With peace secured elsewhere, the Romans and the Veientes were in arms with such anger and hatred that it was plain the end was at hand for whichever should be beaten. The elections of the two peoples were held on widely different principles. The Romans increased the number of military tribunes with consular power: eight were created, as never before—Manius Aemilius Mamercus for the second time, Lucius Valerius Potitus for the third, Appius Claudius Crassus, Marcus Quinctilius Varus, Lucius Iulius Iulus, Marcus Postumius, Marcus Furius Camillus, Marcus Postumius Albinus. The Veientes, on the other hand, weary of the yearly canvassing that was sometimes a cause of discord, created a king. This gave offense to the feelings of the peoples of Etruria, by a hatred no greater of monarchy than of the king himself. He had already before been a burden to the nation by his wealth and his pride, because he had violently broken off the solemn games which it is a sacrilege to interrupt: out of anger at a rebuff—since by the vote of the twelve peoples another priest had been preferred to him—he had suddenly withdrawn the performers, a great part of whom were his own slaves, from the midst of the show. The nation, therefore, beyond all others the more given to religious observance inasmuch as it excelled in the art of practicing it, decreed that aid should be refused to the Veientes so long as they were under a king; and the report of this decree was suppressed at Veii through fear of the king, who held any man by whom such a thing was reported to be a ringleader of sedition rather than the bearer of an idle rumor. To the Romans, though things were reported quiet out of Etruria, nevertheless—because word came that the matter was being agitated in all the councils—they so built their works that the fortifications faced both ways: some turned toward the city and against the sallies of the townsmen, others with their front looking toward Etruria, to block whatever auxiliaries might perchance come from that quarter.

Since the Roman commanders placed more hope in blockade than in assault, they began even to build winter quarters—a thing new to the Roman soldier—and the plan was to carry on the war by wintering in the field. When this was brought to Rome to the tribunes of the plebs, who had now for a long while found no occasion for stirring up novelties, they sprang forward into the assembly and worked upon the feelings of the plebs, declaring again and again that this was the very thing for which pay had been established for the soldiers; that it had not escaped them that this gift would prove smeared with the poison of their enemies. The freedom of the plebs, they said, had been sold; the young men, removed forever and banished from the city and from public life, now gave way not even to winter or to the season of the year, nor visited their homes and their affairs. What did they suppose to be the reason for this continuous service? They would assuredly find no other than that nothing concerning the interests of those men—in whom lay all the strength of the plebs—might be transacted through the gathering of the young in one place. Furthermore the soldier was harassed and ground down far more sharply than the Veientes; for those passed the winter under their own roofs, guarding their city with excellent walls and a natural position, while the Roman soldier toiled at the work and the labor, buried under snow and frost, enduring under hides of leather, not laying down his arms even for the span of winter, which is the rest from all wars by land and by sea. Neither the kings, nor those haughty consuls before the tribunician power was created, nor the grim authority of a dictator, nor the overbearing decemvirs, had laid such servitude upon them as to make a service without end—that the military tribunes should play the tyrant over the Roman plebs. What would those men do as consuls or dictators, who had made the very image of a proconsulship so savage and so harsh? But this was happening not without their deserving it. There had been room for no plebeian even among eight military tribunes. In former times the patricians had been wont to fill three places with the utmost striving; now they went eight in a team to win the offices, and not even in the throng did any plebeian cling on who might, if nothing else, remind his colleagues that it was free men and citizens, not slaves, who were soldiering—men who ought at least in winter to be brought back to their homes and roofs, and at some season of the year to visit their parents and children and wives, to assert their freedom, and to create magistrates. While they cried out these things and the like, they found in Appius Claudius an adversary by no means unequal—a man left behind by his colleagues to crush the tribunician seditions, steeped from his youth in struggles with the plebs, the very man who, it has been recorded, some years before had been the author of dissolving the tribunician power through the veto of his colleagues.

He, by now not only ready of wit but practiced also by experience, delivered a speech of this kind: "If it was ever in doubt, Quirites, whether the tribunes of the plebs have always been the authors of sedition for your sake or for their own, I hold it certain that this year that doubt has ceased; and while I rejoice that an end has at last been made of your long error, I congratulate both you and, on your account, the commonwealth, that it is in your prosperity above all that this error has been removed. For is there anyone who can doubt that the tribunes of the plebs were never so offended and stirred up by any wrongs of yours—if indeed any ever existed—as by the bounty of the Fathers toward the plebs, when pay was established for the men in arms? What else do you suppose they then feared, or wish today to throw into confusion, but the concord of the orders, which they reckon to be above all the dissolving of the tribunician power? In this way, by Hercules, like dishonest craftsmen, they seek work, those who wish always that something be sick in the commonwealth, so that there may be something for whose cure they are called in by you. For do you defend the plebs or assail it? Are you the adversaries of the men in arms, or do you plead their cause? Unless perhaps you say this: ‘Whatever the Fathers do displeases us, whether it be for the plebs or against the plebs’—and just as masters forbid their slaves to have any dealing with men not their own, and think it fair that all should alike abstain from doing them either good or harm, so you interdict the Fathers from intercourse with the plebs, lest by our courtesy and our munificence we provoke the plebs, and lest the plebs be obedient and hearkening to our word. How much rather, if there were in you anything—I will not say of the citizen, but of the human being—ought you to have favored and, so far as in you lay, indulged the courtesy of the Fathers and the compliance of the plebs? And if this concord were lasting, who would not dare to pledge that this empire would shortly be the greatest among its neighbors?

"But how this counsel of my colleagues, by which they refused to withdraw the army from Veii with the work undone, was not only useful but even necessary, I shall set forth hereafter; for now I am minded to speak of the very condition of the men in arms—and this speech, if it were delivered not before you only but in the camp as well, with the army itself for judge, I think it could appear fair. In which speech, if nothing should come into my own mind to say, I should at least be content with the arguments of my opponents. Lately they denied that pay ought to be given to the soldiers, because it had never been given. How then can they now be indignant that, upon men to whom some new benefit has been added, a new labor too should be laid in proportion? Nowhere is there toil without recompense, nor commonly recompense without the outlay of toil. Labor and pleasure, most unlike in their nature, are joined to one another by a certain natural fellowship. The soldier used in former times to take it ill that he furnished his service to the commonwealth at his own cost; the same man rejoiced that for part of the year he tilled his own field, and earned the means whereby he might keep himself and his at home and in the field. Now he rejoices that the commonwealth is a source of profit to him, and gladly receives his pay; let him then bear with an even mind that he is a little longer absent from his home and his estate, on which the charge falls not heavily. And if the commonwealth should summon him to the reckoning, might it not justly say: ‘You have a year’s pay; render a year’s service. Or do you think it fair that for a half-year’s soldiering you should receive your whole stipend?’ Reluctantly, Quirites, do I linger in this part of my speech; for thus ought they to argue who employ a mercenary soldiery; but we wish to deal with you as with citizens, and we think it fair that you deal with us as with a fatherland. Either the war ought not to have been undertaken, or it ought to be waged worthily of the Roman people and brought to an end as soon as may be. And it will be brought to an end if we press the besieged, if we do not withdraw before we have set the term of our hope upon the taking of Veii. If, by Hercules, there were no other reason, the very indignity of it ought to have imposed perseverance. For ten years long a city was once besieged by all Greece for the sake of one woman—how far from home, distant by how many lands, how many seas? We within the twentieth milestone, almost within sight of our own city, are weary of enduring a single year’s siege. No doubt because the cause of war is a light one, and there is nothing of just resentment enough to spur us to persevere. Seven times have they renewed the war; in peace they were never to be trusted; a thousand times they have ravaged our fields; they forced the men of Fidenae to revolt from us; they slew our colonists there; they were the instigators of the impious slaughter of our envoys, against the law of nations; they sought to rouse all Etruria against us, and to this day they plot it; and when our envoys went to demand redress, it wanted but little that they did them violence.

"Is it with men like these that war ought to be waged softly and by delays? If so just a hatred moves us not at all, do not even these things, I beg you, move us? The city is hemmed in by huge works by which the enemy is penned within his walls; he has not tilled his field, and what was tilled has been laid waste by the war. If we lead our army back, who can doubt that they, not from the desire of vengeance alone but also from the necessity laid upon them of plundering from another’s land—having lost their own—will invade our territory? We do not, then, by that counsel put off the war, but receive it within our own borders. What of that which properly concerns the soldiers, for whom the good tribunes of the plebs wished but now to wrest away the pay, and now suddenly want their welfare consulted—what is its nature? A rampart and a ditch, each a work of vast labor, they have drawn through so great a space; forts at first few, afterward, when the army was increased, very many; fortifications looking not only toward the city but toward Etruria as well, should any aid come; and why should I speak of the towers, the sheds, the tortoises, and the rest of the apparatus for storming cities? When so much labor has been spent and the end of the work has at last been reached, do you judge that these things should be left, so that against the summer fresh sweat must be poured out anew in setting them up from the beginning? How much less it is to guard what has been made, and to press on and persevere and be done with the trouble? For the matter is brief enough, surely, if it be carried through in one continuous stretch, and we do not ourselves by these interruptions and intervals make our own hope the slower. I speak of the loss of labor and of time; what of the danger that we go to meet by deferring the war? Do these so frequent councils of Etruria about sending aid to Veii suffer us to forget them? As things now stand, they are angry, they hate, they refuse to send; so far as in them lies, Veii may be taken. Who is there who will pledge that the same temper will remain hereafter, if the war is deferred—when, if you grant a respite, a larger and more frequent embassy will go; when the very thing that now offends the Etruscans, the king created at Veii, may, with an interval interposed, be changed, either by the consent of the state, that thereby they may reconcile the feelings of Etruria, or by the will of the king himself, who would not wish his own kingship to stand in the way of his citizens’ safety? See how many things, and how unprofitable, follow that path of counsel: the loss of works made with so much labor, the devastation hanging over our borders, an Etruscan war stirred up in place of a Veientine. These, tribunes, are your counsels—not unlike, by Hercules, the act of one who, to a sick man who, had he suffered himself to be bravely cured, might forthwith recover, should bring on a long and perhaps incurable disease for the sake of present food or drink.

"If, so help me God, it bore upon this war not at all, yet it would matter very much for the discipline of soldiering to accustom our soldier not only to enjoy a victory already prepared, but, if the matter should go more slowly, to endure the tedium and to await the issue of a hope however late; and if the war be not finished in summer, to wait out the winter, and not, like the birds of summer, at the very coming of autumn to look about for shelter and retreat. I beseech you: the zeal and pleasure of hunting hurries men through snows and frosts into the mountains and the woods—shall we not bring to the necessities of war that endurance which even sport and pleasure are wont to call forth? Do we think the bodies of our soldiers so unmanned, their spirits so soft, that they cannot hold out a single winter in camp, cannot be away from home? That, as though they waged a naval war by watching for storms and observing the season of the year, they can endure neither heat nor cold? Surely they would blush, if anyone cast this in their teeth, and would contend that there is in their spirits and their bodies a manly endurance, that they can wage war alike in winter and in summer, that they did not commit to the tribunes the patronage of softness and sloth, and that they remember their forefathers created this very power not in the shade nor under roofs. These things are worthy of the valor of your soldiers, worthy of the Roman name: to look not at Veii only nor at this war that presses, but to win a name for other wars and among other peoples for the time to come. Or do you think a slight difference of repute will follow from this matter—whether, in the end, the neighboring peoples think the Roman people such that, if any city has but withstood that first onset of the briefest time, it has thereafter nothing to fear; or whether this be the terror of our name, that no weariness of a long siege, no violence of winter, can once stir the Roman army from a city it has hemmed in, that it knows no other end of war than victory, and wages its wars by perseverance rather than by sudden assault? This perseverance is necessary in every kind of soldiering, but most of all in besieging cities, most of which, impregnable by their fortifications and natural site, time itself conquers and storms by hunger and thirst—as it will storm Veii, unless the tribunes of the plebs prove a help to the enemy, and the Veientes find at Rome the garrisons they seek in vain in Etruria. Is there anything that could fall to the Veientes as much to be wished as that, first the city of Rome, then, as if by contagion, the camp should be filled with seditions? But, by Hercules, among the enemy there is such restraint that nothing has been changed among them, neither through the weariness of the siege nor at last through monarchy, nor have the auxiliaries refused by the Etruscans provoked their spirits; for whoever shall be the author of sedition will die forthwith, nor will it be permitted to any man to say the things that among you are said with impunity. He deserves the cudgeling who deserts his standards or quits his post; the authors of deserting the standards and abandoning the camp are heard openly in assembly, not by one soldier or another but by whole armies—so accustomed are you, Quirites, to listen to whatever a tribune of the plebs says, even though it be for the betrayal of the fatherland and the dissolving of the commonwealth; and, captivated by the sweetness of that power, you suffer any crimes whatever to lie hidden beneath it. It only remains that they do in the camp and among the soldiers the very things they bawl out here, and corrupt the armies, and suffer them not to obey their leaders—since at Rome, forsooth, this is liberty: to reverence neither the senate, nor the magistrates, nor the laws, nor the customs of our ancestors, nor the institutions of the Fathers, nor the discipline of war."

