The History of Rome, Book 4

These were followed by Marcus Genucius and Gaius Curtius as consuls. The year was troubled at home and abroad. For at the beginning of it Gaius Canuleius, tribune of the plebs, brought forward a bill concerning intermarriage between the Fathers and the plebs, by which the Fathers thought their own blood would be tainted and the rights of the clans thrown into confusion; and the suggestion, at first gently introduced by the tribunes, that it be allowed for one of the consuls to be made from the plebs, advanced so far thereafter that nine tribunes brought forward a bill that the people should have the power, whether it wished from the plebs or from the Fathers, of making the consuls. And if that should come to pass, they believed that the supreme command would not merely be made common with the lowest, but would be carried clean away from the leading men to the plebs. Gladly, therefore, did the Fathers hear that the people of Ardea had revolted on account of the wrong of the land adjudged away from them, that the Veientes had ravaged the borders of Roman territory, and that the Volsci and Aequi were murmuring over the fortifying of Verrugo; so far did they prefer even an unhappy war to an inglorious peace. These things, then, being taken even greater than they were, that amid the din of so many wars the tribunician proceedings might fall silent, they order a levy to be held, war and arms to be made ready with the utmost force, more keenly, if it might be, than they had been made ready in the consulship of Titus Quinctius. Then Gaius Canuleius, having cried out a few words in the senate—that in vain did the consuls by intimidation seek to turn the plebs from its care for the new laws, that never, while he lived, would they hold a levy before the plebs had voted on the things that had been brought forward by himself and his colleagues—straightway summoned an assembly.

At the same time both the consuls were inciting the senate against the plebs/">tribune, and the tribune the people against the consuls. The consuls declared that the tribunician frenzies could no longer be borne; that it had now come to the end; that more war was being stirred up at home than abroad. This came about, they said, no more by the fault of the plebs than of the Fathers, nor more of the tribunes than of the consuls. The thing that has its reward in a state ever grows by the greatest increase; thus are good men made in peace, thus brave men in war. At Rome the greatest reward was for sedition; and therefore it had ever been a thing of honor to single men and to all. Let them call to mind what majesty of the senate they had themselves received from their fathers, what they were to hand on to their children—as the plebs could boast that it was made fuller and ampler. There was, then, no end to it, nor would there be, so long as the authors of sedition were as honored as their seditions were successful. What great undertakings Gaius Canuleius had set his hand to! A confounding of the clans, a confusion of the public and private auspices, he was bringing in, that nothing be pure, nothing unstained, so that, all distinction taken away, no man might know either himself or his own. For what other force had promiscuous intermarriage than that the couplings of plebs and Fathers should be mingled almost after the manner of wild beasts? so that whoever was born might not know of whose blood he was, of whose sacred rites; he would be half a Father, half a plebeian, not even at concord with his own self. It seemed too little that all things divine and human be thrown into confusion: now the troublers of the rabble were girding themselves for the consulship. And at first they had only sounded the matter in talk, that one consul be made from the plebs; now it was proposed that the people create consuls from the Fathers or from the plebs as it would. And they would create, beyond doubt, the most seditious man of the plebs; the Canuleii, then, and the Icilii would be consuls. Let Jupiter Best and Greatest not suffer the command of kingly majesty to sink so low; let them die a thousand times rather than suffer so great a disgrace to be admitted. They held it for certain that their forefathers too, had they divined that by conceding everything the plebs would become toward them not gentler but harsher, demanding things ever more unjust one after another once it had gained the first, would have undergone at the outset any struggle whatever rather than suffer such laws to be imposed upon them. Because then a concession had been made about the tribunes, a second concession had been made. There could be no end if in the same state there were tribunes of the plebs and Fathers: either that order or that magistracy must be done away; and the audacity and rashness must be met sooner late than never. Were they, then, with impunity, first to sow discords and stir up wars on the borders, and then to forbid the state to be armed and defended against the things they had stirred up, and, when they had all but summoned the enemy, to suffer no armies to be enrolled against the enemy—while Canuleius should dare to declare in the senate that, unless the Fathers suffered his laws to be received as though from a conqueror, he would prevent the holding of a levy? What was this but to threaten that he would betray his country, that he would suffer it to be assailed and taken? What courage would that utterance bring, not to the Roman plebs, but to the Volsci, the Aequi, and the Veientes? Would they not hope, with Canuleius for leader, to be able to scale the Capitol and the citadel? Unless the tribunes, with their right and majesty taken from the Fathers, had robbed them of their courage too, the consuls were ready to be leaders against the crime of citizens sooner than against the arms of enemies.

At the very time these things were being debated in the senate, Canuleius, on behalf of his laws and against the consuls, discoursed thus: "How greatly the Fathers despise you, Quirites, how unworthy they hold you to dwell with them in one city within the same walls, I think indeed I have often perceived before, but most of all now, in that they have risen up so fiercely against these bills of ours—by which what else do we do than remind them that we are their fellow-citizens, and, if we have not the same wealth, yet inhabit the same fatherland? By the one we seek the right of intermarriage, which is wont to be granted to neighbors and to foreigners; we ourselves indeed have given citizenship, which is more than intermarriage, even to enemies when conquered. By the other we bring in nothing new, but reclaim and put to use that which is the people’s, that the Roman people may bestow its honors on whom it will. What reason, pray, is there why they should confound heaven and earth, why an assault was just now all but made upon me in the senate, why they declare they will not keep their hands off, and threaten to violate a power that is sacrosanct? If free suffrage is given to the Roman people, that it may bestow the consulship on whom it will, and the hope is not cut off from the plebeian too, if he be worthy of the highest honor, of attaining the highest honor—shall this city be unable to stand? Is it all over with the command? And does this carry the same weight—that a plebeian be made consul—as though one should say that a slave or a freedman were to become consul? Do you at all perceive in what contempt you live? They would take from you a part of this daylight, if it were allowed; that you breathe, that you utter a voice, that you have the shapes of men, fills them with indignation. Nay more, if it please the gods, they say it is impious that a plebeian be made consul. Pray you, if we are not admitted to the calendars, not to the commentaries of the pontiffs, do we not even know those things which all foreigners too know—that the consuls succeeded into the place of the kings, and have nothing of right or of majesty that was not in the kings before? Do you believe it was ever heard told that Numa Pompilius, not only no patrician but not even a Roman citizen, was summoned from the Sabine country and, by the people’s order, with the Fathers’ sanction, reigned at Rome? that thereafter Lucius Tarquinius, of no Roman nor even Italian stock, son of Demaratus of Corinth and a settler from Tarquinii, was made king while the sons of Ancus lived? that Servius Tullius after him, born of a captive woman of Corniculum, of no father and a slave mother, held the kingship by his genius and his worth? For what shall I say of Titus Tatius the Sabine, whom Romulus himself, the parent of the city, received into a partnership of the kingship? So then, while no stock in which worth shone forth was disdained, the Roman command grew. Are you now to be ashamed of a plebeian consul, when our ancestors did not disdain foreign kings, and not even when the kings were expelled was the city closed to foreign worth? The Claudian clan, at least, after the expulsion of the kings, we received from the Sabines not only into the citizenship but even into the number of the patricians. Shall a foreigner become a patrician, then a consul, and shall a Roman citizen, if he be of the plebs, have the hope of the consulship cut off? Do we, in the end, not believe it can come to pass that a brave and vigorous man, good in peace and war, should be of the plebs, like Numa, Lucius Tarquinius, Servius Tullius? Or, even if there be such a one, shall we not suffer him to come to the helm of the commonwealth, and are we to have consuls liker the decemvirs, the foulest of mortals, who then were all of the Fathers, than to the best of the kings, new men though they were?

"But, you will say, no one of the plebs was consul after the kings were expelled. What of that? Ought no new thing to be instituted? And what has not yet been done—for many things have not yet been done in a young people—ought it not, even if it be useful, to be done? Pontiffs and augurs there were none while Romulus reigned; they were created by Numa Pompilius. The census in the state, and the marshaling of the centuries and classes, there was not; it was made by Servius Tullius. Consuls there had never been; when the kings were expelled they were created. Of a dictator there had been neither the power nor the name; it began to be among the Fathers. Tribunes of the plebs, aediles, quaestors there were none; it was instituted that they should be. Decemvirs for the writing of laws, within these last ten years, we both created and removed from the commonwealth. Who doubts that, the city being founded for eternity and growing to an immeasurable size, new commands, priesthoods, rights of clans and of men are to be instituted? This very thing—that there be no intermarriage of the Fathers with the plebs—did not the decemvirs carry a few years since, to the worst of the public good, and with the greatest wrong to the plebs? Or can there be any greater or more marked affront than that a part of the state should be held, as it were polluted, unworthy of intermarriage? What is this but to suffer exile within the same walls, to suffer banishment? They take care that we be not mingled with them by marriage-ties, by kinships, that the blood be not joined. Why? If this defiles that nobility of yours—which most of you, sprung from Albans and Sabines, hold not by birth nor blood but by co-optation into the Fathers, either chosen by the kings or, after the kings were expelled, by the people’s order—could you not keep it pure by private counsels, by neither taking wives from the plebs nor suffering your daughters and sisters to marry out from the Fathers? No plebeian would offer violence to a patrician maiden; that lust belongs to the patricians; no one would have compelled any man to make a marriage-compact against his will. But that this be forbidden by law, and intermarriage of Fathers and plebs be abolished—that indeed is what is insulting to the plebs. For why do you not propose that there be no intermarriage between rich and poor? That which has everywhere and always been a matter of private counsel—that each woman should marry into the house to which it had been agreed, and each man take in marriage a wife from the house with which he had made the compact—this you cast under the bonds of a most arrogant law, by which you may sunder the civil fellowship and make two states out of one. Why do you not enact that a plebeian be no neighbor to a patrician, that he go not by the same road, that he enter not the same banquet, that he stand not in the same Forum? For what, in the matter, is there other, if a patrician have wedded a plebeian woman, if a plebeian a patrician? What right, in the end, is altered? Surely the children follow the father. Nor is there anything that we seek from intermarriage with you, except that we be counted in the number of men, of citizens; nor have you, unless it please you to contend for our affront and disgrace, anything for which you should strive.

"In the end, is the supreme command, pray, the Roman people’s or yours? When the kings were expelled, was mastery won for you, or equal liberty for all? It must be lawful for the Roman people, if it will, to order a law—or will you, as each bill is brought forward, decree a levy by way of penalty, and, the moment I, a plebs/">tribune, begin to call the tribes to the vote, will you, consul, straightway bind the younger men by the military oath and lead them out into camp, and threaten the plebs, threaten the tribune? What if you had not twice already made trial how little those threats availed against the consent of the plebs? Doubtless it was because you wished our good that you abstained from the contest; or was there no fighting for this reason, that the stronger party was also the more moderate? Nor now will there be a contest, Quirites; your spirits they will always test, your strength they will not try. And so for those wars, whether they be false or true, consuls, the plebs is ready for you, if by restoring intermarriage you make at last this one state, if they can grow together, can be joined and mingled with you by private ties, if hope, if access to honors is given to vigorous and brave men, if it is permitted to share in the partnership, in the fellowship of the commonwealth, if—and this belongs to equal liberty—to obey and to command in turn under annual magistracies. But if anyone shall hinder these things, multiply your wars in talk and in rumor: no one is going to give in his name, no one to take up arms, no one to fight for haughty masters, with whom there is no fellowship of honors in public life nor of intermarriage in private."

When the consuls too had come forward into the assembly, and the matter had turned from set speeches to wrangling, and the plebs/">tribune asked why a plebeian ought not to be made consul, the consul answered—perhaps truly, but for the present contest with too little profit—that no plebeian had the auspices, and that for this reason the decemvirs had abolished intermarriage, lest the auspices be thrown into confusion by an uncertain offspring. At this the plebs blazed up with indignation above all, because they were denied the power of taking the auspices, as though hateful to the immortal gods; nor was there an end of the contentions—since the plebs had got in the tribune a most keen champion, and itself vied with him in stubbornness—until at last the Fathers, beaten, conceded that a bill concerning intermarriage be brought, reckoning above all that thus the tribunes would either wholly drop the contest over plebeian consuls or put it off until after the war, and that the plebs, content in the meantime with intermarriage, would be ready for the levy. When Canuleius was great by his victory over the Fathers and by the favor of the plebs, the other tribunes, kindled to the struggle, fought with all their might for their own bill, and, as the rumor of war grew day by day, hindered the levy. The consuls, since through the senate nothing could be done, the tribunes interposing their veto, held councils of the leading men at home. It was plain that the victory must be yielded either to the enemy or to the citizens. Of the consulars, Valerius and Horatius alone took no part in the councils. The opinion of Gaius Claudius armed the consuls against the tribunes; the opinions of the Quinctii, Cincinnatus and Capitolinus, shrank from bloodshed and from violating men whom, by the compact struck with the plebs, they had received as sacrosanct. Through these councils the matter was brought to this issue: that they should suffer military tribunes with consular power to be created indifferently from the Fathers and from the plebs, but that nothing be changed as to the creating of consuls; and with this the tribunes were content, content the plebs. Elections are proclaimed for creating three tribunes with consular power. These proclaimed, at once whoever had ever said or done anything seditiously—most of all the ex-tribunes—began both to grasp men by the hand and to run about over the whole Forum as candidates, so that despair of attaining the honor, the plebs being at first roused, then indignation, if the honor must be borne along with these men, deterred the patricians. At last, however, compelled by the leading men, they stood, that they might not seem to have yielded up their possession of the commonwealth. The outcome of those elections showed that men’s spirits are of one sort in the struggle for liberty and dignity, of another, the contests laid aside, when the judgment is uncorrupted; for the people created all the tribunes from the patricians, content that account had been taken of plebeians. This self-restraint and fairness and loftiness of spirit, where would you now find it in a single man, which then was the whole people’s?

