the outlets were not easy, hem them in. There the Volscian name was all but wiped out. That thirteen thousand four hundred and seventy fell in the line and the flight, that one thousand seven hundred and fifty were taken alive, that twenty-seven military standards were brought back, I find in certain annals—where, even if something be added to the number, the slaughter was certainly great. The victorious consul, master of vast booty, returned to the same standing camp. Then the consuls join their camps, and the Volsci and Aequi gathered their stricken strength into one. That was the third battle of that year. The same fortune gave the victory; the enemy routed, the camp too was taken.

So the Roman state returned to its old condition, and at once success in war stirred up disturbances in the city. Gaius Terentilius Harsa was tribune of the plebs that year. He, judging that, the consuls being absent, room had been given for tribunician proceedings, after for several days arraigning before the commons the arrogance of the Fathers, inveighed above all against the consular command, as too great and not to be borne by a free state: for in name only was it the less hateful, in the thing itself almost more dreadful than a king’s; since two masters had been taken in place of one, with power unmeasured and unbounded, who, loosed and unbridled themselves, turned all the terrors of the laws and all their penalties upon the commons. That this license might not be theirs forever, he would promulgate a law that five men be created to write down laws concerning the consular power; the right which the people granted over itself, that the consul should use—not they themselves hold their own caprice and license in the place of law. When this law had been promulgated, since the Fathers feared lest in the consuls’ absence they should take on the yoke, the senate is summoned by the prefect of the city, Quintus Fabius; who inveighed so fiercely against the proposal and against the mover himself that nothing of threat and terror was left over, even had both consuls stood about the tribune in anger: that the man had lain in wait and, seizing his moment, had fallen upon the commonwealth. Had the angry gods, the year before, amid disease and war, given them any tribune like him, it could not have been withstood. With the two consuls dead, the state lying sick, in the welter of all things, he would have brought in laws to abolish the consular command of the commonwealth, and would have made himself a leader for the Volsci and Aequi to assault the city. What, then? Was it not lawful for him, if the consuls had done anything proudly or cruelly against any of the citizens, to name a day and accuse them before those very judges against one of whom the cruelty had been done? It was not the consular command he was making hateful and intolerable, but the tribunician power; which, appeased and reconciled to the Fathers, was being driven afresh back into its old wrongs. Nor would he beg the man to desist from going on as he had begun. "You," said Fabius, "the rest of you tribunes, we beseech: that first of all you consider that this power of yours was provided for the help of individuals, not for the ruin of all; that you were created tribunes of the plebs, not enemies to the Fathers. To us it is wretched, to you it is hateful, that the deserted commonwealth be assailed. You will lessen not your right, but the odium against you. Deal with your colleague that he put the whole matter off until the consuls come. Not even the Aequi and Volsci, when the consuls were carried off by disease the year before, pressed us with cruel and arrogant war." The tribunes deal with Terentilius, and—the proceeding put off in show, in fact dropped—the consuls were at once sent for.

Lucretius returned with vast booty, and with far greater glory. And on his arrival he heightens the glory, all the booty being laid out in the Campus Martius, so that each man might for three days recognize his own and lead it away. The rest, for which no owners appeared, was sold. A triumph was owed to the consul by the consent of all; but the matter was put off, the tribune being busy with his law: that was of more account to the consul. For several days the affair was bandied about, both in the senate and before the people; at last the tribune gave way to the consul’s majesty and desisted. Then to the commander and the army their due honor was rendered. He triumphed over the Volsci and Aequi; his own legions followed him in triumph. To the other consul it was granted to enter the city in ovation, without soldiers. Then in the following year the Terentilian law, brought forward by the whole college, beset the new consuls; the consuls were Publius Volumnius and Servius Sulpicius. That year the sky was seen to blaze, and the earth was shaken by a vast quaking. That an ox had spoken—a thing for which there had been no belief the year before—was now believed. Among other prodigies it even rained flesh, which shower a great number of birds, flitting about, are said to have snatched away; what fell to the ground lay scattered so for several days that the smell altered nothing. The Books were consulted through the two commissioners of sacred rites (duumviri); perils were foretold from a gathering of foreigners, lest assaults be made upon the high places of the city and slaughters thence; among other things, warning was given that men abstain from seditions. The tribunes charged that this had been contrived to hinder the law, and a huge contest was at hand. Behold—as though the same cycle revolved every single year—the Hernici announce that the Volsci and Aequi, though their resources had been cut away, were rebuilding their armies; that the sum of the matter was lodged at Antium; that the Antiate colonists at Ecetra were openly holding councils; that this was the head, these the sinews, of the war. When this had been said in the senate, a levy is proclaimed; the consuls were bidden to divide the conduct of the war between them, that the Volsci should be the province of the one, the Aequi of the other. The tribunes resound openly in the Forum, that the Volscian war was a tale made up, that the Hernici were primed to play their parts. Now, they said, the liberty of the Roman people was being crushed not even by valor, but eluded by craft: because faith had now departed that the Volsci and Aequi, slaughtered almost to extinction, could of their own accord set arms astir, new enemies were sought; a faithful neighboring colony was being made infamous. War was being declared on the innocent Antiates, but waged against the Roman commons—whom, loaded with arms, they would drive headlong from the city in a column, taking vengeance on the tribunes by the exile and banishment of the citizens. Thus—lest the people think anything else was afoot—the law was beaten, unless, while the matter was still untouched, while they were at home, while they were in their togas, they took care not to be thrust from possession of the city, not to take on the yoke. If they had spirit, help would not be lacking; all the tribunes were of one mind. There was no foreign terror, no danger: the gods had taken care, the year before, that liberty might be safely defended. So spoke the tribunes.

On the other side, the consuls, with their chairs set in the people’s sight, were holding the levy. Thither the tribunes hurry down and draw the assembly along with them. A few were summoned, as if to make trial of the thing, and at once violence broke out. Whomever the lictor, at the consul’s bidding, had laid hold of, the tribune ordered released; and for no man did his own right set the bound, but the hope of force, and what you aimed at had to be made good by the strong hand. As the tribunes had borne themselves in blocking the levy, so the Fathers bore themselves in hindering the law, which was being brought forward on every assembly-day. The beginning of the brawl was when the tribunes had ordered the people to withdraw, because the Fathers would not suffer themselves to be moved aside. And the elder men scarcely took part in the matter, since it was one not to be steered by counsel but given over to rashness and audacity. The consuls too held much aloof, lest in the welter of things they expose their majesty to any insult. Caeso Quinctius there was, a young man fierce both for the nobility of his house and for the bigness and strength of his body. To these gifts of the gods he had himself added many decorations of war and eloquence in the Forum, so that none was held readier in the state, in tongue or in hand. When this man had taken his stand in the midst of the patrician column, towering above the rest, as though carrying all the dictatorships and consulships in his own voice and strength, he alone sustained the tribunician onsets and the popular storms. Under his lead the tribunes were often driven from the Forum, the commons routed and put to flight; whoever had stood in his way went off battered and stripped, so that it was plain enough that, if it were lawful to act thus, the law was beaten. Then, when the other tribunes were now all but cowed, Aulus Verginius, one of the college, names a day for Caeso on a capital charge. By that act he had kindled the fierce temper rather than terrified it; the more sharply did Caeso resist the law, stir up the commons, harry the tribunes as in a lawful war. The accuser let the defendant rush on and feed the flame of odium and the matter of his charges; meanwhile he pressed the law not so much in the hope of carrying it as to provoke Caeso’s rashness. There, the many things often said and done unadvisedly by the young men fell upon the suspect temper of Caeso alone. Yet he kept resisting the law. And Aulus Verginius said again and again to the commons: "Do you not feel by now, Quirites, that you cannot at once have Caeso for a citizen and the law you long for? Yet why do I speak of the law? He stands in the way of liberty; in arrogance he surpasses all the Tarquins. Wait till he becomes consul or dictator, the man whom, a private citizen, you see reigning by his strength and his audacity." Many assented, complaining that they had been beaten, and of their own accord urged the tribune to push the matter through.

Now the day of trial was at hand, and it was plain that men commonly believed that in Caeso’s condemnation liberty itself was at stake. Then at last, compelled, with much indignity he went about clasping men’s hands one by one. There followed him his kinsmen, the chief men of the state. Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, who had thrice been consul, recounting many honors of his own and his family’s, affirmed that neither in the Quinctian house nor in the Roman state had there ever been so great a native gift of virtue so early ripe; that Caeso had been his own soldier first, and had often fought against the foe under his own eyes. Spurius Furius declared that Caeso, sent to him by Quinctius Capitolinus, had come to his aid in his desperate plight; that there was no single man by whose work he thought the situation more restored. Lucius Lucretius, consul of the year before, shining with fresh glory, shared his own praises with Caeso, recalled his battles, recounted his splendid deeds, now on expeditions, now in the line; and he counseled and warned them that an outstanding young man, furnished with all the goods of nature and fortune, would be the greatest weight in the affairs of whatever state he came to: they should prefer that he be their citizen rather than another’s. What gave offense in him—his heat and his audacity—age was taking away day by day; what was lacking—judgment—that was growing day by day. With his faults aging and his virtue ripening, let them suffer so great a man to grow old in the state. Among these, his father, Lucius Quinctius, surnamed Cincinnatus, not by repeating praises—lest he heap up odium—but by begging pardon for the error and the youthfulness, kept entreating that, for his own sake, who had offended no one by word or deed, they should forgive his son. But some turned away from his prayers, out of shame or fear; others, complaining that they and theirs had been beaten, by a savage answer made their verdict plain beforehand.

Pressing the defendant, besides the common odium, was one charge: that Marcus Volscius Fictor, who some years before had been tribune of the plebs, had come forward as witness that, not long after the pestilence had been in the city, he had fallen in with a band of youths roistering in the Subura. There a brawl arose, and his own elder brother, not yet strong enough after his sickness, struck by a blow of Caeso’s fist, fell; half-dead, he was carried home between men’s hands, and died thereafter, as Volscius believed; nor had he been allowed to follow up so atrocious a deed through the consuls of the earlier years. As Volscius cried this aloud, men were so stirred that it was not far from Caeso’s perishing by the people’s onset. Verginius orders the man seized and led off to chains. The patricians resist force with force. Titus Quinctius cries out that a man for whom a day on a capital charge has been named, and concerning whom there will soon be a trial, ought not to be outraged uncondemned, his case unheard. The tribune says he will not exact punishment on an uncondemned man; yet that he will keep him in chains until the day of trial, so that to the Roman people there may be the means of exacting punishment of the man who killed a man. The tribunes, appealed to, by a middle decree make clear their right of help: they forbid his being cast into chains; they pronounce it their pleasure that the defendant be produced, and that money be promised to the people if he be not produced. How great a sum it were fair to promise came into doubt; that is referred to the senate: the defendant, while the Fathers were consulted, was kept in public custody. It was decided that sureties be given; they bound each surety for three thousand asses; how many should be given was left to the tribunes. They fixed ten; with that many sureties the accuser bound the defendant. He was the first to give sureties to the public. Dismissed from the Forum, the next night he went off into exile among the Etruscans. On the day of trial, when it was pleaded in his excuse that he had changed his ground for the sake of exile, nonetheless—Verginius holding the comitia—his colleagues, appealed to, dismissed the assembly. The money was exacted from the father cruelly, so that, all his goods sold off, for some while he lived beyond the Tiber, like a man banished, in some out-of-the-way hovel.

This trial and the promulgated law kept the state busy; from foreign arms there was quiet. When the tribunes, as if victors, believed that, the Fathers being cowed, the law had been all but carried by Caeso’s exile, and—so far as concerned the elder Fathers—they had yielded up possession of the commonwealth, the younger men, that part above all which had been of Caeso’s company, increased their wrath against the commons and did not lessen their spirit; but there the most was gained because in a certain manner they tempered their onsets. When, first after Caeso’s exile, the law began to be brought forward, drawn up and ready with a vast army of clients they so set upon the tribunes—as soon as these, by clearing folk aside, gave occasion—that no single man carried home from it any special share of glory or odium, and the commons complained that a thousand Caesos had risen up in place of one. On the middle days, when the tribunes were not pressing the law, nothing was more peaceable or quiet than those same men. Kindly they would greet and address the men of the commons, invite them home, stand by them in the Forum, suffer the tribunes themselves to hold their other assemblies without interruption; never were they fierce to anyone, in public or in private, save when the law had begun to be dealt with; elsewhere the young men were the people’s friends. Not even by an uncivil word—far less that any violence was done—but little by little, by soothing and handling, they had tamed the commons. By these arts, through the whole year, the law was eluded. Nor did the tribunes carry through the rest only in calm; they were also re-elected for the year following.

The consuls Gaius Claudius, son of Appius, and Publius Valerius Publicola receive a state more peaceable. The new year had brought nothing new; the care of carrying, or of resisting, the law held the state. The more the younger Fathers wormed their way into the commons’ favor, the more sharply against them the tribunes strove to make them suspect to the commons by accusation: that a conspiracy had been formed; that Caeso was at Rome; that plans had been entered upon for killing the tribunes and slaughtering the commons; that this task had been given by the elder Fathers, that the youth should abolish the tribunician power from the commonwealth, and the form of the state be the same as it had been before the Sacred Mount was seized. And from the Volsci and Aequi a now settled and almost yearly solemn war was feared; and nearer at hand another new evil arose unlooked-for. Exiles and slaves, to the number of two thousand five hundred men, under the lead of Appius Herdonius the Sabine, by night seized the Capitol and the citadel. At once, in the citadel, slaughter was made of those who had refused to join the conspiracy and to take up arms with the rest; others, headlong in the uproar, fly down in panic into the Forum; alternating cries of "To arms!" and "The enemy are in the city!" were heard. The consuls feared both to arm the commons and to leave them unarmed, uncertain what sudden evil—foreign or domestic, from the commons’ hatred or from a slaves’ treachery—had invaded the city; they tried to still the uproar, and in stilling it sometimes stirred it; for the frightened and bewildered multitude could not be ruled by command. They give arms, nonetheless—not to all, only so far that, the enemy being uncertain, there might be a guard trustworthy enough for anything. Anxious through the rest of the night, and uncertain who the men were and how great the number of the enemy, they spent it in disposing pickets at the advantageous places throughout the city. Then daylight disclosed the war and the leader of the war. From the Capitol Appius Herdonius was calling the slaves to liberty: that he had taken up the cause of every most wretched man, to bring back into their fatherland the exiles driven out by injustice and to lift the heavy yoke from the slaves; he would rather this were done with the Roman people as its author; but if there were no hope there, he would try the Volsci and the Aequi and every last extremity, and would stir them up.

The matter grew clearer to the Fathers and the consuls. Yet, besides the things openly threatened, there was the fear that this design might belong to the Veientes or the Sabines, and that—with so great a force of the enemy in the city—soon the Sabine and Etruscan legions would be at hand by concert; and then the eternal enemies, the Volsci and Aequi, would come not, as before, to ravage the borders, but against the city, as though it were already part taken. Many and various were the fears; among the rest stood out the terror of the slaves, lest each man have his own enemy in his house, whom it was scarcely safe either to trust, or, by not trusting, to strip of credit, lest he be made the more hostile; and scarcely did it seem that the peril could be stayed by concord. So far, amid the other evils that overtopped and swamped them, no one feared the tribunes or the commons; that was a tame evil, and one always breaking out through the quiet of the other evils, but now it seemed to rest, lulled by the foreign terror. Yet on that one thing, almost, it pressed hardest, when affairs were at their most precarious. For so great a madness held the tribunes that they contended it was not war, but an empty image of war, that had seated itself on the Capitol to turn the minds of the commons from their care for the law; that the guests and clients of the patricians, if they perceived that, the law once carried, they had raised their tumult in vain, would depart in greater silence than they had come. Then they hold an assembly to carry the law through, calling the people away from their arms. Meanwhile the consuls hold the senate, another and a greater fear showing itself from the tribunes than that which the nocturnal enemy had brought.