Appius was now a match even in the assemblies for the tribunes of the plebs, when suddenly, from a quarter where one would least have believed it, a disaster suffered at Veii both put Appius in the stronger position in the dispute and made the concord of the orders, and the ardor for besieging Veii the more stubbornly, the greater. For when the mound had been pushed forward to the city and the sheds were all but already joined to the walls, while the works were carried on by day more intently than they were guarded by night, a gate was suddenly thrown open and a huge multitude, armed for the most part with torches, hurled fire; and in the space of an hour the conflagration swallowed up at once the mound and the sheds, the work of so long a time; and many men there, bringing aid in vain, were destroyed by steel and by flame. When this was reported at Rome, it cast sadness upon all, and upon the senate care and fear, lest then in truth the sedition could be checked neither in the city nor in the camp, and the tribunes of the plebs should exult as over a commonwealth vanquished by themselves—when suddenly those who had the equestrian rating, but to whom public horses had not been assigned, having first held a council among themselves, approached the senate, and, leave to speak being granted, promised that they would do their service on their own horses. To them, when thanks had been given by the senate in the amplest words, and the report of it had spread through the forum and the city, suddenly there was a rush of the plebs to the senate-house; they said that it was now the part of the foot-rank to offer their service to the commonwealth out of the regular order, whether they wished to lead them to Veii or wherever else; if they were led to Veii, they declared they would not return thence before the enemy’s city was taken. Then indeed there was scarce a holding-back of the joy that overflowed; for the plebs were not, like the knights, bidden to be praised by an assigned commission of the magistrates, nor were they called into the senate-house to be given an answer, nor was the senate kept within the threshold of the house; but each man for himself, from a higher place, signified the public gladness by voice and hands to the multitude standing in the comitium, calling the city of Rome blessed and unconquered and eternal in that concord, praising the knights, praising the plebs, extolling the very day with praises, confessing that the courtesy and kindliness of the senate had been outdone. In rivalry tears of joy flowed from Fathers and plebs alike, until, the Fathers being recalled into the house, a decree of the senate was made that the military tribunes should call an assembly and give thanks to the foot and the horse, and should say that the senate would be mindful of their devotion toward the fatherland; that it was pleasing, moreover, that pay should go forward for all these who had volunteered for service out of the regular order; and to the knight a fixed sum of money was assigned. Then for the first time the knights began to serve on their own horses. The volunteer army that was led to Veii not only restored the works that had been lost, but set up new ones as well. Supplies were brought up from the city with greater care than before, that nothing for its use might be wanting to an army so well-deserving.

The following year had as military tribunes with consular power Gaius Servilius Ahala for the third time, Quintus Servilius, Lucius Verginius, Quintus Sulpicius, Aulus Manlius for the second time, Manius Sergius for the second time. Under these tribunes, while the care of all was bent upon the Veientine war, the garrison of Anxur was neglected—through furloughs granted to the soldiers and through the common admitting of Volscian traders—and, the keepers of the gates being suddenly betrayed, it was overwhelmed. Fewer of the soldiers perished, because, apart from the sick, all were trading after the manner of sutlers through the fields and the neighboring towns. Nor was the business better managed at Veii, which was then the chief of all the public concerns; for the Roman commanders had more spirit of anger against one another than against the enemy, and the war was enlarged by the sudden coming of the men of Capena and of Falerii. These two peoples of Etruria, because they were nearest in region, believing that, Veii being conquered, they would be next in the path of Roman war—the Faliscans being hostile for a reason of their own besides, because they had already before mixed themselves in the war of Fidenae—bound to each other by an oath through envoys sent back and forth, came with their armies unexpectedly to Veii. It chanced that they assailed the camp in the quarter where Manius Sergius, military tribune, was in command, and struck huge terror, because the Romans believed that all Etruria, roused from its dwellings, was at hand in a great mass. The same belief stirred up the Veientes within the city. Thus the Roman camp was assailed in a two-sided battle; and as the men ran this way and that, shifting the standards, they could neither sufficiently confine the Veientine within the fortifications nor keep off the violence from their own works and protect themselves from the enemy outside. The one hope was, if aid should come from the larger camp, that the legions divided might fight, some against the Capenate and Faliscan, others against the sally of the townsmen; but the larger camp was commanded by Verginius, privately hated by Sergius and hostile to him. He, when it was reported that most of the forts had been assailed, the fortifications surmounted, the enemy bearing in on both sides, kept his soldiers under arms, saying again and again that his colleague would send to him if there were need of aid. The arrogance of the one was matched by the obstinacy of the other, who—that he might not seem to have asked help of an enemy—chose rather to be conquered by the foe than to conquer through a fellow citizen. Long were the soldiers cut down in the midst; at last, the fortifications abandoned, a very few made for the larger camp, the greatest part and Sergius himself pushed on to Rome. There, when he laid all the blame upon his colleague, it was resolved to summon Verginius from the camp and that meanwhile the lieutenants should command. The matter was then debated in the senate, and the colleagues contended with abuse. Few stood by the commonwealth; the greater part by this man or that, as private zeal or favor had laid hold of each.

The leading men of the Fathers judged that, whether by the fault or by the ill fortune of the commanders so ignominious a disaster had been suffered, the lawful time of the elections should not be awaited, but that new military tribunes should be created at once, to enter upon their magistracy on the Kalends of October. When the vote was going to that opinion, the other military tribunes made no opposition; but Sergius and Verginius—on whose account it appeared the senate repented of that year’s magistrates—at first begged off the disgrace, then interposed against the senate’s decree, and denied that they would resign their office before the Ides of December, the customary day for entering upon magistracies. Amid this the tribunes of the plebs, who in the concord of men and the prosperity of the state had unwillingly kept silence, suddenly grew fierce and threatened the military tribunes that, unless they submitted to the senate’s authority, they would order them led to prison. Then Gaius Servilius Ahala, military tribune, said: "As for you, tribunes of the plebs, and your threats, gladly indeed would I test how much less of right there is in them than of spirit in you; but it is a sacrilege to strive against the authority of the senate. Therefore both do you cease to seek a place for wrong amid our quarrels, and my colleagues will either do what the senate decrees, or, if they strive too stubbornly, I will name a dictator at once who shall compel them to lay down their magistracy." When this speech had been approved by the assent of all, and the Fathers rejoiced that, without the bugbears of the tribunician power, another and a greater force had been found for coercing the magistrates, the two, overcome by the consent of all, held the elections of military tribunes who should enter upon office on the Kalends of October, and before that day they abdicated their magistracy.

Under the military tribunes with consular power Lucius Valerius Potitus for the fourth time, Marcus Furius Camillus for the second, Manius Aemilius Mamercus for the third, Gnaeus Cornelius Cossus for the second, Kaeso Fabius Ambustus, Lucius Iulius Iulus, many things were done at home and in the field. For the war was at one and the same time manifold—at Veii, and at Capena, and at Falerii, and among the Volsci, that Anxur might be recovered from the enemy; and at Rome there was trouble at once over the levy and over the contribution of the tribute, and a contention over the co-opting of tribunes of the plebs, and no small commotion was stirred by two trials of those who a little before had held the consular power. The first care of the military tribunes was that a levy be held; and not only were the younger men enrolled, but the elder too were compelled to give in their names, to keep guard over the city. But as much as the number of soldiers was increased, by so much the greater money was needed for the pay, and this was raised by the tribute—paid unwillingly by those who remained at home, since for the guarding of the city there was also a labor of military toil to be undergone and a service to be rendered to the commonwealth. These burdens, grievous in themselves, the tribunes of the plebs by seditious harangues made appear the more unworthy, alleging that pay had been established for the soldiers for this very end, that they might wear out one part of the plebs by the war and another by the tribute. One war, they said, was now being dragged out into a third year and purposely ill-managed, that they might wage it the longer. Then for four wars armies had been enrolled in one levy, and even boys and old men dragged out. Now there was no distinction of summer and winter, that the wretched plebs might never have any rest; the plebs which now at last had even been made tributary, so that when they had brought back bodies worn out with labor, with wounds, and at the last by age, and had found everything at home gone to ruin through the long absence of their masters, they paid tribute out of an impaired estate and returned to the commonwealth their military pay, as if borrowed at interest, many times over. Between the levy and the tribute, and minds taken up with the cares of greater matters, the number of tribunes of the plebs could not be filled at the elections. Then the contest was for the empty places, that patricians might be co-opted. When this could not be carried, nevertheless, for the sake of weakening the law, it was brought about that there were co-opted as tribunes of the plebs Gaius Lacerius and Marcus Acutius, beyond doubt by the resources of the patricians.

Fortune so brought it that in that year there was a tribune of the plebs, Gnaeus Trebonius, who seemed to owe to his name and family the patronage of the Trebonian law. He cried out that the patricians had at last won by storm what they had once sought and been repulsed in their first attempt—the abolition of the Trebonian law and the co-opting of tribunes of the plebs not by the votes of the people but by the command of the patricians; that the matter had rolled back to this, that the tribunes of the plebs must be either patricians or the hangers-on of patricians; that the sacred laws were being snatched away, the tribunician power wrested from their hands; and he charged that this had been done by the fraud of the patricians, by the crime and treachery of his colleagues. When not only the Fathers but the tribunes of the plebs too—both the co-opted and those who had co-opted them—were burning under odium, then three of the college, Publius Curatius, Marcus Metilius, Marcus Minucius, in dread for their own fortunes, rushed upon Sergius and Verginius, the military tribunes of the year before; against these they turned away from themselves the anger and odium of the plebs by appointing a day for their trial. Those to whom the levy, to whom the tribute, to whom the long service and the length of the war were grievous, those who grieved over the disaster suffered at Veii, those who had houses in mourning through the loss of children, brothers, kinsmen, connections—to all these, they declared, the right and power of pursuing their public and private grief had been given by themselves out of these two guilty heads. For in Sergius and Verginius lay the causes of all the evils; nor did the accuser charge this more than the defendants confessed it, since, both guilty, each laid the cause upon the other—Verginius reproaching the flight of Sergius, Sergius the treachery of Verginius. Their madness had been so incredible that it was far more likely the thing had been done by collusion and the common fraud of the patricians. By these men both earlier had room been given to the Veientes for burning the works, for the sake of prolonging the war, and now the army had been betrayed, the Roman camp handed over to the Faliscans. Everything was being done that the young men might grow old at Veii, and that the tribunes might not bring before the people any measure concerning the lands or the other interests of the plebs, nor crowd their actions with the throng of the city, nor be able to resist the conspiracy of the patricians. A prejudgment had already been made against the accused by the senate, by the Roman people, and by their own college; for both by a decree of the senate had they been removed from public affairs, and, refusing to abdicate their magistracy, had been coerced by their colleagues through fear of a dictator, and the Roman people had created tribunes who should enter upon office not on the Ides of December, the customary day, but at once on the Kalends of October, because the commonwealth could not stand any longer with these men remaining in office; and yet these men, pierced and pre-condemned by so many judgments, came to the judgment of the people, and thought they had discharged their debt and paid penalty enough because they had been made private men two months the sooner, and did not understand that the power of doing further harm had then been wrested from them, not a penalty imposed; since command had been abrogated from their colleagues too, who surely had done no wrong. Let the Quirites recall to themselves those feelings they had had when the disaster was fresh, when they saw the army falling in at the gates, trembling in flight, full of wounds and panic, accusing not Fortune nor any of the gods but these leaders. They held it for certain that no one stood in the assembly who on that day had not cursed and execrated the person, the house, and the fortunes of Lucius Verginius and Manius Sergius. It was by no means fitting, against men upon whom each had called down the angry gods, not to use one’s own power, when it was lawful and one’s duty. Never did the gods themselves lay hands on the guilty; it was enough if they armed the injured with the opportunity of vengeance.

The plebs, stirred up by these speeches, condemned the accused each in ten thousand asses of heavy bronze—Sergius vainly accusing Mars and the common fortune of war, Verginius pleading that he might not be more luckless at home than in the field. The people’s anger, turned against these men, made the memory of the co-opting of the tribunes and of the fraud against the Trebonian law grow dim. The victorious tribunes, that the plebs might have a present reward of the judgment, promulgated an agrarian law, and forbade the tribute to be contributed—when there was need of pay for so many armies, and the campaigns were so prospering that in no war was the end of hope being reached. For at Veii the camp that had been lost was recovered and strengthened with forts and garrisons; the military tribunes Manius Aemilius and Kaeso Fabius commanded there. By Marcus Furius among the Faliscans, by Gnaeus Cornelius in the territory of Capena, no enemy was found outside the walls; booty was driven off, and the borders laid waste by the burning of farmhouses and crops; the towns were assailed but not besieged. But among the Volsci, the country being ravaged, Anxur was assailed in vain, set in a high place; and after force proved fruitless, it began to be besieged with rampart and ditch; the province of the Volsci had fallen to Valerius Potitus. In this state of military affairs, a sedition at home arose with greater mass than the wars were being conducted; and since the tribute could not be contributed through the tribunes, nor the pay sent to the commanders, and the soldier was clamoring for his military stipend, it wanted but little that the camp too should be thrown into confusion by the contagion of the city’s sedition. Amid these angers of the plebs against the Fathers, when the tribunes of the plebs declared that now was the time for establishing liberty and for transferring the highest office from the Sergii and Verginii to plebeian men, brave and strong, yet it went no further than that one man from the plebs, for the sake of asserting the right, Publius Licinius Calvus, was created military tribune with consular power; the rest created were patricians—Publius Manlius, Lucius Titinius, Publius Maelius, Lucius Furius Medullinus, Lucius Publilius Volscus. The plebs themselves marveled that they had obtained so great a thing—not he alone who had been created, a man who had used no office before, only an old senator and now heavy with age; nor is it sufficiently established why he was held the first and most fit to taste the new honor. Some believe he was drawn up to so great an honor by the favor of his brother Gnaeus Cornelius, who had been military tribune the year before and had given triple pay to the knights; others, that he himself had delivered a timely speech about the concord of the orders, pleasing to Fathers and plebs alike. Exulting in this victory of the elections, the tribunes of the plebs relaxed about the tribute, which was the greatest hindrance to the commonwealth. It was contributed obediently and sent to the army.