In the three hundred and tenth year after the city of Rome was founded, for the first time military tribunes in place of consuls enter upon their magistracy: Aulus Sempronius Atratinus, Lucius Atilius, Titus Cloelius; in whose magistracy concord at home afforded peace even abroad. There are those who say that, on account of the Veientine war added to the war with the Aequi and Volsci and to the revolt of the Ardeates, because two consuls could not attend to so many wars at once, three military tribunes were created, with no mention of the bill brought forward concerning the creating of consuls from the plebs, and that they used the consular command and insignia. But the right of that magistracy did not yet stand as a thing confirmed, because in the third month after they entered upon it they went out of the honor by a decree of the augurs, as having been created with a flaw, on the ground that Gaius Curtius, who had presided at their election, had pitched his tent amiss. Envoys came from Ardea to Rome, complaining of the wrong in such fashion that, if it were removed by restoring the land, it was plain they would abide in the treaty and friendship. From the senate the answer was given that a judgment of the people could not be rescinded by the senate—besides that it would be done by no precedent nor right—and also for the sake of the concord of the orders: if the Ardeates were willing to await their own time and leave to the senate the disposing of the relief of their wrong, it would come to pass that afterward they would rejoice that they had tempered their anger, and would know that the Fathers had been at equal pains both that no wrong arise against them and that, once arisen, it not be lasting. So the envoys, having said that they would refer the matter back whole, were courteously dismissed. The patricians, since the commonwealth was without a curule magistrate, came together and created an interrex. A contention whether consuls or military tribunes should be created held the matter through several days in the interregnum. The interrex and the senate strive that the election be of consuls, the tribunes of the plebs and the plebs that it be of military tribunes. The Fathers prevailed, because the plebs, about to confer the honor on patricians whether the one or the other, gave over contending in vain, and the leaders of the plebs preferred those elections in which no account was taken of themselves to those in which they would be passed over as unworthy. The tribunes of the plebs too left a contest without effect for a favor with the chief of the Fathers. Titus Quinctius Barbatus, the interrex, creates as consuls Lucius Papirius Mugillanus and Lucius Sempronius Atratinus. In their consulship the treaty with the Ardeates was renewed; and this is the proof that they were consuls in that year, who are found neither in the ancient annals nor in the books of the magistrates. I suppose, because there were military tribunes at the beginning of the year, that, just as though they had been in command the whole year, the names of these consuls were passed over, when they had been substituted. Licinius Macer is the authority that they were found both in the Ardeatine treaty and in the linen books at the temple of Moneta. And both abroad, though so many terrors had been displayed by the neighbors, and at home, there was quiet.

This year—whether it had only tribunes, or also consuls substituted for the tribunes—is followed by a year of undoubted consuls, Marcus Geganius Macerinus for the second time and Titus Quinctius Capitolinus for the fifth. This same year was the beginning of the censorship, a thing risen from a small origin, which afterward was increased with so great a growth that under it lay the governance of Roman morals and discipline, with the senate and the centuries of the knights the distinguishing of honor and dishonor, the right over public and private places, and the revenues of the Roman people, under its nod and arbitration. The beginning of the thing arose because, the people having gone many years unregistered, the census could neither be put off nor was it possible for the consuls, when the wars of so many peoples were impending, to find leisure to attend to that business. Mention was made in the senate that the task, laborious and by no means consular, needed its own proper magistracy, to which should be subjected the service of the scribes and the care of keeping the records, and the disposal of the form of the census. And the Fathers, though the matter was a small one, yet, that there might be more patrician magistracies in the commonwealth, gladly received it—reckoning too, I believe, that what came to pass would come to pass, that soon the means of those who presided would add right and majesty to the honor itself; and the tribunes, regarding the administration as one of a service then more necessary than splendid—as indeed it then was—did not greatly contend, lest in small matters too they should be unseasonably opposed. Since the honor was scorned by the chief men of the state, the people by their suffrages set Papirius and Sempronius, about whose consulship there is doubt, over the holding of the census, that by that magistracy they might fill out a consulship not quite solid. From their business the censors were named.

While these things were being done at Rome, envoys came from Ardea, imploring, in the name of their most ancient alliance and the treaty lately renewed, help for a city all but overthrown. For it was not permitted them to enjoy the peace which by the best of counsels they had kept with the Roman people, because of intestine strife; the cause and origin of which is recorded to have sprung from a contest of factions, which have been, and will be, the ruin of more peoples than foreign wars, than famine or sickness or whatever else men turn into the wrath of the gods, as the uttermost of public ills. A maiden of plebeian stock, most marked for her beauty, two young men sought: the one equal to the maiden in birth, relying on her guardians, who were themselves of the same order; the other noble, taken by nothing save her beauty. This latter the zeal of the optimates supported, by which the contest of parties made its way even into the girl’s home. The noble seemed the better in the judgment of her mother, who wished the girl joined in the most splendid marriage; the guardians, mindful even in that matter of party, leaned toward their own man. When the affair could not be carried through within the walls of the house, it came to law. The demand of the mother and the guardians being heard, the magistrates grant the right of marriage according to the parent’s choice. But force was more powerful; for the guardians, having harangued openly in the Forum among the men of their party about the wrong of the decree, with a band gathered carry off the maiden from her mother’s house; against whom a more hostile array of the optimates arose and followed the young man, kindled by the wrong. A fierce battle is fought. The plebs, beaten—in no way like the Roman plebs—went out of the city in arms, and, seizing a certain hill, makes raids with sword and fire into the lands of the optimates; the city too it prepares to besiege, the whole multitude of craftsmen, who before had had no part in the contest, being called out by the hope of plunder; nor is any form or calamity of war wanting, as though the state had been infected with the madness of two young men who sought a deadly marriage out of their country’s downfall. To either party it seemed there was too little of arms and war at home: the optimates called out the Romans to the help of their besieged city, the plebs the Volsci to storm Ardea with them. The Volsci first, under the leadership of Cluilius the Aequian, came to Ardea and threw up a rampart against the enemy’s walls. When this was reported at Rome, at once Marcus Geganius the consul set out with an army and took up ground for a camp three miles from the enemy; and, the day being now nearly spent, he bids the soldiers tend their bodies. Then in the fourth watch he advances the standards; and the work begun was so hastened that at sunrise the Volsci saw themselves surrounded by the Romans with a stronger entrenchment than that with which they themselves had hemmed the city; and on another side the consul had joined an arm of works to the wall of Ardea, by which his own men could pass to and fro from the town.

The Volscian commander, who up to that day had fed his soldier not from a provision laid in beforehand but from grain snatched day by day out of the ravaging of the fields, after he was suddenly, hedged within a rampart, in want of all things, the consul being called out to a conference, says that, if the Roman had come for the sake of raising the siege, he would lead the Volsci away from there. Against this the consul answered that terms were for the conquered to accept, not to offer, and that, as the Volsci had come to assail the allies of the Roman people at their own discretion, so they should not depart at their own discretion. He bids them surrender their commander and lay down their arms, confessing themselves beaten and obeying his command; otherwise, whether they departed or stayed, he would be their relentless enemy, and would carry back to Rome a victory over the Volsci rather than a faithless peace. The Volsci, when they had tried the scanty hope that lay in arms, all else being cut off on every side, and, besides their other disadvantages, had engaged on ground unfavorable for fighting and still more unfavorable for flight, when they were being cut down on every side, turned from the fight to entreaty; their commander surrendered and their arms handed over, they are sent under the yoke and dismissed, with a single garment each, full of disgrace and disaster; and when they had encamped not far from the city of Tusculum, by the old hatred of the Tusculans they were, unarmed, fallen upon and paid the penalty, scarce any being left to bring word of the slaughter. The Roman composed the affairs of Ardea, troubled by sedition, by striking off with the axe the leaders of that disturbance and confiscating their goods to the Ardean treasury; and the Ardeates believed that by so great a benefit of the Roman people the wrong of the judgment had been removed; to the senate it seemed there remained something more to blot out the monument of the public greed. The consul returned to the city in triumph, Cluilius the leader of the Volsci led before his chariot and the spoils displayed with which he had sent the disarmed enemy army under the yoke. Quinctius the consul matched—which is no easy thing—in his civilian’s gown the glory of his armed colleague, because, in his care for concord and peace at home, by tempering the rights of lowest and highest, he so held the state that both the Fathers believed him a strict consul and the plebs one courteous enough. And against the tribunes he held his ground more by authority than by contest; five consulships borne in the same tenor, and a whole life lived consularly, made the man himself almost more to be revered than the honor. For this reason there was no mention of military tribunes under these consuls.

As consuls they create Marcus Fabius Vibulanus and Postumus Aebutius Cornicen. Fabius and Aebutius the consuls, seeing into how great a glory of things done at home and abroad they were succeeding, and that the year was most memorable above all among the neighboring allies and enemies, because the Ardeates in their headlong peril had been succored with so great a care, made it their more earnest aim utterly to blot out from men’s minds the infamy of the judgment, and passed a decree of the senate that, since the state of the Ardeates had been reduced by intestine tumult to a few, colonists should be enrolled thither for the sake of a garrison against the Volsci. This was openly entered on the tablets, that the plan formed to rescind the judgment might escape the plebs and the tribunes; but they had agreed that, with a far greater part of Rutulian than of Roman colonists enrolled, no land should be divided except that which had been filched by the infamous judgment, and that to no Roman should a clod of land be assigned there before it had been divided among all the Rutulians. Thus the land returned to the Ardeates. As triumvirs for leading out the colony to Ardea were created Agrippa Menenius, Titus Cloelius Siculus, Marcus Aebutius Helva. These, besides a most unpopular service, having offended the plebs by assigning to the allies the land which the Roman people had judged its own, and not even acceptable enough to the chief of the Fathers, because they had given nothing to anyone’s favor, escaped the vexations of a day now named against them by the tribunes before the people by remaining in the colony, which they had as a witness of their integrity and justice.

There was peace at home and abroad both this year and the next, in the consulship of Gaius Furius Pacilus and Marcus Papirius Crassus. The games, vowed by the decemvirs during the secession of the plebs from the Fathers by decree of the senate, were held that year. The cause of seditions was sought in vain by Poetelius, who, made tribune of the plebs a second time by announcing those very things, neither could prevail that the consuls bring before the senate the dividing of lands among the plebs, nor, when with a great struggle he had obtained that the Fathers be consulted whether it pleased them that elections be held of consuls or of tribunes, were consuls ordered to be created; and the threats of the tribune, announcing that he would hinder the levy, were a mockery, since, the neighbors being quiet, there was need neither of war nor of preparation for war. This tranquillity of affairs is followed by a year, in the consulship of Proculus Geganius Macerinus and Lucius Menenius Lanatus, marked by manifold disaster and danger, by seditions, by famine, by a kingship all but taken onto men’s necks through the sweetness of largesse; one thing only was wanting, a foreign war; and if affairs had been weighed down by that, scarce by the help of all the gods could they have been withstood. The evils began from famine, whether the year was adverse to the crops, or whether, through the sweetness of assemblies and of the city, the tilling of the fields had been deserted; for both are recorded. And the Fathers accused the plebs of idleness, and the tribunes of the plebs now the fraud, now the negligence of the consuls. At last they drove the plebs, the senate not opposing, to have Lucius Minucius created prefect of the corn-supply, a man destined to be more fortunate in that magistracy for the guarding of liberty than for the management of his own charge—though in the end, the corn-supply too being relieved, he bore not undeserved both the gratitude and the glory. He, when by many embassies sent in vain by land and sea round the neighboring peoples—save that from Etruria not so very much grain was brought in—he had made no change in the corn-supply, and, fallen back upon the dispensing of the scarcity, by compelling men to declare their grain and to sell what was over their monthly use, by docking the slaves of part of their daily ration, by then accusing the corn-dealers and casting them to the people’s anger, opened up the scarcity by a bitter inquisition rather than relieved it, many of the plebs, their hope lost, rather than be tortured by dragging out their lives, with their heads muffled flung themselves into the Tiber.

Then Spurius Maelius, of the equestrian order, very rich for those times, set his hand to a useful thing by the worst of precedents and with a still worse design. For having bought up grain from Etruria with his private money through the services of his guests and clients—which very thing, I believe, had been a hindrance to the relieving of the corn-supply by the public care—he set about making largesses of grain; and, the plebs cajoled by this gift, wherever he went, being conspicuous and exalted beyond the measure of a private man, he drew it along with him, its favor and its hope pledging him a sure consulship. He himself—as the mind of man is insatiable for what fortune promises—reached for higher and unpermitted things, and, since even the consulship must be wrested from the unwilling Fathers, set his thoughts on a kingship: that alone, he judged, would be a prize worthy of so great an apparatus of designs and of the struggle that must be sweated through. Now the consular elections were at hand; which thing fell upon him with his designs not yet settled or ripe enough. As consul for the sixth time was created Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, a man least opportune for one bent on revolution; as colleague is added to him Agrippa Menenius, surnamed Lanatus; and Lucius Minucius, prefect of the corn-supply, was either reappointed or created for an indefinite term, as the case should require; for nothing is certain, save that the prefect’s name is entered in the linen books among the magistrates in both years. This Minucius, conducting in the public service the same charge which Maelius had taken up to conduct privately, since the same kind of men frequented both houses, carries the matter, once ascertained, to the senate: that weapons were being collected into the house of Maelius, that he held assemblies in his home, and that there were designs of kingship not to be doubted. The time of carrying out the thing was not yet fixed: all else was already agreed; both that the tribunes had been bought with hire to betray liberty, and that the services had been parceled out to the leaders of the multitude. He brought this almost later than was safe, lest he should be the author of anything uncertain and idle. When these things had been heard, while on every side the chief of the Fathers upbraided both the consuls of the previous year, that they had suffered those largesses and gatherings of the plebs to take place in a private house, and the new consuls, that they had waited until so great a matter was carried to the senate by the prefect of the corn-supply—a matter that demanded a consul not only as its mover but also as its avenger—then Quinctius said that the consuls were upbraided undeservedly, who, bound by the laws concerning appeal passed for the dissolving of command, had by no means as much strength in the magistracy to punish that matter according to its atrocity as they had spirit. There was need not only of a brave man but also of one free and loosed from the bonds of the laws. And so he would name as dictator tribune/">Lucius Quinctius; in him there was a spirit equal to so great a power. All approving, Quinctius at first refused, and kept asking what they meant who, his age now spent, would expose him to so great a struggle. Then, when on every side they said that in that aged spirit there was more not only of counsel but even of valor than in all others, and loaded him with praises not undeserved, and the consul gave no remission, Cincinnatus at last, having prayed the immortal gods that his old age be not, in affairs so anxious, a loss or a disgrace to the commonwealth, is named dictator by the consul. He himself then names Gaius Servilius Ahala master of the horse.

On the next day, having posted guards, when he had come down into the Forum, and the plebs was turned toward him by the novelty and marvel of the thing, and the followers of Maelius and their leader himself saw the force of so great a command bent against him, while those who had no part in the designs of kingship kept asking what tumult, what sudden war had called for either a dictator’s majesty or for Quinctius, past his eightieth year, as ruler of the commonwealth, Servilius the master of the horse, sent by the dictator, came to Maelius and said, "The dictator summons you." When in terror he asked what he wanted, and Servilius set forth that he must plead his cause and clear himself of the charge brought by Minucius to the senate, then Maelius drew back into the band of his followers, and at first, looking about him, hung back, then, when the apparitor, by order of the master of the horse, was leading him off, snatched away by those standing about and fleeing, implored the protection of the Roman plebs, and said he was being crushed by a conspiracy of the Fathers because he had dealt kindly with the plebs; he begged them to bring him help in his last extremity, and not to suffer him to be butchered before their eyes. As he was crying out thus, Ahala Servilius overtook and cut him down; and bespattered with the blood of the slain man, ringed by a band of patrician youths, he reports to the dictator that Maelius, summoned to him, had thrust back the apparitor and was stirring up the multitude, and had received the punishment he deserved. Then the dictator said, "Well done in valor, Gaius Servilius—the commonwealth is freed."