After it was announced that arms were being laid down and men were withdrawing from their posts, Publius Valerius—his colleague keeping the senate in session—rushes out from the Curia and comes thence into the temple to the tribunes. "What business is this," he said, "tribunes? Under the leadership and auspices of Appius Herdonius are you going to overturn the commonwealth? Has he who could not stir your slaves been so successful in corrupting you? When the enemy is over your heads, does it please you to withdraw from arms and to pass laws?" Then, his speech turned to the multitude: "If no care for the city touches you, Quirites, if none for yourselves, yet reverence your own gods, taken captive by the enemy. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Queen Juno, and Minerva, and the other gods and goddesses, are besieged; a camp of slaves holds your public Penates; does this seem to you the look of a sound state? So great a host of the enemy is not only within the walls but in the citadel, above the Forum and the Curia; meanwhile the comitia are in the Forum, the senate is in the Curia; as though peace were in plenty, the senator speaks his opinion, the other Quirites cast their votes. Was it not fitting that all there is of Fathers and commons, the consuls, the tribunes, gods and men all, should take up arms, bear aid, run to the Capitol, free and make peaceful that most august house of Jupiter Optimus Maximus? Father Romulus, give to your stock that mind of yours, with which once you recovered the citadel taken by gold from these same Sabines; bid it enter upon the way which you, its leader, and your army entered. Lo, I the consul, first—so far as a mortal can follow a god—will follow you and your footsteps." The end of his speech was, that he was taking up arms and calling all the Quirites to arms; if any should hinder, that he would now, forgetful of the consular command, forgetful of the tribunician power and the sacred laws, hold him—whoever he were, wherever he were, on the Capitol or in the Forum—for an enemy. Let the tribunes order, since they forbade arms to be taken against Appius Herdonius, that arms be taken against the consul Publius Valerius; he would dare against the tribunes what the founder of his family had dared against the kings. It was plain that the last violence was to come, and that the Roman sedition would be a spectacle for the enemy. Yet neither could the law be passed nor could the consul go to the Capitol; night crushed the contests begun; the tribunes gave way to the night, fearing the consuls’ arms. The authors of the sedition being thereupon removed, the Fathers went round the commons and, inserting themselves into the knots of men, sowed talk fitted to the hour; they warned them to see into what crisis they were bringing the commonwealth. It was not a contest between Fathers and commons, but Fathers and commons together—the citadel of the city, the temples of the gods, the Penates public and private—were being given over to the enemy. While these things were being done in the Forum to settle the discord, the consuls meanwhile, lest the Sabine or the Veientine enemy should stir, had gone off about the gates and the walls.

That same night, messengers come to Tusculum too, of the citadel taken and the Capitol seized and of the other state of the troubled city. Lucius Mamilius was then dictator at Tusculum. He, at once calling the senate together and bringing in the messengers, strongly urges that they not wait until envoys come from Rome to seek aid; the very peril and crisis, and the allied gods and the faith of the treaties, demanded it; the gods would never give them an equal occasion of earning, by a service, so powerful and so neighboring a state. It pleases them to bear aid; the young men are enrolled, arms are given. Coming to Rome at first light, they presented from afar the appearance of enemies; Aequi or Volsci seemed to be coming; then, when the empty terror passed off, received into the city, in column they go down into the Forum. There already Publius Valerius, his colleague left to guard the gates, was drawing up the line. The authority of the man had moved them, as he affirmed that, the Capitol once recovered and the city pacified, if they would suffer themselves to be shown plainly what fraud the tribunes were hiding in the law, he—mindful of his ancestors, mindful of the surname by which the care of cherishing the people had been handed down to him from his forefathers as a thing inherited—would not hinder the assembly of the commons. Following this leader, the tribunes crying out in vain, they bring the line up onto the Capitoline slope. The Tusculan legion too is joined to them. Allies and citizens vie which should make the recapture of the citadel their own glory; each leader exhorts his own. Then the enemy quail, and trust in nothing well enough save the ground; upon the quailing the Romans and allies bring up the standards. Already they had broken through into the vestibule of the temple, when Publius Valerius, rousing the fight among the foremost, is killed. Publius Volumnius, of consular rank, saw him fall. He, having charged his men to cover the body, himself flies forward into the consul’s place and stead. By the ardor and onrush of so great a moment, the awareness of it did not reach the soldier; he conquered before he felt that he was fighting without a leader. Many of the exiles befouled the temple with their own slaughter, many were taken alive, Herdonius was killed. So the Capitol was recovered. Of the captives, as each was free man or slave, punishment was taken of each according to his lot. Thanks were rendered to the Tusculans; the Capitol was cleansed and purified. Into the consul’s house the commons are said to have flung their farthings, that he might be carried out with a more ample funeral.

Peace being won, the tribunes then press the Fathers to discharge Publius Valerius’s pledge, press Gaius Claudius to free his colleague’s shade from the fraud, and to allow the law to be dealt with. The consul declared he would not suffer the law to be dealt with before he had had a colleague chosen in his stead. These contentions held up to the comitia for choosing a substitute consul. In the month of December, by the utmost zeal of the Fathers, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, Caeso’s father, is elected consul, to take up the magistracy at once. The commons were stricken at the prospect of having a consul angry, powerful in the favor of the Fathers, in his own worth, in his three sons—of whom none yielded to Caeso in greatness of spirit, while they were his betters in applying counsel and measure where the case demanded. As soon as he entered on his magistracy, in constant harangues from the tribunal he was the more vehement, not in coercing the commons, but in chastising the senate, by whose languor the tribunes of the plebs, now perpetual, reigned by tongue and accusations, not as in the commonwealth of the Roman people, but as in a ruined household: that with his son Caeso, valor, constancy, all the honors of youth in war and at home, had been driven and put to flight from the city of Rome; that babblers, seditious men, the seed-plots of discord, tribunes twice and three times over, lived by the worst of arts with a king’s license. "That Aulus Verginius," he said, "because he was not on the Capitol—did he deserve less punishment than Appius Herdonius? Considerably more, by Hercules, for one who will weigh the matter truly. Herdonius, if nothing else, by confessing himself an enemy all but gave you notice to take up arms; this man, by denying that there was a war, took your arms from you and threw you, naked, to your own slaves and exiles. And you—I will say it with the leave of Gaius Claudius and of the dead Publius Valerius—did you bring your standards up the Capitoline slope before you had cleared these enemies from the Forum? It is a shame before gods and men. When the enemy were in the citadel, on the Capitol, when the leader of exiles and slaves, all things profaned, dwelt in the very shrine of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, arms were taken up at Tusculum before they were at Rome. It hung in doubt whether Lucius Mamilius, the Tusculan leader, or Publius Valerius and Gaius Claudius the consuls would free the Roman citadel; and we, who before would not suffer the Latins to touch arms even for themselves when they had the enemy in their borders, now—had the Latins not of their own accord taken up arms—were taken and destroyed. Is this, tribunes, to bear aid to the commons: to throw them, unarmed, to be butchered by the enemy? Surely, if any most lowly man of your commons—that part which, as though broken off from the rest of the people, you have made your own fatherland and your private commonwealth—if any of these reported that his house was beset by an armed household, you would think aid must be borne him: was Jupiter Optimus Maximus, hedged about by the arms of exiles and slaves, worthy of no human help? And these men demand to be held sacrosanct, men to whom the very gods are neither sacred nor holy? Yet, overwhelmed with crimes divine and human, you keep declaring you will carry your law this year. Then, by Hercules, on the day I was made consul, the commonwealth was ill served—far worse than when the consul Publius Valerius perished—if you carry it. But first of all, now, Quirites," he said, "it is my mind and my colleague’s to lead the legions against the Volsci and the Aequi. By some fate we have the gods more favorable to us making war than at peace. How great the peril from those peoples would have been, had they known the Capitol was beset by exiles, it is better to guess from the past than to learn by the thing itself."

The consul’s speech had moved the commons; the Fathers, lifted up, believed the commonwealth restored. The other consul, a companion more spirited than an instigator, having readily suffered his colleague to take up first such weighty proceedings, claimed for himself a part in the carrying out of the consular duty. Then the tribunes, mocking it as so many empty words, pursued the matter by asking in what way the consuls would lead out an army, when no one would suffer them to hold a levy. "But we," said Quinctius, "have no need of a levy, since, at the time when Publius Valerius gave the commons arms for recovering the Capitol, all swore the oath that they would assemble at the consul’s order and would not depart without it. We therefore proclaim that all of you who swore the oath be present, armed, tomorrow at Lake Regillus." Then the tribunes fell to quibbling, and wished to release the people from the obligation: that Quinctius had been a private man at the time when they were bound by the sacrament. But not yet had this neglect of the gods come which now holds the age; nor did each man make the oath and the laws fit himself by his interpretation, but rather adapted his own conduct to them. And so the tribunes, since there was no hope of hindering the matter, set about deferring the departure—the more so because a report had gone out that the augurs too had been ordered to be present at Lake Regillus, and that the place was to be inaugurated where business might be done with the people under auspices, so that whatever had been proposed at Rome by tribunician force might there, in the comitia, be repealed: all, they said, would order whatever the consuls wished; for there was no appeal farther than a mile from the city, and the tribunes, should they come there, would be subject, amid the other throng of Quirites, to the consular command. These things terrified; but that greatest terror agitated their minds, that Quinctius kept declaring again and again that he would not hold the consular elections: the state was not so sick that it could be stayed by the accustomed remedies; the commonwealth had need of a dictator, so that whoever stirred to trouble the condition of the state might feel that the dictatorship is without appeal.

The senate was on the Capitol; there the tribunes come, with the commons in confusion. The multitude, with a vast outcry, implore now the consuls’ protection, now the Fathers’; nor did they move the consul from his purpose before the tribunes promised that they would abide by the Fathers’ authority. Then, on the consul’s motion concerning the demands of the tribunes and the commons, decrees of the senate are passed: that the tribunes should not bring the law that year, nor the consuls lead an army out from the city; and for the rest, the senate judged that the prolonging of magistracies, and the re-electing of the same tribunes, was against the commonwealth. The consuls were in the Fathers’ power; the tribunes, over the consuls’ protests, were re-elected. The Fathers too, that they might yield nothing to the commons, were themselves for re-electing Lucius Quinctius consul. In all that year there was no more vehement utterance of the consul’s. "Am I to wonder," he said, "Conscript Fathers, if your authority counts for nothing with the commons? It is you who cheapen it. Because the commons broke a decree of the senate by prolonging magistracies, you wish to break one yourselves, that you may not yield to the rashness of the multitude—as though to have the more power in the state were to have the more fickleness and license. For surely it is lighter and emptier to annul one’s own decrees and resolutions than another’s. Imitate, Conscript Fathers, the heedless mob; and you who ought to be an example to others, sin rather by the example of others than that others should do right by yours—provided that I do not imitate the tribunes, nor suffer myself to be returned consul against a decree of the senate. You, indeed, Gaius Claudius, I exhort both to keep the Roman people yourself from this license, and to persuade yourself of me that I shall so take it as to count my office not hindered by you, but the glory of an office spurned increased, and the odium that would hang over me from its prolonging lightened." Then jointly they issue an edict: that no man should make Lucius Quinctius consul; if any did, they would not regard that vote.

The consuls elected were Quintus Fabius Vibulanus, for the third time, and Lucius Cornelius Maluginensis. A census was taken that year; but the closing of the lustrum, because the Capitol had been seized and a consul slain, was held a matter of religious scruple. In the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Lucius Cornelius, at the very beginning of the year, things at once grew troubled. The tribunes were inciting the commons; the Latins and Hernici announced a great war from the Volsci and Aequi: already the legions of the Volsci were at Antium. There was great fear too that the colony itself would revolt; and it was with difficulty obtained from the tribunes that they suffer the war to take precedence. The consuls then divided the commands: to Fabius it was given to lead the legions to Antium; to Cornelius, to be a garrison at Rome, lest any part of the enemy—as was the Aequian custom—come to ravage. The Hernici and Latins were bidden to furnish soldiers by the treaty, and two parts of the army were of the allies, the third of citizens. After the allies had come by the appointed day, the consul pitched camp outside the Porta Capena. Then, the army having been purified, he set out for Antium and took post not far from the town and the enemy’s standing camp. There, when the Volsci—because the army had not yet come from the Aequi—did not dare to fight, and were preparing to guard themselves quietly behind their rampart, on the next day Fabius drew up, not one army of allies and citizens mingled together, but three separate lines of the three peoples around the enemy’s rampart; he himself was in the center with the Roman legions. Then he bade the signal be watched, so that the allies might both begin the action together and draw back their foot together, if he had sounded the retreat. The cavalry likewise he posted, each contingent behind its own front line. So, attacking on three sides, he surrounded the camp, and, pressing from every quarter, drove the Volsci—who could not bear the onset—from the rampart. Then, crossing the fortifications, he expelled the panic-stricken throng, swept toward a single quarter, from the camp. Thereupon the cavalry, for which it had not been easy to surmount the rampart, and which had till then stood as a spectator of the fight, caught the fugitives in the open field and enjoyed its share of the victory by cutting down the terrified. Great was the slaughter of the fleeing both within the camp and outside the fortifications, but greater the booty, since the enemy could scarcely carry off his arms with him; and the army would have been wiped out, had not the woods sheltered the fugitives.

While these things are being done at Antium, meanwhile the Aequi, sending ahead the flower of their youth, seize the citadel of Tusculum by surprise in the night, and with the rest of the army take post not far from the walls of Tusculum, to draw apart the enemy’s forces. This, carried swiftly to Rome, and from Rome to the camp at Antium, stirs the Romans no otherwise than as if word had come that the Capitol was taken; so recent was the service of the Tusculans, and the very likeness of the danger seemed to demand back the aid that had been given. Fabius, dropping all else, hurriedly conveys the booty from the camp to Antium; there, leaving a small garrison, he rushes his column at speed to Tusculum. Nothing but their arms, and what cooked food was at hand, was the soldier allowed to carry; the consul Cornelius brought up provisions from Rome. For several months there was fighting at Tusculum. With part of his army the consul assaulted the camp of the Aequi; part he had given to the Tusculans to recover the citadel. By force it could never be approached; hunger at last drew the enemy down from it. When it had come to the last extremity there, unarmed and stripped they were all sent under the yoke by the Tusculans. As these were betaking themselves home in disgraceful flight, the Roman consul overtook them on the Algidus and killed every one of them to a man. Victorious, he led his army back to Columen—that is the name of the place—and pitched camp. And the other consul, after the danger had ceased—the enemy now driven from the Roman walls—himself also set out from Rome. So the consuls, entering the enemy’s borders in two divisions, with a vast struggle laid waste, on the one side the Volsci, on the other the Aequi. That in the same year the men of Antium revolted I find in most authorities, and that the consul Lucius Cornelius waged that war and took the town. To affirm it for certain I would not dare, because there is no mention of the matter among the older writers.

This war finished, a tribunician war at home alarms the Fathers. They cry that it is by fraud that the army is kept abroad; that this is a balking of the law’s abolition; that they will none the less carry through the thing they have undertaken. Yet Lucius Lucretius, the prefect of the city, prevailed that the tribunician proceedings be put off until the consuls’ coming. There had arisen too a new cause of disturbance. Aulus Cornelius and Quintus Servilius, the quaestors, had set a day of trial for Marcus Volscius, because he had beyond doubt stood up as a false witness against Caeso. For by many proofs it was leaking out that Volscius’s brother, from the time he had once fallen ill, had never so much as been seen in public, nor even risen from his sickness, but had died of a wasting that lasted many months; and that in the time into which the witness had thrown his charge Caeso had not been seen at Rome, those who had served with him affirming that he had then been with them, constant at the standards, without any furlough. Unless it were so, many privately offered Volscius a judge. When he did not dare to go to trial, all these things, converging into one, made the condemnation of Volscius no more doubtful than that of Caeso had been on Volscius’s evidence. The tribunes were a hindrance, who declared they would not suffer the quaestors to hold the assembly concerning the accused unless one had first been held concerning the law. So both matters were dragged out into the consuls’ coming. When these entered the city in triumph, victorious with their army, because there was silence about the law, the greater part believed the tribunes confounded; but they—for it was now the end of the year—seeking a fourth tribunate, had turned the contest from the law to a wrangle over the elections. And although the consuls had striven against the prolonging of the tribunate no less than if a law to lessen their own majesty were being brought forward, the victory in the contest rested with the tribunes. In the same year peace was granted to the Aequi, who sought it. The census, a matter begun the year before, is completed, and this they say was the tenth lustrum closed since the founding of the city. The citizens assessed were a hundred and seventeen thousand three hundred and nineteen. Great was the glory of the consuls that year both at home and in war, because abroad they brought forth peace, and at home, though not harmonious, the state was yet less hostile than at other times.