Anxur among the Volsci was shortly recovered, the watch of the city being neglected on a festal day. This year was notable for a winter so icy and snowy that the roads were closed and the Tiber not navigable. The price of grain was not changed, by reason of the store conveyed in beforehand. And because Publius Licinius, as he had taken his magistracy without disturbance, to the greater joy of the plebs than the indignation of the Fathers, so also bore it, a sweet desire seized men of creating plebeians at the next elections of military tribunes. Of the patrician candidates Marcus Veturius alone held his place; as the other military tribunes with consular power nearly all the centuries named plebeians—Marcus Pomponius, Gnaeus Duillius, Volero Publilius, Gnaeus Genucius, Lucius Atilius. Upon a winter so harsh—whether from the distemper of the heavens, the change to its opposite being made suddenly, or from some other cause—there followed a summer grievous and pestilent to all living things; and since for its incurable destruction neither cause nor end could be found, the Sibylline books were consulted by decree of the senate. The two men appointed for the performance of the rites, a lectisternium being then for the first time held in the city of Rome, for eight days appeased Apollo and Latona and Diana, Hercules, Mercury, and Neptune, with three couches spread as splendidly as could then be furnished. The rite was celebrated privately as well. Through all the city, with doors standing open and the use of all things laid out in common in the open, they received, men say, strangers known and unknown alike everywhere into their hospitality, and held kindly and courteous converse even with their enemies; men abstained from quarrels and lawsuits; from prisoners too their chains were taken away for those days; and afterward it was a scruple of religion to put back in fetters those to whom the gods had brought such aid. Meanwhile at Veii the terror was manifold, three wars being gathered into one. For when in the same manner as before the Capenates and Faliscans had suddenly come to the relief around the fortifications, the battle was fought in a two-sided fight against three armies. Above all things the memory of the condemnation of Sergius and Verginius helped. And so from the larger camp, whence before there had been delay, the forces, led around in a short space, attack from the rear the Capenates who were turned against the Roman rampart; from this the battle, once begun, struck terror into the Faliscans too, and, as they wavered, a sally opportunely made from the camp turned them to flight. The victors, then pursuing the repulsed, wrought a huge slaughter; and not long after, plunderers of the Capenate country, by chance fallen in with while scattered, finished off the remnants of the battle. And of the Veientes fleeing back into the city many were slain before the gates, while in their fear—lest the Roman should burst in along with them—by closing the doors they shut out the last of their own men.

These things were done in that year; and now the elections of military tribunes were at hand, and the care of them was almost greater to the Fathers than the war, since they saw the highest command not only shared with the plebs but almost lost. Therefore, the most distinguished men being made ready by agreement to stand—men whom they believed the people would have shame to pass over—nonetheless they themselves, just as if all were candidates, leaving nothing untried, roused not men only but the gods as well, casting into the scruple of religion the elections held over two years: that in the former year an intolerable winter, like a sign of the divine displeasure, had arisen; in the next, not portents but already the issue—a pestilence brought upon fields and city by the manifest anger of the gods, who, it was found in the books of fate, must be appeased to ward off that plague; and that it seemed unworthy to the gods that, when the elections were held under auspices, the honors should be made common and the distinctions of birth confounded. Men, awe-struck not only by the dignity of the candidates but by religion, created as military tribunes with consular power all patricians, and a great part of them the most honored—Lucius Valerius Potitus for the fifth time, Marcus Valerius Maximus, Marcus Furius Camillus for the second, Lucius Furius Medullinus for the third, Quintus Servilius Fidenas for the second, Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus for the second. Under these tribunes nothing very memorable was done at Veii; the whole force was spent in ravaging. Two chief commanders, Potitus from Falerii, Camillus from Capena, drove off huge booty, leaving nothing whole on which iron or fire could do harm.

Meanwhile many prodigies were reported, most of which, both because their authors were single men and because—the Etruscans being enemies—there were no soothsayers through whom to expiate them, were too little believed and slighted. The care of all turned upon one alone: that the lake in the Alban grove, without any rains from heaven or any other cause that might lift the thing out of the miraculous, grew to an unwonted height. Envoys were sent to inquire of the Delphic oracle what the gods portended by that prodigy. But a nearer interpreter of the fates presented himself—a certain elder of Veii, who, among the soldiers, Roman and Etruscan, that bandied gibes at the outposts and the watches, chanted after the manner of a prophet that until the water had been let out of the Alban lake the Roman would never get possession of Veii. This at first was spurned as flung out at random, then began to be turned over in talk, until one of the Roman outposts asked the nearest of the townsmen—an interchange of speech being now made through the length of the war—who that man was who flung out riddles about the Alban lake; and when he heard he was a soothsayer, a man of no unscrupulous mind in religion, pretending that he wished to consult him about the expiation of a private portent, if he had leisure for it, he drew the seer forth to a parley. And when both had advanced some distance from their own, unarmed and without any fear, the powerful Roman youth seized the feeble old man in sight of all, and—the Etruscans clamoring in vain—carried him off to his own side. He, when he had been brought to the commander, and from there sent to Rome to the senate, on being asked what that was which he had declared about the Alban lake, answered that surely the gods had been angry with the Veientine people on that day when they cast into his mind such a thought as to betray the fated destruction of his fatherland. And so the things he had then chanted, instigated by a divine breath, he could neither recall as though unsaid, and perhaps by keeping silent the things the immortal gods would have made known, no less a sacrilege was incurred than by speaking out what should be concealed. Thus, then, it had been handed down in the books of fate, thus in the Etruscan lore: that when the Alban water should overflow, then, if the Roman duly let it out, victory over the Veientes was given; before that should be done, the gods would not desert the walls of Veii. He then went on to explain what the solemn drawing-off should be; but the Fathers, judging the authority too slight and not trustworthy enough in so great a matter, decreed that the envoys and the responses of the Pythian oracle must be awaited.

Before the envoys returned from Delphi or the expiations of the Alban prodigy were found, the new military tribunes with consular power, Lucius Iulius Iulus, Lucius Furius Medullinus for the fourth time, Lucius Sergius Fidenas, Aulus Postumius Regillensis, Publius Cornelius Maluginensis, Aulus Manlius, entered upon their magistracy. That year the Tarquinienses arose as new enemies. They, because they saw the Romans occupied with many wars at once—with the Volsci at Anxur, where the garrison was besieged, with the Aequi at Labici, who were assailing a Roman colony there, and besides with the Veientine and Faliscan and Capenate war—and that affairs within the walls were no quieter, with the contests of Fathers and plebs, reckoned that amid all this there was room for a wrong, and sent light-armed cohorts to plunder in the Roman territory: for either the Romans would suffer that wrong unavenged, lest they burden themselves with a new war, or would pursue it with a small and therefore too weak an army. To the Romans the indignity was greater than the concern at the ravaging of the Tarquinienses; therefore the matter was taken up with no great effort nor put off for long. Aulus Postumius and Lucius Iulius, not by a regular levy—for they were hindered by the tribunes of the plebs—but with a band gathered almost of volunteers whom they had stirred up by exhortation, going out through the territory of Caere by cross-paths, fell upon the Tarquinienses as they were returning from their ravagings and heavy with booty. They cut down many men, stripped them all of their baggage, and, recovering the spoils of their own fields, returned to Rome. Two days were given to the owners for recognizing their goods; on the third the unclaimed—and these were for the most part the enemy’s own—were sold under the spear, and what was raised from it was divided among the soldiers. The other wars, and most of all the Veientine, were of uncertain issue. And now the Romans, despairing of human help, were looking to the fates and the gods, when envoys came from Delphi, bringing the response of the oracle, agreeing with the answer of the captive seer: "Roman, beware to keep the Alban water shut in the lake, beware to let it flow in its own channel to the sea; thou shalt draw it off and water the fields, and shalt waste it scattered in the rivulets; then press boldly, thou, upon the enemy’s walls, mindful that over the city thou hast besieged through so many years the victory is given thee by these fates now disclosed. When the war is finished, bear thou, the victor, an ample gift to my temples, and restore the rites of thy fathers, whose care has been let fall, and perform them in the wonted manner."

From this the captive seer began to be held in great account, and the military tribunes Cornelius and Postumius began to employ him for the expiation of the Alban prodigy and the duly appeasing of the gods; and it was found at last where the gods charged that ceremonies had been neglected or a solemn rite intermitted: it was assuredly nothing else than that the magistrates, created with a flaw, had not duly proclaimed the Latin Festival and the sacrifice on the Alban Mount; the one expiation of these things was that the military tribunes should abdicate their magistracy, the auspices be taken afresh, and an interregnum be entered upon. These things were so done by decree of the senate. There were three interreges in succession, Lucius Valerius, Quintus Servilius Fidenas, Marcus Furius Camillus. Meanwhile there was never an end of disturbance, the tribunes of the plebs interrupting the elections, until it had first been agreed that the greater part of the military tribunes should be created from the plebs. While these things were going on, the councils of Etruria were held at the shrine of Voltumna, and to the Capenates and Faliscans demanding that all the peoples of Etruria, with common heart and counsel, should deliver Veii from the siege, the answer was given that before they had refused this to the Veientes, because in so great a matter they ought not to seek aid from those from whom they had not sought counsel; now their own fortune forbade it for their own sake. In the greatest part of Etruria a strange nation, new neighbors, the Gauls, had now arrived—with whom there was neither a peace trustworthy enough nor war for certain. Yet to the blood and the name and the present dangers of their kinsmen this much was granted: that if any of their young men went of their own will to that war, they would not hinder them. A great number of the enemy had come, the rumor was at Rome; and on that account the domestic discords began, as happens, to soften through the common fear.

Not unwillingly the Fathers, by the prerogative century, created Publius Licinius Calvus military tribune, though he was not a candidate—a man of proved moderation in his former magistracy, but now of an age already spent; and it appeared that all the rest from the college of that same year would be re-elected—Lucius Titinius, Publius Maenius, Gnaeus Genucius, Lucius Atilius. Before they were declared, the tribes being duly summoned, by leave of the interrex Publius Licinius Calvus spoke thus: "An omen of concord, Quirites, a thing most useful for this present time, I see you seek at these elections for the year to come, in your memory of our magistracy. For you re-elect the same colleagues, made even better by experience; but me you see no longer the same, but the shadow and the name of Publius Licinius left behind. The strength of my body is impaired, the senses of my eyes and ears are dull, my memory wavers, the vigor of my mind is blunted. Behold for you"—he said, holding his son—"a young man, the likeness and the image of him whom you before made the first military tribune from the plebs. Him, trained in my own discipline, I give and dedicate to the commonwealth as my substitute in my stead; and I beg you, Quirites, that the honor offered to me unsought you bestow upon him as he seeks it, with my prayers added on his behalf." This was granted to the father as he asked, and his son, Publius Licinius, was declared military tribune with consular power along with those whom we have named above. Titinius and Genucius, military tribunes, having set out against the Faliscans and Capenates, while they waged war with more spirit than counsel, plunged headlong into an ambush. Genucius, atoning by an honorable death for his rashness, fell before the standards among the foremost; Titinius, gathering his soldiers out of much confusion onto a high knoll, restored the line; yet he did not engage the enemy on level ground. There was more of disgrace than of disaster suffered, which all but turned into a huge disaster; so great was the terror that came of it, not at Rome only, whither rumor had arrived many times magnified, but in the camp at Veii too. There the soldier was with difficulty held back from flight, when the rumor had spread through the camp that the leaders and the army had been cut down, and that the victorious Capenate and Faliscan, and all the youth of Etruria, were not far off. At Rome things still more tumultuous had been believed—that the camp at Veii was now being assailed, that now part of the enemy was making for the city in a hostile column; and there was a running together to the walls, and supplications made in the temples by the matrons, whom the public panic had roused from their homes, and prayers offered to the gods that they would ward off destruction from the roofs and temples and walls of Rome, and turn that terror away to Veii, if the rites had been duly renewed, the prodigies duly expiated.

Now the games and the Latin Festival had been held anew, now the water had been let out of the Alban lake into the fields, and the fates were drawing near to Veii. And so the man fated to be the leader for the destruction of that city and the saving of the fatherland, Marcus Furius Camillus, named dictator, named as his master of the horse Publius Cornelius Scipio. By the change of the commander all things had suddenly been changed: another hope, another spirit was in men, and the very fortune of the city seemed other. First of all, after the manner of military discipline, he visited punishment upon those who in that panic had fled from Veii, and brought it about that the enemy should not be what the soldier feared most. Then, a levy being proclaimed for an appointed day, he himself meanwhile ran across to Veii to confirm the spirits of the soldiers; thence he returned to Rome to enroll a new army, no man declining the service. The foreign youth too, the Latins and the Hernici, came offering their service for that war; and when the dictator had given them thanks in the senate, all things being now ready enough for that war, he vowed by decree of the senate that, Veii being taken, he would hold the Great Games, and would dedicate the restored temple of Mother Matuta, dedicated already long before by King Servius Tullius. Setting out from the city with his army amid the expectation of men, greater than their hope, he first in the territory of Nepete joined battle with the Faliscans and Capenates. There all things were done with the highest skill and counsel, and fortune too, as happens, followed. Not in battle only did he rout the enemy, but stripped them of their camp as well, and gained possession of huge booty; the greatest part of which was brought back to the quaestor, and not so very much was given to the soldier. From there the army was led to Veii, and the forts were made denser, and—the skirmishes which were many rashly made between wall and rampart being forbidden by an edict that no man should fight without orders—the soldiers were brought over to the work. Of all the works by far the greatest and most laborious was a mine begun to be driven into the citadel of the enemy. And that the work might not be intermitted, nor the continuous toil beneath the earth wear out the same men, he divided the number of the diggers into six parts; six-hour shifts in rotation were assigned to the work; by night and by day they never left off until they made a way into the citadel.