Then he ordered the multitude, in tumult over the uncertain estimation of the deed, to be called to an assembly, and pronounced that Maelius had been lawfully slain, even had he been guiltless of the charge of kingship, who, summoned by the master of the horse to the dictator, had not come. He himself had sat down to inquire into the cause, and the cause inquired into, Maelius would have had a fortune answering to it; preparing force that he might not commit himself to a trial, he had been coerced by force. Nor was he to be dealt with as with a citizen, who, born among a free people, amid rights and laws, out of a city from which he knew that the kings had been expelled, and in the same year the sons of the king’s sister and the children of the consul, the liberator of his country, struck with the axe by their father for a compact disclosed of receiving the kings back into the city; from which Collatinus Tarquinius the consul had been bidden, through hatred of the name, to abdicate his magistracy and go into exile; in which, some years after, punishment was exacted of Spurius Cassius for designs entered upon concerning a kingship; in which lately the decemvirs had been mulcted in goods, exile, and life for their kingly pride—in that city Spurius Maelius had conceived the hope of a kingship. And what manner of man? Although no nobility, no honors, no merits open to any the way to mastery; yet for all that the Claudii, the Cassii, by consulships, by decemvirates, by their own honors and their forefathers’, by the splendor of their families, had lifted up their spirits to that which was impious: Spurius Maelius—to whom a tribunate of the plebs was rather to be wished than hoped for—a corn-dealer grown rich, had hoped, for a couple of pounds of spelt, that he had bought the liberty of his fellow-citizens, and reckoned that by flinging them food a people the conqueror of all its neighbors could be enticed into slavery, so that one whom the state could scarce stomach as a senator it should endure as king, holding the insignia and command of Romulus, the founder, sprung from the gods and taken back to the gods. This was to be held not so much for a crime as for a portent, nor was it enough that it was expiated by his blood, unless the roof and walls within which so great a madness had been conceived were torn down, and the goods, tainted by the price of buying a kingdom, were confiscated. He bade the quaestors, therefore, sell those goods and bring them into the public treasury.

He then ordered the house to be torn down at once, that the empty space might stand as a monument of the wicked hope crushed. It was called Aequimaelium. Lucius Minucius was presented with a gilded ox outside the Porta Trigemina, not even against the plebs’s will, because he had divided the Maelian grain among the plebs at the rate of an as the peck. I find in certain authorities that this Minucius crossed over from the Fathers to the plebs, and, co-opted as eleventh tribune of the plebs, quieted the sedition stirred up by the slaying of Maelius; but it is scarcely credible that the Fathers suffered the number of the tribunes to be increased, and that this precedent above all was introduced by a patrician, and that the plebs did not thereafter, once it had been granted, hold fast to it, or at least make the attempt. But before all else the false inscription on his statue is refuted by the fact that a few years before it had been provided by law that the tribunes should not be allowed to co-opt a colleague. Quintus Caecilius, Quintus Iunius, and Sextus Titinius, alone of the college of tribunes, had not brought the law concerning the honors of Minucius, and had not ceased now to accuse Minucius, now Servilius, before the plebs, and to lament the unworthy death of Maelius. They prevailed, therefore, that elections be held of military tribunes rather than of consuls, doubting not that in six places—for so many it was now lawful to create—some plebeians too, by professing that they would be the avengers of the Maelian slaying, would be created. The plebs, although it had been agitated that year by many and various commotions, created no more than three tribunes with consular power, and among them Lucius Quinctius, son of Cincinnatus, from the odium of whose dictatorship the disturbance was being sought. Preferred in the voting above Quinctius was Mamercus Aemilius, a man of the highest dignity; as third they create Lucius Iulius.

In the magistracy of these men, Fidenae, a Roman colony, revolted to Lars Tolumnius and the Veientes. A greater crime was added to the revolt: Gaius Fulcinius, Cloelius Tullus, Spurius Antius, and Lucius Roscius, Roman envoys seeking the cause of the new policy, they slew by the order of Tolumnius. Some lighten the king’s crime: that at a lucky throw of the dice an ambiguous utterance of his, such that he seemed to have ordered them killed, was caught up by the Fidenates and was the envoys’ cause of death—an incredible thing, that the intervention of the Fidenates, his new allies, consulting him about a slaying that would break the law of nations, did not turn his mind from its absorption in the game, and that the deed was not thereafter set down to a mistake. It is nearer belief that he wished the people of the Fidenates to be bound by complicity in so great a crime, that they might look back to no hope from the Romans. The statues of the envoys who had been slain at Fidenae were set up at public cost on the Rostra. With the Veientes and the Fidenates—besides that they were neighboring peoples, and that the war had begun from a cause so abominable—a fierce struggle was at hand. And so, the plebs and its tribunes being quiet, there was no dispute, in the care for the supreme interest, but that consuls be created, Marcus Geganius Macerinus for the third time and Lucius Sergius Fidenas. From the war, I believe, which he afterward waged, he was so named; for he was the first to fight on this side of the Anio with the king of the Veientes in a hard-won engagement, and brought back no bloodless victory. And so there was greater grief over the citizens lost than joy over the enemy routed; and the senate, as in alarming circumstances, ordered Mamercus Aemilius to be named dictator. He named as master of the horse, from the college of the previous year, in which they had together been military tribunes with consular power, tribune/">Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a young man worthy of his father. To the levy held by the consuls were added old centurions skilled in war, and the number of those lost in the last battle was filled up. As legates the dictator bade Titus Quinctius Capitolinus and Marcus Fabius Vibulanus to follow him. With the greater power, and a man too equal to the power, they drove the enemy out of Roman territory across the Anio; and the enemy, drawing back their camp, seized the hills between Fidenae and the Anio, and did not come down into the plains before the legions of the Faliscans came to their aid. Then at last the camp of the Etruscans was pitched before the walls of Fidenae. And the Roman dictator took up his position not far from there at the confluence, on the banks of both rivers, throwing a rampart across wherever he could carry the line of works. On the next day he led out into battle-line.

Among the enemy there were various opinions. The Faliscan, ill-enduring service far from home and trusting enough in himself, demanded battle; to the Veientine and the Fidenate there was more hope in dragging out the war. Tolumnius, although the counsels of his own people pleased him more, proclaims that he will fight on the next day, lest the Faliscans should not endure a distant campaign. To the dictator and the Romans, because the enemy had declined battle, courage came; and on the next day, the soldiers now murmuring that they would storm the camp and the city if no chance of battle were given, the lines on both sides advance into the middle of the plain between the two camps. The Veientine, abounding in numbers, sent men round behind the mountains to fall upon the Roman camp during the fight. The army of the three peoples stood drawn up so that the Veientes held the right wing, the Faliscans the left, and the Fidenates were in the center. The dictator bore his standards against the Faliscans on the right, Quinctius Capitolinus against the Veientine on the left; before the center of the line the master of the horse advanced with the cavalry. For a little while there was silence and stillness, since the Etruscans would not enter battle unless compelled, and the dictator was looking back toward the Roman citadel, that from it, the moment the augurs had duly admitted the birds, the signal might be raised by agreement. As soon as he caught sight of it, he sent the foremost horsemen, with a shout raised, against the enemy; the line of foot followed and closed with mighty force. In no part did the Etruscan legions sustain the Roman charge; the cavalry resisted most, and the king himself, by far the bravest of the horsemen, riding up against the Romans as they pursued in disorder on every side, prolonged the contest.

There was then among the horsemen a military tribune, Aulus Cornelius Cossus, of surpassing bodily beauty, equal in spirit and strength, and mindful of his lineage, which, most illustrious as he had received it, he left greater and ampler to his descendants. He, when he saw the Roman squadrons in alarm at the onset of Tolumnius wherever he had turned, and recognized him, conspicuous in his royal garb, ranging over the whole line, said: "Is this the breaker of the compact of mankind, the violator of the law of nations? Now will I—if only the gods will that there be anything sacred on earth—offer him up, a slain victim, to the shades of the envoys." Setting spurs to his horse, with leveled lance he is borne against the one enemy; and when he had struck and hurled him from his horse, at once he too, propped on his spear, sprang to his feet. As the king rose, he flung him back with the boss of his shield, and, thrusting again and again with his lance, pinned him to the ground. Then, the spoils stripped from the lifeless body and the head struck off, bearing it on his spear-point as victor, he routs the enemy by the terror of the slain king. Thus the line of cavalry too was routed, which alone had made the contest doubtful. The dictator presses on the routed legions and cuts them down, driven back to their camp. Most of the Fidenates, by their knowledge of the ground, escaped into the mountains. Cossus, carried across the Tiber with the cavalry, brought back from Veientine territory a huge booty to the city. During the battle there was fighting at the Roman camp too, against the part of the forces sent, as was said before, by Tolumnius against the camp. Fabius Vibulanus at first defended the rampart with a ring of men; then, when the enemy were intent upon the rampart, going out by the right principal gate with the triarii, he suddenly falls upon them. The panic thrown into them, the slaughter was the less because they were fewer, but the flight no less alarmed than in the battle-line.

The matter being well managed in every place, the dictator, by decree of the senate and order of the people, returned in triumph to the city. By far the greatest spectacle of the triumph was Cossus, bearing the spolia opima of the slain king; upon him the soldiers sang their rude songs, matching him with Romulus. The spoils, with a solemn dedication as a gift, he fixed in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius near the spoils of Romulus, which—the first to be called opima—were at that time the only ones; and he had turned upon himself, away from the dictator’s chariot, the eyes of the citizens, and had borne off almost alone the enjoyment of the glory of that day. The dictator, by order of the people, set in the Capitol a golden crown of a pound’s weight, a gift to Jupiter from the public money. Following all the authorities before me, I have set forth that Aulus Cornelius Cossus, a military tribune, brought the second spolia opima into the temple of Jupiter Feretrius; but—besides that those are rightly held opima spoils which a leader has stripped from a leader, and that we know no leader save him under whose auspices the war is waged—the very inscription set upon the spoils proves them and me wrong, that Cossus took them as consul. When I had heard that Augustus Caesar, the founder or restorer of all the temples, having entered the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, which, fallen to ruin with age, he rebuilt, had himself read this inscription on the linen corselet, I held it well-nigh sacrilege to withdraw from Cossus, as witness to his own spoils, Caesar, the very founder of the temple. Wherein if there be any error—that annals so ancient, and the books of the magistrates, which Licinius Macer cites again and again as authorities, the linen books stored in the temple of Moneta, have Aulus Cornelius Cossus as consul only in the seventh year afterward, with Titus Quinctius Poenus—the estimation is open to all alike. For this too is added, to keep so famous a battle from being transferred into that year: that around the consulship of Aulus Cornelius there was an almost unwarlike three years of pestilence and dearth of crops, so that certain annals, as though funereal, furnish nothing but the names of the consuls. The third year from the consulship of Cossus has him as military tribune with consular power, and in the same year master of the horse; in which command he fought another notable cavalry battle. Here conjecture is free. But, as I judge, one may turn the idle question to all opinions whatever, when the author of the battle himself, having placed the fresh spoils in the holy seat, looking upon Jupiter almost in person, to whom the vows had been made, and upon Romulus—witnesses of a false inscription not to be despised—wrote himself down as Aulus Cornelius Cossus, consul.

In the consulship of Marcus Cornelius Maluginensis and Lucius Papirius Crassus, armies were led into the Veientine and Faliscan territory. Booty of men and cattle was driven off; nowhere in the fields was the enemy found, nor was any chance of fighting given; the cities, however, were not assaulted, because a pestilence fell upon the people. And seditions were sought at home, yet not stirred, by Spurius Maelius, a plebs/">tribune of the plebs, who, thinking that by the favor attached to his name he would set something in motion, had both named a day for Minucius and brought a bill for confiscating the goods of Servilius Ahala—charging that Maelius had been entrapped by Minucius with false accusations, and casting in Servilius’s teeth the slaying of an uncondemned citizen; which proved emptier before the people than even their author. But the growing violence of the disease was the greater care, and the terrors and prodigies—most of all because by frequent earthquakes the roofs in the fields were reported to be falling. And so a supplication was made by the people, the duumvirs leading the formula. A still more pestilential year thereafter, in the consulship of Gaius Iulius for the second time and Lucius Verginius, wrought so much fear and desolation in the city and the fields that not only did no one go out from Roman territory for the sake of plundering, nor had Fathers or plebs any thought of making war, but the Fidenates besides, who at first had kept to the mountains or their walls, came ravaging down into Roman territory. Then, the army of the Veientes being called in—for the Faliscans could be driven to renew the war neither by the disaster of the Romans nor by the prayers of their allies—the two peoples crossed the Anio and kept their standards not far from the Colline Gate. And so there was alarm in the fields no more than in the city. Iulius the consul deploys his forces on the rampart and the walls; by Verginius the senate is consulted in the temple of Quirinus. It is resolved that Quintus Servilius be named dictator—whose surname some hand down as Priscus, others as Structus. Verginius, delaying while he should consult his colleague, named the dictator by night with the other’s leave; the dictator names for himself as master of the horse Postumus Aebutius Helva.

The dictator orders all to be present at first light outside the Colline Gate. Whoever had strength enough to bear arms were at hand. The standards, brought out from the treasury, are carried to the dictator. While these things were doing, the enemy withdrew to higher ground. Thither the dictator comes up with a column ready for battle; and not far from Nomentum, the standards joined, he routed the Etruscan legions. He drove them thence into the city of Fidenae and surrounded it with a rampart; but the city, high and fortified, could neither be taken by ladders, nor was there any force in the siege, because grain sufficed not only for necessity but abundantly even for plenty, out of what had been carried in beforehand. So, the hope of storming it and of compelling it to surrender being alike lost, the dictator, in a place known to him for its nearness, on the rear side of the city—most neglected because by its own nature it was the safest—set about driving a mine toward the citadel. He himself, approaching the walls at the most widely separated points, the army divided into four parts so that some should relieve others at the fight, kept turning the enemy from any sense of the work by a battle continued day and night, until, the hill being tunneled through, a way was carried up into the citadel; and, while the Etruscans were intent upon empty threats away from the real danger, a hostile shout overhead showed that the city was taken. In that year Gaius Furius Paculus and Marcus Geganius Macerinus, the censors, approved the public villa in the Campus Martius, and there for the first time the census of the people was held.

That the same consuls were reelected the following year—Iulius for the third time, Verginius for the second—I find in Licinius Macer; tribune/">Valerius Antias and Quintus Tubero report Marcus Manlius and Quintus Sulpicius as consuls for that year. But, in a report so discrepant, both Tubero and Macer profess the linen books as their authorities; neither dissembles that it is handed down by the ancient writers that there were military tribunes in that year. It pleases Licinius to follow the linen books beyond doubt; Tubero is uncertain of the truth. Let this too, among the other things covered over by age, be set down as uncertain. There was alarm in Etruria after the capture of Fidenae, not the Veientes alone being terrified by the fear of a like destruction, but the Faliscans too by the memory of the war first entered upon together with them, although they had not aided them when they rebelled. Therefore, when the two states, by envoys sent round to the twelve peoples, had obtained that a council of all Etruria be proclaimed at the shrine of Voltumna, the senate, as though a great tumult were thence impending, ordered dictator/">Mamercus Aemilius to be named dictator a second time. By him Aulus Postumius Tubertus was named master of the horse; and the war was made ready with effort so much the greater than the last as there was more danger from all Etruria than there had been from the two peoples.