Lucius Minucius then and Gaius Nautius, made consuls, took over the two matters left from the year before. In the same way the consuls were hindering the law, the tribunes the trial of Volscius; but in the new quaestors there was greater force, greater authority. Quaestor along with Marcus Valerius, son of Manius and grandson of Volesus, was Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, who had been thrice consul. He, since neither to the Quinctian house could Caeso, nor to the commonwealth the greatest of her young men, be restored, pursued the false witness—who had taken from an innocent man the power of pleading his cause—in a just and righteous war. When Verginius above all the tribunes was pressing the law, a space of two months was granted to the consuls to examine it, so that, when they had taught the people what hidden fraud was being brought forward, they might then allow the vote to be taken. This grant of an interval made things quiet in the city. Nor did the Aequi grant a long rest: breaking the treaty struck the year before with the Romans, they confer the command on Gracchus Cloelius—he was then far the foremost among the Aequi. Under the leadership of Gracchus they come into the Labican country, thence into the Tusculan, in hostile devastation, and, glutted with plunder, pitch camp on the Algidus. To that camp came from Rome, as envoys, Quintus Fabius, Publius Volumnius, and Aulus Postumius, to complain of the wrongs and to demand restitution under the treaty. The Aequian commander bids them tell to an oak whatever charge they have from the Roman senate; he himself meanwhile would do other things. A huge oak, a great tree, overhung the headquarters, and its shade made a cool seat. Then one of the envoys, going away, said: "Let both this hallowed oak and whatever gods there are hear that the treaty has been broken by you; and let them now be present at our complaints, and soon at our arms, when we shall exact the rights of gods and men together that you have outraged." When the envoys had returned to Rome, the senate ordered the one consul to lead an army against Gracchus to the Algidus, and gave the other the ravaging of the Aequian borders as his province. The tribunes, after their manner, hindered the levy—and perhaps would have hindered it to the last; but a new terror was suddenly added.

A vast force of the Sabines came in hostile devastation almost to the walls of the city; the fields were despoiled, terror cast upon the city. Then the commons took up arms willingly; in vain the tribunes protesting, two great armies were enrolled. The one Nautius led against the Sabines, and, having pitched camp at Eretum, by small forays—mostly by night raids—wrought such desolation in the Sabine country that, set against it, the Roman borders seemed almost untouched by war. To Minucius neither the fortune nor the same vigor of spirit was given in the conduct of his business; for, having pitched camp not far from the enemy, though he had taken no great loss, he kept himself within the camp in fear. When the enemy had perceived this, their daring grew—as happens—out of another’s fear; and, attacking the camp by night, after open force had availed too little, on the next day they throw fortifications around it. Before these, set on every side, could close the exits with a rampart, five horsemen, sent out between the enemy’s posts, carried to Rome the news that the consul and his army were besieged. Nothing so unlooked-for, nothing so unhoped-for, could have happened. And so there was such panic, such trepidation, as if the enemy were besieging the city, not a camp. They summon the consul Nautius. And when in him there seemed too little safeguard, and it was resolved to name a dictator to set the shaken fortune right, by the consent of all Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is named. It is worth the while to hear—you who despise all human things in comparison with riches, and think there is no room for great honor nor for excellence except where wealth flows out in abundance. The single hope of the empire of the Roman people, Lucius Quinctius, was tilling a four-iugera field across the Tiber, opposite the very place where the dockyards now are—the fields that are called the Quinctian Meadows. There, by the envoys—whether digging a ditch as he leaned on his spade, or as he plowed; intent at any rate, that much is agreed, on his rustic labor—when greeting had been given and returned in turn, and he had been asked to put on his toga and hear the senate’s commands, with a prayer that it might turn out well for himself and the commonwealth, he, wondering and asking again and again, "Is all well?", bids his wife Racilia bring out the toga in haste from the hut. When, the dust and sweat wiped off, he had come forward robed in it, the envoys hail him, with congratulations, as dictator, and call him to the city, and lay before him what terror is in the army. A ship had been made ready for Quinctius at public charge, and as he crossed over his three sons, who had gone out to meet him, received him, then other kinsmen and friends, then the greater part of the Fathers. Hedged about by that throng, with the lictors going before, he was escorted home. There was a great gathering of the commons too; but they by no means looked on Quinctius so gladly, deeming both the command excessive and the man more vehement than the command itself. And that night, indeed, nothing was done in the city but the keeping of watch.

On the next day the dictator, having come into the Forum before light, names as master of the horse Lucius Tarquitius, of a patrician house, but one who, because of poverty, had served his campaigns on foot—yet had been reckoned far the first in war of the Roman youth. With the master of the horse he comes into the assembly, proclaims a suspension of business (iustitium), bids the shops be closed throughout the whole city, forbids anyone to transact any private affair; then he ordered that all who were of military age should be present, armed, with five days’ cooked rations and twelve stakes apiece, in the Campus Martius before sunset; and those whose age was too heavy for soldiering he bade cook the rations for the soldier next to them, while that man prepared his arms and sought his stakes. So the youth ran this way and that to seek stakes. Each took them where they were nearest to him; no one was forbidden; and one and all promptly answered the dictator’s edict. Then, the column being arrayed no more fit for the march than for battle, should the matter so fall out, the legions the dictator himself, the master of the horse his own cavalry, led. In each column were the exhortations the very occasion called for: that they quicken their step; that there was need of haste, so that the enemy might be reached by night; that the consul and a Roman army were besieged, were now shut in for a third day; that what each night or day might bring was uncertain; that often, in a point of time, the issues of the greatest matters turn. "Hurry, standard-bearer!" "Follow, soldier!" they kept crying among themselves too, doing their leaders a pleasure. At midnight they reach the Algidus, and, when they felt that they were now near the enemy, halt the standards.

There the dictator, riding round on horseback so far as could be seen by night, and surveying what the lie of the camp was and what its shape, ordered the tribunes of the soldiers to bid the packs be thrown into one heap, and the soldier return to his own rank with his arms and stake. What he ordered was done. Then, in the order in which they had been on the march, he surrounds the whole army in a long line about the enemy’s camp, and bids them all, when the signal was given, raise a shout; the shout once raised, each man before him is to dig a ditch and cast up a rampart. The order issued, the signal followed. The soldier carries out his bidding; the shout rings around the enemy. Then it passes beyond the enemy’s camp and comes into the consul’s camp; in one place it makes terror, in the other huge joy. The Romans, congratulating one another that it was a countryman’s shout and that help was at hand, of their own accord terrify the enemy from their posts and watches. The consul says there must be no delay; that by that shout was signified not merely an arrival, but that the thing had been begun by their own men, and that it would be a marvel if the enemy’s camp were not already being assaulted on its outer side. And so he bids his men take arms and follow him close. By night the battle was begun; with a shout they signify to the dictator’s legions that on that side too the matter was at the hazard. Now the Aequi were making ready to ward off the works being thrown around them, when, the battle having been begun by the enemy within, lest a sally be made through the midst of their own camp, they turned from the men fortifying to the men fighting, inward, and gave the night free for the work; and there was fighting with the consul until daylight. At first light they were already walled in by the dictator and could scarcely sustain the battle against a single army. Then by the Quinctian army—which, the work finished, returned at once to arms—the rampart is attacked. Here a fresh battle pressed; the former had remitted nothing. Then, hard pressed by the twofold evil, turned from fighting to prayers, they beg now the dictator, now the consul, not to set their victory in slaughter, but to suffer them to depart thence unarmed. They were bidden by the consul to go to the dictator; he in his anger added disgrace: that Gracchus Cloelius, their leader, and the other chief men be brought to him in chains, and the town of Corbio be evacuated. The blood of the Aequi he did not need; they were free to go, but, that confession might at last be wrung from them that their nation was beaten and subdued, they should pass under the yoke. Of three spears a yoke is made—two fixed in the ground and over them one bound crosswise. Under this yoke the dictator sent the Aequi.

The enemy’s camp being taken, full of all manner of things—for he had sent them out stripped—he gave all the booty to his own soldiery alone; and, chiding the consular army and the consul himself, "You shall go without your share of the booty, soldier," he said, "from that enemy to whom you came near to being booty yourself. And you, Lucius Minucius, until you begin to have a consul’s spirit, shall command these legions as legate." So Minucius resigns the consulship and, as bidden, stays with the army. But so meekly obedient then was the spirit to a better command, that this army, mindful of the kindness rather than of the disgrace, both decreed the dictator a golden crown of a pound’s weight and saluted him patron as he departed. At Rome a senate held by Quintus Fabius, prefect of the city, bade Quinctius in his triumph enter the city with the column in which he came. Before his car were led the enemy’s leaders; the military standards were borne in front; the army, laden with booty, followed. Banquets, they say, were spread before all the houses, and the feasters, with the triumphal song and the customary jests, followed the car after the manner of revelers. On that day, with the approval of all, citizenship was given to Lucius Mamilius the Tusculan. The dictator would have laid down his office at once, had not the trial of Marcus Volscius, the false witness, detained him. Fear of the dictator kept the tribunes from hindering it; Volscius, condemned, went into exile at Lanuvium. On the sixteenth day Quinctius laid down a dictatorship received for six months. During those days the consul Nautius fought splendidly with the Sabines at Eretum; to their ravaged fields that disaster too was added for the Sabines. Fabius was sent as successor to Minucius on the Algidus. At the end of the year there was agitation by the tribunes about the law; but because two armies were abroad, the Fathers prevailed that nothing be brought before the people; the commons won the point that they should create the same tribunes for a fifth time. Wolves, they say, were seen on the Capitol, put to flight by the dogs; because of that portent the Capitol was purified. These things were done that year.

There follow as consuls Quintus Minucius and Marcus Horatius Pulvillus. At the beginning of that year, while abroad there was quiet, at home the same tribunes, the same law, made disturbances; and it would have gone further—so had their spirits flared—had it not been announced that, as if of set purpose, by a night assault of the Aequi the garrison at Corbio had been lost. The consuls summon the senate; they are bidden to enroll an emergency army and lead it to the Algidus. Then, the contest over the law laid aside, a new strife over the levy arose; and the consular power was being overcome by tribunician obstruction, when another terror was added: that a Sabine army had come down to plunder into Roman fields, and was thence advancing on the city. This fear so struck them that the tribunes suffered soldiers to be enrolled—yet not without a bargain: that, since they themselves had been baffled for five years, and that was a small safeguard for the commons, ten tribunes of the plebs should thereafter be created. Necessity wrung this from the Fathers; they made only this exception, that they should not afterward see the same tribunes. The tribunician elections—lest this too, like the rest, prove empty after the war—were held forthwith. In the thirty-sixth year from the first tribunes, ten tribunes of the plebs were created, two from each of the classes; and it was provided that they should be so created thereafter. Then, the levy held, Minucius set out against the Sabines and did not find the enemy. Horatius, when the Aequi—the garrison at Corbio slain—had now also taken Ortona, fights on the Algidus; he kills many men; he routs the enemy not only from the Algidus but from Corbio and Ortona. He even razed Corbio, on account of the garrison betrayed.

Then Marcus Valerius and Spurius Verginius were made consuls. At home and abroad there was quiet; the corn-supply suffered because of inclement weather. A law was carried about the public assignment of the Aventine. The same tribunes of the plebs were re-elected. These, in the following year, in the consulship of Titus Romilius and Gaius Veturius, kept urging the law at all their assemblies: that they were ashamed of their number increased to no purpose, if that matter lay as idle in their two years as it had lain idle through the whole previous five. While they were most busy with this, alarmed messengers come from Tusculum that the Aequi were in the Tusculan territory. The recent service of that people made it a shame to delay the aid. Both consuls were sent with an army, and find the enemy in his own seat, on the Algidus. There it was fought. Above seven thousand of the enemy were cut down, the rest put to flight; vast booty was won. This, because of the poverty of the treasury, the consuls sold. The thing was nonetheless an object of resentment to the army, and gave the tribunes matter for accusing the consuls before the commons. And so, accordingly, when they had gone out of office, in the consulship of Spurius Tarpeius and Aulus Aternius, a day of trial was set for Romilius by Gaius Calvius Cicero, tribune of the plebs, and for Veturius by Lucius Alienus, aedile of the plebs. Each was condemned, to the great indignation of the Fathers—Romilius at ten thousand asses, Veturius at fifteen. Nor had this misfortune of the former consuls made the new consuls more slack. They both said that they too could be condemned, but that the commons and the tribunes could not pass the law. Then, the law abandoned—which, once promulgated, had grown old—the tribunes dealt more gently with the Fathers: let them at last make an end of the contests. If plebeian laws displeased, let them at least suffer law-givers to be created jointly, from both the plebs and the Fathers, who should propose what was useful to both and what made for the equalizing of liberty. The Fathers did not spurn the matter; they said that no one should give laws save from the Fathers. When there was agreement about the laws, and they differed only about the law-giver, envoys were sent to Athens—Spurius Postumius Albus, Aulus Manlius, Publius Sulpicius Camerinus—and bidden to copy out the renowned laws of Solon, and to learn the institutions, customs, and rights of the other states of Greece.

The year was quiet from foreign wars; quieter the next, in the consulship of Publius Curiatius and Sextus Quinctilius, with perpetual silence of the tribunes—which at first the awaiting of the envoys who had gone to Athens, and of the foreign laws, afforded; then two great evils arose together, famine and pestilence, foul to man, foul to beast. The fields were laid waste, the city drained by unceasing funerals; many and famous houses were in mourning. The flamen of Quirinus, Servius Cornelius, died; the augur Gaius Horatius Pulvillus, into whose place the augurs chose Gaius Veturius—the more eagerly because he had been condemned by the commons. The consul Quinctilius died, and four tribunes of the plebs. The year was disfigured by manifold disaster; from the enemy there was quiet. Then the consuls were Gaius Menenius and Publius Sestius Capitolinus. Neither in that year was there any foreign war: at home disturbances arose. The envoys had now returned with the Attic laws. The more eagerly therefore the tribunes pressed that a beginning at last be made of writing the laws. It is resolved to create decemvirs without appeal, and that there be no other magistrate that year. Whether plebeians should be admitted was for some time in dispute; at last it was conceded to the Fathers, on the one condition that the Icilian law concerning the Aventine and the other sacred laws should not be repealed.