When the dictator now saw the victory in his hands, that a most opulent city was about to be taken, and that there would be as much booty as had not been in all the former wars put together, lest he should incur either the anger of the soldiers from a niggardly division of the spoil, or the ill will of the Fathers from a prodigal largess, he sent a letter to the senate: that by the bounty of the immortal gods, by his own counsels, and by the endurance of the soldiers, Veii would soon be in the power of the Roman people; what did they judge should be done about the booty? Two opinions divided the senate: that of the aged Publius Licinius, who, they say, asked first by his son, was first to speak—it pleased him that it be openly proclaimed to the people that whoever wished to share in the booty should go to the camp at Veii; the other of Appius Claudius, who, denouncing the largess as new, prodigal, unequal, and ill-considered, was of the mind—if once they held it a sacrilege that money taken from the enemy should lie in a treasury drained by wars—that pay should be counted out to the soldier from that money, so that the plebs might contribute the less tribute; for the homes of all would feel the partnership of that gift equally, and the hands of idle city-dwellers would not snatch away the rewards of brave warriors, since it commonly so falls out that the readier plunderer is the slacker fighter, while each best man is wont to seek for himself the chief part of toil and danger. Licinius, on the contrary, said that money would always be suspected and hated, and would furnish to the plebs occasions of accusations, and thence of seditions and new laws; better, therefore, that the feelings of the plebs be reconciled by that gift, that succor be brought to men drained and emptied by the tribute of so many years, and that they feel the fruit of the booty from a war in which they had grown almost old. It would be more grateful and more gladdening, what each man with his own hand had taken from the enemy and carried home, than if he received many times the amount at another’s discretion. The dictator himself shunned the ill will arising from it and the accusations; therefore he had referred it to the senate; the senate too ought to refer the matter back, and entrust it to the plebs, and suffer each to keep what the chance of war had given him. This opinion seemed the safer, as one that would make the senate popular. It was therefore proclaimed that whoever pleased should set out to the booty of Veii, to the camp of the dictator.

A huge multitude set out and filled the camp. Then the dictator, having gone forth after taking the auspices, when he had given the order that the soldiers take arms, said: "Under thy guidance, Pythian Apollo, and instigated by thy divine will, I go forward to destroy the city of Veii, and to thee I here vow the tenth part of the booty. Thee at the same time, Queen Juno, who now dwellest at Veii, I beseech that thou follow us victors into our city, soon to be thine also, where a temple worthy of thy greatness shall receive thee." Having prayed thus, with his multitude overpowering them at all points, he assailed the city, that there might be the less sense of the peril rushing on from the mine. The Veientes, ignorant that they were now betrayed by their own seers, now by foreign oracles, that the gods were now called to a share of their booty, that some had been called forth from their own city by vows and were looking to the temples of their enemies and to new abodes, and that they themselves were passing that last day—fearing nothing less than that the walls, undermined by the tunnel, were now full of the enemy—each for himself ran armed to the walls, marveling what this might be, that when for so many days no Roman had stirred from his post, now they ran heedless to the walls as if struck by a sudden frenzy. There is inserted at this place a tale: that as the king of the Veientes was sacrificing, the voice of a soothsayer, saying that to him who had cut up the entrails of that victim victory was given, heard in the mine, moved the Roman soldiers to open the mine and snatch the entrails and carry them to the dictator. But in matters so ancient I would be content if whatever is like the truth be accepted as truth: these things, fitter for the show of a stage that delights in marvels than for belief, it is not worth the while either to affirm or to refute. The mine, full at that time of chosen soldiers, suddenly poured forth armed men into the temple of Juno that was in the citadel of Veii, and some assailed the enemy where they faced away on the walls, some tore back the bars of the gates, some, as from the roofs stones and tiles were thrown by the women and the slaves, brought up fire. A shout filled all places, with the mingled cries of those who terrified and those who feared, and with the wailing of women and children. In a moment of time, the armed men being everywhere cast down from the wall and the gates thrown open, while some rushed in in a column and others scaled the deserted walls, the city was filled with enemies; the fighting was at all points; then, much slaughter being now done, the battle slackened, and the dictator bade the heralds proclaim that the unarmed should be spared. That was the end of bloodshed. The unarmed then began to give themselves up, and the soldier, by the dictator’s leave, scattered for plunder. When that booty was brought before his eyes, somewhat greater than his hope and expectation and of greater worth, he is said to have raised his hands to heaven and prayed that, if to any of gods or men his own fortune and the Roman people’s seemed excessive, it might be granted to soften that ill will with the least loss to his own private good and to the public good of the Roman people. As he was turning himself about amid this act of worship, it is recorded by tradition that he slipped and fell; and that omen, to those who reckoned the matter by the event afterward, seemed to have pointed to the condemnation of Camillus himself, and then to the disaster of the capture of the city of Rome, which befell a few years later. And that day was spent in the slaughter of the enemy and the sack of a most opulent city.

On the next day the dictator sold the free persons under the crown. That money alone was paid into the public treasury, and not without the anger of the plebs; and what booty they brought back with them they reckoned owed neither to the leader, who in seeking authors of niggardliness with the senate had cast off a matter of his own discretion, nor to the senate, but to the Licinian family, of which the son had referred the matter to the senate and the father had been the author of so popular an opinion. When now the wealth of men had been carried off from Veii, they began to remove the gifts of the gods and the gods themselves, but after the manner of worshipers rather than of plunderers. For young men chosen out of the whole army, their bodies cleanly washed and clad in white robes, to whom the bringing-away of Queen Juno to Rome had been assigned, entered the temple in awe, at first reverently laying on their hands, because by Etruscan custom no one but a priest of a fixed family had been wont to touch that image. Then, when one of them, whether touched by a divine breath or in youthful jest, said, "Wilt thou go to Rome, Juno?" the rest cried out that the goddess had nodded assent. To the tale it was afterward added that her voice too was heard, saying that she was willing; at any rate we have received that, moved from her seat with engines of slight effort, she was light and easy to carry off, as though following of her own accord, and was conveyed whole to the Aventine, her eternal abode, whither the vows of the Roman dictator had called her, where afterward the same Camillus who had vowed it dedicated a temple to her. Such was the fall of Veii, a most opulent city of the Etruscan name, showing its greatness even in its last disaster: for through ten summers and winters continuously besieged, when it had inflicted considerably more loss than it had received, at last, when the fates too pressed upon it, it was stormed by works, not by force.

When it was reported at Rome that Veii had been taken, although both the prodigies had been expiated and the responses of the seers and the Pythian oracles were known, and, so far as it could be aided by human counsels, they had chosen for the business a leader, Marcus Furius, the greatest of all commanders—nevertheless, because for so many years the war there had been waged with varying fortune and many disasters suffered, the joy was immense, as if beyond hope; and before the senate could decree it, all the temples were full of Roman matrons giving thanks to the gods. The senate decreed supplications for four days, a number of days that had been decreed in no war before. The arrival of the dictator too, with all orders pouring out to meet him, was more thronged than any man’s ever before, and his triumph somewhat exceeded the whole wonted measure of honoring that day. He himself was the chief spectacle, borne into the city in a chariot drawn by white horses; and that seemed something not merely uncivic but inhuman. Men drew it even into a matter of religious scruple, that the dictator had been made equal with the horses of Jupiter and the Sun; and the triumph, for that one thing above all, was more brilliant than welcome. Then he located on the Aventine a temple to Queen Juno, and dedicated that of Mother Matuta; and these things divine and human accomplished, he abdicated the dictatorship. Then it began to be debated about the gift to Apollo. When Camillus said that he had vowed the tenth part of the booty, and the pontiffs judged that the people must be loosed from the religious bond, no easy means was found of bidding the people bring back the booty, that from it the part owed might be set apart for the sacred use. At last they had recourse to what seemed the mildest course: that whoever wished to acquit himself and his household of the religious obligation should, when he had himself appraised his own booty, pay into the public treasury the value of a tenth part of it, so that from this a golden gift, worthy of the greatness of the temple and the divine power of the god, might be made, becoming the dignity of the Roman people. This contribution too alienated the feelings of the plebs from Camillus. Amid these things envoys came from the Volsci and the Aequi to sue for peace; and peace was obtained, rather that the state, wearied by so long a war, might rest, than that those who sought it deserved it.

Veii being taken, the next year had six military tribunes with consular power: two Publii Cornelii, Cossus and Scipio, Marcus Valerius Maximus for the second time, Kaeso Fabius Ambustus for the third, Lucius Furius Medullinus for the fifth, Quintus Servilius for the third. To the Cornelii the Faliscan war fell by lot, to Valerius and Servilius the Capenate. By these no cities were tried by force or by works, but the country was ravaged and booty of farm-stuff driven off; no fruitful tree, nothing that bore a crop, was left in the field. That disaster subdued the Capenate people; peace was given them at their suit; among the Faliscans the war remained. At Rome meanwhile there was a manifold sedition, for the soothing of which it had been resolved that a colony should be planted among the Volsci, into which three thousand Roman citizens should be enrolled; and the three men created for the purpose had divided three jugera and seven-twelfths to each man. This largess began to be spurned, because they judged it thrown out as a sop to divert them from a greater hope; for why should the plebs be banished into the country of the Volsci, when the most beautiful city of Veii and the Veientine land were in sight, more fertile and more ample than the Roman land? They preferred the city too to the city of Rome, whether for its site or for the magnificence of its public and private buildings and quarters. Nay, that proposal too was set on foot, which after the capture of Rome by the Gauls was in any case the more famous—of migrating to Veii. They destined part of the plebs, part of the senate, to dwell there, and held that two cities could be inhabited by the Roman people under a common commonwealth. Against which when the optimates so strove that they declared they would die sooner in the sight of the Roman people than that any of those things should be put to the vote—seeing that now in one city there were so many dissensions, what would there be in two cities? Should anyone prefer a vanquished to a victorious fatherland, and suffer Veii to have a greater fortune captured than it had had unharmed? In the end they themselves might be left by their fellow citizens in their fatherland; but that they should leave their fatherland and their fellow citizens, no force would ever compel them, and that they should follow Titus Sicinius—for he was the proposer of that measure among the tribunes of the plebs—as founder to Veii, forsaking the god Romulus, son of a god, the father and author of the city of Rome.

While these things were carried on with foul contests—for the Fathers had drawn part of the tribunes of the plebs over to their opinion—nothing else made the plebs keep their hands from violence than that, when a shout had arisen for the joining of a brawl, the leaders of the senate, offering themselves first to the crowd, bade themselves be assailed and struck and slain. While men shrank from violating their years, their dignity, and their honors, a sense of shame stood in the way of like attempts upon the rest. Camillus, again and again in all places, declared in assembly: it was no wonder, indeed, that the state was mad, which, bound by a vow, held the care of all other things more pressing than that of acquitting itself of its religious debt. He said nothing of the contribution—truer to call it an offering than a tithe, since each man had bound himself privately to it, and the people had been freed. But this his conscience would not suffer him to keep silent: that from that booty alone which was of movable goods a tenth was being set apart, while of the city and the captured land—which too was comprised in the vow—no mention at all was made. When this dispute, seeming doubtful to the senate, had been referred to the pontiffs, Camillus being called in, it seemed good to the college that whatever had belonged to the Veientes before the vow was conceived, and after the vow had come into the power of the Roman people—a tenth part of that was sacred to Apollo. Thus the city and the land came into the appraisal. Money was drawn from the treasury, and the business given to the consular military tribunes to buy gold with it. When there was no supply of it, the matrons, holding gatherings to consult upon the matter, by common decree promised their gold and all their ornaments to the military tribunes, and carried them down to the treasury. That thing was as grateful to the senate as anything ever was; and they say that in honor of that munificence it was granted to the matrons that they might use the carriage to the sacred rites and the games, and the two-wheeled car on feast days and on common days. The weight of gold being received and appraised from each, that the money might be paid back, it was resolved that a golden bowl should be made to be carried as a gift to Apollo at Delphi. As soon as they had relaxed their minds from religion, the tribunes of the plebs renewed the sedition; the multitude was stirred up against all the leading men, before others against Camillus: he, by making the Veientine booty public and sacred, had reduced it to nothing. The absent they reviled fiercely; in the presence of those who of their own accord offered themselves to their anger they had shame. When they saw the matter being dragged out beyond that year, they re-elected for the year the same tribunes of the plebs, proposers of the law; and the Fathers strove to do the same about the vetoers of the law; thus for the most part the same tribunes of the plebs were re-elected.

At the elections of military tribunes the Fathers, with the utmost effort, won that Marcus Furius Camillus be created. They pretended that a leader was being prepared on account of the wars; but an adversary to the tribunician largess was being sought. With Camillus there were created as military tribunes with consular power Lucius Furius Medullinus for the sixth time, Gaius Aemilius, Lucius Valerius Publicola, Spurius Postumius, Publius Cornelius for the second time. At the beginning of the year the tribunes of the plebs made no stir, until Marcus Furius Camillus should set out against the Faliscans, to whom that war had been entrusted. By deferring, the matter then languished; and to Camillus, whom they had feared most as an adversary, glory grew among the Faliscans. For when at first the enemy kept themselves within their walls, holding that the safest, by ravaging the fields and burning the farmhouses he compelled them to go forth from the city. But fear forbade them to advance farther; about a mile from the town they pitched their camp, trusting it to be safe enough for no other reason than the difficulty of approach, the ground about it rough and broken, and the roads partly narrow, partly steep. But Camillus, following a captive from those very fields as a guide, moving his camp far on in the night, at first light showed himself on ground considerably higher. The Romans were fortifying in three divisions; the rest of the army stood ready for battle. There he routed and put to flight the enemy who tried to hinder the work; and so great a panic was thereby struck into the Faliscans that, in headlong flight, passing by their own camp which was nearer, they made for the city. Many were slain and wounded before in their terror they tumbled in at the gates; the camp was taken; the booty was brought back to the quaestors, to the great anger of the soldiers; but, overcome by the severity of his command, they both hated and admired the same valor. Then followed the blockade of the city and the works of siege, and from time to time, when occasion offered, sallies of the townsmen upon the Roman outposts, and small battles; and time was worn away with hope inclining to neither side, since grain and other supplies were more plentiful for the besieged, from what had been conveyed in beforehand, than for the besiegers. And the toil seemed likely to be as long-drawn-out as it had been at Veii, had not fortune given the Roman commander at once a proof of his proved skill in war and a speedy victory.