That affair was a good deal more peaceable than the general expectation. And so, when it had been reported by traders that aid had been refused to the Veientes, and that they had been bidden to follow through by their own strength a war begun by their own counsel, and not to seek, for adversity, allies with whom they had not shared an undamaged hope—then the dictator, lest he should have been created in vain, the matter for seeking glory in war being taken away, desiring to put forth in peace some work that should be a monument of his dictatorship, prepares to diminish the censorship, whether thinking its power too great or offended not so much by the greatness of the honor as by its long duration. And so, an assembly being called, he says that the immortal gods had taken upon themselves the conduct of the commonwealth abroad and the keeping of all things safe; that he, for what must be done within the walls, would take thought for the liberty of the Roman people. And the greatest safeguard of that liberty was, that great commands should not be of long duration, and that a limit of time should be set upon those on which no limit of right could be set. Other magistracies were yearly, the censorship of five years; it was hard to live for so many years, through a great part of life, subject to the same men. He would bring a law that the censorship should be no more than a year and a half. On the next day, with the immense consent of the people, he carried the law through, and "that you may know by the thing itself," he said, "Quirites, how little long commands please me, I abdicate the dictatorship." His own magistracy laid down, a limit imposed upon the other, he was escorted home with the congratulation and immense favor of the people. The censors, taking it ill that Mamercus had diminished a magistracy of the Roman people, moved him from his tribe and, his rating multiplied eightfold, made him an aerarian. They say that he himself bore the thing with a great spirit, looking rather to the cause of the disgrace than to the disgrace; but that the leading Fathers, although they had not wished the right of the censorship diminished, were offended by the precedent of censorian harshness, since each saw that he himself would be subject to the censors longer and oftener than he would hold the censorship: at all events so great an indignation of the people is said to have arisen that violence against the censors could be deterred by no man’s authority save Mamercus’s own.

The plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, by hindering the consular elections with unremitting contentions, when the matter had been brought almost to an interregnum, prevailed at last that military tribunes with consular power be created. There was no reward of victory in what was sought—that a plebeian be created: all the created were patricians, Marcus Fabius Vibulanus, Marcus Folius, Lucius Sergius Fidenas. A pestilence that year afforded a respite from other matters. A temple was vowed to Apollo for the people’s health. The duumvirs, out of the Books, did many things for appeasing the wrath of the gods and turning the plague from the people; yet a great calamity was suffered in the city and the fields, in a promiscuous destruction of men and cattle. Fearing famine too out of the pestilence, the tillers of the fields being entangled in disease, they sent into Etruria and the Pomptine country and to Cumae, and at last into Sicily also, for the sake of grain. Of consular elections no mention was made; military tribunes with consular power were created, all patricians, Lucius Pinarius Mamercus, Lucius Furius Medullinus, Spurius Postumius Albus. In that year the violence of the disease was lightened, nor was there danger from a scarcity of grain, because provision had been made beforehand. Counsels for setting wars afoot were stirred in the councils of the Volsci and Aequi and in Etruria at the shrine of Voltumna. There the matter was put off for a year, and it was provided by decree that no council be held before that; in vain did the Veientine people complain that the same fortune by which Fidenae had been destroyed was hanging over Veii. Meanwhile at Rome the leaders of the plebs, now long threatening in vain at the hope of a greater honor, while there was quiet abroad, proclaim gatherings in the houses of the tribunes of the plebs; there they ply their secret counsels; they complain that they are so despised by the plebs that, although for so many years military tribunes with consular power are created, never has there been to any plebeian an approach to that honor. Much had their forefathers provided who took care that no plebeian magistracy should lie open to any patrician; otherwise they would have had to have patricians as tribunes of the plebs; so cheap were they even to their own, and despised no less by the plebs than by the Fathers. Others excuse the plebs and turn the blame onto the Fathers: by their canvassing and their arts it came about that the road to honor was fenced off from the plebs; if the plebs were allowed to draw breath from their mingled prayers and threats, it would, mindful of its own, enter upon the voting, and, the aid once won, would take to itself the command also. It is resolved, for the sake of removing canvassing, that the tribunes promulgate a law that it be lawful for no one to add white to his garment for the sake of candidacy. A small matter now, and one that could scarcely seem to be dealt with in earnest, which then inflamed the Fathers and the plebs with an immense struggle. The tribunes prevailed, however, to carry the law through; and it was plain that, men’s spirits being provoked, the plebs would incline its zeal toward its own men. That these might not be free, a decree of the senate was made that consular elections be held.

The cause of the tumult was the one the Latins and Hernici had announced from the Aequi and Volsci. Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus, son of Lucius—to the same man the surname Poenus too is added—and Gnaeus Iulius Mento were made consuls; nor was the terror of war put off further. By the sacred law, which among them was the greatest force for compelling military service, a levy being held, strong armies set out from both sides and met on the Algidus, and there, the Aequi apart, the Volsci apart, fortified their camps, and the care of the leaders for fortifying and drilling the soldier was keener than ever before. The more did the messengers bring terror to Rome. It pleased the senate that a dictator be named, because, though often beaten, the peoples had nevertheless rebelled with a greater effort than ever otherwise; and a good part of the Roman youth had been carried off by disease. Before all things the perversity of the consuls, and the discord between them and their clashes in every council, were a terror. There are those who are authorities that the fighting on the Algidus went ill for these consuls, and that this was the cause of creating a dictator. This much is sufficiently agreed: that, discordant in other matters, they consented in this one thing against the Fathers’ will, not to name a dictator, until, as terrors more and more dreadful were brought one upon another and the consuls were not subject to the senate’s authority, Quintus Servilius Priscus, a man who had used the highest honors excellently, said: "You, plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, since it has come to the last extremity, the senate calls upon, that in so great a crisis of the commonwealth you compel the consuls, by virtue of your power, to name a dictator." This utterance heard, the tribunes, reckoning that an occasion of enlarging their power was offered, withdraw, and on behalf of their college pronounce: it is their pleasure that the consuls obey the senate; if against the consent of the most ample order they should hold out further, they would order them led to prison. The consuls preferred to be beaten by the tribunes rather than by the senate, declaring that the right of the supreme command had been betrayed by the Fathers, and the consulship given under the yoke to the tribunician power, if indeed the consuls could be compelled to do anything by a tribune’s power and—than which what could be more to be feared by a private man?—be even led to prison. The lot to name the dictator—for not even on that had the colleagues agreed—fell to Titus Quinctius. He named as dictator Aulus Postumius Tubertus, his own father-in-law, a man of the severest command; by him Lucius Iulius was named master of the horse. A levy is proclaimed at once, and a suspension of business, nor was anything else done in the whole city than the making ready of war. The inquiry into those exempt from the duty of service is deferred until after the war; thus the doubtful too incline to giving in their names. Soldiers are required of the Hernici and Latins too; from both sides the dictator was strenuously obeyed.

All these things were done with immense speed; and, Gnaeus Iulius the consul being left for the garrison of the city, and Lucius Iulius the master of the horse for the sudden services of the war, that nothing they should need might cause delay in the camp, the dictator, the pontifex-maximus/">pontifex maximus Aulus Cornelius leading the formula, vowed the Great Games on account of the tumult, and, setting out from the city, the army divided with Quinctius the consul, came to the enemy. As they had seen the enemy’s two camps standing a small space apart from each other, they themselves too, about a thousand paces from the enemy, took up positions for their camps, the dictator nearer Tusculum, the consul nearer Lanuvium. Thus four armies, as many entrenchments, had a plain in the middle wide enough not only for excursions to battle but even for deploying the lines on both sides. Nor, from the time the camps were brought face to face, was there any rest from light skirmishes, the dictator readily suffering his men, by matching their strength, to forecast the hope of a complete victory from the issue of the contests gradually tried. And so the enemy, no hope being left in a regular battle, attacking the consul’s camp by night, commit the matter to the chance of a doubtful issue. A shout suddenly arising roused not only the consul’s sentries, and then the whole army, but the dictator too from sleep. Where the matter needed present aid, the consul failed neither in spirit nor in counsel: part of the soldiers strengthen the stations at the gates, part ring the rampart with a circle of men. In the other camp, with the dictator, the less of tumult there was, the more is perceived what needs to be done. A relief is sent at once to the camp, over which Spurius Postumius Albus, a legate, is set: he himself, with part of the forces, by a small circuit seeks a place most apart from the tumult, whence he may fall upon the enemy unawares from the rear. He sets the legate Quintus Sulpicius over the camp; to the legate Marcus Fabius he assigns the cavalry, and bids them not move the troop before light, hard to manage amid nocturnal tumults. All that another commander, prudent and unwearied, would prescribe and do in such an affair, he prescribes and does in order: this was a singular proof of his counsel and spirit, and of no common praise—that he sent of his own accord, to assault the enemy’s camp, from which it had been ascertained that they had set out with the larger column, Marcus Geganius with picked cohorts. He, after he had fallen upon men intent on the issue of another’s danger, careless for themselves, their watches and stations neglected, all but took the camp before the enemy well knew that they were being assaulted. Then, when the signal given by smoke, as had been agreed, was seen by the dictator, he cries out that the enemy’s camp is taken, and bids it be proclaimed everywhere.

And now it was growing light, and all things were under the eye. And Fabius had charged with the cavalry, and the consul had made a sally from the camp upon the now alarmed enemy; the dictator, moreover, on the other side, having attacked the reserves and the second line, had thrown the victorious foot and horse from every quarter against the enemy as he wheeled himself about toward the discordant shouts and the sudden tumults. And so, surrounded now in the midst, they would all have paid to the last man the penalty of their rebellion, had not Vettius Messius, of the Volsci, a man more noble by his deeds than his birth, upbraiding his men, who were already forming the circle, with a clear voice said: "Are you going to offer yourselves here to the enemy’s weapons, undefended, unavenged? Why then have you arms, or why did you of your own accord bring on war—turbulent in peace, sluggish in war? What hope is there for you standing here? Or do you think that some god will protect you and snatch you hence? A way must be made with the sword. By this way, where you shall see me go before, come on—you who would see your homes, your parents, your wives, your children—follow me. It is no wall, no rampart, but armed men that bar armed men. In valor you are their equals; in necessity, which is the last and greatest of weapons, you are their betters." Having spoken thus and following out his words, they followed him with the shout renewed, and made a charge where Postumius Albus had set his cohorts; and they moved the victor, until the dictator came up as his men were already giving ground, and thither the whole battle turned. On one man, Messius, the fortune of the enemy leaned. Many wounds on both sides, much slaughter everywhere; now not even the Roman leaders fight unbloodied. Postumius alone, struck by a stone, his head broken, left the line; not the dictator, his shoulder wounded, not Fabius, his thigh all but pinned to his horse, not the consul, his arm cut, withdrew from a battle so doubtful.

Messius’s onset, through the enemy laid low by slaughter, bore him with a band of the bravest youths to the camp of the Volsci, which had not yet been taken. To the same point all the line inclines. The consul, having pursued them, scattered, right up to the rampart, assaults the camp itself and the rampart; thither the dictator too brings up his forces on another side. The assault is no less keen than the battle had been. They relate that the consul even flung a standard within the rampart, that the soldiers might press on the more fiercely, and that the first charge was made in recovering the standard. And the dictator, the rampart torn down, had now carried the battle into the camp. Then the enemy began everywhere to throw away their arms and to surrender, and, these camps too taken, the enemy, all save the senators, were sold. Part of the booty was restored to the Latins and Hernici who recognized their own; part the dictator sold under the spear; and, the consul set over the camp, he himself, riding into the city in triumph, abdicated the dictatorship. They make the memory of a distinguished dictatorship a sad one who hand down that a son was struck with the axe by Aulus Postumius, the victor, because, caught by an opportunity of fighting well, he had left his post without orders. Nor is it pleasant to believe it, and one is free, among varying opinions; and it is an argument that the commands were called Manlian, not Postumian, since he who was the earlier author of so cruel a precedent would have seized the notable title of cruelty. To Manlius too the surname Imperiosus was given; Postumius was marked by no sad note. Gnaeus Iulius the consul dedicated the temple of Apollo in his colleague’s absence, without the lot. Quinctius bore it ill, but, having dismissed the army and returned to the city, complained in the senate in vain. To a year distinguished by great events is added a thing that then seemed to pertain nothing to the Roman state: that the Carthaginians, destined to be so great enemies, then first, through the seditions of the Sicilians, crossed an army into Sicily to the aid of one party.

It was agitated in the city by the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs that military tribunes with consular power be created, nor could it be obtained. Consuls are made Lucius Papirius Crassus and Lucius Iulius. When the envoys of the Aequi had sought a treaty from the senate, and surrender was held up to them in place of a treaty, they obtained a truce of eight years: the affairs of the Volsci, on top of the disaster received on the Algidus, had turned, by a stubborn contest between the authors of peace and of war, into quarrels and seditions: on every side there was quiet for the Romans. When the consuls had got wind, through the betrayal of one of the college, of a law concerning the assessment of fines, very pleasing to the people, being made ready by the tribunes, they themselves forestalled them in bringing it. Consuls: Lucius Sergius Fidenas for the second time, Hostius Lucretius Tricipitinus. Nothing worth telling was done under these consuls. There followed them as consuls Aulus Cornelius Cossus and Titus Quinctius Poenus for the second time. The Veientes made incursions into Roman territory. There was a report that certain of the youth of the Fidenates had been sharers in that ravaging, and the inquiry into the matter was committed to Lucius Sergius and Quintus Servilius and Mamercus Aemilius. Certain men were relegated to Ostia, because it was not clear enough why during those days they had been away from Fidenae; the number of colonists was increased, and to them was assigned the land of those slain in the war. By drought there was very great suffering that year, and not only did the waters of heaven fail, but the earth too, in want of its native moisture, scarcely sufficed for the perennial streams. A failure of waters elsewhere, around the parched springs and brooks, gave a havoc of cattle dying of thirst; others were carried off by mange, and the diseases spread among men. And at first they had assailed the country folk and the slaves; then the city is filled. Nor were bodies only afflicted with wasting, but a manifold superstition, and mostly foreign, invaded their minds too, those who make a profit of men’s minds caught by superstition bringing new rites of sacrifice into their homes by prophesying, until at last a public shame reached the chief men of the state, seeing in all the streets and shrines foreign and unwonted expiations for begging the peace of the gods. The business was then given to the aediles, to see to it that no gods but Roman, nor in any other manner than the ancestral, be worshiped. The angers against the Veientes were deferred to the following year, in the consulship of Gaius Servilius Ahala and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus. Then too religion stood in the way of war’s being declared at once and armies sent: they resolved that fetials must first be sent to demand restitution. There had lately been fighting in the line with the Veientes at Nomentum and Fidenae, and from that a truce, not a peace, had been made, of which both the term had run out, and before the term they had rebelled; yet fetials were sent; nor, when by the custom of the fathers they demanded restitution under oath, were their words heard. Then there was a dispute whether war should be declared by order of the people or whether a decree of the senate were enough. The tribunes prevailed, by threatening that they would hinder the levy, that Quinctius the consul should bring the matter of the war before the people. All the centuries ordered it. In this too the plebs was the stronger, in that it carried the point that consuls should not be created for the next year.