In the three hundred and second year after Rome was founded, the form of the state is changed a second time—the supreme power being transferred from consuls to decemvirs, as before it had passed from kings to consuls. The change was the less notable, because it was not lasting. For the glad beginnings of that magistracy ran too rank; the more quickly the thing slid downward, and a return was made to entrusting to two men the name and the power of consuls. The decemvirs elected were Appius Claudius, Titus Genucius, Publius Sestius, Lucius Veturius, Gaius Julius, Aulus Manlius, Publius Sulpicius, Publius Curiatius, Titus Romilius, and Spurius Postumius. To Claudius and Genucius, because they had been consuls designate for that year, honor was rendered in place of honor; and to Sestius, one of the consuls of the year before, because he had laid that business before the Fathers against his colleague’s will. Next to these were reckoned the three envoys who had gone to Athens—both that the honor might be a reward for so distant an embassy, and because they believed that men skilled in foreign laws would be of use for the framing of the new code. The rest filled out the number. Men heavy with age, they say, were chosen by the latest votes, that they might less fiercely oppose the proposals of others. The direction of the whole magistracy lay with Appius, by the favor of the commons; and so new a temper had he put on that of a sudden he turned out a friend of the people and a hunter after every popular breeze, in place of the savage and cruel persecutor of the commons. Every tenth day, each in turn rendered justice to the people. On that day, with the prefect of justice were the twelve fasces; to his nine colleagues single attendants gave service. And amid their singular concord among themselves—an agreement that is sometimes hurtful even to private men—there was the utmost fairness toward others. Of their moderation it will be enough to note one instance by way of example. Though they had been created without appeal, when a corpse, buried in the house of Publius Sestius, a man of patrician family, was found and brought out into the assembly, in a matter alike manifest and atrocious, Gaius Julius the decemvir set a day of trial for Sestius and stood forth as accuser before the people—of which matter he was himself the lawful judge—and gave up his own right, that by what he took from the power of the magistracy he might add to the people’s liberty.

When this ready justice—as if uncorrupt from an oracle—the highest and the lowest alike obtained from them, then care was given to drawing up the laws; and, ten tables being set forth amid huge expectation of men, they called the people to assembly and bade them—with prayer that it might be good, auspicious, and happy for the commonwealth, for themselves, and for their children—go and read the laws proposed: that they, so far as could be foreseen by the wits of ten men, had made the rights equal for all, highest and lowest; but that the wits and counsels of many availed more. Let each turn over in his own mind every several matter, then debate it in talk, and bring into the common view what in each point was too much or too little. The Roman people would have such laws as the consent of all might seem not so much to have had passed for it as itself to have proposed. When, by the reports of men published on each chapter of the laws, they seemed sufficiently corrected, the laws of the ten tables were carried in the comitia centuriata—which even now, in this immense heap of laws piled one upon another, are the fountainhead of all public and private right. Then a rumor spreads abroad that two tables were lacking, by adding which the body, as it were, of all Roman law could be completed. This expectation, as the day of the elections drew near, made a desire to create decemvirs a second time. And now the commons, besides that they hated the name of consuls no less than that of kings, did not even seek the tribunician aid, since the decemvirs yielded in turn to appeal.

But after the elections for creating decemvirs had been proclaimed for the third market-day, so great a canvassing flared up that even the chief men of the state—from fear, I suppose, lest the possession of so great a power, if the place were left empty by themselves, should lie open to men none too worthy—went about soliciting men, suppliantly seeking from that commons, with whom they had striven, the honor they had with all their might assailed. That his dignity was now brought into jeopardy, at that age and after such honors achieved, goaded Appius Claudius. You could not tell whether to reckon him among the decemvirs or among the candidates; at times he was nearer to one seeking a magistracy than to one holding it. He fell to accusing the optimates, to exalting each lightest and lowest of the candidates, himself flitting in the midst among the tribune-men, the Duillii and Icilii, about the Forum, and through them peddling himself to the commons—until his colleagues too, who till that time had been singularly devoted to him, cast their eyes upon him, marveling what he would be at: it was plain that there was nothing sincere in it; surely such affability, amid so great pride, would not be without price; his forcing himself down into the rank and file and making himself common with private men was the mark not of one in haste to go out of office, but of one seeking a way to continue in office. Daring too little to go openly against his ambition, they set about softening his rush by compliance. The task of holding the elections, since he was the youngest, they lay upon him by consent. This was their device—that he might not be able to create himself, a thing which, save the tribunes of the plebs, no one had ever done, and that itself by a most evil precedent. But he, professing—"and may it turn out well"—that he would hold the elections, snatched at the hindrance as an opportunity; and, the two Quinctii, Capitolinus and Cincinnatus, being thrust out of the honor by a coalition, and his own uncle Gaius Claudius, a man most steadfast in the cause of the optimates, and other citizens of the same eminence, he creates as decemvirs men by no means their equals in the splendor of their lives—himself first of all, a thing the good disapproved no less than no one had believed he would dare to do. Created with him were Marcus Cornelius Maluginensis, Marcus Sergius, Lucius Minucius, Quintus Fabius Vibulanus, Quintus Poetelius, Titus Antonius Merenda, Caeso Duillius, Spurius Oppius Cornicen, and Manius Rabuleius.

That was the end for Appius of bearing another’s character. He began thenceforth to live by his own nature, and to mold his new colleagues, even before they entered upon office, to his own ways. Daily they met with witnesses removed; then, furnished with high-handed counsels, which they cooked up in secret apart from others, no longer dissembling their pride, hard of access, harsh to those who would speak with them, they brought the matter on to the Ides of May. The Ides of May were then the customary day for entering on magistracies. Having entered office, therefore, they made the first day of their honor notable by the proclamation of enormous terror. For whereas the former decemvirs had so kept the rule that one alone should have the fasces, and this kingly emblem should go round in turn, each man’s by his own turn, through all of them, suddenly they all came forth, each with his twelve fasces. A hundred and twenty lictors had filled the Forum, and carried before them the axes bound up with the fasces; and they put this construction on it—that it had not been to the purpose to take away the axe, since they had been created without appeal. There was the appearance of ten kings, and the terror was multiplied not for the lowest only but for the chief of the Fathers, who thought that a cause and a beginning for slaughter was being sought, so that, if anyone uttered in senate or assembly a voice mindful of liberty, at once the rods and axes might be made ready, even for the terror of the rest. For besides that, with appeal taken away, there was no protection in the people, they had by agreement also done away with intercession—whereas the former decemvirs had suffered the justice they rendered to be corrected by appeal to a colleague, and had referred to the people certain matters that might seem within their own jurisdiction. For a while the terror was equal among all; little by little it began to turn wholly upon the commons. They kept their hands off the Fathers; against the humbler sort they took counsel wantonly and cruelly. They were wholly for persons, not for causes, as men with whom favor had the force of right. They forged their judgments at home, pronounced them in the Forum. If anyone appealed to a colleague, he so departed from the one to whom he had come that he repented not having abided by the first man’s decree. An opinion too had gone out, without an author, that they had conspired in wrong not for the present time only, but that a secret compact had been struck among them by oath, that they should hold no elections, and should keep by a perpetual decemvirate the power once seized.

Then the plebeians scanned the faces of the patricians, and sought a breath of liberty from the very quarter from which, fearing slavery, they had brought the commonwealth into that condition. The chief of the Fathers hated the decemvirs, hated the commons; they did not approve what was being done, yet believed it befell men not undeserving; they were unwilling to help those who, by rushing greedily to liberty, had slipped into slavery; nay, they even wished the wrongs heaped up, so that, through weariness of the present, two consuls and the old order of things might at last come to be longed for. And now the greater part of the year had gone by, and two tables of laws had been added to the ten tables of the year before, nor was there anything now remaining—if those laws too were carried in the comitia centuriata—why the commonwealth should have need of that magistracy. They were waiting how soon an assembly for creating consuls would be proclaimed; this only the commons turned over, by what means they might repair the tribunician power, the bulwark of liberty, an institution now intermitted—when meanwhile no mention of an assembly was made. And the decemvirs, who at first had paraded about themselves, before the commons, men of tribunician stamp, because that was held popular, had now fenced their flanks with patrician youths. Their bands beset the tribunals; these harried and plundered the commons and the commons’ goods, since fortune—whereby whatever was coveted belonged to the more powerful—was on their side. And now not even men’s backs were spared; some were scourged with rods, others laid under the axe; and, that the cruelty might not be without reward, the grant of the victim’s goods followed the master’s punishment. Corrupted by this bribe, the noble youth not only did not go to meet the wrong, but openly preferred their own license to the liberty of all.

The Ides of May came. With no magistrates chosen to succeed them, they come forth as private men in the decemvirs’ room, with spirits no whit lessened for the wielding of command, nor with the emblems for the show of office. This indeed seemed beyond doubt a monarchy. Liberty is bewailed as lost forever, nor does any champion arise, nor seem like to arise. And not only had they themselves despaired in spirit, but they had begun to be despised by the neighboring peoples, who scorned that there should be empire where there was no liberty. The Sabines made an inroad into Roman territory with a great force; and, having ravaged far and wide and driven off, unavenged, their plunder of men and beasts, with the column that had straggled here and there recalled to Eretum, they pitch camp, placing their hope in Roman discord: that it would be a hindrance to the levy. Not messengers only, but the flight of countryfolk through the city, struck terror. The decemvirs take counsel what is to be done, forsaken between the hatreds of the Fathers and of the commons. Fortune added yet another terror besides. The Aequi, on another side, pitch camp on the Algidus, and ravage thence by sallies the Tusculan territory; envoys from Tusculum, begging a garrison, bring word of it. This panic so struck the decemvirs that—two wars at once standing about the city—they resolved to consult the senate. They order the Fathers to be summoned into the Curia, not unaware how great a storm of odium was hanging over them: that all would heap upon them the causes of the ravaged fields and the impending dangers; and that this would be an attempt to abolish their magistracy, unless they resisted with one accord and, by sternly wielding command, crushed in a few of fierce spirit the attempts of the rest. After the herald’s voice was heard in the Forum, calling the Fathers into the Curia to the decemvirs, the thing—as a novelty, because they had now long intermitted the custom of consulting the senate—turned the commons to wondering what had befallen, that after so great an interval they should resume a practice fallen into disuse; thanks were owed to the enemy and the war, they said, that anything customary to a free state was being done. They scanned every part of the Forum for a senator, and rarely anywhere recognized one; then they gazed at the Curia and the solitude around the decemvirs, while both they themselves construed it that their own power was hateful by consent, and the commons that, because private men had no right of summoning the senate, the Fathers were not assembling; that a head was now being made for those who would reclaim liberty, if the commons gave itself as a companion to the senate, and, as the Fathers when summoned did not come together in the senate, so the commons should refuse the levy. So the commons murmur. Of the Fathers scarcely any were in the Forum; in the city they were few. In indignation at the state of things they had withdrawn to their fields, and were minded for their own affairs, the public lost—reckoning themselves as far from wrong as they had removed themselves from the gathering and company of their headstrong masters. When, summoned, they did not assemble, attendants sent round their houses—both to take pledges and to inquire whether they were withdrawing of set purpose—report that the senate was in the country. This fell out more pleasantly for the decemvirs than if they reported them present and refusing the command. They bid them all be sent for, and proclaim the senate for the next day; which assembled somewhat fuller than their own hope. By which deed the commons reckoned that liberty had been betrayed by the Fathers, because the senate had obeyed men who had now gone out of office and were private men—if force were absent—as though they compelled by right.

But we are told that the coming into the Curia was more obedient than that the opinions delivered were submissive. It has been handed down to memory that Lucius Valerius Potitus, after Appius Claudius’s motion, before the opinions were asked in order, by demanding that it be allowed to speak about the commonwealth—the decemvirs threateningly forbidding, and he giving notice that he would go forth to the commons—stirred up a tumult. Nor less fiercely did Marcus Horatius Barbatus go into the contest, calling them ten Tarquins, and reminding them that under the leadership of the Valerii and Horatii the kings had been driven out. Nor had men then loathed the name—the name by which it is lawful that Jupiter be called, by which Romulus, the founder of the city, and the kings in succession were called, which is even retained in the sacred rites as a solemn title: it was the pride and violence of the king that they then abhorred. And if these had not been to be borne in a king then, or in a king’s son, who would bear them in so many private men? Let them look to it lest, by forbidding men to speak freely in the Curia, they stir a voice even outside the Curia; nor did he see why it should be less lawful for him, a private man, to call the people to assembly than for them to muster the senate. Let them make trial, when they would, how much stronger is resentment in vindicating one’s own liberty than greed in an unjust domination. They were bringing forward the Sabine war, as though any war were greater for the Roman people than that with men who, created to give laws, had left no right in the state; who had abolished the elections, the annual magistracies, the alternation of command—the one thing that makes for the equalizing of liberty; who as private men held the fasces and a kingly power. After the kings were expelled there had been patrician magistrates; afterward, after the secession of the plebs, plebeian ones were created; of which party, he kept asking, were they? Of the people’s? What, then, had they done through the people? Of the optimates?—they who for nearly a year had not held a senate, and now held one in such fashion as to forbid speech about the commonwealth? Let them not place too much hope in another’s fear; the things men suffer seemed to them now heavier than the things they feared.

While Horatius was crying out thus, and the decemvirs could find no measure either of anger or of pardon, nor discern to what the matter would issue, the speech of Gaius Claudius—who was uncle of Appius the decemvir—was liker to entreaty than to wrangling, as he begged, by the shades of his own brother and that man’s father, that he remember rather the civil fellowship in which he had been born than the compact wickedly struck with his colleagues. He prayed it, he said, far more for that man’s sake than for the commonwealth’s; for the commonwealth would seek its right, if it could not from the willing, then from the unwilling; but from a great struggle great angers are commonly kindled, and their outcome he dreaded. Though the decemvirs forbade speaking of anything but what they had laid before them, respect kept them from interrupting Claudius. So he carried his opinion through: that it was his pleasure that no decree of the senate be made. And all so took it that they had been adjudged private men by Claudius; and many of the consulars assented in a word. Another opinion, harsher in appearance, had somewhat less force, which bade the patricians come together to name an interrex. For by voting anything at all, it judged that there were magistrates who could hold a senate—those whom the man who moved that no decree be made had made private men. So, the decemvirs’ case now sliding, Lucius Cornelius Maluginensis, the brother of Marcus Cornelius the decemvir—having of set purpose been kept among the consulars for the last place of speaking—by feigning concern for the war, screened his brother and his colleagues, declaring that he marveled by what fate it had fallen out that the decemvirs should be assailed by those who had sought the decemvirate—either they alone or chiefly—or why, when through so many months, the state being without magistrates, no one had made a question whether there were lawful magistrates set over the sum of things, now at last, when the enemy were almost at the gates, they should sow civil discords—unless because they thought that in the muddy water it would be the less clear what was being done. For the rest—was it not true that, men’s minds being taken up with a greater care, a prejudgment of so great a matter ought to be set aside?—it was his pleasure that, concerning the charge of Valerius and Horatius that the decemvirs had gone out of office before the Ides of May, the matter be handled, the impending wars finished and the commonwealth brought into calm, with the senate adjudicating; and that even now Appius Claudius should so prepare himself as to know that of the elections which he, a decemvir, had held for creating decemvirs, an account must be rendered by him—whether they had been created for one year, or until the laws that were lacking should be carried through. For the present it was his pleasure that all be let go save the war; whereof, if they thought its rumor falsely spread abroad, and that not the messengers only but the very envoys of the Tusculans had brought vain tales, scouts should be sent who might bring back surer intelligence; but if credit were given both to the messengers and to the envoys, a levy should be held at the first opportunity, and the decemvirs should each lead an army whither it seemed good to him, and nothing else take precedence.