It was the custom of the Faliscans to use the same man as master and as attendant of their children, and several boys at once—a thing that endures to this day in Greece too—were committed to the charge of one. The children of the chief men, as commonly happens, he who seemed to excel in knowledge instructed. He, having in time of peace established the practice of leading the boys out before the city for sport and exercise, intermitting that custom in no degree through the time of war, by drawing them now in shorter, now in longer ranges from the gate, with sport and talk varied, when occasion gave, having gone farther than usual, led them on among the enemy’s outposts and so into the Roman camp, to the headquarters, to Camillus. There he added to his wicked deed a speech still more wicked: that he had delivered Falerii into the hands of the Romans, since he had given into their power those boys whose parents were the heads of affairs there. When Camillus heard this, he said: "You have not come, wicked man with your wicked gift, to a people or a commander like yourself. Between us and the Faliscans there is no fellowship made by the compact of men; but that which nature has implanted in both there is and will be. There are rights of war, as of peace, and we have learned to wage them justly no less than bravely. We bear arms not against that age which is spared even when cities are taken, but against the armed, and against men who, neither hurt nor provoked by us, assailed the Roman camp at Veii. These you, so far as in you lay, have conquered by a new crime; I will conquer them by Roman arts—by valor, by works, by arms—as I conquered Veii." Then, stripping him and binding his hands behind his back, he gave him to the boys to be led back to Falerii, and gave them rods with which to drive the traitor, beating him, into the city. At which spectacle, a concourse of the people first being made, then a senate called by the magistrates over the strange affair, so great a change was wrought in their minds that those who but now, savage with hatred and anger, had almost preferred the fate of Veii to the peace of the Capenates, with one accord the whole state demanded peace. Roman good faith and the justice of the commander were celebrated in the forum and the senate-house; and by the consent of all, envoys set out to Camillus in the camp, and from there, by Camillus’s leave, to Rome to the senate, to surrender Falerii. Brought before the senate, they are reported to have spoken thus: "Conscript Fathers, conquered by you and by your commander with a victory at which neither god nor any man can be displeased, we surrender ourselves to you, believing—than which nothing is more glorious to a victor—that we shall live better under your rule than under our own laws. By the issue of this war two wholesome examples have been set forth to the human race: you preferred good faith in war to a victory in hand; we, provoked by that good faith, of our own accord brought you the victory. We are under your dominion; send men to receive our arms, our hostages, our city with its gates standing open. Neither shall you have cause to repent of our good faith, nor we of your rule." Thanks were given to Camillus both by the enemy and by his fellow citizens. Money was levied upon the Faliscans for the pay of the soldiers of that year, that the Roman people might be free of the tribute. Peace being given, the army was led back to Rome.

Camillus, distinguished by a far better praise than when the white horses had borne him in triumph through the city—by justice and good faith toward a conquered enemy—when he had returned to the city, the senate could not endure his silent modesty without freeing him without delay of his vow; and the golden bowl, a gift to Apollo at Delphi, the envoys who should carry it, Lucius Valerius, Lucius Sergius, Aulus Manlius, sent in a single long ship, not far from the Sicilian strait, were intercepted by pirates of the Liparians and carried off to Lipara. It was the custom of that state to divide the booty gained as it were by a public brigandage. By chance in that year there was in the highest magistracy a certain Timasitheus, a man liker to the Romans than to his own people; who, out of reverence for the name of the envoys and their gift, and the god to whom it was being sent, and the cause of the gift, filled with a just religious awe the multitude too, which is almost always like its ruler, and, bringing the envoys into the public guest-house, escorted them with an escort of ships besides to Delphi, and from there restored them safe to Rome. A bond of hospitality with him was made by decree of the senate, and gifts were publicly given. In the same year there was varying war among the Aequi, so that it was uncertain, both with the armies themselves and at Rome, whether they had conquered or been conquered. The Roman commanders, from the military tribunes, were Gaius Aemilius and Spurius Postumius. At first they conducted the campaign in common; then, the enemy being routed in line, it pleased them that Aemilius should hold Verrugo with a garrison, Postumius lay waste the borders. Him the Aequi, as he went in a disordered column too carelessly after his success, attacked, and, terror being struck into them, drove the nearest into the neighboring heights; and the panic was thence carried as far as Verrugo, to the other garrison. Postumius, his men being received into safety, when, calling an assembly, he reproached their terror and their flight—that they had been routed by the most cowardly and most fugitive of enemies—the whole army shouted out that they deserved to hear it and confessed the disgrace committed, but that the same men would set it right, and the enemy’s joy would not be lasting. Demanding that he lead them straightway from there to the enemy’s camp—and it was in sight, set in the plain—they refused no penalty if they had not stormed it before night. Praising them, he bade them refresh their bodies and be ready at the fourth watch. And the enemy, to cut off the Romans’ night-flight from the hill, where it led to Verrugo, met them on the way; and the battle was joined before light—but the moon shone all night—and the battle was no less certain than a fight by day; but a shout carried to Verrugo, since they believed the Roman camp was being assailed, struck so great a panic that, though Aemilius held them back and besought them in vain, they fled scattered to Tusculum. From there a report was carried to Rome that Postumius and his army had been slain. But he, when the first light had taken away the fear of ambush from those who pursued too eagerly, having ridden along the line recalling his promises, struck so great an ardor into them that the Aequi could no longer withstand the onset. Then the slaughter of the fleeing—such as where the matter is conducted by anger rather than by valor—was wrought to the destruction of the enemy; and upon the grievous news from Tusculum, the state being needlessly alarmed, there followed a laurel-wreathed letter from Postumius, that the victory was the Roman people’s, the army of the Aequi destroyed.

Because the proceedings of the tribunes of the plebs had not yet found their end, both the plebs strove to continue the tribunate to the proposers of the law, and the Fathers to re-elect the vetoers of it; but the plebs prevailed more in their own assembly. Which grief the Fathers avenged by a decree of the senate that consuls, a magistracy hateful to the plebs, should be created. After fifteen years there were created consuls Lucius Lucretius Flavus and Servius Sulpicius Camerinus. At the beginning of this year, when the tribunes of the plebs had fiercely banded together to carry the law through—because no one of the college was going to veto it—and the consuls resisted no less keenly for that very reason, and the whole state was turned upon that single care, the Aequi stormed Vitellia, a Roman colony in their own territory. The greatest part of the colonists, because the town had been taken by treachery at night, but free flight given through the back of the city, escaped safe to Rome. That province fell to the consul Lucius Lucretius. He, having set out with an army, conquered the enemy in line, and returned as victor to Rome to a considerably greater contest. A day of trial had been appointed for the tribunes of the plebs of the two preceding years, Aulus Verginius and Quintus Pomponius, whom it concerned the good faith of the senate to defend by the consent of the Fathers; for no one charged them with any other crime, either of their life or of their conduct of magistracy, save that, to gratify the Fathers, they had vetoed the tribunician measure. Nevertheless the anger of the plebs prevailed over the favor of the senate, and by a most pernicious precedent the innocent men were condemned each in ten thousand asses of heavy bronze. The Fathers took it ill; Camillus openly charged the plebs with crime—that, now turned against their own, they did not understand that by a wicked judgment about the tribunes they had taken away the veto, and by taking away the veto had overthrown the tribunician power; for as to their hoping the Fathers would bear the unbridled license of that magistracy, they were deceived. If the tribunician violence could not be repelled by tribunician help, the Fathers would find another weapon; and he upbraided the consuls because they had silently suffered those tribunes to be deceived under the public faith who had followed the authority of the senate. By haranguing thus openly day by day he increased men’s angers the more.

But he did not cease to stir up the senate against the law: that they should go down into the forum, when the day for carrying the law had come, in no other temper than as men who remembered they would have to fight for their altars and hearths, for the temples of the gods, and for the soil on which they had been born. For as to what concerned himself privately, if amid the struggle for his fatherland it were lawful for him to remember his own glory, it was an honor to him too that a city taken by himself should be peopled, that he should enjoy daily a monument of his own glory and have before his eyes a city carried in his own triumph, that all should tread in the footsteps of his renown; but he held it a sacrilege that a city deserted and abandoned by the immortal gods should be inhabited, that the Roman people should dwell on captive soil and exchange a victorious fatherland for a vanquished one. Roused by these exhortations, the leading men, old and young, when the law was being brought forward, came in a body into the forum; and, scattering through the tribes, each laying hold of his own tribesmen, with tears began to beg them not to forsake that fatherland for which they themselves and their fathers had fought most bravely and most happily—pointing to the Capitol, to the temple of Vesta, to the other temples of the gods round about; that they would not drive the Roman people, an exile and an outcast, from its native soil and its household gods into an enemy city, and bring the matter to such a pass that it had been better Veii were not taken, lest Rome should be deserted. Because they acted not by force but by entreaties, and amid their entreaties was much mention of the gods, it became a matter of religion to the greatest part, and more tribes rejected the law than passed it. And so glad was that victory to the Fathers that on the next day, on the motion of the consuls, a decree of the senate was made that seven jugera of the Veientine land should be divided among the plebs—and not to fathers of households only, but that account should be taken of all the free heads in each house, and that men might be willing to rear children in that hope.

The plebs being soothed by that gift, there was no contest to hinder the holding of the consular elections. There were created consuls Lucius Valerius Potitus and Marcus Manlius, who was afterward surnamed Capitolinus. These consuls held the Great Games which Marcus Furius as dictator had vowed in the Veientine war. In the same year the temple of Queen Juno, vowed by the same dictator in the same war, was dedicated; and they record that the dedication was thronged by the matrons with vast zeal. A war not worth recording was waged on Algidus with the Aequi, the enemy being routed almost before they joined hands. To Valerius, because he was more persevering in pursuing the fleeing, a triumph was decreed; to Manlius, that he should enter the city in ovation. In the same year a new war broke out with the men of Volsinii; an army could not be led against them on account of a famine and pestilence in the Roman country, arisen from drought and excessive heats. On account of which the Volsinienses, with the Sappinates joined to them, inflated with pride, of their own accord overran the Roman fields; thereupon war was declared on the two peoples. Gaius Iulius the censor died; in his place Marcus Cornelius was appointed—a thing that afterward became a matter of religious scruple, because in that lustrum Rome was taken; nor ever thereafter is a censor appointed in the room of one who has died. And the consuls being entangled in sickness, it was resolved that the auspices should be renewed through an interregnum. And so, when by decree of the senate the consuls had abdicated their magistracy, Marcus Furius Camillus was created interrex, who named Publius Cornelius Scipio, and he in turn named Lucius Valerius Potitus as interrex. By him were created six military tribunes with consular power, so that, even if ill-health should befall any of them, there might be a supply of magistrates for the commonwealth.

On the Kalends of Quintilis they entered upon their magistracy: Lucius Lucretius, Servius Sulpicius, Marcus Aemilius, Lucius Furius Medullinus for the seventh time, Agrippa Furius, Gaius Aemilius for the second time. Of these the province of the Volsinienses fell to Lucius Lucretius and Gaius Aemilius, that of the Sappinates to Agrippa Furius and Servius Sulpicius. The fighting was first with the Volsinienses. The war, vast in the number of the enemy, was in the struggle by no means hard. Their line was routed at the first onset; in the flight eight thousand armed men, cut off by the cavalry, laid down their arms and came into surrender. The fame of that war brought it about that the Sappinates would not commit themselves to battle; armed, they protected themselves within their walls. The Romans drove off booty everywhere, both from the Sappinate and from the Volsinian territory, no one warding off that violence; until the Volsinienses, wearied by war, were granted a truce for twenty years on this condition, that they restore to the Roman people what was theirs and furnish the pay of the army for that year. In the same year Marcus Caedicius, a plebeian, reported to the tribunes that in the New Way, where now there is a chapel above the temple of Vesta, he had heard in the silence of the night a voice clearer than a human one, which bade that it be told to the magistrates that the Gauls were drawing near. This, as happens, was slighted on account of the lowliness of its author, and because the nation was a distant and therefore the more unknown one. And not only were the warnings of the gods slighted, with the fate that was bearing down; but the one human help there was, Marcus Furius, they removed from the city. He, a day of trial having been appointed for him by Lucius Apuleius, tribune of the plebs, on account of the Veientine booty—bereaved too about the same time of his young son—when, having summoned to his house his tribesmen and clients, who were a great part of the plebs, and sounded their feelings, he had received the answer that they would contribute whatever he had been condemned in, but could not acquit him, went into exile, praying the immortal gods that, if that wrong were done him guiltless, they would at the first opportunity make an ungrateful state long for him. Absent, he was condemned in fifteen thousand asses of heavy bronze.

The citizen being driven out by whose remaining, if there is anything certain in human affairs, Rome could not have been taken, with the disaster fated for the city now drawing near, envoys came from Clusium seeking help against the Gauls. The tradition is that this nation, drawn by the sweetness of the fruits and especially of the wine, a pleasure then new to them, crossed the Alps and took possession of fields formerly tilled by the Etruscans; and that wine was imported into Gaul to entice the nation by Arruns of Clusium, out of anger at the corrupting of his wife by Lucumo, of whom he had been guardian—a most powerful youth, and one from whom redress could not be had unless foreign force were sought; and that he was the guide and the author of crossing the Alps and of assailing Clusium. I would not indeed deny that the Gauls were brought to Clusium by Arruns or by some other man of Clusium; but it is sufficiently established that those who assailed Clusium were not the first who crossed the Alps. For two hundred years before they assailed Clusium and took the city of Rome the Gauls crossed over into Italy; nor was it with these first of the Etruscans, but much earlier, with those who dwelt between the Apennine and the Alps, that the Gallic armies often fought. Before the Roman dominion the power of the Etruscans lay widely spread by land and sea. How great their power was over the upper and lower seas by which Italy is girt like an island, the names are an argument, since the one the Italian peoples called the Tuscan sea by the common name of the nation, the other the Adriatic from Hatria, an Etruscan colony; the Greeks call the same seas the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic. They, dwelling toward both seas, inhabited these lands in twelve cities each—first on this side of the Apennine toward the lower sea, afterward beyond the Apennine sending out as many colonies as there had been mother-cities, which held all the regions beyond the Po—except the corner of the Veneti who dwell about the gulf of the sea—as far as the Alps. To the Alpine peoples too their origin is beyond doubt, most of all to the Raeti, whom the very places have made savage, so that they retain nothing of the old except the sound of their speech, and not even that uncorrupted.