Four military tribunes with consular power were created: Titus Quinctius Poenus, from the consulship; Gaius Furius; Marcus Postumius; Aulus Cornelius Cossus. Of these, Cossus presided over the city; three, a levy held, set out for Veii, and were a proof how useless in war is the command of several. By each one’s striving toward his own counsels, since one thing seemed best to one and another to another, they opened a place for opportunity to the enemy; for, the line wavering—some bidding the signal be given, others the retreat be sounded—the Veientes assailed it at the right moment. The camp being near, it received them disordered and turning their backs; and so more of disgrace than of disaster was suffered. The state was downcast, unaccustomed to be beaten; it hated the tribunes, demanded a dictator: on him the hope of the state was turned. And when there too religion stood in the way, that a dictator could not be named save by a consul, the augurs being consulted removed that religious scruple. Aulus Cornelius named as dictator Mamercus Aemilius, and was himself named by him master of the horse; so true is it that, the moment the fortune of the state had need of true valor, the censorian stricture availed nothing to keep the governance of affairs from being sought from a house unworthily branded. The Veientes, lifted up by their success, sending envoys round the peoples of Etruria, boasting that three Roman leaders had been routed by them in one battle, yet, when they had moved no fellowship of a public alliance, gathered volunteers from every side to the hope of plunder. The people of the Fidenates alone resolved to rebel; and, as though it were impious to begin a war except from crime, just as before with the blood of the envoys, so now with the slaughter of the new colonists their arms steeped, they join themselves to the Veientes. Then the leaders of the two peoples deliberate whether to take Veii or Fidenae as the seat of war. Fidenae seemed the more opportune; and so, the Tiber crossed, the Veientes transferred the war to Fidenae. At Rome the terror was immense. The army being summoned from Veii, and that very army shaken by the ill success, a camp is pitched before the Colline Gate, and armed men are posted on the walls, and there is a suspension of business in the Forum and the shops are closed, and all things are made liker a camp than a city,

when the dictator, heralds being sent round through the streets, upbraided the alarmed state, called to an assembly, for carrying spirits hung in suspense on movements of fortune so slight that, a small loss received—and that itself received not by the enemy’s valor nor the Roman army’s cowardice but by the discord of the commanders—they should dread to death a Veientine enemy six times beaten, and Fidenae almost more often taken than assaulted. The Romans and the enemy were the same who had been through so many generations; they bore the same spirits, the same bodily strength, the same arms. He too was the same dictator, Mamercus Aemilius, who before had routed the armies of the Veientes and Fidenates, with the Faliscans joined, at Nomentum; and the master of the horse, Aulus Cornelius, would be the same in the line who in the former war, as military tribune, when Lars Tolumnius, king of the Veientes, had been slain in the sight of two armies, brought the spolia opima into the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. Therefore, mindful that with them were triumphs, with them the spoils, with them the victory, while the enemy had the crime of envoys slain against the law of nations, the slaughter in peace of the Fidenate colonists, the truce broken, the seventh and unlucky revolt—let them take up arms. As soon as they had joined camp to camp, he had confidence enough that neither would the most criminal enemies have a lasting joy from the disgrace of the Roman army, and that the Roman people would understand how much better they had deserved of the commonwealth who had named him dictator a third time than they who, for a kingship snatched from the censorship, had set a stain on his second dictatorship. Then, vows pronounced, he set out and pitches camp fifteen hundred paces this side of Fidenae, fenced on the right by the mountains, on the left by the river Tiber. He bids the legate Titus Quinctius Poenus seize the mountains and take, unseen, that ridge which would be at the enemy’s rear. He himself, on the next day, when the Etruscans, full of spirits from the better luck of the former day rather than from a battle, had advanced into the line, having delayed a little while the scouts reported that Quinctius had got out onto the ridge near the citadel of Fidenae, brings forward his standards and leads the marshaled line of foot against the enemy at full pace; he charges the master of the horse not to begin the fight without orders—he himself, when there should be need of cavalry aid, would give the signal; then let him bear himself mindful of the kingly battle, mindful of the opima gift and of Romulus and of Jupiter Feretrius. The legions clash with an immense charge. The Roman, kindled with hatred, calling the Fidenate impious, the Veientine a brigand, the breakers of the truce, men bloody with the unspeakable slaughter of the envoys, sprinkled with the blood of his own colonists, faithless allies, unwarlike enemies, gluts his hatred at once with deeds and words.

At the very first encounter he had shaken the enemy, when suddenly, the gates of Fidenae thrown open, a new line bursts out, unheard of before that time and unseen. An immense multitude armed with fires, and all ablaze with burning torches, as though driven by a frenzied rush, hurls itself upon the enemy, and the appearance of so unwonted a battle for a little while terrified the Romans. Then the dictator, the master of the horse and the cavalry being summoned, and Quinctius too from the mountains, while rousing the battle, himself runs up to the left wing, which, liker a conflagration than a battle, had in terror given way to the flames, and with a clear voice said: "Beaten by smoke, like a swarm of bees, will you be driven from your place and yield to an unarmed enemy? Do you not put out the fires with the sword? Do you not, each man for himself, if the fight is to be with fire and not with weapons, snatch these very torches and of your own accord turn them on the foe? Come, mindful of the Roman name and of your fathers’ valor and your own, turn this conflagration upon the enemy’s city, and with its own flames destroy Fidenae, which by your benefits you could not appease. The blood of your envoys and your colonists, and your ravaged borders, warn you to this." At the dictator’s command the whole line was set in motion. The torches, part flung at them, are caught, part wrested away by force: both lines are armed with fire. The master of the horse too makes a new thing of the cavalry battle: he orders that the bridles be drawn off the horses, and himself, foremost, setting spurs, borne forward on his unbridled horse, charges into the midst of the fires, and the other horses, driven on, carry their riders against the enemy in a free career. The dust, raised and mingled with smoke, takes the light from the eyes of men and horses. That sight which had terrified the soldier terrified the horses nothing; and so wherever the cavalry had broken through, it gave a havoc like a collapse. Then a new shout arose; which, when it had turned both lines, wondering, upon itself, the dictator cries out that Quinctius the legate and his men have attacked the enemy from behind; he himself, the shout renewed, presses his standards more keenly. When two lines, two separate battles, pressed the surrounded Etruscans both from front and from rear, and there was no road of flight back into the camp nor into the mountains, whence the new enemy had set himself in the way, and the horses, free of their bridles, had carried the cavalry far and wide, the greatest part of the Veientes, pouring out, make for the Tiber, those of the Fidenates who survive head for the city of Fidenae. Their flight bears the panic-stricken into the midst of the slaughter; they are cut down on the banks; others, driven into the water, the eddies carry off; even those skilled in swimming, weariness and wounds and terror weigh down; few out of many swim across. The other column is borne through the camp into the city. The same onset hurries the pursuing Romans too, Quinctius most of all and those who had just come down with him from the mountains, the soldier freshest for toil, because he had come up at the last of the battle.

These, after they had entered the gate mingled with the enemy, get out onto the walls, and from the wall raise to their own men the signal of the captured town. When the dictator caught sight of it—for now he too had penetrated into the deserted camp of the enemy—the soldier eager to scatter to the plunder, the hope being thrown out of greater plunder in the city, he leads to the gate, and, received within the walls, makes for the citadel, whither he saw the crowd of fugitives rushing; nor was the slaughter in the city less than in the battle, until, their arms thrown away, seeking nothing but their lives, they surrender to the dictator. The city and the camp are plundered. On the next day, single captives being drawn by lot for each horseman and centurion, and, for those whose valor had been outstanding, two apiece, the rest sold under the wreath, the dictator led back to Rome in triumph his victorious army, rich with booty; and, the master of the horse being bidden to abdicate his magistracy, he himself then abdicates, on the sixteenth day restoring in peace the command which he had received in war and in alarming circumstances. That there was fighting with a fleet too, at Fidenae, against the Veientes, certain men have set down in their annals—a thing as difficult as it is incredible, the river being neither now wide enough for this and then somewhat narrower, as we have received from the ancients—unless perhaps, in hindering the crossing of the river, they magnified, as happens, the clash of a few ships and grasped at the empty title of a naval victory.

The following year had as military tribunes with consular power Aulus Sempronius Atratinus, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, Lucius Furius Medullinus, Lucius Horatius Barbatus. To the Veientes a truce of twenty years was granted, and to the Aequi of three, when they had sought one of more years; and there was quiet from urban seditions. The following year, distinguished neither by war abroad nor by sedition at home, the games vowed during the war made famous, both by the apparatus of the military tribunes and by the concourse of the neighbors. The tribunes with consular power were Appius Claudius Crassus, Spurius Nautius Rutulus, Lucius Sergius Fidenas, Sextus Iulius Iulus. The spectacle was the more pleasing to the strangers by the courtesy too of their hosts, to which they had agreed publicly. After the games there were seditious harangues of the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, chiding the multitude because, in admiration of those whom it hated, it held itself dazed in everlasting slavery, and not only dared not aspire to recalling to its share the hope of the consulship, but did not, even in creating military tribunes—elections common to Fathers and plebs—remember itself or its own. Let it cease, then, to wonder why no one acted on behalf of the plebs’s advantages; labor and danger were spent where reward and honor were hoped for; there was nothing men would not attempt, if great rewards were set before great undertakings; but that any tribune of the plebs should rush blindly into contests with immense danger and no fruit, from which he held it for certain that the Fathers, against whom he should strive, would pursue him with an inexpiable war, and that among the plebs, for which he had fought, he would be in no way the more honored—this was neither to be hoped nor demanded. Great spirits are made by great honors. No plebeian would he despise, when they had ceased to be despised. The thing must at last be tried in one man or another, whether there were any plebeian capable of bearing a great honor, or whether it were like a portent and a miracle that any brave and vigorous man should arise sprung from the plebs. With the utmost force it had been wrested out that military tribunes with consular power should be created from the plebs too. Men tried at home and in war had stood for it; in the first years they had been jeered at, rejected, a laughingstock to the Fathers; at last they had ceased to offer their faces to insult. Nor did he see why the law too should not be repealed, by which that was allowed which would never be; for there would be less shame in the inequity of the right than if through their own unworthiness they were passed over.

Orations of this sort, heard with assent, spurred certain men to seek the military tribunate, each professing that in his magistracy he would bring some measure for the plebs’s advantage. Hopes were held out of dividing the public land and leading out colonies, and, a tax laid on the holders of the lands, of paying out from it the money for the soldiers’ stipend. Then a time was seized by the military tribunes, when, through the dispersal of men from the city—the Fathers having been recalled by a secret summons to a fixed day—a decree of the senate might be made, in the absence of the tribunes of the plebs, that, since it was rumored that the Volsci had gone out to plunder into the lands of the Hernici, the military tribunes should set out to inspect the matter, and that consular elections be held. Setting out, they leave Appius Claudius, son of the decemvir, as prefect of the city—a vigorous young man, and from his very cradle imbued with hatred of the tribunes and the plebs. The tribunes of the plebs had nothing they could contend, neither with those who, being absent, had made the decree of the senate, nor with Appius, the matter being already done.

Created consuls were Gaius Sempronius Atratinus and Quintus Fabius Vibulanus. A foreign event, but worth recording, is handed down to have been done that year: that Volturnum, a city of the Etruscans, which is now Capua, was taken by the Samnites, and was called Capua either from their leader Capys or—what is nearer the truth—from the level country. They took it, moreover, the Etruscans being first worn out by war, after being received into a fellowship of city and lands, and then, on a festal day, the new colonists assailing the old inhabitants, heavy with sleep and feasting, in a nocturnal slaughter. These things done, those consuls whom we have named entered upon their magistracy on the Ides of December. Now not only had those who had been sent for that purpose reported that a Volscian war was impending, but envoys too from the Latins and Hernici announced that never before had the Volsci been more intent either on choosing leaders or on enrolling an army; that everywhere there was a murmur that either arms and war must be given over to oblivion forever and the yoke accepted, or with those with whom the struggle for empire was waged they must yield neither in valor nor in endurance nor in military discipline. They brought no empty tidings; but the Fathers were not correspondingly moved, and Gaius Sempronius, to whom that province fell by lot, relying as on the most steadfast of things on fortune, because he was the leader of a victorious people against the vanquished, did all things rashly and negligently, so much so that there was more of Roman discipline in the Volscian army than in the Roman. And so fortune, as often elsewhere, followed valor. In the first battle, which was joined by Sempronius incautiously and unadvisedly, the clash was made with the line not strengthened by reserves, nor the cavalry aptly placed. The shout was the first sign of which way the matter would incline, raised more eager and more frequent from the enemy; from the Romans discordant, unequal, oftener repeated more sluggishly, it betrayed the panic of their spirits. The fiercer for that, the enemy, borne in, presses with his shields and flashes his swords. On the other side the helmets nod, as the men look about them, and the wavering crowd in alarm; the standards now, standing fast, are deserted by their front-rank men, now are received back among their own maniples. Not yet was the flight certain, not yet the victory; the Roman was sheltering himself rather than fighting; the Volscian bore his standards on, pressed the line, saw more of slaughter of the enemy than of flight.

Now ground was being given on all sides, in vain did Sempronius the consul chide and exhort. Neither command nor majesty availed at all, and their backs would soon have been turned to the enemy, had not Sextus Tempanius, a decurion of cavalry, the matter now tottering, come to the rescue with present spirit. He, when with a great voice he had cried out that the horsemen who wished the commonwealth to be safe should leap down from their horses, the horsemen of all the squadrons being moved as though at the consul’s command, said: "Unless this shielded band stops the enemy’s charge, it is all over with the command. Follow my lance-point in place of a standard; show Romans and Volsci that, as horsemen, no horsemen are your match, nor, as footmen, any footmen." When the exhortation had been approved with a shout, he advances, bearing his lance high. Wherever they go, they make a way by force; thither they thrust themselves, their shields set against the foe, where they see the greatest distress of their own men. The battle is restored in all the places to which their charge bore them; nor was there any doubt but that, if so few could attend to all things at once, the enemy would have turned their backs.