The younger senators carried the day for going to a division on this opinion. And rising up again more fiercely, Valerius and Horatius cried out that it should be allowed to speak about the commonwealth; that they would speak to the people, if in the senate it was not allowed through faction; for private men could not bar their way either in the Curia or in the assembly, nor would they give ground before make-believe fasces. Then Appius, judging it now near that, unless their violence were met with equal audacity, the imperium would be beaten down, said, "It will be the better course to have uttered no word save on the matter we are deliberating"; and to Valerius, who refused to hold his tongue for a private man, he ordered a lictor to advance. And now, as Valerius from the threshold of the Curia was imploring the protection of the Quirites, Lucius Cornelius—by throwing his arms about Appius, taking thought not for the man he pretended to—broke off the struggle; and leave being granted through Cornelius for Valerius to say what he would, since liberty had gone no further than speech, the decemvirs held to their purpose. The consulars too and the elders, out of a lingering hatred of the tribunician power—the longing for which they reckoned far keener in the commons than the longing for consular authority—almost preferred that the decemvirs should later lay down their office of their own will, rather than that the commons should rise up again through resentment of them: if the matter, gently handled and without a popular uproar, came back to consuls, the commons might, whether by wars set between or by the moderation of the consuls in wielding their commands, be brought to forget the tribunes. Amid the Fathers’ silence the levy is proclaimed. The younger men, since the command was without appeal, answer to their names. The legions enrolled, the decemvirs settled among themselves which were to go to the war, which to command the armies. The chief among the decemvirs were Quintus Fabius and Appius Claudius. War at home loomed greater than war abroad. They judged the violence of Appius the fitter for crushing the disturbances of the city: in Fabius the nature was less constant in good than active in mischief. For this man, once outstanding at home and in the field, the decemvirate and his colleagues had so altered that he chose to be like Appius rather than like himself. To him the war among the Sabines was entrusted, with Manius Rabuleius and Quintus Poetelius added as his colleagues. Marcus Cornelius was sent to the Algidus with Lucius Minucius and Titus Antonius and Kaeso Duillius and Marcus Sergius. Spurius Oppius they decree as Appius Claudius’s helper in guarding the city, the command of all the decemvirs being equal.

No better was the commonwealth administered in the field than at home. In the leaders this alone was the fault, that they had made themselves hateful to the citizens: all the rest of the blame lay with the soldiers, who, that nothing might anywhere be done with success under the leadership and auspices of the decemvirs, suffered themselves to be beaten, to their own disgrace and to the decemvirs’. Their armies were routed both by the Sabines at Eretum and on the Algidus by the Aequi. Stealing away from Eretum in the silence of the night, they fortified a camp on higher ground nearer the city, between Fidenae and Crustumeria; and against the enemy who pursued them they nowhere committed themselves to a fair fight, but defended themselves by the nature of the ground and by their rampart, not by valor and arms. On the Algidus the disgrace was greater, and a heavier loss was taken; the camp too had been lost, and the soldier, stripped of all his gear, had betaken himself to Tusculum, meaning to live by the good faith and pity of his hosts—which, for all that, did not fail him. To Rome such terrors were brought that the Fathers, their hatred of the decemvirs now laid by, voted that watches be kept in the city, ordered all who by their age could bear arms to guard the walls and keep outposts before the gates, decreed that arms be sent to Tusculum as a reinforcement, that the decemvirs come down from the citadel of Tusculum and keep their soldiery in a camp, and that the other camp be shifted from Fidenae into Sabine territory, and the enemy, by the carrying of war against them, be frightened off their design of assaulting the city.

To the disasters taken from the enemy the decemvirs add two abominable crimes, one in the field, one at home. Lucius Siccius, who in the Sabine country—out of the decemviral envy—was sowing among the common soldiers, in secret talk, mention of electing tribunes and of a secession, they send out to scout a site for pitching the camp. The soldiers whom they had sent as companions of that scouting were given the task of falling on him at a fit place and killing him. They did not kill him unavenged; for round about him, as he fought back, several of the men in ambush fell, while he himself, of great strength and of a spirit to match his strength, defended himself though hemmed in. The rest report in the camp that Siccius had plunged headlong into an ambush; that, fighting gallantly, he had been lost, and certain soldiers with him. At first the bearers of the report were believed; afterward a cohort that set out, by the decemvirs’ leave, to bury those who had fallen, when they saw that no body there had been stripped, and that Siccius lay armed in the midst with all the bodies turned toward him, and neither any body of the enemy nor any trace of men withdrawing, brought back the corpse, declaring that he had assuredly been killed by his own men. The camp was full of indignation, and it was resolved that Siccius be carried forthwith to Rome, had not the decemvirs made haste to hold a soldier’s funeral for him at the public charge. He was buried amid the deep grief of the soldiery, and the decemvirs’ name stood blackest of all in the common talk.

There follows another outrage in the city, sprung from lust, with an end no less foul than that which through the rape and death of Lucretia had driven the Tarquins from the city and the kingship, so that not only was the end of the decemvirs the same as the kings’, but the cause too of their losing power the same. A lust to violate a plebeian maiden seized Appius Claudius. The maiden’s father, Lucius Verginius, held an honorable rank on the Algidus, a man of upright pattern at home and in the field. After the same fashion his wife had been bred, and his children were being bred. He had betrothed his daughter to Lucius Icilius, a former tribune, a man of fire and of valor proved in the cause of the plebs. This maiden, full-grown and of surpassing beauty, Appius, frantic with love, undertook to entice by money and by hope; and when he perceived that all was fenced about with modesty, he turned his mind to cruel and overweening force. To Marcus Claudius, a client of his, he gave the charge to claim the maiden for a slave and not to yield to those who demanded that her freedom be provisionally guaranteed—reckoning, since the girl’s father was absent, that there was room for the wrong. As the maiden was coming into the Forum—for there, in the booths, were the schools of letters—the minister of the decemvir’s lust laid his hand upon her, calling her the daughter of his slave-woman and herself a slave, and bidding her follow him: if she hung back, he would drag her off by force. The girl was struck dumb with fear; but at the cry of her nurse, who was imploring the protection of the Quirites, a crowd gathered; the popular names of Verginius her father and of Icilius her betrothed were on every tongue. Their friendship won over those who knew them, the indignity of the thing the throng, to the maiden’s side. Now she was safe from violence, when the claimant said there was no need to rouse a multitude: he was proceeding by law, not by force. He summons the girl into court. With those present urging her to follow, they came to Appius’s tribunal. The claimant rehearses the tale—well known to the judge, since he was himself the deviser of the plot—that the girl had been born in his own house and thence carried off by theft into the house of Verginius and palmed off on him; that he brought this proven on information, and would prove it even with Verginius himself for judge, to whom the greater part of the wrong belonged; meanwhile it was just that the slave-woman follow her master. The girl’s advocates, when they had said that Verginius was absent on the commonwealth’s business and would be present within two days if word were sent to him, and that it was unfair that a man should contend over his children in his absence, demand that he hold the whole matter entire until the father’s coming, that by the law he himself had carried he grant provisional freedom, and that he not suffer a full-grown maiden to run a risk to her good name before she ran a risk to her freedom.

Appius prefaces his decree by declaring that the very law which Verginius’s friends put forward in support of their demand showed how he favored liberty; but a firm safeguard for liberty would be found in it only if it did not shift with the cases and the persons. For in the case of those who are claimed into liberty, since anyone at all may go to law, that right held good; but in the case of one who is in her father’s hand, there was no other to whom the master should yield possession. It was his pleasure, therefore, that the father be summoned; meanwhile the claimant should make no forfeiture of his right, but should take the girl away and promise to produce her at the coming of him who was called her father. Against the wrong of this decree, when many were murmuring rather than any one man daring to refuse, Publius Numitorius, the girl’s grandfather, and Icilius her betrothed come between; and a way being made for them through the throng—the multitude believing that by Icilius’s intervention above all Appius could be withstood—the lictor says that the decree had been given, and thrusts back Icilius as he cries out. So foul a wrong would have kindled even a placid temper. "By the sword, Appius," he says, "must I be thrust from here, that you may carry off in silence what you would keep hidden. This maiden I am to wed, and I mean to have a chaste wife. So summon the lictors of your colleagues too; bid the rods and axes be made ready; the betrothed of Icilius shall not stay outside her father’s house. Though you have taken from the Roman plebs the help of the tribunes and the right of appeal, those two citadels for the guarding of liberty, it is not therefore granted to your lust to be king over our children and our wives as well. Vent your savagery upon our backs and our necks: let chastity at least be in safety. If violence is offered to her, I shall call upon the protection of the Quirites here present for my betrothed, Verginius upon that of the soldiers for his only daughter, all of us upon the protection of gods and men, nor will you ever carry that decree into effect save over our slaughter. I demand, Appius, that you consider again and again to what you are advancing. Verginius, when he comes, will see what he is to do about his daughter; let him only know this, that if he yields to this man’s claim he must seek another match for his child. As for me, vindicating my betrothed into liberty—life will leave me sooner than my faith."

The multitude was roused, and a struggle seemed at hand. The lictors had ringed Icilius about; yet matters went no further than threats, since Appius declared that it was not Verginia who was being defended by Icilius, but that a restless man, still breathing the spirit of the tribunate, was seeking an occasion for sedition. He would give him no material for it that day; but, that he might know even now that the concession was made not to his insolence but to the absent Verginius, to a father’s name, and to liberty, he would not pronounce judgment that day nor interpose a decree: he would ask of Marcus Claudius that he relax his right and suffer the girl to be guaranteed her freedom until the morrow. But if on the next day the father were not present, he gave notice to Icilius and to such as Icilius that neither would the framer of his own law be wanting to that law, nor the decemvir to his firmness; nor in any case would he summon his colleagues’ lictors to coerce the authors of sedition: he would be content with his own. The time of the wrong being thus put off, and the girl’s advocates having withdrawn, it was resolved first of all that the brother of Icilius and the son of Numitorius, brisk young men, should go straight from there to the gate, and that Verginius be fetched from the camp with all the speed that could be made; on this turned the girl’s safety, if on the next day the avenger of the wrong were at hand in time. They go as bidden, and at the gallop carry the message to the father. When the girl’s claimant pressed that she be guaranteed and that sureties be given, and Icilius said that this very thing was being done—purposely wasting the time, until the messengers sent to the camp should have got a start on their journey—the multitude on every side raised their hands, and each showed himself ready to go surety for Icilius. And he, with tears, said: "It is kindly meant; tomorrow I shall use your help; for now I have sureties enough." So Verginia is guaranteed, her kinsmen standing surety. Appius, after waiting a little, that he might not seem to have sat for that affair’s sake, when, with all other business neglected before this single care, no one came forward, betook himself home and wrote to his colleagues in the camp not to grant Verginius leave of absence, and even to keep him in custody. The wicked counsel was, as it deserved, too late, and Verginius, his leave already obtained, had set out in the first watch, when on the next morning at dawn the letter about detaining him was delivered in vain.

But in the city, at first light, when the state stood on tiptoe with expectation in the Forum, Verginius, in mourning weeds, leads his daughter, clad in worn garments, down into the Forum, some matrons attending her, with a great band of advocates. There he began to go about and grasp men by the hand, and not only to beg their help as a thing implored, but to ask it as a thing owed: every day he stood in the line of battle for their children and their wives, nor was there another man of whom more deeds of strength and fierceness in war could be told; what profit was it, if, with the city safe, the last things to be feared in a captured city must be suffered by his children? These things he kept saying as he went about the men, almost as if addressing an assembly. The like was flung out by Icilius. The company of women moved men more by their silent weeping than any words could. Against all this Appius—so great a force of madness, more truly than of love, had unsettled his mind—with a stubborn spirit mounts the tribunal; and when the claimant had complained a little that the day before his right had not been granted him, through favor-seeking, before either the man could finish his demand or room be given to Verginius for answering, Appius breaks in. What words he set before his decree, perhaps the ancient authors have handed down some true ones; but since nowhere, in a decree so foul, do I find any that wears the look of truth, the bare fact that is agreed upon seems the thing to set down: he decreed the maiden into slavery. At first amazement struck all dumb with wonder at a thing so monstrous; then for a while silence held. Then, as Marcus Claudius went, amid the matrons standing round, to lay hold of the maiden, and a piteous wailing of the women met him, Verginius, stretching out his hands toward Appius, said: "To Icilius, Appius, not to you, did I betroth my daughter, and I reared her for marriage, not for outrage. Is it your pleasure that, after the manner of cattle and wild beasts, men rush promiscuously to couple? Whether these here will suffer such things, I know not: I hope that those who carry arms will not suffer them." When the maiden’s claimant was driven back by the knot of women and of the advocates standing about, silence was made by the crier.

The decemvir, his mind estranged to lust, declares that not from yesterday’s railing of Icilius only and the violence of Verginius—of which he had the Roman people for witness—but by sure proofs as well he had learned that through the whole night meetings had been held in the city to stir up sedition. And so, not unaware of that struggle, he had come down with armed men, not to do violence to any peaceable man, but to coerce, in keeping with the majesty of the imperium, those who would trouble the city’s quiet. "It will therefore be the better course to keep still. Go," he says, "lictor, thrust back the throng, and make way for the master to lay hold of his chattel." When he had thundered this out, full of anger, the multitude of its own accord parted asunder, and the girl stood, the deserted prey of the wrong. Then Verginius, when he saw no help anywhere, said: "I pray you, Appius, first forgive a father’s grief, if in anything I have inveighed against you too harshly; next, suffer me here, in the maiden’s presence, to question her nurse what this matter is, that, if I have been falsely called her father, I may go hence with a quieter mind." Leave being granted, he draws his daughter and her nurse aside near the shrine of Cloacina, to the booths now called the New Booths; and there, snatching up a knife from a butcher, "By this one way, my daughter, the only way I can, I vindicate you into liberty"; and then he pierces the girl’s breast, and looking back toward the tribunal, "By this blood, Appius," he says, "I devote your head to the curse." Roused by the cry that rose at so monstrous a deed, Appius orders Verginius seized. But he, with the sword, made a way wheresoever he went, until, guarded by the throng of those that followed too, he won through to the gate. Icilius and Numitorius lift up the bloodless body and display it to the people; they bewail the crime of Appius, the maiden’s ill-starred beauty, the father’s hard necessity. The matrons, following, cry aloud: was this the condition of bearing children, were these the rewards of chastity?—and the rest that, in such a case, a woman’s grief, the more piteous as it is the weaker in spirit, suggests to those who mourn, more pitiful still. The voice of the men, and of Icilius above all, was wholly of the tribunician power and the appeal to the people torn away, and of the public outrages.

The multitude is stirred up, partly by the atrocity of the crime, partly by the hope of recovering their liberty by the occasion. Appius now orders Icilius to be summoned, now, as he hangs back, to be seized; at last, when no room of approach was given to the apparitors, he himself, going through the crowd with a band of patrician youths, orders him led to prison. Now about Icilius were not the multitude only but the leaders of the multitude too, Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius, who, when the lictor was driven back, said that, if he acted by law, they claimed Icilius free of a private man; if he tried to bring force, there too they would be no unequal match. From this a fierce brawl arises. The decemvir’s lictor attacks Valerius and Horatius: the fasces are broken by the multitude. Appius mounts to the assembly: Horatius and Valerius follow. The assembly listens to them: the decemvir is shouted down. Now Valerius, as if in authority, was bidding the lictors leave a private man, when Appius, his spirit broken and fearing for his life, with his head muffled and his adversaries unaware, withdraws into a house near the Forum. Spurius Oppius, to bring help to his colleague, bursts into the Forum from the other side. He sees the imperium beaten by force. Then, tossed about by counsels to which, agreeing on every hand with many advisers, he had wavered, he ordered the senate at last to be summoned. That measure, because the decemvirs’ acts seemed to displease a great part of the Fathers, calmed the multitude by the hope that their power would be ended through the senate. The senate judged that the plebs should not be provoked, and that it should be far more carefully provided that the coming of Verginius cause no disturbance in the army.