Concerning the crossing of the Gauls into Italy we have received this: when Tarquinius Priscus reigned at Rome, the chief power among the Celts—who are a third part of Gaul—was in the hands of the Bituriges; they gave a king to the Celtic land. This was Ambigatus, a man pre-eminent in valor and fortune, both his own and the public, because in his reign Gaul was so fertile in crops and in men that the abounding multitude seemed hardly to be governable. He, now great in years, wishing to relieve his kingdom of the overweighing throng, declared that he would send Bellovesus and Segovesus, his sister’s sons, enterprising young men, into whatever abodes the gods should grant them by augury; let them call out as great a number of men as they themselves wished, that no nation might be able to keep off the comers. Then to Segovesus were given by the lots the Hercynian forests; to Bellovesus the gods gave a way into Italy by no little the more gladdening. He called out what was overflowing of those peoples—Bituriges, Arverni, Senones, Aedui, Ambarri, Carnutes, Aulerci. Setting out with vast forces of foot and horse, he came to the Tricastini. There the Alps lay opposite; which it is no wonder seemed to them impassable, since as yet by no road—so far at least as memory reaches continuously—had they been surmounted, unless one chooses to believe the tales about Hercules. There, while the height of the mountains held the Gauls as it were penned in, and they looked about for some way by which, over the ridges joined to the sky, they might pass into another world, a scruple of religion too held them, because word was brought that strangers seeking land were being assailed by the people of the Salyes. These were the Massilienses, who had set out in ships from Phocaea. The Gauls, taking this for an omen of their own fortune, gave help, so that the Salyes suffering it, they fortified the place which they had first seized on landing. They themselves passed over the Alps through the Taurine passes and the pass of the Duria; and, routing the Etruscans in line not far from the river Ticinus, when they heard that the country in which they had settled was called the Insubrian—of like name with the Insubres, a canton of the Aedui—following the omen of the place, they founded a city there; they called it Mediolanium.

Another band soon after, of the Cenomani, under the leadership of Etitovius, following the footsteps of the former, when by the same pass, with Bellovesus favoring, it had crossed the Alps, held the places where now are the cities of Brixia and Verona. After these the Libui settle, and the Salluvii, near the ancient tribe of the Laevi Ligures, dwelling about the river Ticinus. Then, the Poenine pass being crossed by the Boii and the Lingones, when all the land between the Po and the Alps was already held, the Po being crossed on rafts, they drove not only the Etruscans but the Umbrians too from their land; yet they kept themselves within the Apennine. Then the Senones, the latest of the comers, held their borders from the river Utens as far as the Aesis. This nation, I find, came thence to Clusium and to Rome; but it is too little certain whether alone, or aided by all the peoples of the Cisalpine Gauls. The Clusini, terrified by the strange war, when they saw the multitude, when they saw the unwonted shapes of the men and the kind of arms, and heard that often on this side of the Po and beyond it the legions of the Etruscans had been routed by them—although they had no right of alliance or friendship with the Romans, save that they had not defended the Veientes, their kinsmen, against the Roman people—sent envoys to Rome to seek help from the senate. Of help nothing was obtained; three envoys, sons of Marcus Fabius Ambustus, were sent, to treat with the Gauls in the name of the senate and people of Rome, that they should not assail the allies and friends of the Roman people from whom they had received no injury. The Romans, they were to say, must defend them even by war if the case compelled; but it seemed better that the war itself be turned aside if it could, and that the Gauls, a new nation, be made known rather by peace than by arms.

A gentle embassy, had it not had over-fierce envoys, liker to Gauls than to Romans. When they had delivered their charge in the council of the Gauls, this answer was given: that although they heard the name of the Romans for the first time, yet they believed them to be brave men, whose help had been implored by the Clusini in their hour of dread; and since they had chosen to defend their allies against them by an embassy rather than by arms, neither did they themselves spurn the peace they offered, if to the Gauls, who lacked land, the Clusini would yield a part of their borders, which they possessed more widely than they tilled; otherwise peace could not be had. And they wished to receive the answer in the presence of the Romans, and, if land were refused, to fight in the presence of those same Romans, that they might be able to report home how far the Gauls surpassed the rest of mortals in valor. When the Romans asked what right it was to demand land from its possessors, or to threaten arms, and what business the Gauls had in Etruria, and the others fiercely answered that they carried their right in their arms and that all things belonged to the brave—their spirits being kindled on both sides, they ran to arms and the battle was joined. There, with the fates now pressing upon the city of Rome, the envoys, against the law of nations, took up arms. Nor could that be done in secret, when, before the standards of the Etruscans, three of the noblest and bravest of the Roman youth were fighting; so far did the valor of the strangers stand out. Nay more, Quintus Fabius, riding out beyond the line, ran through the side with his spear and slew a leader of the Gauls who was fiercely charging upon the very standards of the Etruscans; and as he was gathering the spoils the Gauls recognized him, and through the whole line the word was given that it was a Roman envoy. Then, their anger against the Clusini being laid aside, they sounded the retreat, threatening the Romans. There were those who thought they should go straight to Rome; but the elders prevailed that envoys should first be sent to complain of the wrongs and to demand that for the violation of the law of nations the Fabii be surrendered. When the envoys of the Gauls had set forth their charge as it had been given them, the senate disapproved the deed of the Fabii, and held that the barbarians demanded what was right; but, in men of such nobility, partiality stood in the way of decreeing what they thought right. And so, that the blame for any disaster suffered in a Gallic war might not rest with themselves, they referred the cognizance of the Gauls’ demands to the people; where favor and wealth so far prevailed that those of whose punishment the question was were created military tribunes with consular power for the year to come. Which being done, the Gauls, justly incensed—as well they might be—threatening war openly, returned to their own. With the three Fabii were created as military tribunes Quintus Sulpicius Longus, Quintus Servilius for the fourth time, Publius Cornelius Maluginensis.

When so great a mass of evil was pressing on—so does fortune blind men’s minds when it will not have its onrushing force broken—the state which against a Fidenate and Veientine enemy and other neighboring peoples had, as the last resort, in many a crisis named a dictator, then, with an unseen and unheard-of enemy rousing war from the Ocean and the farthest shores of the earth, sought no extraordinary command nor any aid. The tribunes by whose rashness the war had been brought on were in chief command, and held a levy in no degree more careful than was wont for ordinary wars, even making light of the rumor of the war. Meanwhile the Gauls, when they learned that honor had been done, over and above, to the violators of human right, and that their embassy had been mocked, blazing with anger, of which that nation has no mastery, forthwith snatched up their standards and set out on the march at a hurried pace. At the sudden tumult of their passing, when the terrified cities ran to arms and there was a flight of the country folk, they signified with a great shout, wherever they went, that they were going to Rome, covering a vast space of ground with their column of horse and men spread far and wide. But, the rumor going before and the messengers of the Clusini, and after them of the other peoples in turn, it was the swiftness of the enemy that brought most terror to Rome; since, an army being led out in haste as if at a sudden alarm, they were met with difficulty at the eleventh milestone, where the river Allia, flowing down from the Crustuminian hills in a very deep channel, mingles with the Tiber not much below the road. By now all things in front and round about were full of the enemy; and the nation, born for vain alarms, had filled all things with a horrible din with their savage chanting and varied shouting.

There the military tribunes, no place for the camp being taken beforehand, no rampart fortified for a retreat, with no thought of the gods, even if not of men, neither taking the auspices nor obtaining favorable omens, drew up the line, stretched out into wings lest they could be surrounded by the multitude of the enemy; nor yet could they make the fronts equal, since by thinning it they had a middle line weak and scarcely holding together. There was a little rising ground to the right which they resolved to fill with the reserves; and that thing, as it was the beginning of panic and of flight, so was it the one safety to the fleeing. For Brennus, chieftain of the Gauls, fearing in the small number of the enemy a stratagem above all, supposing that the higher ground had been seized for this purpose, that when the Gauls should have charged front to front against the line of the legions, the reserves might make an onset upon their rear and flank, turned his standards against the reserves, sure that, if he drove them from their position, the victory in the level of the plain would be easy for so great a superiority of numbers. So not fortune only but skill too stood with the barbarians. In the other line there was nothing like the Romans, neither among the leaders nor among the soldiers. Panic and flight had seized their minds, and so great a forgetfulness of all things, that a far greater part fled to Veii, into an enemy city, though the Tiber barred the way, than by the straight road to Rome, to their wives and children. The reserves the place protected for a little while; in the rest of the line, as soon as the shout was heard, by those nearest on the flank, by the farthest in the rear, almost before they saw the unknown enemy, not only without attempting the fight but without even returning the shout, unhurt and untouched they fled; nor was there any slaughter of men fighting; their backs were cut down as in their own struggle they hindered flight in the press. About the bank of the Tiber, whither the whole left wing fled, casting away their arms, a great slaughter was made; and the eddies swallowed up many who knew not how to swim, or were weakened, weighed down by their breastplates and other coverings. The greatest part, however, escaped unhurt to Veii, whence not only was no garrison-help, but not even a messenger of the disaster, sent to Rome. From the right wing, which had stood far from the river and more under the hill, all made for Rome, and, not even the gates of the city being shut, took refuge in the citadel.

The Gauls too were held, as it were stupefied, by the marvel of so sudden a victory, and themselves at first stood fixed with fear, as though ignorant of what had befallen; then they dreaded an ambush; at last they began to gather the spoils of the slain and, as is their custom, to heap up the piles of arms; then at length, when nowhere was anything hostile seen, they entered upon the march, and not much before sunset reached the city of Rome. There, when the horsemen who had gone ahead reported that the gates were not shut, that no outpost kept watch before the gates, that there were no armed men on the walls, another marvel like the first held them back; and, dreading the night and the lie of an unknown city, they sat down between Rome and the Anio, sending out scouts about the walls and the other gates, to learn what counsels the enemy had in their desperate case. The Romans, since a greater part of the army had made for Veii than for Rome, when no one believed that any survived save those who had fled back to Rome, all alike, the living and the dead bewailed, filled almost the whole city with laments. Then the public panic stunned their private griefs, when it was announced that the enemy were at hand; soon they heard the howling and the discordant songs of the barbarians ranging in troops about the walls. Thereafter all the time held their minds in suspense, even until the second dawn, so that again and again the assault upon the city seemed about to come: at their first coming, because they had drawn near the city—for they would have stayed at the Allia had not this been their plan; then toward sunset, because not much of the day was left—they thought they would attack before night; then that the design had been put off into the night, to strike the more terror. At last the approaching light unmanned them, and the very evil, continuous with the unbroken fear, came when the hostile standards were borne in upon the gates. Yet by no means that night nor the following day was the state like that one which had so timorously fled at the Allia. For when there was no hope that the city could be defended with so small a band as was left, it was resolved that the men of military age, with their wives and children, and the strength of the senate, should withdraw into the citadel and the Capitol, and, arms and grain being gathered in, from that fortified place defend the gods and men and the Roman name; that the flamen and the Vestal priestesses should bear the public sacred things far from the slaughter and the burning, and that the worship of them should not be abandoned until there survived none to perform it. If the citadel and the Capitol, the seat of the gods—if the senate, the head of public counsel—if the men of military age survived the impending ruin of the city, the loss of the throng of old men left in the city, sure in any case to perish, would be an easy one. And that the multitude of the plebs might bear it the more calmly, the old men of triumphal and consular rank openly declared that they would meet death together with those others, and would not burden the scanty number of the armed with bodies that could not bear arms nor defend the fatherland.

Such were the consolations bandied among the old men destined for death. Then the exhortations were turned to the band of the young whom they escorted to the Capitol and the citadel, commending to their valor and their youth whatever fortune remained of a city victorious for three hundred and sixty years in all its wars. As those who carried with them all hope and help parted from those who had resolved not to survive the captured city’s destruction, when the very thing and the sight of it were piteous, then the weeping of the women and their aimless running to and fro, following now these, now those, and asking of their husbands and sons to what fate they were giving themselves, left nothing wanting of human misery. Yet a great part of them followed their own into the citadel, none forbidding, none calling—since what was useful to the besieged, to lessen the unwarlike multitude, was too little human. Another throng, chiefly of the plebs, whom so small a hill could neither hold nor feed in so great a scarcity of grain, pouring out of the city, in one column as it were, made for the Janiculum. Thence part scattered through the fields, part made for the neighboring cities, without any leader or common counsel, each pursuing his own hope, his own designs, the common cause being given up for lost. The flamen of Quirinus meanwhile and the Vestal virgins, putting aside the care of their own affairs, consulting which of the sacred things they should bear away with them, and which—because strength was wanting to bear all—they must leave behind, and what place would keep them with faithful guard, thought it best to bury in jars in the chapel nearest the dwelling of the flamen of Quirinus—where now it is a religious offense to spit—and to carry the rest, the burden being divided among them, along the road that leads by the wooden bridge to the Janiculum. On that slope, when Lucius Albinius, a man of the Roman plebs, conveying his wife and children in a wagon among the rest of the throng that, useless for war, was leaving the city, caught sight of them—even then keeping safe the distinction between things divine and human, and holding it a matter of religion that the public priestesses and the sacred things of the Roman people should go on foot and be carried, while he and his were seen in a vehicle—he bade his wife and boys get down, set the virgins and the sacred things in the wagon, and conveyed them to Caere, whither the priestesses’ road lay.