And when now they were withstood in no part, the Volscian commander gives the signal that to the shielded ones, this new cohort of the enemy, room be given, until, borne on by their charge, they be cut off from their own. When this was done, the horsemen, intercepted, were unable to break back through by the same way they had crossed, the enemy being most thickly massed there where they had made the way; and the consul and the Roman legions, when they nowhere saw what had just been the cover of the whole army, lest the enemy crush so many bravest men cut off, push on into whatever chance might come. The Volsci, divided, on this side withstand the consul and the legions, on the other front press Tempanius and the horsemen; who, when often, having tried, they had been unable to break through to their own, having seized a certain hillock, defended themselves in a ring, by no means unavenged; nor was there an end of the battle before night. The consul too, the contest nowhere slackened, held the enemy while any of the daylight was left. Night parted the uncertain combatants; and so great a panic, from their ignorance of the outcome, held both camps that, leaving their wounded and a great part of their baggage, both armies, as though beaten, withdrew to the nearest mountains. The hillock, however, was beset beyond midnight; to which, when it had been reported to the besiegers that the camp was deserted, thinking their own side beaten, they too fled, wherever in the darkness panic carried each man. Tempanius, for fear of an ambush, held his men until light. Then, having himself gone off with a few to reconnoiter, when by questioning the wounded enemy he had found that the camp of the Volsci was deserted, glad, he calls his men down from the hillock and penetrates into the Roman camp. There, when he had found all things waste and deserted and the same foulness as among the enemy, before the discovered error should bring the Volsci back, leading with him such of the wounded as he could, ignorant which region the consul had made for, he heads for the city by the nearest roads.

Now the report of the unsuccessful battle and the deserted camp had been carried thither, and before all things the horsemen had been mourned, with grief no more private than public; and Fabius the consul, terror being thrown over the city too, was keeping a station before the gates, when the horsemen, seen afar—not without terror, from doubt as to who they might be—then recognized, made so great a joy out of fear that a shout swept through the city of men giving thanks that the horsemen had returned safe and victorious; and out of the houses but a little before in mourning, which had cried the death-cry for their own, men ran out into the streets, and the trembling mothers and wives, forgetting decorum for joy, rushed to meet the column, each pouring herself out, in body and mind alike, upon her own, scarcely mistress of herself for gladness. To the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs who had named a day for Marcus Postumius and Titus Quinctius, because by their doing the fighting at Veii had gone ill, an occasion seemed offered, through the fresh hatred of Sempronius the consul, of renewing the odium against them. And so, an assembly being called, when they had cried out that the commonwealth had been betrayed at Veii by its leaders, then betrayed—because that had gone unpunished for those men—the army among the Volsci by the consul, that the bravest horsemen had been handed over to slaughter, the camp foully deserted, Gaius Iunius, one of the tribunes, bade the horseman Tempanius be summoned, and to his face said: "Sextus Tempanius, I ask of you whether you judge that Gaius Sempronius the consul either entered the battle in good time, or strengthened the line with reserves, or performed any duty of a good consul; and whether you yourself, the Roman legions beaten, by your own counsel led the horseman down to foot and restored the battle; then, you and the horsemen being cut off from our line, whether either the consul himself came to your aid or sent a guard; on the next day, finally, whether you had any guard anywhere, or whether you and your cohort broke through into your camp by valor; whether you found any consul in the camp, any army, or a deserted camp and abandoned wounded soldiers. These things, in keeping with your valor and good faith, by which alone the commonwealth stood in this war, you must tell today: finally, where is Gaius Sempronius, where are our legions; were you deserted, or did you desert the consul and the army; were we, in the end, beaten, or did we conquer?"

Against these things the speech of Tempanius is said to have been unpolished, but soldierly and weighty, puffed up neither with its own praises nor glad at another’s blame: how great prudence in warfare there was in Gaius Sempronius was not for a soldier to estimate of his commander, but had been the Roman people’s, when at the elections it chose him consul. And so let them not require of him a commander’s counsels or a consul’s arts, which even to weigh demanded great spirits and talents; but what he had seen he could report. Now he had seen, before he was cut off from the line, the consul fighting in the front rank, exhorting, moving among the Roman standards and the enemy’s weapons. Afterward, carried off from the sight of his own men, he had yet perceived, from the din and shout, that the contest was drawn out until night; nor did he believe that a way could have been broken through to the hillock which he himself had held, for the multitude of the enemy. Where the army was, he did not know; he supposed that, just as he himself in the alarming crisis had protected himself and his men by the defense of the ground, so the consul, for the sake of saving the army, had taken safer ground for his camp; nor did he believe that the affairs of the Volsci were better than the Roman people’s; that fortune and the night had filled all things with mutual error. And then, begging that they not hold him, worn out with toil and wounds, he was dismissed with immense praise no less of his self-restraint than of his valor. While these things were doing, the consul was already on the Labican road at the shrine of Quies. Thither, wagons and other beasts of burden being sent from the city, they received the army worn out by battle and by the night march. A little after, the consul entered the city, no more earnestly removing the blame from himself than extolling Tempanius with deserved praises. To a state downcast by the ill-managed affair and angry at its leaders, Marcus Postumius was set up as defendant, who had been military tribune with consular power at Veii, and is condemned in ten thousand asses of heavy bronze. His colleague Titus Quinctius—because both among the Volsci as consul under the auspices of the dictator Postumius Tubertus, and at Fidenae as legate of the other dictator Mamercus Aemilius, he had managed affairs prosperously, and was transferring the whole blame of that time onto his pre-condemned colleague—all the tribes acquitted. It is said that the memory of his father Cincinnatus, a venerable man, profited him, and Capitolinus Quinctius, now of spent age, suppliantly praying that they not suffer him, in the brief remaining span of his life, to carry so sad a message to Cincinnatus.

The plebs made tribunes of the plebs, in their absence, Sextus Tempanius, Marcus Asellius, Tiberius Antistius, Tiberius Spurillius, whom the horsemen, at Tempanius’s instance, had also set over themselves in place of centurions. The senate, since through hatred of Sempronius the consular name gave offense, ordered military tribunes with consular power to be created. Created were Lucius Manlius Capitolinus, Quintus Antonius Merenda, Lucius Papirius Mugillanus. At the very beginning of the year Lucius Hortensius, tribune of the plebs, named a day for Gaius Sempronius, the consul of the previous year. When his four colleagues, the Roman people looking on, begged him not to harass their commander, a guiltless man, in whom nothing but fortune could be blamed, Hortensius bore it ill, believing it to be a trial of his perseverance, and that the defendant trusted not in the prayers of the tribunes, which were flung out for show only, but in their aid. And so, now turning to him, he asked where that patrician spirit was, where the mind supported and confident in its innocence; under the tribunician shade a consular man had skulked; now, to the colleagues: "And you, if I carry the defendant through, what will you do? Will you snatch its right from the people and overturn the tribunician power?" When they said that both over Sempronius and over all the supreme power was the Roman people’s, and that they neither wished nor were able to take away the people’s judgment, but that, if their prayers for their commander, who was to them in a parent’s place, had not availed, they would change their garb along with him, then Hortensius said: "The Roman plebs shall not see its tribunes in mourning. Gaius Sempronius I detain no longer, since he has achieved this in his command—to be so dear to his soldiers." Nor was the dutifulness of the four tribunes more pleasing, equally to plebs and Fathers, than Hortensius’s temper, so placable to just prayers. Fortune did not longer indulge the Aequi, who had embraced the ambiguous victory of the Volsci as their own.

In the next year, in the consulship of Numerius Fabius Vibulanus and Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, son of Capitolinus, under the leadership of Fabius, to whom that province had fallen by lot, nothing worth recording was done; when the Aequi had only shown an alarmed line, they are routed in shameful flight, with no great glory to the consul. And so a triumph was refused; but, on account of the disgrace of the Sempronian disaster lightened, it was granted that he should enter the city in ovation. As the war had been finished with less fighting than they had feared, so in the city, out of tranquillity, an unlooked-for mass of discords arose between plebs and Fathers, begun from the doubling of the number of the quaestors. This matter—that, besides the two urban quaestors, two others be created who should be at hand to the consuls for the services of war—being brought by the consuls, when the Fathers too had approved it with the utmost effort, the tribunes of the plebs brought on a struggle, that a part of the quaestors—for up to that time patricians had been created—be made from the plebs. Against which proceeding at first both consuls and Fathers strove with the utmost effort, then, conceding that, just as in creating tribunes with consular power, so in the quaestors the people’s choice should be free; when they made too little progress, they drop the whole matter of increasing the number of the quaestors. The tribunes take up what was dropped, and other seditious proceedings arise thereupon, among them that of an agrarian law; on account of which commotions, since the senate preferred consuls to be created rather than tribunes, and a decree of the senate could not be made because of the tribunician vetoes, the commonwealth passes from consuls to an interregnum—and that itself not without an immense struggle, for the tribunes hindered the patricians from coming together. When the greater part of the following year had been drawn out, through new tribunes of the plebs and several interreges, in contests—now the tribunes hindering the patricians from coming together to name an interrex, now interrupting the interrex, that he not make a decree of the senate concerning consular elections—at last Lucius Papirius Mugillanus, named interrex, chiding now the Fathers, now the tribunes of the plebs, recalled that the commonwealth, deserted and abandoned by men, was upheld by the providence and care of the gods, and stood by the Veientine truce and the hesitation of the Aequi. From which quarter, if any terror should sound, was it their pleasure that the commonwealth be crushed without a patrician magistrate? that there be no army, no leader to enroll an army? Or would they ward off a foreign war by an intestine one? And if these should come together into one, scarcely by the resources of the gods could the Roman state be kept from being overwhelmed. Why did they not rather, each remitting something of the sum of his right, couple concord on a middle ground—the Fathers by suffering military tribunes to be made in place of consuls, the tribunes of the plebs by not vetoing, so that four quaestors should be made indifferently from plebs and Fathers by the people’s free vote?

First the tribunician elections were held. Created tribunes with consular power were all patricians, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus for the third time, Lucius Furius Medullinus for the second, Marcus Manlius, Aulus Sempronius Atratinus. This tribune holding the quaestors’ elections, and among several plebeian candidates the son of Antistius the plebs/">tribune of the plebs, and the brother of another tribune of the plebs, Sextus Pompilius, seeking office, neither the power nor the canvassing of these availed to keep the people from preferring in nobility those whose fathers and grandfathers they had seen as consuls. All the tribunes of the plebs raged, before all Pompilius and Antistius, kindled by the rejection of their own. What in the world was this? Not by their own benefits, not by the Fathers’ wrongs, not finally by the desire of exercising a right—when that was now allowed which before had not been allowed—had anyone of the plebs been made, not a military tribune, nor even a quaestor. The prayers of a father for a son, of a brother for a brother, of tribunes of the plebs, of a sacrosanct power created for the aid of liberty, had not availed. There was surely fraud in the matter, and Aulus Sempronius had brought more art than good faith to the elections. By his wrong they complained that their own had been cast down from honor. And so, since an attack could not be made on the man himself, safe both in his innocence and in the magistracy he then held, they turned their angers onto Gaius Sempronius, the cousin of Atratinus, and named a day for him, with his colleague Marcus Canuleius as helper, on account of the disgrace of the Volscian war. Forthwith mention was brought by the same tribunes in the senate of dividing the lands, an action which Gaius Sempronius had always most keenly withstood, reckoning—which was the case—that either, the cause laid down, he would be a lighter defendant before the Fathers, or, persevering, he would offend the plebs about the time of the trial. He chose rather to be exposed to hostile odium and to harm his own cause than to fail the public one, and stood in the same opinion, that no largesse should be made which would turn to the favor of the three tribunes; nor was land now being sought for the plebs, but odium for himself; he too would undergo that storm with a brave spirit; nor ought the senate to hold him or any other citizen so dear that, in sparing one, a public evil be done. With spirit nothing the more abased, when the day came, his cause pleaded by himself for himself, the Fathers having tried everything in vain to soften the plebs, he is condemned in fifteen thousand asses. In the same year Postumia, a Vestal virgin, pleaded her cause on a charge of incest—guiltless of the crime, but not far enough removed from suspicion on account of a dress too elegant and a wit freer than becomes a virgin. She, the case adjourned and then acquitted, by the sentence of the college pontifex-maximus/">the pontifex maximus bade abstain from jests and be cultivated holily rather than smartly. In the same year Cumae, which the Greeks then held as a city, is taken by the Campanians. The following year had as military tribunes with consular power Agrippa Menenius Lanatus, Publius Lucretius Tricipitinus, Spurius Nautius Rutulus,

a year distinguished, by the good fortune of the Roman people, by an immense peril rather than by a disaster. The slaves conspired to set fire to the city in places far apart, and, the people being intent on bearing aid everywhere to the roofs, to seize, armed, the citadel and the Capitol. Jupiter turned aside the abominable designs, and, on the information of two, the guilty being arrested, paid the penalty. To the informers ten thousand of heavy bronze apiece, which were then accounted riches, were counted out from the treasury, and liberty was their reward. Thereupon war began to be renewed by the Aequi; and that new enemies, the Labicani, were joining their counsels with the old, was brought to Rome on no uncertain authority. The state had now grown accustomed to the arms of the Aequi as though to a yearly thing; envoys sent to Labici, when they had brought back doubtful answers from there, by which it appeared that neither was war then being prepared nor would the peace be lasting, the business was given to the Tusculans to turn their minds to it, that no new tumult arise at Labici. To the military tribunes with consular power of the following year, their magistracy entered upon, envoys came from Tusculum—the tribunes being Lucius Sergius Fidenas, Marcus Papirius Mugillanus, and Gaius Servilius, son of that Priscus under whom as dictator Fidenae had been taken. The envoys announced that the Labicani had taken up arms and, with the army of the Aequi, having ravaged the Tusculan territory, had pitched camp on the Algidus. Then war was declared on the Labicani; and, a decree of the senate being made that two of the tribunes should set out for the war, one care for affairs at Rome, a contest suddenly arose among the tribunes; each held himself the better leader for the war, and spurned the care of the city as thankless and inglorious. When the Fathers, wondering, beheld a contest unseemly between colleagues, Quintus Servilius said: "Since there is no reverence either for this order or for the commonwealth, a father’s majesty shall settle that wrangling of yours. My son shall preside over the city without the lot. As for the war, may those who seek it wage it more considerately and concordantly than they desire."

It pleased them that the levy be held not from the whole people indiscriminately; ten tribes were drawn by lot; from these the younger men enrolled, the two tribunes led to the war. The contests begun between them in the city, from the same lust for command, were kindled much more intensely in the camp: they felt nothing alike, fought for their own opinion, wished their own counsels, their own commands alone, to be ratified, despised in turn and were despised, until, the legates chiding them, it was at last so arranged that they should hold the supreme command on alternate days. When these things had been brought to Rome, Quintus Servilius, taught by age and experience, is said to have prayed the immortal gods that the discord of the tribunes be not more ruinous to the commonwealth than it had been at Veii, and, as though a disaster, hardly to be doubted, were impending, to have pressed his son to enroll soldiers and prepare arms. Nor was he a false prophet. For under the leadership of Lucius Sergius, whose day of command it was, on unfavorable ground beneath the enemy’s camp—since, because the enemy in feigned fear had withdrawn to his rampart, a vain hope of storming the camp had drawn them thither—by a sudden charge of the Aequi they were routed down the sloping valley, and many were crushed and cut down in a collapse greater than a flight; and the camp, that day scarcely held, on the next day, the enemy now poured round it for the most part, is deserted in shameful flight by the rear gate. The leaders and legates, and what of the strength of the army was about the standards, made for Tusculum; the rest, straggling here and there over the fields by many roads, hastened to Rome, messengers of a greater disaster than had been received. There was the less alarm because the outcome had agreed with men’s fear, and because the reserves to look back to in an alarming crisis had been prepared beforehand by the military tribune. And by the order of the same man, the tumult in the city being quieted by the minor magistrates, scouts sent in haste announced that the leaders and the army were at Tusculum, and that the enemy had not moved his camp from its place. And—what gave the most of spirit—a dictator was named by decree of the senate, Quintus Servilius Priscus, a man whose foresight in the commonwealth the state had tried before, in many other storms, and now in the outcome of this war, which to him alone the contest of the tribunes had been suspect before the affair went ill. The master of the horse created being him by whom, as military tribune, he himself the dictator had been named—his own son, as some have handed down; for others write that Ahala Servilius was master of the horse in that year—with a new army he set out for the war, and, summoning those who were at Tusculum, took up ground for his camp two miles from the enemy.