And so the younger senators, sent into the camp—which was then on Mount Vecilius—give the decemvirs notice to hold the soldiers back from sedition with all their might. There Verginius stirred up a greater commotion than the one he had left in the city. For, besides that he was seen coming with a band of nearly four hundred men, who, kindled by the indignity of the thing, had given themselves as his companions from the city, a drawn weapon too and he himself besprinkled with blood turned the whole camp toward him. And the togas, seen in many places through the camp, had made the throng of city-folk appear somewhat greater than it was. To those who asked what the matter was, he long, for weeping, uttered no word; at last, when the crowd of those who had run together settled out of their first alarm, and there was silence, he set forth all in order, as it had been done. Then, stretching up his hands palm-upward, calling them fellow-soldiers, he begged that they not lay to his charge the crime that was Appius Claudius’s, nor turn from him as from the murderer of his children. His daughter’s life had been dearer to him than his own, had it been permitted her to live free and chaste: when he saw her dragged off, like a slave, to be outraged, deeming it better that his children be lost by death than by dishonor, he had slipped, through pity, into the seeming of cruelty; nor would he have outlived his daughter, had he not had the hope of avenging her death in the help of his fellow-soldiers. They too had daughters, sisters, wives, nor with his daughter was the lust of Appius Claudius extinguished, but the more unpunished it was, the more unbridled it would be. By another’s calamity a warning had been given them to guard against the like wrong. For what touched himself, his wife had been snatched from him by fate, his daughter, because she was not to live chaste any longer, had met a wretched but an honorable death; there was no longer in his house any room for the lust of Appius; from any other violence of his he would vindicate his own body with the same spirit with which he had vindicated his daughter’s: let the rest take thought for themselves and for their children. As Verginius cried out thus, the multitude shouted back that they would fail neither his grief nor their own liberty. And the men in togas, mingling with the throng of soldiers, by lamenting those same things and showing how much more outrageous the deeds, seen, could appear than, heard, and at the same time by bringing word that the matter at Rome was already as good as undone—men following who said that Appius, all but slain, had gone into exile—drove them so far that the call to arms was raised, and they plucked up the standards and set out for Rome. The decemvirs, dismayed alike by what they saw and by what they had heard was done at Rome, run, one to one part of the camp, one to another, to calm the disturbance. And to those who dealt gently no answer is returned: if any sought to wield command, answer is made that they were men, and armed. They go in column to the city and seize the Aventine, exhorting the plebs, as each man met them, to recover their liberty and to elect tribunes of the plebs. No other word of violence was heard. The senate is held by Spurius Oppius. It is the pleasure of all that nothing be done harshly; for the room for sedition had been given by the Fathers themselves. Three legates of consular rank are sent, Spurius Tarpeius, Gaius Iulius, Publius Sulpicius, to ask in the senate’s name by whose order they had deserted the camp, or what they meant by occupying the Aventine in arms and, with the war turned away from the enemy, seizing their own native city. There was no lack of what to answer: there lacked one to give the answer, since as yet there was no settled leader and single men did not dare enough to offer themselves to envy. This only was shouted out by the multitude, that they should send Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius to them: to these they would give their answer.

The legates dismissed, Verginius reminds the soldiers that a little before, in a matter of no great moment, there had been alarm, because the multitude had been without a head, and the answer, though not unprofitable, had yet been made by chance agreement rather than by common counsel; he proposed that ten be created to preside over the sum of affairs, and, by a military style of honor, be called tribunes of the soldiers. When that honor was offered first to himself, "Reserve," he said, "those judgments upon me for better days, mine and yours. Neither does my daughter, unavenged, suffer any honor to be pleasant to me, nor in a troubled commonwealth is it of use that those preside over you who stand nearest to envy. If there be any use of me, no less of it will be had from a private man." So they create ten military tribunes in number. Nor did the army in the Sabine country keep quiet. There too, by the prompting of Icilius and Numitorius, a secession from the decemvirs was made, the memory of Siccius’s slaughter renewed with no less stirring of spirits than the kindling wrought by the fresh report of the maiden so foully sought after for lust. Icilius, when he heard that military tribunes had been created on the Aventine, lest the city elections, in electing those same men tribunes of the plebs, should follow the precedent of the military elections, being skilled in the people’s affairs and himself with an eye on that power, takes care, before the march to the city, that an equal number be created by his own men with equal power. They entered the city by the Colline gate under their standards, and through the middle of the city went in column to the Aventine. There, joined to the other army, they gave to the twenty military tribunes the charge of creating from their own number two to preside over the sum of affairs. They create Marcus Oppius and Sextus Manilius. The Fathers, anxious for the sum of things, though the senate met daily, wore away the time more often in wranglings than in counsels. The slaughter of Siccius, the lust of Appius, and the dishonors of the campaign were cast in the decemvirs’ teeth. It was resolved that Valerius and Horatius should go to the Aventine. They refused to go on any other terms than that the decemvirs lay down the insignia of that magistracy which they had already, the year before, gone out of. The decemvirs, complaining that they were being forced down into the rank of private men, said they would not lay down their command until the laws were carried for whose sake they had been created.

Through Marcus Duillius, who had been a tribune of the plebs, the plebs being made certain that by these unending contentions nothing was being brought to a finish, passes from the Aventine to the Sacred Mount, Duillius affirming that not until they saw the city deserted would care sink into the Fathers’ minds; the Sacred Mount would remind them of the constancy of the plebs; they would learn that without the power restored matters could not be brought back into concord. Setting out by the Nomentan road, which then bore the name Ficolensian, they pitched a camp on the Sacred Mount, copying the moderation of their fathers in doing no violence. The plebs followed the army, no one whose age allowed him to go hanging back. Their wives and children attend them, asking piteously to whom they were being left, in a city in which neither chastity nor liberty was held sacred. When an unwonted solitude had made all Rome desolate, and in the Forum was no one save a few of the elders, and, when the Fathers had been summoned into the senate, the Forum appeared deserted, now more than Horatius and Valerius cried out: "What will you wait for, conscript Fathers? If the decemvirs make no end of their obstinacy, will you suffer everything to fall and burn to ashes? And what is this command of yours, decemvirs, that you cling to and hold fast? To roofs and walls will you give judgment? Are you not ashamed that almost a greater number of your lictors should be seen in the Forum than of other men in togas? What will you do if the enemy come to the city? What if the plebs presently, when we are too little moved by their secession, come in arms? Will you choose to end your command in the fall of the city? Yet either the plebs must not be had at all, or tribunes of the plebs must be had. We could sooner do without patrician magistrates than they without plebeian ones. A new and untried power they wrested from our fathers; let them not now, once caught by the sweetness of it, brook the loss of it, especially when we ourselves do not temper our commands so as to let them have less need of help." When these things were flung out on every side, the decemvirs, overcome by the general consent, declare that, since it so seemed good, they would be at the Fathers’ disposal. This one thing they at once beg and warn, that they be guarded from envy, and that the plebs not be habituated, by their blood, to the punishment of the Fathers.

Then Valerius and Horatius, sent to recall the plebs on what terms might seem good and to compose affairs, are bidden to take precaution for the decemvirs too against the anger and onset of the multitude. They set out, and are received in the camp with the plebs’s great joy, since they were, beyond doubt, liberators both at the beginning of the disturbance and at the issue of the matter. For this, on their arrival, thanks were rendered them; Icilius speaks on the multitude’s behalf. The same man, when the terms were under debate and the legates asked what the demands of the plebs were, by a plan settled before the legates’ coming, made demands such that it was plain more hope was placed in the equity of their cause than in arms. For they were asking back the tribunician power and the appeal, which before the decemvirs were created had been the helps of the plebs, and that it be to no one’s harm that he had stirred up the soldiers or the plebs to recover liberty by a secession. Concerning the punishment of the decemvirs only was the demand savage; for they thought it just that those men be given up, and threatened to burn them alive. The legates to this: "The things that were of counsel you have demanded so justly that they ought to have been offered to you unasked; for it is safeguards for liberty that you seek, not license to assail others. Your anger is rather to be forgiven than indulged, seeing that, out of hatred of cruelty, you rush into cruelty, and almost before you are yourselves free you wish already to lord it over your adversaries. Will our state never rest from punishments, whether of the Fathers upon the Roman plebs or of the plebs upon the Fathers? You have more need of a shield than of a sword. Lowly enough, and more than enough, is he who lives in the state on equal right, neither doing wrong nor suffering it. Even if at some time you mean to show yourselves to be feared, when, your magistracies and laws recovered, the judgments over our life and fortunes shall be in your hands, then you will decide as each cause shall be: for now it is enough that liberty be reclaimed."

All consenting that they should do as they would, the legates affirm that they will soon return, the business finished. Setting out, when they had laid the plebs’s mandates before the Fathers, the other decemvirs, since, beyond their own expectation, no mention was made of their punishment, made no refusal of anything: Appius, of savage nature and singularly hated, measuring the hatred of others toward him by his own toward them, said: "I am not unaware of the fortune that hangs over me. I see that the contest against us is being put off until arms are handed to our adversaries. Blood must be given to envy. I myself put nothing in the way of my going out of the decemvirate." A decree of the senate was passed that the decemvirs abdicate their magistracy at the first possible moment; that Quintus Furius, the pontifex maximus, create tribunes of the plebs; and that the secession of the soldiers and the plebs be to no one’s harm. These decrees of the senate carried through, and the senate dismissed, the decemvirs come forth into the assembly and abdicate their magistracy, to the people’s great joy. These things are reported to the plebs. Whatever of men was left in the city escorts the legates. To this multitude a glad throng runs from the camp to meet it. They congratulate one another that liberty and concord are restored to the state. The legates before the assembly: "May it be good, blest, and happy for you and for the commonwealth!—return to your native land, to your hearths, your wives, your children; but the self-restraint you have shown here, where no man’s land, in so much use of so many things by so great a multitude, has been violated, that self-restraint carry into the city. Go to the Aventine, whence you set out; there, in the place of good omen where you laid the first beginnings of your liberty, you shall create tribunes of the plebs. The pontifex maximus will be at hand to hold the elections." Great was the assent and the eagerness of all in approval. They pluck up the standards from there, and setting out for Rome vie in joy with those they meet. In arms, through the city, in silence, they reach the Aventine. There forthwith, the pontifex maximus holding the elections, they created tribunes of the plebs, first of all Lucius Verginius, then Lucius Icilius and Publius Numitorius, Verginia’s great-uncle, the authors of the secession, then Gaius Sicinius, the descendant of him who is recorded to have been the first tribune of the plebs created on the Sacred Mount, and Marcus Duillius, who had held a notable tribunate before the decemvirs were created and had not failed the plebs in the decemviral struggles. Chosen then more by hope than by deserts were Marcus Titinius, Marcus Pomponius, Gaius Apronius, Publius Villius, Gaius Oppius. His tribunate entered upon, Lucius Icilius forthwith put it to the plebs, and the plebs ordained, that it be to no one’s harm that the secession from the decemvirs had been made. At once Marcus Duillius carried a bill concerning the creating of consuls with the right of appeal. All these things were transacted in the Flaminian meadows, in the council of the plebs, which they now call the Circus Flaminius.

Then, through an interrex, were created as consuls Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius, who forthwith entered upon their magistracy. Their consulship, popular and without any wrong to the Fathers, was yet not without giving offense; for whatever was provided for the liberty of the plebs they believed taken from their own strength. First of all, since the law was as it were in dispute, whether the Fathers were bound by the resolutions of the plebs, they carried a law in the centuriate assembly that what the plebs had ordered by tribes should bind the people—a law by which the keenest of weapons was given to tribunician bills. Then another consular law, concerning the appeal, that one safeguard of liberty overthrown by the decemviral power, they not only restore but also fortify for the time to come by enacting a new law, that no one create any magistracy without appeal; that whosoever had so created, it should be right and lawful that he be killed, and that such a killing be not held a capital offense. And when they had sufficiently strengthened the plebs, on this side by the appeal, on that by the tribunician help, they also—that the tribunes themselves might seem sacrosanct, a matter of which the very memory had now well-nigh perished—by recalling certain ceremonies from a great interval of time renewed it, and made them inviolable both by religion and now by law as well, enacting that whoever had done harm to tribunes of the plebs, to aediles, to judges, to decemvirs, his head should be forfeit to Jupiter, and his household be sold at the temple of Ceres, Liber, and Libera. By this law the interpreters of the law deny that anyone is sacrosanct, but that he who has done harm to any of these is made forfeit to Jupiter; and so that an aedile may be seized and led off by the higher magistrates—which, though it be not done by right, since harm may not by this law be done to him, is yet a proof that the aedile is not held sacrosanct; that the tribunes are sacrosanct by the ancient oath of the plebs, taken when it first created that power. There have been those who interpreted that by this same Horatian law provision was made for the consuls too and the praetors, because they were created under the same auspices as the consuls: for the consul is called a judge. Which interpretation is refuted, because in those days it was the custom to call not the consul but the praetor a judge. These were the consular laws. It was instituted also by these same consuls that decrees of the senate be delivered to the aediles of the plebs in the temple of Ceres, whereas before they had been suppressed and tampered with at the consuls’ pleasure. Then Marcus Duillius, tribune of the plebs, put it to the plebs, and the plebs ordained, that whoever had left the plebs without tribunes, and whoever had created a magistrate without appeal, should be punished in his back and his head. All these things, as without the patricians’ goodwill, so without their resistance, were carried through, because as yet there was no savagery against any single man.

The tribunician power and the plebs’s liberty thus founded, the tribunes, judging it now safe and ripe to attack single men, choose first Verginius for accuser and Appius for defendant. When Verginius had named a day for Appius, and Appius, hedged about with patrician youths, had come down into the Forum, at once the memory of that most foul power was renewed in all, when they saw the man himself and his satellites. Then Verginius: "Oratory was devised for matters in doubt; and so neither will I waste your time in accusing the man from whose cruelty you yourselves vindicated yourselves with arms, nor will I suffer this man to add to his other crimes shamelessness in defending himself. Of all, then, the impious and abominable things, Appius Claudius, that through two years you have dared, one upon another, I make you a free gift. Of one charge only, unless you name a judge—that you did not, against the laws, grant provisional freedom and so vindicate from liberty into slavery—I shall order you led to prison." Neither in tribunician help nor in the judgment of the people had Appius any hope; yet he both appealed to the tribunes and, when, none staying him, he was seized by the officer, "I appeal," he said. The hearing of that one word, the vindicator of liberty, sent forth from that mouth by which liberty had lately been adjudged into slavery, made silence. And while each for himself muttered that there were gods after all, and that they did not neglect the things of men, and that to pride and cruelty came, though late, yet not light penalties—that he appealed who had abolished the appeal, and implored the people’s protection who had trodden down all the people’s rights, and was being haled to prison, lacking the right of liberty, who had adjudged a free body into slavery—amid the murmur of the assembly the voice of Appius himself, imploring the protection of the Roman people, was heard: he kept rehearsing the services of his ancestors to the commonwealth at home and in the field, his own ill-starred zeal for the Roman plebs, for whose sake, to equalize the laws, he had gone out of the consulship to the greatest offense of the Fathers, his own laws, by which, while they stood, their framer was being led to prison. But his own particular goods and ills, when the chance of pleading his cause should be given, then he would put to the proof; for the present he demanded, by the common right of citizenship, that to him, a Roman citizen, on a named day, leave be given to plead, to make trial of the judgment of the Roman people. He had not so dreaded envy as to have no hope in the equity and pity of his fellow-citizens. But if, his cause unheard, he was led to prison, he again appealed to the tribunes of the plebs and warned them not to imitate those they hated. But if the tribunes confessed themselves bound by the same compact for abolishing the appeal which they had charged the decemvirs with conspiring to make, then he appealed to the people, he implored the laws concerning appeal, both consular and tribunician, carried in that very year. For who would appeal, if this were not allowed to a man uncondemned, his cause unheard? What plebeian and humble man would have a safeguard in the laws, if Appius Claudius had none? He would be a proof whether by the new laws domination or liberty had been confirmed, and whether the right of appeal and challenge against the wrong of magistrates had been merely displayed in empty letters or truly given.