At Rome meanwhile, all things being now arranged, as well as might be in such a case, for the guarding of the citadel, the throng of old men returned home and awaited the coming of the enemy with minds steadfast for death. Those of them who had held curule magistracies, that they might die in the insignia of their former fortune and honors or of their valor, clad themselves in the most august robes—that which is worn by those who lead the cars of the gods or who triumph—and so attired sat in the midst of their houses on chairs of ivory. There are those who relate that, with Marcus Folius the pontifex maximus reciting the formula before them, they devoted themselves for the fatherland and the Roman Quirites. The Gauls, both because the night that had intervened had relaxed the keenness of the battle, and because they had nowhere fought in a doubtful field, nor then were taking the city by assault or force, entered it the next day without anger, without heat of spirit, through the Colline gate standing open, and came into the forum, casting their eyes about upon the temples of the gods and the citadel, which alone wore the look of war. From there, leaving a moderate guard lest any onset be made from the citadel or Capitol upon them while scattered, they dispersed for plunder through streets empty of the meeting of men, some rushing in a body into the nearest of the houses, others making for the farthest, as though those alone were untouched and full of booty; then, frightened back by the very loneliness, lest some hostile stratagem should catch them as they wandered, they returned in close bands to the forum and the places near the forum; where, the dwellings of the plebs being barred but the halls of the chief men standing open, a hesitation almost greater held them to assail the open than the shut. So like to worshipers did they gaze upon the men sitting in the vestibules of the houses, who, besides their adornment and bearing more august than human, were most like to gods in the majesty too that their countenance and the gravity of their look bore before them. While they stood turned toward them as toward images, Marcus Papirius, one of them, is said to have roused the anger of a Gaul who was stroking his beard—as all then wore it long—by striking him on the head with his ivory staff; and from him the beginning of slaughter arose, and the rest were butchered in their seats; and after the slaying of the chief men no mortal thereafter was spared, the houses ransacked, and fire flung into them when emptied.

But—whether because not all had the lust to destroy the city, or because the chiefs of the Gauls had so resolved, both that certain fires should be shown for the sake of terror, in case the besieged could be driven to surrender by love of their dwellings, and that not all the roofs should be burned up, so that whatever was left of the city they might hold as a pledge for bending the spirits of the enemy—by no means as in a captured city did the fire on the first day range either at random or far and wide. The Romans, beholding from the citadel the city full of enemies and their runnings to and fro through all the streets, while now in one quarter, now in another, some new disaster arose, could not, not in their minds only, but not even with their ears and eyes, stay constant. Wherever the shout of the enemy, the wailing of women and children, the sound of the flame and the crash of falling roofs turned them, trembling at all things, they bent their minds and faces and eyes—as though set by fortune for a spectacle of their fatherland’s fall, and left to be the avengers of nothing that was theirs save their own bodies—the more to be pitied beyond all others who were ever besieged, in that, cut off from their fatherland, they were besieged seeing all their own in the enemy’s power. Nor did a quieter night follow a day so foully spent; then a restless dawn followed the night, nor was there any time that was free from the spectacle of ever some new disaster. Yet, weighed down and overwhelmed by so many evils, they bent their spirits not at all, but, though they should see all things leveled by flame and ruin, the hill they held, however poor and small, they would, free men still, defend, left to them by their valor; and now, when the same things befell daily, as men grown used to evils they had estranged their minds from the sense of their own fortunes, looking only at their arms and the iron in their right hands as though the sole remnants of their hope.

The Gauls too, when for some days they had warred in vain merely against the roofs of the city, and saw that, amid the fires and ruins of the captured city, nothing survived but armed enemies, and that these, terrified by no disasters, would not bend their minds to surrender unless force were applied, resolved to try the last resort and to make an assault upon the citadel. At first light, the signal being given, the whole multitude was drawn up in the forum; thence, raising the shout and forming the tortoise, they advanced. Against these the Romans did nothing rashly nor in alarm: at all the approaches the outposts being strengthened, where they saw the standards borne, there setting the strength of their men in the way, they suffered the enemy to climb, reckoning that the higher he mounted into the steep, the more easily he could be driven down the slope. About the middle of the rise they halted; and then from the higher ground, which of itself almost carried them upon the enemy, an onset being made, they routed the Gauls with slaughter and ruin, so that never afterward did they, in part or all together, attempt that kind of fight. And so, the hope of getting up by force and arms being given up, they made ready for a blockade—of which till that time they had been heedless—and they had consumed by the burning of the city the grain that had been in the city, while from the fields in those very days everything had been carried off to Veii. Therefore, the army being divided, it pleased them that part should plunder among the neighboring peoples, part besiege the citadel, so that the ravagers of the fields might furnish grain to the besiegers. The Gauls setting out from the city, fortune herself led, to make trial of Roman valor, to Ardea, where Camillus was in exile; who, more grieved there over the public fortune than his own, while he grew old in upbraiding gods and men, indignant and marveling where those men were who with him had taken Veii and Falerii, who had waged other wars ever more bravely than luckily—suddenly heard that the army of the Gauls was drawing near, and that the Ardeates were anxiously deliberating about it. And, as though touched by a divine breath, when he had borne himself into the midst of the assembly—being wont before to abstain from such gatherings—he said:

"Men of Ardea, old friends, and now my fellow citizens too—since both your kindness so willed and my fortune so required it—let none of you think I have come forward forgetful of my condition; but the case and the common danger compel each to bring into the common stock what aid he can in the hour of dread. And when shall I ever render you thanks for your so great deserts toward me, if now I hold back? Or where shall there be use of me to you, if not in war? By this art I stood in my fatherland, and, unconquered in war, was driven out in peace by ungrateful citizens. To you, men of Ardea, fortune has offered an occasion of rendering thanks for the great former benefits of the Roman people—how great you yourselves remember (nor are they to be cast up to those who remember)—and for this city of winning a vast glory of war from a common enemy. The nation that comes on in a loose column is one to which nature has given bodies and spirits great rather than firm; therefore into every fight they bring more of terror than of strength. Let the Roman disaster be the proof. They took the city when it lay open; from the citadel and Capitol a scanty band withstands them: already, worn out with the tedium of the siege, they depart and wander straggling through the fields. Gorged with food and wine hastily swallowed, when night comes on, near the streams of water, without fortification, without outposts and watches, they lie strewn everywhere after the manner of wild beasts, now, after their successes, even more heedless than is their wont. If it is in your mind to defend your walls and not to suffer all this to become Gaul, at the first watch take up arms in full numbers, follow me to a slaughter, not to a battle. If I do not deliver them over to you, bound by sleep, to be butchered like cattle, I refuse not for myself the same issue of my affairs at Ardea that I had at Rome."

To friend and foe alike it was a settled conviction that there was nowhere at that time so great a man in war. The assembly being dismissed, they refreshed their bodies, intent on how soon the signal would be given. When it was given, in the first silence of the night they were at the gates ready for Camillus. Going out not far from the city, they found, as had been foretold, the camp of the Gauls unguarded and neglected on every side, and with a vast shout fell upon it. Nowhere a battle; in all places slaughter; naked bodies, slack with sleep, were butchered. Yet the farthest, roused from their beds by panic, ignorant what or whence the violence was, were carried into flight, and some, unwitting, even upon the enemy himself. A great part, borne into the territory of Antium, were surrounded by a sally of the townsmen made upon them as they straggled. A like slaughter was made in the Veientine country of the Etruscans, who had so little pity for a city their neighbor now almost in its four-hundredth year, crushed by an enemy unseen, unheard-of, that in that very time they made inroads into the Roman territory, and, full of booty, had it in mind to assail Veii too, and its garrison, the last hope of the Roman name. The Roman soldiers had seen them straggling through the fields, and, their column gathered, driving the booty before them, and saw their camp pitched not far from Veii. Thence first pity for themselves, then indignation, and out of it anger, seized their spirits: were the Etruscans too, from whom they had turned the Gallic war upon themselves, to make a mockery of their disasters? Scarcely did they master their feelings from making an onset at once; checked by Quintus Caedicius, a centurion whom they had themselves set over them, they held the matter over till night. Only a leader equal to Camillus was wanting; the rest was carried through in the same order and with the same issue of fortune. Nay more, with captives for guides who had survived the night-slaughter, setting out against another band of Etruscans at the Salinae, in the following night they wrought a still greater slaughter unawares, and, exulting in a double victory, returned to Veii.

At Rome meanwhile for the most part the siege was sluggish, and there was silence on both sides, the Gauls being intent only on this, that none of the enemy should escape between their outposts—when suddenly a Roman youth turned upon himself the admiration of citizens and enemies. There was a sacrifice, fixed by custom, of the Fabian clan on the Quirinal hill. To perform it, Gaius Fabius Dorsuo, girt in the Gabine cincture and bearing the sacred things in his hands, when he had come down from the Capitol, passed out through the midst of the enemy’s outposts, moved by no man’s voice or threat, and reached the Quirinal hill; and there, all things being solemnly performed, returning by the same way, with countenance and step alike steadfast, sure enough that the gods were propitious whose worship he had not deserted even for fear of death, he returned to the Capitol to his own—whether because the Gauls were astounded by the marvel of his daring, or moved by religion too, of which that nation is by no means heedless. At Veii meanwhile not spirits only but strength too were daily growing. Not only the Romans gathering there from the fields, who had been scattered after the unlucky battle or the disaster of the captured city, but volunteers also flowing in from Latium, that they might have a share in the booty, made it seem now ripe to recover the fatherland and snatch it from the enemy’s hands; but to the strong body a head was wanting. The very place put them in mind of Camillus, and a great part of the soldiers were men who had prospered under his leadership and auspices; and Caedicius declared he would not give cause why any of gods or men should put an end to his command, but, mindful of his own rank, would himself demand a commander. By the consent of all it pleased them to summon Camillus from Ardea, but first to consult the senate that was at Rome: so far did a sense of shame govern all things, and they kept the distinctions of order with affairs almost in ruin. They had to cross through the enemy’s outposts at huge peril. For that task Pontius Cominius, an enterprising youth, promising his service, lying upon a cork, was borne down the Tiber to the city. Thence, where it was nearest from the bank, climbing up a rock sheer and therefore neglected by the enemy’s guard, he made his way onto the Capitol, and, brought to the magistrates, delivered the message of the army. Receiving then a decree of the senate, that Camillus, recalled from exile through the comitia curiata by command of the people, should at once be named dictator, and that the soldiers should have the commander they wished, the messenger, descending by the same way, hastened to Veii; and envoys sent to Ardea brought Camillus to Veii—or rather, which I more gladly believe, he did not set out from Ardea before he had learned that the law was passed, since neither could he change his borders without the people’s bidding, nor have the auspices in the army unless named dictator. The curiate law was passed and he was named dictator in his absence.

While these things were doing at Veii, meanwhile the citadel of Rome and the Capitol were in vast peril. For the Gauls—whether because they had marked a human footprint where the messenger from Veii had passed, or of their own accord having noted, at the rock of Carmentis, an ascent of easy slope—on a faintly moonlit night, having first sent ahead an unarmed man to try the way, then handing up the arms where there was any steepness, leaning on one another by turns and lifting and drawing each other up, as the ground required, climbed in such silence to the top that they not only escaped the sentinels, but did not even rouse the dogs, an animal sensitive to nocturnal noises. They did not escape the geese, which, sacred to Juno, had been spared even in the utmost scarcity of food. That thing was their salvation; for, roused by their clangor and the clatter of their wings, Marcus Manlius, who three years before had been consul, a man eminent in war, snatching up his arms and at the same time rousing the rest to arms, while the others were in confusion strode forward, and struck and hurled down a Gaul who had already gotten a footing on the summit. As his fall, slipping, laid low those nearest, Manlius cut down the others, who in their alarm had thrown away their arms and clasped with their hands the rocks they clung to. And now others gathered too, and with javelins and stones began to dislodge the enemy, and the whole line, slipping in ruin, was hurled down the precipice. The tumult being then stilled, the rest of the night, as far as could be amid disturbed minds, with the past peril too keeping them anxious, was given to rest. At dawn the soldiers being summoned by the trumpet to council before the tribunes, when both for right doing and for wrong a recompense was due, Manlius first was praised for his valor and rewarded, not by the military tribunes only but by the consent of the soldiery; for to his house, which was in the citadel, all brought, each a half-pound of spelt and a quarter-pint of wine—a thing small in the telling, but scarcity had made it a great proof of affection, since each man, defrauding himself of his own sustenance, contributed it, withdrawn from his body and from his necessary uses, to the honor of one man. Then the watchmen of that place by which the climbing enemy had escaped notice were called up; and when Quintus Sulpicius, military tribune, had declared that he would punish all of them after the manner of military discipline, deterred by the shout of the soldiers with one accord throwing the blame on a single sentinel, he spared the rest, and the man, beyond doubt guilty of that fault, with the approval of all, he cast down from the rock. Thenceforth the watches were more attentive on both sides—both among the Gauls, because it had got abroad that messengers passed between Veii and Rome, and among the Romans from the memory of the nocturnal peril.

But before all the evils of siege and war, famine pressed upon both armies, and upon the Gauls a pestilence besides, since they kept their camp in a low-lying place between the hills, scorched moreover by the fires and full of heat, bearing ash, not dust only, whenever any breath of wind had stirred. A nation most impatient of such things, used to damp and cold, racked by the heat and the choking air, died as the plagues spread abroad as if among cattle; and now, out of weariness of burying them one by one, they burned them heaped up indiscriminately in piles, and made the place notable thereafter under the name of the Gallic Pyres. Then a truce was made with the Romans, and parleys held by leave of the commanders; and in these, when the Gauls again and again cast their famine in their teeth and on that plea summoned them to surrender, it is said that, to turn aside that belief, bread was thrown in many places from the Capitol into the enemy’s posts. But by now the famine could neither be dissembled nor borne any longer. And so, while the dictator in person held a levy at Ardea, and bade Lucius Valerius, master of the horse, bring the army from Veii, and made ready and arrayed the force with which he might fall upon the enemy on no unequal terms—meanwhile the army of the Capitol, worn out with outposts and watches, having overcome all human ills yet, since nature would not suffer famine alone to be conquered, looking out day after day for any aid that might appear from the dictator, at last, when not food only but hope too began to fail, and when, as the outposts went forward, their arms all but bore down their feeble bodies—ordered that they be either surrendered or ransomed on whatever terms they could, the Gauls hinting not obscurely that for no great price they might be brought to abandon the siege. Then the senate was held, and the business given to the military tribunes to make terms. Thereupon the matter was settled in a parley between Quintus Sulpicius, military tribune, and Brennus, chieftain of the Gauls, and a thousand pounds of gold was made the price of a people soon to rule the nations. To a thing foul enough in itself an indignity was added: the weights brought by the Gauls were false, and when the tribune protested, the insolent Gaul added his sword to the weight, and a voice intolerable to Romans was heard—Woe to the vanquished.