There had passed over, from the success, the pride and negligence to the Aequi which had been in the Roman leaders. And so at the very first battle, when the dictator, the cavalry sent in, had disordered the enemy’s front-rank men, he bade the standards of the legions then be borne on in haste, and slew one of his own standard-bearers who hung back. So great was the ardor for fighting that the Aequi did not bear the charge; and, beaten in the line, when in scattered flight they had made for their camp, the assault of the camp was shorter in time and less in struggle than the battle had been. The camp taken and plundered, when the dictator had granted the booty to the soldier, and the cavalry, having followed the enemy fleeing from the camp, had reported that all the Labicani were beaten and that a great part of the Aequi had fled to Labici, on the next day the army was led to Labici, and the town, a ring thrown around it, was taken by ladders and plundered. The dictator, his victorious army led back to Rome, on the eighth day after he had been created, abdicated his magistracy; and opportunely the senate, before the agrarian seditions should be stirred by the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, mention being brought of dividing the Labican land, voted in a full house that a colony be led out to Labici. Fifteen hundred colonists sent from the city received two iugera apiece. Labici being taken, and then, the military tribunes with consular power being Agrippa Menenius Lanatus and Gaius Servilius Structus and Publius Lucretius Tricipitinus—all these for the second time—and Spurius Rutilius Crassus, and in the following year Aulus Sempronius Atratinus for the third time, and two for the second, Marcus Papirius Mugillanus and Spurius Nautius Rutulus—for two years foreign affairs were tranquil, and there was discord at home over the agrarian laws.

The troublers of the crowd were Spurius Maecilius for the fourth time and Marcus Metilius for the third, plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, both created in their absence. When these had promulgated a bill that the land taken from the enemy be divided man by man, and by that plebiscite the fortunes of a great part of the nobility would be confiscated—for scarcely any land, as in a city set on another’s soil, had not been won by arms, nor did any that had been sold or assigned publicly belong to any but the plebs—a fierce contest seemed set before plebs and Fathers. Nor did the military tribunes, now in the senate, now in private councils of the leading men gathered, find a way of counsel, when Appius Claudius, grandson of him who had been decemvir for writing the laws, the youngest in birth of the council of the Fathers, is said to have said that he brought from home an old and family counsel; for his great-grandfather Appius Claudius had shown the Fathers one way of dissolving the tribunician power, through the veto of colleagues. New men were easily led off from their opinion by the authority of the leaders, if a speech were applied mindful sometimes of the times rather than of majesty. Their spirits were according to their fortune; when they saw that the leaders, their colleagues, had forestalled all the favor of carrying the measure with the plebs, and that no room was left in it for themselves, they would, not grudgingly, incline toward the senate’s cause, by which they might conciliate to themselves both the whole order and the chief of the Fathers. With all approving, and before all Quintus Servilius Priscus, commending the youth because he had not degenerated from the Claudian stock, the business is given that each induce to the veto whom he could from the college of the tribunes. The senate dismissed, the tribunes are buttonholed by the leaders. By persuading, warning, and promising that it would be pleasing privately to each, pleasing to the whole senate, they got six ready for the veto. And on the next day, when by arrangement it had been brought before the senate concerning the sedition which Maecilius and Metilius were stirring by a largesse of the worst precedent, such speeches were made by the chief of the Fathers that each said for himself that now neither did counsel suffice him, nor did he discern any other help anywhere save in the tribunician aid; into the protection of that power the surrounded commonwealth, like a helpless private man, took refuge; it was a glorious thing for them and for their power that there was in the tribunate more strength for resisting wicked colleagues than for harassing the senate and stirring the discord of the orders. Then a murmur of the whole senate arose, when the tribunes were appealed to by all the Fathers of the curia. Then, silence made, those who had been prepared by the favor of the leaders show that they will veto whatever bill, promulgated by their colleagues, the senate should judge to be for the dissolving of the commonwealth. Thanks were given to the vetoers by the senate. The bringers of the bill, an assembly called, calling them betrayers of the plebs’s advantages and slaves of the consulars, and inveighing in other fierce speech against their colleagues, laid down the action.

The following year would have had two wars, in which Publius Cornelius Cossus, Gaius Valerius Potitus, Quintus Quinctius Cincinnatus, and Numerius Fabius Vibulanus were military tribunes with consular power, had not religion deferred the Veientine war—the lands of those leaders the Tiber, poured out over its banks, devastated, most of all by the collapse of their farm-buildings. At the same time the disaster received three years before kept the Aequi from bringing aid to the Bolani, a people of their own race. Incursions had thence been made into the neighboring Labican territory, and war brought on the new colonists. This injury, when they had hoped to defend it by the consent of all the Aequi, deserted by their own, in a war not even memorable, by a siege and one slight battle they lost both their town and their territory. An attempt by Lucius Decius, a plebs/">tribune of the plebs, to bring a bill that colonists be sent to Bolae too, just as to Labici, was broken up by the veto of his colleagues, who showed that they would suffer no plebiscite to be carried through save by the authority of the senate. Bolae being recovered the following year, the Aequi, a colony led out thither, strengthened the town with new forces, the military tribunes with consular power at Rome being Gnaeus Cornelius Cossus, Lucius Valerius Potitus, Quintus Fabius Vibulanus for the second time, and Marcus Postumius Regillensis. To this last the war against the Aequi was committed—a man of a crooked mind, which, however, the victory showed more than the war. For, an army briskly enrolled and led to Bolae, when by light battles he had broken the spirits of the Aequi, at last he burst into the town. Then he turned the contest from the enemy onto the citizens, and, when during the assault he had proclaimed that the plunder should be the soldier’s, on the town’s being taken he changed his faith. I am the more led to believe that this was the cause of anger to the army than that in a city lately plundered and a new colony there was less of plunder than the tribune’s proclamation. This anger was increased, after he, summoned by his colleagues on account of the tribunician seditions, returned to the city, by a saying of his heard in the assembly, stupid and well-nigh frantic, by which, when Marcus Sextius, a tribune of the plebs, was bringing an agrarian law, saying at the same time that he would bring one that colonists be sent to Bolae too—for it was fitting that the city and the territory of Bolae belong to those who had taken them by arms—"ill, indeed, shall it go with my soldiers," he said, "unless they keep quiet." Which, heard, offended the assembly no more than soon the Fathers. And the tribune of the plebs, a keen man and not without eloquence, having found among his adversaries a haughty temper and an unbridled tongue, which by irritating and goading he might drive into such utterances as would be a source of odium not to the man himself only but to the cause and the whole order, drew no one of the college of the military tribunes oftener than Postumius into the dispute. Then indeed, after so savage and inhuman a saying, "Do you hear, Quirites," he said, "one threatening his soldiers with a beating as though they were slaves? Yet will this beast seem to you worthier of so great an honor than those who present you with city and lands and send you into colonies, who provide a seat for your old age, who fight to the end for your advantages against adversaries so cruel and haughty? Begin then to wonder why few now take up your cause. What should they hope from you? The honors, which you give to your adversaries rather than to the champions of the Roman people? You groaned just now at hearing this man’s voice. What does that matter? Even now, if the vote were given, you would prefer this man, who threatens you with a beating, to those who wish to make firm your fields and seats and fortunes."

This saying of Postumius, carried to the soldiers, stirred a much greater indignation in the camp: was the interceptor and defrauder of their plunder to threaten the soldiers with a beating besides? And so, when the murmur was open, and the quaestor Publius Sextius thought that the sedition could be checked by the same violence by which it had been stirred, a lictor being sent to a certain soldier who was shouting, when from that a clamor and quarrel arose, struck by a stone he withdraws from the crowd, the man who had wounded him crying out besides that the quaestor had what the commander had threatened the soldiers with. Postumius, summoned to this tumult, made everything harsher by bitter inquiries and cruel punishments. At last, when he set no limit to his anger, at the outcry of those whom he had ordered to be killed under the hurdle, a concourse being made, he himself, frantic, ran down from the tribunal against those who were interrupting the punishment. There, when the lictors and centurions, clearing the way everywhere, were harassing the crowd, indignation burst out so far that the military plebs/">tribune was overwhelmed by his own army with stones. When so atrocious a deed had been announced at Rome, the military tribunes decreeing inquiries through the senate into their colleague’s death, the tribunes of the plebs interposed their veto. But that contention hung from another struggle, in that a care had come upon the Fathers lest, for fear of the inquiries and in anger, the plebs should create military tribunes from the plebs, and they strove with the utmost effort that consuls be created. When the tribunes of the plebs would not suffer a decree of the senate to be made, and the same men vetoed the consular elections, the matter returned to an interregnum. Then the victory was with the Fathers.

Quintus Fabius Vibulanus, the interrex, holding the elections, consuls were created, Aulus Cornelius Cossus and Lucius Furius Medullinus. Under these consuls, at the beginning of the year, a decree of the senate was made that the tribunes should, at the first possible time, bring before the plebs the matter of the inquiry into the Postumian slaying, and that the plebs should set over the inquiry whom it would. By the plebs, with the people’s consent, the business is committed to the consuls; who, with the utmost moderation and lenity, the matter transacted through the punishment of a few—who were sufficiently believed to have inflicted death on themselves—were nevertheless unable to bring it about that the plebs did not bear it most ill: that proceedings brought concerning their own advantages lay so long without effect, while meanwhile a law brought concerning their own blood and punishment was at once enforced and had so great force. The most fitting time would have been, the seditions being avenged, to throw out a soothing of their spirits in the division of the Bolan land—which done, they would have lessened the longing for the agrarian law that was driving the Fathers from the public land held by wrong; at that time this very indignity galled their spirits: that the nobility was stubborn not only in retaining the public lands which it held by force, but would not even divide among the plebs the empty land, lately taken from the enemy, soon to be, like the rest, the plunder of a few. In the same year, against the Volsci ravaging the borders of the Hernici, the legions were led by Furius the consul, and, when they had not found the enemy there, took Ferentinum, whither a great multitude of the Volsci had betaken itself. There was less plunder than they had hoped, because the Volsci, after the hope of holding it was slight, their goods carried off, abandoned the town by night; on the next day it is taken almost deserted. The town itself and its territory were given as a gift to the Hernici.

A year quiet through the moderation of the tribunes was succeeded by the plebs/">tribune of the plebs Lucius Icilius, in the consulship of Quintus Fabius Ambustus and Gaius Furius Paculus. He, when at the very beginning of the year, as though it were the appointed task of his name and family, he was stirring seditions by promulgating agrarian laws, a pestilence having arisen—more threatening, however, than destructive—turned men’s thoughts from the Forum and the public contests to home and the care of nursing their bodies; and they believe that it was less damaging than the sedition would have been. The state having got through, with the sickness of very many but very few funerals, the pestilential year was succeeded by a scarcity of crops—the tilling of the fields neglected, as mostly happens—in the consulship of Marcus Papirius Atratinus and Gaius Nautius Rutulus. And now the famine was sadder than the pestilence had been, had not the corn-supply been relieved, envoys being sent round all the peoples who dwell by the Etruscan sea and the Tiber, to buy grain. Haughtily by the Samnites who held Capua and Cumae were the envoys barred from trade, contrariwise kindly aided by the tyrants of the Sicilians; the greatest convoys the Tiber brought down, with the utmost zeal of Etruria. The consuls experienced a solitude in the ailing state, when, finding for the embassies no more than a single senator apiece, they were compelled to add two knights to each. Apart from the disease and the corn-supply, there was no intestine or foreign trouble in those two years. But when those anxieties departed, all the things by which the state was wont to be thrown into turmoil arose—discord at home, war abroad.

In the consulship of Marcus Aemilius and Gaius Valerius Potitus the Aequi were preparing war, the Volsci, though not taking up arms by public counsel, following the campaign as volunteers for hire. At the report of these enemies—for they had now crossed over into the Latin and Hernican territory—when Marcus Menenius, a plebs/">tribune of the plebs and bringer of an agrarian law, was hindering Valerius the consul as he held a levy, and by the tribune’s aid no one unwilling took the oath, suddenly it is announced that the citadel of Caruentum had been seized by the enemy. That disgrace received both made for odium against Menenius among the Fathers, and furnished the other tribunes, already beforehand prepared as vetoers of the agrarian law, a juster cause for resisting their colleague. And so, when the matter had long been drawn out through wrangling, the consuls calling gods and men to witness that whatever of disaster and disgrace from the enemy had either now been received or was threatening, the blame would rest with Menenius, who hindered the levy, Menenius on the other hand crying out that, if they would withdraw from possession of the public land unjustly held, he would make no delay to the levy, a decree being interposed, the nine tribunes ended the contest and pronounced, by the sentence of their college: that to Gaius Valerius the consul they would be a help, as he restrained, by a fine and other coercion against his colleague’s veto, those who shirked service from declining the campaign. Armed with this decree, when the consul had wrung the neck of a few who were appealing to the tribune, the rest in fear took the oath. The army led to the citadel of Caruentum, although it was hated by and hostile to the consul, briskly, at the very first arrival, those who were in the garrison being thrown down, recovers the citadel; the plunderers, slipped away from the garrison through negligence, had opened the occasion for the assault. Of plunder, from the continual ravagings, because all things had been heaped into a safe place, there was a good deal. The consul ordered the quaestors to bring it, sold under the spear, into the treasury, then proclaiming that the army should be a sharer in the plunder when it had not refused the campaign. From this the angers of the plebs and the soldiers against the consul grew. And so, when by decree of the senate he entered the city in ovation, alternating, rude verses were flung with military license, by which the consul was railed at, while the famous name of Menenius was in their praises, since at every mention of the tribune the favor of the surrounding people vied, with applause and assent, with the voices of the soldiers. And that matter cast more care upon the Fathers than the well-nigh customary wantonness of the soldiers against the consul; and, as though the honor of military tribune were not in doubt for Menenius if he should seek it, he was shut out at the consular elections.