Against this Verginius said that Appius Claudius alone was beyond the laws and beyond the bond of civil and human fellowship: let men look upon that tribunal, the stronghold of every crime, where that perpetual decemvir, the enemy of the goods, the backs, the blood of the citizens, threatening rods and axes to all, the despiser of gods and men, ringed about with executioners, not lictors, his mind turned now from robbery and slaughter to lust, in the eyes of the Roman people, as though she were a captive of war, tore a freeborn maiden from her father’s embrace and gave her in gift to the minister of his bedchamber, his client; where by a cruel decree and an abominable adjudication he armed a father’s right hand against his daughter; where he ordered the betrothed and the grandfather, as they lifted the maiden’s half-dead body, led to prison, moved more by the outrage thwarted than by the slaying. For him too the prison had been built which he was wont to call the dwelling-place of the Roman plebs. Therefore, let him appeal again and again as he would, so would he again and again offer him a judge, if he did not, from liberty into slavery, grant the adjudication; if he went not to a judge, he ordered him led to prison as a condemned man. With none disapproving, yet with a great stirring of spirits—since at the punishment of so great a man even the plebs itself now thought its own liberty too much—he was cast into prison; the tribune named him a day. Amid these things, from the Latins and the Hernici came legates to Rome to congratulate it on the concord of the Fathers and the plebs, and for it they brought, as a gift to Jupiter Best and Greatest, a golden crown to the Capitol, of little weight, inasmuch as their means were not opulent and religion was observed piously rather than magnificently. By these same men it was learned that the Aequi and the Volsci were preparing war with all their might. And so the consuls were bidden to divide the commands between them. To Horatius the Sabines fell, to Valerius the Aequi. When for those wars they had proclaimed a levy, by the favor of the plebs not the younger men only but a great part of veterans whose terms were already served were ready of their own accord to give in their names, so that the army was the stronger not only in numbers but in the kind of soldiers too, with veterans mingled in. Before they went out of the city, they set up in public, engraved on bronze, the decemviral laws, which bear the name of the Twelve Tables. There are those who write that, by the tribunes’ order, the aediles performed that service.

Gaius Claudius, who, loathing the decemvirs’ crimes and above all hostile to the pride of his brother’s son, had betaken himself to Regillus, his ancient native town—he, now well on in years, having returned to plead away the perils of the man whose vices he had fled, in mourning weeds with his clansmen and clients was grasping single men in the Forum and begging that they would not brand the Claudian house with the stain of seeming worthy of prison and chains. A man of the most honored likeness for posterity, the framer of laws and founder of Roman jurisprudence, lay bound among nightly thieves and brigands. Let them turn their minds for a little from anger to inquiry and reflection, and rather pardon one man at the entreaty of so many Claudii than, for the hatred of one, spurn the prayers of many. He too gave this much to his lineage and name, nor had he come back into goodwill with the man whose adverse fortune he wished to be relieved. By valor liberty had been recovered: by clemency the concord of the orders could be made firm. There were those whom he moved more by his own dutifulness than by the cause of the man for whom he pleaded; but Verginius begged that they would rather take pity on himself and on his daughter, and listen not to the prayers of the Claudian house, which had drawn by lot a kingship over the plebs, but to the prayers of Verginia’s kinsmen, the three tribunes, who, created for the help of the plebs, were themselves imploring the plebs’s good faith and help. These tears seemed the juster. And so, his hope cut off, before the appointed day came, Appius did himself to death. Soon after, Spurius Oppius, next in unpopularity, because he had been in the city when the unjust adjudication was given by his colleague, was seized by Publius Numitorius. Yet the wrong done made more for the hatred of Oppius than the wrong not prevented. A witness was brought forward who, reckoning up his seven-and-twenty campaigns, eight times decorated out of the ordinary, and wearing those decorations in the people’s sight, tore his garment and showed his back torn by the rods, asking nothing but that, if the defendant could name any fault of his, he, a private man again, might rage upon him a second time. Oppius too was led to prison, and before the day of judgment there made an end of his life. The goods of Claudius and of Oppius the tribunes confiscated. Their colleagues changed their soil for the sake of exile; their goods were confiscated. And Marcus Claudius, the claimant of Verginia, his day named and himself condemned, by Verginius’s own remitting of the extreme penalty, was let go to exile at Tibur; and the shade of Verginia, happier dead than alive, having wandered through so many houses to seek out vengeance, when no guilty man was left, at last found rest.

A great fear had come upon the Fathers, and the looks of the tribunes were now the same as the decemvirs’ had been, when Marcus Duillius, tribune of the plebs, having set a wholesome curb upon excessive power, said: "Of our liberty, and of penalties from our enemies, there is enough; and so this year I shall suffer no man to have a day named against him, nor any man to be led to prison. For neither is it well that old offenses, now blotted out, be raked up afresh, when the new ones have been expiated by the decemvirs’ punishment, and the unbroken care of both consuls in guarding your liberty is a pledge that nothing will be committed that should call for tribunician force." That moderation of the tribune first took the fear from the Fathers, and the same increased the consuls’ unpopularity, because they had been so wholly the plebs’s that for the safety and liberty of the Fathers a plebeian magistrate had had a care sooner than a patrician, and the enemies had reached a surfeit of penalties before it appeared that the consuls would go to meet their license. And there were many who said that they had taken counsel too softly, because the Fathers had given their sanction to the laws carried by them; nor was there any doubt that, the commonwealth’s state being troubled, they had bowed to the time.

The consuls, the affairs of the city composed and the plebs’s standing founded, went off, the one this way, the other that, into their commands. Valerius, against the now-united armies of the Aequi and Volsci on the Algidus, by policy held the war in suspense; whereas, if he had at once committed the matter to fortune, I scarce know whether, such being the spirits of Romans and enemies after the decemvirs’ unhappy auspices, the contest would not have stood at great cost. His camp pitched a mile from the enemy, he kept his forces in hand. The enemy filled the space midway between the two camps with a line drawn up, and to their challenges to battle no Roman made answer. At last, wearied with standing and with awaiting the contest in vain, the Aequi and Volsci, when they believed that the victory had been all but conceded, go off to plunder, part among the Hernici, part among the Latins; there is left rather a garrison for the camp than strength enough for a contest. When the consul perceived this, he gives back the terror brought upon him before, and, his line drawn up, of his own accord provokes the enemy. When they, conscious how much of their strength was away, declined the fight, at once the Romans’ spirit rose, and they held them as good as beaten, cowering within their rampart. After they had stood through the whole day, intent upon the contest, they gave way to night. And the Romans, full of hope, were tending their bodies; the enemy, in no like spirit, send messengers in alarm here and there to recall their plunderers. Men come running back from the nearer places: those further off were not found. When it grew light, the Roman goes out of camp, meaning to assail the rampart unless the chance of battle were offered. And after the day was now far gone and nothing was stirred by the enemy, the consul orders the standards advanced; and the line being set in motion, indignation seized the Aequi and Volsci, that victorious armies should be screened by a rampart rather than by valor and arms. And so they too received from their leaders the signal of battle, demanded with clamor. And now part had gone out of the gates, and others in turn were keeping their ranks, each coming down into his own place, when the Roman consul, before the enemy’s line could stand propped on its whole strength, advanced the standards; and falling on them while not all were yet led out, and those that were were not in well-deployed ranks, upon a throng all but wavering, of men in alarm looking about this way and that for themselves and their fellows, with a shout and a charge added to their already troubled minds he assails them. The enemy at first gave ground; then, when they had gathered their spirits, and on every side their leaders upbraided them with yielding to the beaten, the battle is restored.

The consul on the other side bade the Romans remember that on that day, for the first time, free men were fighting for a free Roman city, that they would conquer for their own selves, not, as victors over the decemvirs, to be a prize. The matter was not being carried on under Appius for leader, but under the consul Valerius, sprung from the liberators of the Roman people, himself a liberator. Let them show that in the former battles it had stood through their leaders, not through the soldiers, that they did not conquer. It was shameful to have had more spirit against fellow-citizens than against enemies, and to have feared slavery more at home than abroad. There had been one Verginia whose chastity was in peril in peace, one Appius a citizen of perilous lust; but if the fortune of war should incline, there would be peril for the children of all from so many thousands of enemies. He would not utter as an omen the things which neither Jupiter nor father Mars would suffer to befall a city founded under such auspices. He reminded them of the Aventine and the Sacred Mount, that where liberty had been won a few months before, thither they should carry back the command undiminished, and show that the same native quality was in Roman soldiers after the decemvirs were driven out as before they were created, and that the valor of the Roman people had not been lessened by the equalizing of the laws. When he had given out these words amid the standards of the foot, he flies off next to the cavalry. "Come, young men," he says, "surpass the foot in valor as you surpass them in honor and in rank. At the first encounter the foot moved the enemy; do you, having driven him, push him from the field with loosened reins. He will not bear your charge, and even now he wavers rather than withstands." They spur their horses and let them go against an enemy already disordered by the battle of the foot; and, the ranks broken through, carried on to the rearmost line, part, wheeling round through the open space, turn most of them, now everywhere taking to flight, from the camp, and, galloping past, scare them off. The line of foot, and the consul himself, and the whole force of the battle is borne against the camp, and, with great slaughter, he takes it and gains a still greater booty. The fame of this battle, carried not to the city only but among the Sabines too, to the other army, was in the city celebrated only with rejoicing, in the camp it kindled the soldiers’ spirits to rival the glory. Already Horatius had, by sending them out on sorties and trying them in light skirmishes, schooled them to trust in themselves rather than to remember the disgrace taken under the leadership of the decemvirs, and small contests had told toward the sum of the whole hope. Nor did the Sabines cease—fierce from the success of the year before—to provoke and press, asking what they meant by wasting time, after the fashion of brigandage, in dashing forward a few at a time and running back, and by frittering away into many small battles the sum of a single war: why did they not join in line and entrust the matter, once for all, to the cast of fortune?

To that which of its own accord had gathered spirit enough, the Romans were further kindled by indignation: the other army would soon return victorious to the city; upon themselves the enemy of his own accord heaped insults; when, if not now, would they ever be a match for the enemy? When the consul perceived the soldiers muttering thus in the camp, an assembly being called, he said: "How the matter was carried on upon the Algidus, you, soldiers, have, I think, heard. Such as the army of a free people ought to be, such was it; by the policy of my colleague, by the valor of the soldiers, the victory was won. For what concerns me, I shall have that policy and that spirit which you shall make for me. Both the war can be wholesomely drawn out and it can be timely finished. If it is to be drawn out, I shall, by the same discipline in which I have begun, bring it about that your hope and valor grow day by day; if there is now spirit enough and it is your pleasure to fight it out, come then, raise here such a shout as you mean to raise in the line, the token of your will and your valor." After the shout had been raised with great alacrity, he affirms that—may it turn out well—he will do as they wish, and on the next day will lead them out into line. The rest of the day was spent in making ready their arms. On the next day, as soon as the Sabines saw the Roman line being formed, they too, long since greedy for the contest, advance. The battle was such as between two armies each confident in itself, the one of an old and unbroken glory, the other elated by its recent new victory. The Sabines aided their strength by stratagem too; for, having made their line equal, they kept two thousand out of the ranks, to make an onset, in the very contest, upon the left wing of the Romans. When these, by bringing their standards in from the flank, were weighing down the well-nigh surrounded wing, the cavalry of the two legions, about six hundred, leap down from their horses, and, as their own men were now giving ground, dash forward into the front, and at once set themselves against the enemy and, the peril first made equal, then by shame kindle the spirits of the foot. It was a thing of shame that the horseman should fight in his own fashion and another’s too, while the foot was not a match even for a horseman dismounted to fight on foot.

They go, therefore, into the battle that on their part had been let go, and recover the ground from which they had given way; and in a moment not only is the fight restored, but the Sabine wing is even turned. The horseman, screened among the ranks of the foot, betakes himself back to his horses; thence he flies across to the other part, the messenger to his own of the victory; at the same time he makes a charge upon the enemy, now panic-stricken, since the stronger wing of their side had been routed. In that battle no men’s valor shone more. The consul provided for everything, praised the brave, upbraided wherever the fight was slacker. The chidden, at once, did the deeds of brave men; and shame spurred these as much as praise the others. The shout renewed, all on every side, with one effort, turn the enemy, nor thereafter could the Roman force be withstood. The Sabines, routed and scattered through the fields, leave their camp to the enemy for plunder. There the Roman recovers not, as on the Algidus, the goods of allies, but his own, lost by the ravaging of his fields. For the double victory, won in two battles in two places, the senate grudgingly decreed thanksgivings in the consuls’ names for one day only. The people, unbidden, went on a second day too in throngs to give thanks; and this straggling, popular thanksgiving was, by men’s zeal, well-nigh the better attended. The consuls, by agreement, drew near the city on those same two days and summoned the senate to the Campus Martius. There, while they were treating of their own achievements, the chief of the Fathers complained that the senate was held among the soldiers, of set purpose, to cause terror. And so the consuls, that there be no room for the charge, withdrew the senate thence to the Flaminian meadows, where now is the temple of Apollo—even then they called it the Apollinare. There, when by the great consent of the Fathers a triumph was being refused, Lucius Icilius, tribune of the plebs, brought before the people a measure concerning the consuls’ triumph, many coming forward to dissuade it, most of all Gaius Claudius crying out that the consuls wished to triumph over the Fathers, not over the enemy, and that a thank-offering for a private service to a tribune, not an honor for valor, was being sought. Never before had a triumph been dealt with through the people; always the weighing and the disposal of that honor had rested with the senate; not even the kings had diminished the majesty of the highest order. Let not the tribunes so fill all things with their own power that they suffer no public council to exist. Only so would the state be free, only so the laws be made equal, if each order kept its own rights, its own majesty. When to the same effect much had been said by the rest of the elder Fathers too, all the tribes accepted that measure. Then for the first time, without the senate’s authority, by the people’s order, a triumph was held.

This victory of the tribunes and the plebs all but turned into an unwholesome wantonness, a conspiracy being made among the tribunes that the same tribunes be re-elected, and—that their own ambition might show the less—that they continue the consuls too in their magistracy. They alleged the consent of the Fathers, by which, through the consuls’ affronting, the rights of the plebs had been undermined. What would happen, the laws not yet firmly settled, if they should attack new tribunes through consuls of their own faction? For there would not always be Valeriuses and Horatiuses for consuls, men who set their own power after the liberty of the plebs. By a chance happily useful for the moment, it fell by lot to Marcus Duillius above all to preside over the elections, a prudent man, and one who saw the unpopularity that threatened from a continuance of the magistracy. When he declared that he would take account of none of the old tribunes, and his colleagues struggled that he should send the tribes to a free vote or yield to his colleagues the lot of the elections—men who would hold the elections by the law rather than by the Fathers’ will—a contention thus thrown in, Duillius summoned the consuls to the benches, and when he had asked what they had in mind concerning the consular elections, and they had answered that they would create new consuls, having found popular backers for an unpopular opinion, he came forth with them into the assembly. There, when the consuls, brought before the people and asked what they would do if the Roman people, mindful of the liberty recovered through them at home, mindful of their deeds done in the field, made them consuls a second time, had changed nothing of their opinion, he held the elections, the consuls being praised because they persevered, to the last, in being unlike the decemvirs. And when five tribunes of the plebs had been created, since, through the open canvassing of the nine tribunes, the other candidates could not fill the tribes, he dismissed the council, nor thereafter held it for the elections’ sake. He said the law had been satisfied, which, with the number nowhere fixed beforehand, only enacted that tribunes be left, and bade those who had been created co-opt their colleagues; and he recited the form of the bill, in which it ran thus: "If I shall ask you for ten tribunes of the plebs, if you shall today make fewer than ten tribunes of the plebs, then let those whom these shall have co-opted to themselves as colleagues be lawful tribunes of the plebs by the same law as those whom you shall today have made tribunes of the plebs." When Duillius had persevered to the last in denying that the commonwealth could have fifteen tribunes of the plebs, having overcome his colleagues’ ambition, alike acceptable to Fathers and to plebs, he went out of his magistracy.

The new tribunes of the plebs, in co-opting their colleagues, courted the goodwill of the Fathers; they even co-opted two patricians and consulars, Spurius Tarpeius and Aulus Aternius. As consuls were created Spurius Herminius and Titus Verginius Caelimontanus, in no marked degree inclined to the cause of the Fathers or of the plebs; they had quiet at home and abroad. Lucius Trebonius, tribune of the plebs, hostile to the Fathers because he said he had been caught by them by a trick in the co-opting of tribunes, and betrayed by his colleagues, carried a bill that whoever should put to the Roman plebs the election of tribunes of the plebs should go on putting it until he had made ten tribunes of the plebs; and he passed his tribunate in baiting the Fathers, whence the surname Asper, "the Rough," was even fastened on him. Then Marcus Geganius Macerinus and Gaius Iulius, made consuls, allayed the contentions of the tribunes that had arisen against the young nobles, without assailing that power, the majesty of the Fathers being preserved; and by proclaiming a levy for the war against the Volsci and Aequi, by holding the matter in suspense, they kept the plebs from seditions, affirming that, with quiet in the city, all was tranquil abroad too, and that through civil discords the foreigner took heart. Care for peace was the cause also of concord within. But the one order was ever heavy upon the moderation of the other; upon the quiet plebs wrongs began to be done by the younger Fathers. When the tribunes brought help to the humbler sort, at first it availed little; then not even they themselves were unhurt, especially in the last months, both because through cabals of the more powerful the wrong was done, and because the whole force of the office is wont to grow somewhat slacker in the later part of the year. And now the plebs set some hope on the tribunate only if it had tribunes like Icilius: for two years they had had names alone. The elder Fathers, on the other hand, while they believed their own young men too fierce, yet preferred, if a measure had to be exceeded, that the excess of spirit be on their own side rather than their adversaries’. So hard a thing is moderation in the guarding of liberty, while, under pretense of wishing to be made equal, each so exalts himself as to press another down; and men, by guarding against fear, make themselves in turn to be feared, and the wrong repelled from ourselves we lay upon others, as though it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it.

Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, for the fourth time, and Agrippa Furius, made consuls thereafter, found neither sedition at home nor war abroad; but both were impending. No longer could the discord of the citizens be held down, with both the tribunes and the plebs incited against the Fathers, since the naming of a day against some noble was forever troubling the assemblies with new contests. At the first din of these, as though at a signal given, the Aequi and Volsci took up arms, at once because their leaders, greedy for plunder, had persuaded them that the levy proclaimed two years before could not be held, the plebs now refusing service: it was for this that no armies had been sent against them. By license of soldiering the discipline was dissolved, and Rome was no longer a common fatherland. Whatever of angers and feuds there had been with the foreigner was turned against themselves. The occasion was at hand for crushing wolves blinded by inward madness. With their armies joined, they first ravaged thoroughly the Latin territory; then, when there no avenger met them, then indeed, while the authors of the war exulted, they came up, plundering, to the very walls of Rome, in the quarter of the Esquiline gate, displaying to the city, by way of insult, the laying waste of its fields. Thence, when they had gone back unavenged, driving their booty before them, in column toward Corbio, the consul Quinctius called the people to an assembly.

There I find that he spoke to this effect: "Though I am conscious to myself of no fault, Quirites, yet it is with the deepest shame that I have come forward into the assembly, into your sight. That you should know this—that this should be handed down to the memory of posterity—that the Aequi and the Volsci, scarce now a match for the Hernici, came in arms, with impunity, to the walls of the city of Rome, in the fourth consulship of Titus Quinctius! This disgrace, although for long now we so live, such is the state of things, that my mind divines nothing good—had I known that it threatened this year above all, I would have shunned it by exile or by death, if there were no other escape from the office. Then, if men had held those arms that were within our gates, could Rome have been taken in my consulship? Honors enough I had had, enough and more of life: I ought to have died in my third consulship. Whom, after all, did these basest of enemies despise? Us the consuls, or you, Quirites? If the fault is in us, take the command from the unworthy, and, if that is too little, exact a penalty besides: if it is in you, may there be none, of gods or of men, to punish your faults, Quirites: only do you yourselves repent of them. It was not your cowardice they despised, nor in their own valor did they trust; for, so often routed and put to flight, stripped of their camp, mulcted of their land, sent under the yoke, they know both themselves and you: it was the discord of the orders, the poison of this city, the contests of Fathers and plebs—while there is to us no measure of command nor to you of liberty, while you loathe patrician and we plebeian magistrates—that lifted up their spirits. In the name of the gods, what is it you want? You longed for tribunes of the plebs; for concord’s sake we granted them. You craved decemvirs; we suffered them to be created. You grew sick of the decemvirs; we forced them out of office. Your anger abiding against the same men now private, we suffered the noblest and most honored of men to die and to go into exile. You wished to create tribunes of the plebs a second time; you created them. To make consuls of your own party—though we saw they were unjust to the Fathers, we beheld even a patrician magistracy made a gift to the plebs. The tribunician help, the appeal to the people, the resolutions of the plebs laid upon the Fathers, under the title of equalizing the laws our own rights crushed—we have borne, and we bear. What end will there be of discords? When shall it be allowed us to have one city, when to have this for a common fatherland? We, the vanquished, keep quiet with a calmer mind than you, the victors. Is it enough for you that we are to be feared by you? Against us the Aventine is seized, against us the Sacred Mount is occupied; we have seen the Esquiline all but taken by the enemy, and the Volscian climbing the rampart. No one drove the enemy off: against us you are men, against us in arms.

"Come then—when you have here beset the Curia and made the Forum a place of menace and filled the prison with the chief men—go forth, with those same fierce spirits, out of the Esquiline gate; or, if you dare not even this, look from the walls upon your fields laid waste with sword and fire, the booty driven off, the houses smoking, set ablaze on every hand. But it is the commonwealth that, by all this, is in worse case! The land is burned, the city besieged, the glory of war is with the enemy. What then? In what state are your private fortunes? Soon to each of you his own losses from his fields will be reported. What is there, pray, at home wherewith to make these good? Will the tribunes give you back and restore what you have lost? Of voice and words they will heap on you as much as you will, and of charges against the chief men and of laws one upon another, and of assemblies; but from those assemblies never did any one of you go home richer in substance or in fortune. Has any man brought back anything to his wife and children except hatreds, offenses, feuds public and private, from which you are kept safe always not by your own valor and innocence but by another’s help? But, by Hercules, when you did your campaigns under us as consuls, not under tribunes for leaders, and in the camp, not in the Forum, and in the line of battle it was your shout the enemy dreaded, not, in the assembly, the Roman Fathers, then, your booty won, the land taken from the foe, full of fortunes and of glory, public alike and private, in triumph you returned home to your hearths: now you let the enemy go off laden with your fortunes. Cleave fast, then, glued to your assemblies, and live in the Forum: the necessity of soldiering, which you flee, follows you. It was grievous to set out against the Aequi and the Volsci: the war is before the gates. If it be not driven thence, it will soon be within the walls, and will climb the citadel and the Capitol and will follow you into your very homes. Two years ago the senate ordered a levy to be held and an army led out to the Algidus: we sit idle at home, like women, wrangling among ourselves, glad of a present peace and not discerning that out of that short respite a manifold war will return. I know that other things are pleasanter to say than these; but to speak the true rather than the pleasing, even did my own nature not prompt me, necessity compels. I could wish indeed to please you, Quirites; but far rather do I wish you safe, whatever your feeling toward me is to be. It is so ordered by nature, that he who speaks before a multitude for his own ends is more welcome than he whose mind sees nothing beyond the public good—unless, perchance, you suppose that those public flatterers, those courtiers of the plebs, who suffer you to be neither in arms nor at peace, rouse and goad you for your own sakes. When stirred up, you are to them either an honor or a profit; and because in the concord of the orders they see themselves to be nowhere at all, they choose to be leaders of an evil cause rather than of none, of tumults and seditions. If of these things a weariness can at last take you, and you are willing to put on, in place of these new ways, the ancient manners of your fathers and your own, I refuse no punishment, if within a few days I have not routed and put to flight these ravagers of our fields, stripped them of their camp, and carried over from our gates and walls to their cities this terror of war by which you are now thunderstruck."

Rarely at another time was the speech of a popular tribune more welcome to the plebs than then was that of a most stern consul. The youth too, which amid such alarms had been wont to hold the shirking of service as the keenest weapon against the Fathers, looked now to arms and war. And the flight of the country-folk, and the despoiled and the wounded in the fields, reporting things fouler than what was set before their eyes, filled the whole city with anger. When the senate was come together, there indeed all, turned toward Quinctius, looked to him as the one champion of Roman majesty; and the chief of the Fathers declared that his harangue was worthy of the consular command, worthy of so many consulships borne before, worthy of his whole life, full of honors often held, oftener earned. Other consuls had either, by betraying the dignity of the Fathers, fawned upon the plebs, or, by bitterly guarding the rights of their order, had made the multitude the harsher in the taming: Titus Quinctius had delivered a speech mindful of the majesty of the Fathers, of the concord of the orders, and, above all, of the times. They begged him and his colleague to take the commonwealth in hand; they begged the tribunes that, of one mind with the consuls, they would have the war driven from the city and its walls, and would render the plebs, in so anxious a case, obedient to the Fathers; the tribunes, they said, appealed to the common fatherland and implored their help, now the fields were laid waste and the city all but assailed. By the consent of all a levy is decreed and held. When the consuls had proclaimed in the assembly that there was no time for examining excuses, all the younger men should be present on the next day at dawn in the Campus Martius; for examining the cases of those who had not given in their names they would find time when the war was finished; he should be held a deserter whose case they had not approved—all the youth was present on the next day. The cohorts each chose their own centurions; two senators were set over each cohort. All this we have received was so quickly done that the standards, brought out that very day by the quaestors from the treasury and carried to the Campus, were moved from the Campus at the fourth hour of the day, and the new army, a few cohorts of veteran soldiers following of their own will, halted at the tenth milestone. The following day brought the enemy into view, and the camp was joined to their camp at Corbio. On the third day, since anger goaded the Romans, and the others, having so often renewed the war, the consciousness of their guilt and despair, there was no delay made in the fighting.

In the Roman army, since there were two consuls of equal power—which is the most wholesome thing in the conduct of great affairs—the sum of command, by Agrippa’s yielding it, rested with his colleague; and the man so preferred answered the other’s readiness in submitting himself with courtesy, by sharing his counsels and his praises and by making his unequal his equal. In the line Quinctius held the right wing, Agrippa the left; to Spurius Postumius Albus, a legate, the center of the line is given to guard; the other legate, Publius Sulpicius, they set over the cavalry. The foot on the right wing fought splendidly, the Volsci resisting with no slackness. Publius Sulpicius with the cavalry broke through the enemy’s center. And though from there he could have returned the same way to his own men, it seemed better, before the enemy should refit their disordered ranks, to assail their rear; and in a moment, by charging the line from behind, he would, with the double terror, have scattered the enemy, had not the cavalry of the Volsci and Aequi, meeting him with their own private battle, held him a while. There indeed Sulpicius cried that there was no time for delay, shouting that they were surrounded and cut off from their own, unless with all their might they pressed the cavalry-fight to its end; nor was it enough to put the horsemen to flight unhurt: let them make an end of horses and men, that none might be carried back thence to the battle or renew the fight; those could not withstand them to whom the close-packed line of the foot had given way. To no deaf ears were the words spoken. In one charge they routed the whole cavalry, hurled a great number from their horses, and ran men and horses through with their javelins. That was the end of the cavalry-fight. Then, falling on the line of foot, they send messengers of the deed to the consuls, where the enemy’s line was now giving way. The message both raised the spirits of the Romans, who were winning, and struck down the Aequi as they fell back. In the center first they began to be beaten, where the cavalry, let loose, had disordered the ranks; then the left wing began to be driven by the consul Quinctius; on the right was the most toil. There Agrippa, fierce in his years and strength, when he saw that in every part of the battle the matter went better than with himself, snatched the standards from the standard-bearers and began himself to bear them forward, and even to fling some into the packed enemy; and the soldiers, stirred by the fear of that disgrace, fell upon the enemy. So on every side the victory was made even. Then came a message from Quinctius that he, now victorious, was looming over the enemy’s camp; that he would not break in before he knew that on the left wing too the fighting was done: if Agrippa had now routed the enemy, let him bring his standards to him, that the whole army together might win the booty. Victorious Agrippa, with mutual congratulation, came to his victorious colleague and to the enemy’s camp. There, a few defending it and in a moment routed, without a struggle they break into the fortifications, and lead back the army, master of vast booty and having recovered its own goods too, lost by the ravaging of the fields. A triumph I find that neither they themselves demanded nor that it was offered them by the senate, nor is the cause handed down of the honor scorned or not hoped for. I, so far as I conjecture across so great an interval of time, suppose that, since to Valerius and Horatius as consuls—who, besides the Volsci and Aequi, had won the glory of finishing the Sabine war as well—a triumph had been refused by the senate, it was out of modesty that the consuls forbore to ask a triumph for half the achievement, lest, even if they obtained it, it might seem that account had been taken of the men rather than of their deserts.

A victory honorably won from the enemy a base judgment of the people at home, concerning the boundaries of allies, deformed. The men of Aricia and of Ardea, having often contended in war over a disputed piece of land, wearied by the many losses each had dealt the other, took the Roman people for judge. When they had come to plead their cause, an assembly of the people being granted them by the magistrates, the matter was conducted with great heat. And now, the witnesses produced, when the tribes ought to be called and the people to go to the vote, there rises up Publius Scaptius, of the plebs, a man far on in years, and says: "If it is allowed, consuls, to speak about the commonwealth, I will not suffer the people to err in this cause." When the consuls said he was a worthless fellow and not to be heard, and ordered him, as he cried out that the public interest was being betrayed, to be removed, he appeals to the tribunes. The tribunes, as nearly always they are ruled by the multitude rather than rule it, granted to the plebs, eager to hear, that Scaptius might say what he would. There he begins: that he was now in his three-and-eightieth year, and that in the very land in dispute he had served as a soldier, no young man then, already earning his twentieth campaign, when the war was waged at Corioli. Therefore he brought a matter blotted out by age, but fixed in his own memory: that the land in dispute had been within the bounds of Corioli, and, when Corioli was taken, had by right of war become public property of the Roman people. He wondered with what face the men of Ardea and Aricia, who had never asserted any right to that land while the Coriolan state stood unharmed, hoped now to filch it from the Roman people, whom they had made judge instead of master. To himself a scant span of life remained; yet he could not bring himself, in respect of a land which as a soldier he had with his own hand, for his own part, helped to take, not to vindicate it, an old man too, by his voice, the one means he had left. He earnestly counseled the people not to condemn its own cause through an unprofitable shame.

The consuls, when they perceived that Scaptius was heard not in silence only but even with approval, calling gods and men to witness that a great scandal was being done, summon the chief of the Fathers. With them they go round the tribes, beseeching them not to commit a most wicked deed by a still worse precedent, the judges turning the suit to their own profit—since, especially, even if it were right that a judge should have a care for his own gain, by no means so much would be got by filching the land as would be lost by alienating, through the wrong, the hearts of the allies. For the losses to repute and to good faith were greater than could be reckoned: this the envoys would carry home, this would be noised abroad, this the allies would hear, this the enemy—with what grief the one, with what joy the other? Did they think the neighboring peoples would lay this to the charge of Scaptius, an old haranguer of the assembly? Famous would Scaptius be by this portrait; but the Roman people would wear the character of a sharper and a filcher of another’s suit. For what judge, in a private matter, ever did this, that he adjudged to himself the thing in dispute? Scaptius himself, indeed, though his sense of shame be now dead before him, would not do it. Thus the consuls, thus the Fathers cried aloud; but greed prevailed, and the prompter of greed, Scaptius. The tribes, called to vote, judged that the land was public property of the Roman people. Nor is it denied that so it would have been, had they gone to other judges; but as it was, the disgrace of the judgment is in no wise lightened by the goodness of the cause; and it seemed no less foul and bitter to the Roman Fathers than to the men of Aricia and Ardea. The rest of the year remained quiet from disturbances in the city and from foreign foes.