Created consuls were Gnaeus Cornelius Cossus and Lucius Furius Medullinus for the second time. At no other time did the plebs bear it more bitterly that the tribunician elections were not entrusted to it. That grief it showed and at the same time avenged in the quaestorian elections, plebeian quaestors then for the first time created, so that, in creating four, one place was left to a patrician, Kaeso Fabius Ambustus, while three plebeians—Quintus Silius, Publius Aelius, Publius Papius—were preferred to young men of the most illustrious families. I learn that the authors of so free a vote to the people were the Icilii, three of whom, from a family most hostile to the Fathers, were created tribunes of the plebs for that year, holding out to a people most greedy for them the mass of many and great matters, when they had affirmed that they would set nothing in motion if not even in the quaestorian elections—which alone the senate had left common to plebs and Fathers—the people had spirit enough for that which they had so long wished and which by the laws was allowed. For an immense victory, therefore, the plebs accounted it, and they valued that quaestorship not by the limit of the honor itself, but the way to the consulship and to triumphs seemed laid open to new men. The Fathers on the contrary murmured, not as at honors shared but as at honors lost; they denied that, if these things were so, children ought to be reared, who, driven from their ancestors’ place and seeing others in possession of their own dignity, would be left as salii and flamens, nowhere for anything but to sacrifice on behalf of the people, without commands or powers. The spirits of both parties being provoked, when the plebs had both taken courage and had three leaders of a most famous name for the popular cause, the Fathers, seeing that all things in the quaestorian elections, where either was allowed to the plebs, would be alike, strove toward the consular elections, which were not yet common; the Icilii on the contrary said that military tribunes must be created, and that at long last honors must be imparted to the plebs.

But there was no consular proceeding by hindering which they might extort what they sought, when, with marvelous opportuneness, it is brought word that the Volsci and Aequi had gone out beyond their borders to plunder, into the Latin and Hernican territory. When, for this war, by decree of the senate the consuls begin to hold a levy, the tribunes then strenuously oppose, recalling that this fortune had been offered to themselves and the plebs. There were three, and all most keen men and now noble, as among plebeians. Two, singly, take it upon themselves by continual effort to watch one consul each; to one the harangues were given, the plebs now to be held back, now to be roused. Neither did the consuls get through the levy nor the tribunes the elections they sought. Then, fortune inclining itself to the plebs’s cause, messengers come that the citadel of Caruentum, the soldiers who were in the garrison having slipped away to plunder, the Aequi had assailed, a few of the guards of the citadel being killed; some, running back into the citadel, others, straggling in the fields, were cut down. That adverse event for the state added strength to the tribunician proceeding. For, tried in vain that they should then at last cease from hindering the war, after they yielded neither to the public storm nor to their own odium, they win out that a decree of the senate be made concerning the creating of military tribunes—on a fixed condition, however, that no account be taken of any who was tribune of the plebs that year, nor that anyone be reelected tribune of the plebs for the year, the senate beyond doubt marking out the Icilii, whom they charged with seeking the consulship as the wage of a seditious tribunate. Then the levy began to be held and the war prepared by the consent of all the orders. Whether both consuls set out for the citadel of Caruentum, or whether one stayed behind to hold the elections, the divergent authorities leave uncertain; those things are to be held for certain in which they do not disagree—that the citadel of Caruentum, after it had long been assaulted in vain, was withdrawn from, that Verrugo among the Volsci was recovered with the same army, and that ravagings and plunderings, both among the Aequi and in the Volscian territory, were made on an immense scale.

At Rome, just as the plebs’s victory lay in this, that they should hold which elections they preferred, so by the outcome of the elections the Fathers conquered; for as military tribunes with consular power, against the hope of all, three patricians were created, Gaius Iulius Iulus, Publius Cornelius Cossus, Gaius Servilius Ahala. They say an art was employed by the patricians, of which the Icilii then too accused them, that by intermixing a crowd of unworthy candidates among the worthy, they had, by disgust at the meanness of certain conspicuous ones, turned the people from the plebeians. Then the Volsci and Aequi—whether the retained citadel of Caruentum had impelled them to hope, or the lost garrison of Verrugo to anger—word is brought that they had risen to war with the utmost force; the head of affairs were the Antiates; their envoys had gone round the peoples of both races, chiding their cowardice, that, hidden within their walls, they had suffered the Romans the year before to roam ravaging in the fields and the garrison of Verrugo to be crushed. Now not only armed armies but colonies too were being sent into their borders; nor did the Romans only hold their own land divided up, but had also given Ferentinum, captured from them, as a gift to the Hernici. When their spirits were inflamed at these things, as each people was reached, the number of the younger men was enrolled. Thus the youth of all the peoples, drawn together at Antium, a camp being pitched, awaited the enemy. When these things are announced at Rome with even greater tumult than the matter warranted, the senate at once, which in alarming circumstances was the last counsel, ordered a dictator to be named. They say that Iulius and Cornelius bore this ill, and that the matter was carried through with a great struggle of spirits, when the chief of the Fathers, having complained in vain that the military tribunes were not subject to the senate’s authority, at last appealed even to the tribunes of the plebs, and cited that against the consuls too force had been restrained by that power in such a matter—the tribunes of the plebs, glad at the discord of the Fathers, said that there was in them no aid for those to whom they were not in the number of citizens, nor finally of men: if ever honors were common and the commonwealth shared, then they would take heed that no arrogance of magistrates should make the senate’s decrees void; meanwhile let the patricians, loosed from reverence for laws and magistrates, live as they would, and let the tribunes too act on their own account.

This contention, at a time least suitable, when so great a war was in hand, had seized men’s thoughts, until, when Iulius and Cornelius had long, by turns, argued that, since they were leaders fit enough for that war, it was not fair that an honor entrusted to them by the people be snatched away, then Ahala Servilius, military tribune, says that he had been silent so long, not because he had been uncertain of his opinion—for what good citizen separates his own counsels from the public ones?—but because he had preferred that his colleagues yield of their own accord to the authority of the senate rather than suffer the tribunician power to be implored against themselves. Then too, if the matter allowed, he would gladly have given them time to retreat from too stubborn an opinion; but, since the necessities of war do not wait for human counsels, the commonwealth would be of more worth to him than his colleagues’ favor, and, if the senate remained in its opinion, he would name a dictator the next night; and if anyone vetoed the decree of the senate, he would be content with the senate’s authority. By which deed, when he had borne off not undeserved praise and favor with all, a dictator being named, Publius Cornelius, and he himself created master of the horse by him, he was an example to his colleagues, and to those looking upon him, how favor and honor are sometimes more opportune for those who do not covet them. The war was not memorable. In one, and that an easy, battle the enemy were cut down at Antium; the victorious army ravaged the Volscian territory. A fort by Lake Fucinus was taken by storm, and in it three thousand men captured, the rest of the Volsci being driven within their walls and not defending their fields. The dictator, the war so waged that fortune seemed only not to have been wanting, returning to the city greater in good luck than in glory, abdicated his magistracy. The military tribunes, no mention being made of consular elections—I believe, because of anger at the dictator who had been created—proclaimed elections of military tribunes. Then indeed a graver care came upon the Fathers, since they saw the cause betrayed by their own. And so, just as in the previous year, through the most unworthy of the plebeian candidates, they had made a disgust of all, even of the worthy, so now, the chief of the Fathers being prepared by their splendor and favor for the candidacy, they obtained all the places, that there be no approach for any plebeian. Four were created, all now having held that honor: Lucius Furius Medullinus, Gaius Valerius Potitus, Numerius Fabius Vibulanus, Gaius Servilius Ahala—this last reelected, the honor continued, both for his other virtues and on account of the recent favor won by his unique moderation.

In that year, because the time of the truce with the Veientine people had run out, restitution began to be demanded through envoys and fetials. As these were coming to the border, an embassy of the Veientes met them. They asked that, before they themselves had approached the Roman senate, there be no going to Veii. It was obtained from the senate, because the Veientes were laboring under intestine discord, that restitution not be demanded from them; so far was it that out of another’s misfortune their own occasion should be sought. And among the Volsci a disaster was received, the garrison of Verrugo lost; where there was so much weight in the timing that, when the soldiers, who were there besieged by the Volsci, could have been succored, praying for aid, had haste been made, the army sent to their relief came to this—that the enemy, scattered to plunder from the fresh slaughter, were overwhelmed. The cause of the delay was not in the senate more than in the tribunes, who, because it was announced that resistance was being made with the utmost force, considered too little that by no valor is the limit of human strength surpassed. The bravest soldiers, however, were unavenged neither alive nor after death. In the following year, Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Cossus, Numerius Fabius Ambustus, and Lucius plebs/">tribune/">Valerius Potitus being military tribunes with consular power, a Veientine war was set in motion on account of the haughty answer of the Veientine senate, which, when envoys demanded restitution, ordered the reply to be given that, unless they betook themselves quickly from the city and the borders, they would give them what Lars Tolumnius had given. The Fathers, bearing this ill, decreed that the military tribunes should, at the first possible day, bring before the people the matter of declaring war on the Veientes. When this was first promulgated, the youth murmured that the war with the Volsci was not yet fought out; that just now two garrisons had been slain to the last man, the rest held with peril; that there was no year in which there was not fighting in the line; and that, as though they repented of their toil, a new war was being prepared with a neighboring and most powerful people, who would rouse all Etruria. These things, stirred of their own accord, the tribunes of the plebs further inflame; they keep saying that the greatest war for the Fathers was with the plebs; that it was on purpose harassed by service and thrown to the enemy to be butchered; that it was held far from the city and sent away, lest at home, in leisure, mindful of liberty, it should ply counsels of colonies or of public land or of the free casting of the vote. And, buttonholing the veterans, they counted each man’s campaigns and wounds and scars; what place was now whole in his body for receiving new wounds, what of blood was left that could be given for the commonwealth? When, by stirring these things at times in talk and in assemblies, they had turned the plebs from undertaking the war, the time of bringing the law is put off, which, if it were exposed to odium, it was plain would be rejected.

Meanwhile it pleased them that the military tribunes lead the army into the Volscian territory; Gnaeus Cornelius alone was left at Rome. The three tribunes, after it appeared that the Volsci had a camp in no place, nor would commit themselves to battle, departed in three directions to lay waste the borders. plebs/">tribune/">Valerius makes for Antium, Cornelius for Ecetra; wherever they advanced, they ravaged the roofs and fields far and wide, to keep the Volsci apart; Fabius, which was most sought, came to assault Anxur, without any ravaging. Anxur, which is now Tarracina, was a city sloping down toward the marshes. From that side Fabius made a show of assault; four cohorts sent round with Gaius Servilius Ahala, when they had seized the hill overhanging the city, from the higher ground, where there was no garrison, with an immense shout and tumult assailed the walls. At which tumult those who were guarding the lower city against Fabius, stupefied, gave room for the ladders to be set up, and all things were full of the enemy, and for a long time there was a merciless slaughter, alike of the fleeing and the resisting, of the armed and the unarmed. The beaten were therefore compelled, because for those giving way there was no hope, to enter the fight, when, it being suddenly proclaimed that no one but the armed should be harmed, all the remaining multitude voluntarily stripped off their arms, of whom about two thousand five hundred are taken alive. From the rest of the plunder Fabius kept the soldier away, until his colleagues should come, keeping saying that Anxur had been captured by those armies too, which had turned the rest of the Volsci from the garrison of that place. When they came, the three armies plundered the town, opulent in its old fortune; and that generosity of the commanders first conciliated the plebs to the Fathers. There was added then, by a gift of the chief men to the multitude most timely of all, that, before any mention of the plebs or the tribunes, the senate decreed that the soldier should receive his pay from the public funds, whereas before that time each had performed that duty out of his own.

Nothing is handed down to have ever been received from the plebs with so great joy. There was a running together, accordingly, to the senate-house, and the hands of those coming out were grasped, and they were truly called Fathers, the men confessing that it had been brought about that no one, on behalf of so munificent a fatherland, would, while any of his strength remained, spare his body or his blood. While the advantage pleased them, that their household estate should at least rest for the time in which their body was made over and devoted to the commonwealth, then the fact that it had been offered to them unasked, never agitated by the tribunes of the plebs, never demanded by their own talk, made the joy manifold and the gratitude for the thing the fuller. The tribunes of the plebs, alone without part in the common gladness and concord of the orders, denied that this would be as glad to the Fathers, nor as prosperous to the citizens at large, as they themselves believed; the plan had been better in first appearance than it would prove in use. For whence could that money be made up except by a tribute imposed on the people? They had therefore been generous to others out of another’s purse; nor would those whose campaigns were already served suffer, even if the rest bore it, that others should serve on a better condition than they themselves had served, and that the same men should have made the outlays for their own campaigns and make them for others’. By these words they moved part of the plebs; at last, the tribute being now imposed, the tribunes proclaimed besides that they would be a help if anyone had not contributed the tribute for the soldiers’ pay. The Fathers perseveringly protected the well-begun matter; they contributed first themselves; and, because silver was not yet coined, some, conveying heavy bronze in wagons to the treasury, made even their contribution a thing of show. When the senate had contributed with the utmost good faith according to its rating, the leaders of the plebs, friends of the nobles, by arrangement begin to contribute. When the common run of men saw these both praised by the Fathers and looked upon by men of military age as good citizens, suddenly, the tribunician aid spurned, a rivalry of contributing arose. And, the law being carried for declaring war on the Veientes, the new military tribunes with consular power led to Veii an army for the most part of volunteers.

The tribunes, moreover, were Titus Quinctius Capitolinus, Quintus Quinctius Cincinnatus, Gaius Iulius Iulus for the second time, Aulus Manlius, Lucius Furius Medullinus for the third time, Manius Aemilius Mamercus. By them Veii was first beset; at the beginning of which siege, when a council of the Etruscans had been held in full numbers at the shrine of Voltumna, it was not settled enough whether the Veientes were to be defended by the public war of the whole race. That assault was slacker the following year, part of the tribunes and the army being called off to the Volscian war. That year had as military tribunes with consular power Gaius tribune/">Valerius Potitus for the third time, Manius Sergius Fidenas, Publius Cornelius Maluginensis, Gnaeus Cornelius Cossus, Gaius Fabius Ambustus, Spurius Nautius Rutulus for the second time. With the Volsci there was fighting in the line between Ferentinum and Ecetra; for the Romans the fortune of the battle was favorable. Then Artena, a town of the Volsci, began to be besieged by the tribunes. Thereupon, during an attempted sally, the enemy being driven into the city, an occasion was given the Romans of bursting in, and all but the citadel was taken; into the citadel, fortified by nature, a knot of armed men withdrew; below the citadel many mortals were slain and captured. The citadel was then besieged; and it could neither be taken by force, because for the extent of the place it had garrison enough, nor did it give hope of surrender, all the public grain having been conveyed into the citadel before the city was taken; and there would have been a withdrawal thence in weariness, had not a slave betrayed the citadel to the Romans. By him soldiers, received up the steep place, took it; by whom, when the guards were being butchered, the rest of the multitude, overwhelmed by sudden panic, came into surrender. The citadel and the city of Artena both razed, the legions were led back from the Volsci, and all the Roman force was turned upon Veii. To the betrayer, besides liberty, the goods of two families were given as a reward; he was called Servius Romanus. There are those who believe that Artena was the Veientes’, not the Volsci’s. The thing that affords the error is that a city of the same name was between Caere and Veii; but that one the Roman kings destroyed, and it had been the Caerites’, not the Veientes’; this other of the same name was in the Volscian territory, whose destruction has been told.