But the gods and men forbade that the Romans should live ransomed. For by some chance, before the abominable price was made up, while in the wrangling not all the gold had yet been weighed out, the dictator came between, and bade the gold be taken from their midst and the Gauls be removed. When they, resisting, said that they had made a compact, he denied that that compact was valid which, after he himself had been created dictator, had been made by a magistrate of lesser right without his command; and he gave the Gauls warning to make ready for battle. His own men he bade throw their baggage into a heap and make their arms ready, and recover their fatherland by iron, not by gold, having before their eyes the shrines of the gods and their wives and children and the soil of their fatherland foul with the ravages of war and all that it was right to defend, to reclaim, and to avenge. Then he drew up the line, as the nature of the ground allowed, on the soil of the half-ruined city and on ground uneven by nature, and provided everything that the art of war could choose or make ready to his men’s advantage. The Gauls, alarmed at the new turn, took up arms and rushed upon the Romans more in anger than in counsel. Now fortune had turned; now the power of the gods and the counsels of men were aiding the Roman cause. And so at the first onset the Gauls were routed with no greater effort than that with which they had conquered at the Allia. Then in a second and juster battle, at the eighth milestone on the Gabine road, whither they had betaken themselves in their flight, they were conquered under the same leadership and auspices of Camillus. There slaughter held all things; the camp was taken, and not even a messenger of the disaster was left. The dictator, the fatherland recovered from the enemy, returned in triumph to the city, and amid the soldiers’ jests, which they fling out rude and unpolished, was hailed in no idle praise as Romulus and father of his country and a second founder of the city. The fatherland that he had saved in war he then unmistakably saved a second time in peace, when he prevented the migration to Veii—the tribunes pressing the matter more keenly after the burning of the city, and the plebs of itself the more inclined to that design. And this was the cause of his not laying down the dictatorship after his triumph, the senate beseeching him not to leave the commonwealth in an uncertain state.

First of all, since he was a most diligent observer of religious duties, he brought before the senate the matters that concerned the immortal gods, and a decree of the senate was made: that all the shrines, so far as the enemy had held them, should be restored, their bounds set anew, and they be expiated, and that their manner of expiation be sought in the books by the duumvirs; that a guest-friendship be formed by the state with the people of Caere, because they had received the sacred things of the Roman people and its priests, and by that people’s kindness the worship of the immortal gods had not been broken off; that the Capitoline Games be held, because Jupiter Best and Greatest had guarded his own seat and the citadel of the Roman people in their hour of dread; and that Marcus Furius the dictator should establish a college for that purpose from among those who dwelt on the Capitol and in the citadel. Mention too was brought forward of expiating the voice in the night which, before the Gallic war, had been heard foretelling the disaster and had been neglected; and it was ordered that a temple be made on the Nova Via to Aius Locutius, the Speaking Voice. The gold which had been wrested from the Gauls, and that which in the alarm had been gathered into Jupiter’s shrine from the other temples, since by confused memory it could not be told into which they ought to be carried back, was all adjudged sacred and ordered to be placed beneath Jupiter’s throne. Already before this the religious scruple of the state had shown itself in this, that, when there was not gold enough in the public store from which the sum of the price pledged to the Gauls might be made up, they had taken it contributed by the matrons, that the sacred gold might be left untouched. Thanks were rendered to the matrons, and an honor added, that there should be a solemn eulogy over them after death, as over men. These things being done that concerned the gods and could be transacted through the senate, then at last—the tribunes stirring the plebs with unceasing harangues to forsake the ruins and migrate to Veii, a city ready for them—he went up into the assembly, the whole senate following him, and spoke thus.

"So bitter to me, Quirites, are these contests with the tribunes of the plebs, that, while I lived at Ardea, I had no other solace of my most grievous exile than that I was far from these struggles; and for these same reasons, not if you recalled me a thousand times over by decree of the senate and command of the people, should I ever have meant to return. Nor now has my own will, changed, driven me to come back, but your fortune; for the aim was that the fatherland should abide in its own seat, not that I at all costs should be in the fatherland. And even now I would gladly be still and silent, were not this too a struggle for the fatherland; to fail which, while life holds out, is base for other men, but for Camillus a sin as well. For why did we reclaim her, why did we snatch her, besieged, from the enemy’s hands, if, recovered, we ourselves desert her? And when, with the Gauls victorious and the whole city taken, the Capitol and citadel were yet held by the gods and the men of Rome, shall the Romans, victorious and the city recovered, desert even the citadel and the Capitol, and shall our prosperous fortune work more desolation for this city than our adverse fortune wrought? Indeed, had we no rites laid down and handed on from hand to hand together with the founding of the city, yet in this season a divine power so manifest has stood by the Roman cause that I would think all negligence of the divine worship taken clean away from men. For look upon the successes, then the disasters, of these years one after another; you will find that all prosperous things befell those who followed the gods, all adverse those who scorned them. Now first of all, the Veientine war—through how many years, with how great toil it was waged—took no end before, at the gods’ warning, the water was let out from the Alban lake. And what of this fresh disaster of our city? Did it arise before the voice sent from heaven about the coming of the Gauls was scorned, before the law of nations was violated by our envoys, before that violation—which we ought to have punished—was, by that same negligence of the gods, passed over by us? And so, conquered and captured and ransomed, we have paid such penalties to gods and men as to be a lesson to the whole world. Then our adversities put us in mind of religion. We fled for refuge to the Capitol, to the gods, to the seat of Jupiter Best and Greatest; in the ruin of our fortunes we hid some of our sacred things in the earth, others we carried away into the neighboring cities and removed from the enemy’s sight; deserted by gods and men, we yet did not break off the worship of the gods. They therefore have given back our fatherland, and our victory, and the ancient glory of war we had lost; and upon the enemy, who, blind with greed, broke faith and treaty over the weighing of the gold, they have turned terror and flight and slaughter.

"Beholding such monuments of the divine power, worshiped or neglected, at work in human affairs, do you at all perceive, Quirites, what impiety we are preparing, scarcely yet emerging from the shipwrecks of our former guilt and disaster? We hold a city founded after the auspices were taken and the inauguration made; no place in it is not full of religious observances and of gods; for the solemn sacrifices the days are no more fixed than the places in which they are to be performed. All these gods, public and private, Quirites, are you about to desert? How does your deed match his which, in the late siege, was beheld in that excellent youth, Gaius Fabius, with no less wonder of the enemy than of yourselves, when, descending from the citadel through the Gallic weapons, he performed the solemn rite of the Fabian clan on the Quirinal hill? Is it your pleasure that the rites of a clan be not interrupted even in war, but the public rites and the Roman gods be deserted even in peace, and that the pontiffs and flamens be more careless of the public observances than a private man was in his clan’s solemnity? Perhaps someone will say that either we shall perform these rites at Veii, or shall send our priests hither from there to perform them; but neither of these can be done with the ceremonies kept whole. And not to reckon up all the rites by kind and all the gods—at the feast of Jupiter can the sacred couch be spread anywhere but on the Capitol? What shall I say of the eternal fires of Vesta, and of that image which, as a pledge of empire, is kept in the guardianship of her temple? What of your sacred shields, Mars Gradivus, and you, father Quirinus? Is it your pleasure that all these sacred things, coeval with the city, some older than the city’s origin, be deserted on unhallowed ground? And see what difference there is between us and our forefathers. They handed down to us certain rites to be performed on the Alban mount and at Lavinium. Was it a thing of religion to transfer the sacred things to Rome to us out of the cities of enemies, and shall we without sin transfer them hence into Veii, an enemy’s city? Recall, come now, how often the rites are begun anew because something of the ancestral usage has been passed over through negligence or chance. But just now—what was a remedy to the commonwealth, stricken by the Veientine war, after the prodigy of the Alban lake, but the renewing of the rites and the auspices? Nay more, as though mindful of the old religions, we have both brought foreign gods to Rome and instituted new ones. Juno the Queen, lately carried over from Veii, on what a signal day, amid the surpassing zeal of the matrons, and how thronged, was she dedicated on the Aventine! We ordered a temple to be made to Aius Locutius, because of the heavenly voice heard, on the Nova Via; we added the Capitoline Games to the other solemnities, and founded a new college for that purpose by the senate’s authority. What need was there to undertake any of these, if we were to leave the city of Rome together with the Gauls, if we did not stay on the Capitol of our own will through so many months of the siege, but were held back by the enemy in fear? We speak of rites and of temples; what, then, of the priests? Does it not come into your minds how great an impiety would be committed? For the Vestals surely have that one seat, from which nothing ever moved them save the capture of the city; for the flamen of Jupiter it is a sin to remain even a single night outside the city. Will you make these priests Veientine instead of Roman, and shall your Vestals desert you, Vesta, and shall the flamen, by dwelling abroad, draw upon himself and upon the commonwealth so great a guilt night by night? And the other things which we do after the auspices are taken, almost all within the pomerium—to what oblivion or neglect do we consign them? The curiate assembly, which holds the conduct of war, the centuriate assembly, in which you create consuls and military tribunes—where, after auspices, can they be held save where they are wont? Shall we transfer these to Veii? Or, for the assemblies’ sake, shall the people, at so great inconvenience, come together into this city, deserted by gods and men?

"But, you will say, it is plain indeed that all is polluted and can be cleansed by no atonements; yet the case itself compels us to leave a city laid waste by fires and ruins, and to migrate to Veii, where all is whole, and not here to harass the needy plebs with building. That this plea, however, is rather pretended than true—even though I should not say it—I think is plain to you, Quirites, who remember that, before the coming of the Gauls, with the public and private roofs unharmed, with the city standing untouched, this same proposal was urged, that we should migrate to Veii. And see, tribunes, how great a difference there is between my judgment and yours. You think that, even if it ought not to have been done then, now at all events it must be done; I, on the contrary—and do not wonder at it before you have heard what it is—even if we ought to have migrated then, while the whole city stood untouched, would not now vote that these ruins be abandoned. For then our cause for migrating into a captured city would have been victory, glorious to us and to our posterity; now this migration is wretched and shameful for us, glorious for the Gauls. For we shall seem not to have left our fatherland as victors, but to have lost it as vanquished: this the rout at the Allia, this the captured city, this the beleaguered Capitol will be seen to have laid upon us as a necessity—that we should desert our household gods and decree for ourselves exile and flight from the place we could not guard. And were the Gauls able to overthrow Rome, and shall the Romans be thought to have been unable to raise her up again? What remains but that, if now they should come with fresh forces—for it is agreed that their multitude is scarcely credible—and should choose to dwell in this city, taken by them, deserted by you, you should suffer it? What? If not the Gauls, but your old enemies, the Aequi or the Volsci, should remove to Rome, would you be willing that they should be Romans, and you Veientines? Or would you rather that this be your wasteland than an enemy’s city? For my part I do not see which would be the greater sin. Are you ready to endure these crimes, these dishonors, because it irks you to build? If in the whole city no better or ampler dwelling could be raised than that hut of our founder, is it not better to dwell, after the manner of shepherds and rustics, in huts among our sacred things and household gods, than to go forth as a people into exile? Our forefathers, gathered strangers and shepherds, when in these places there was nothing but woods and marshes, built a new city in so short a time: do we, with the Capitol and citadel unharmed, with the temples of the gods standing, find it irksome to build over what is burned? And what each of us singly would have done, had his own house burned down, this, in a public conflagration, do we all together refuse to do?

"What then? If by crime or by chance a fire should arise at Veii, and the flame, spread by the wind, as may happen, should consume a great part of the city, shall we seek out Fidenae, or Gabii, or some other city to migrate to? Does the soil of the fatherland hold us so little, and this earth which we call mother, but does our love of country hang upon surfaces and timbers? Indeed—I will confess it to you, though it gives less pleasure to remember your wrong than my own calamity—when I was away, as often as the fatherland came into my mind, all these things rose before me: the hills and the plains and the Tiber and the region familiar to my eyes and this sky beneath which I was born and reared; which, Quirites, may they now rather move you by their own dearness to abide in your seat, than afterward, when you have left it, waste you with longing. Not without cause did gods and men choose this place for the founding of a city: these most healthful hills, a convenient river by which from the inland parts the crops may be borne down, by which the supplies from the sea may be received; near to the sea for its conveniences, yet not exposed by too great nearness to the perils of foreign fleets; set in the very middle of the regions of Italy—a place born, beyond all others, for the growth of a city. The proof is the very greatness of so young a city. It is now, Quirites, the three hundred and sixty-fifth year of the city; among so many of the most ancient peoples you wage war so long, while meanwhile—not to speak of single cities—neither the Volsci joined with the Aequi, with so many strong towns, nor all Etruria, so mighty by land and sea and holding the breadth of Italy between its two seas, is a match for you in war. Since this is so, what reason—plague take it—is there to make trial of other places, having tried these, when, though your valor may pass elsewhere, the fortune of this place surely cannot be carried away? Here is the Capitol, where once, a human head being found, the answer was given that in that place should be the head of the world and the height of empire; here, when the Capitol was being cleared by augury, Iuventas and Terminus, to the exceeding joy of your fathers, suffered not themselves to be moved; here are the fires of Vesta, here the shields sent down from heaven, here are all the gods propitious to you while you abide."

Camillus moved them, it is said, by the whole of his speech, but most of all by that part which touched upon religion; yet a voice opportunely uttered decided the matter while it hung in doubt. For when, a little after, the senate was being held on these matters in the Curia Hostilia, and some cohorts returning from the outposts chanced to pass in column through the forum, a centurion in the comitium cried out: "Standard-bearer, plant the standard; here we shall best remain." On hearing that voice, the senate, coming forth from the Curia, cried aloud that it accepted the omen, and the plebs gathered round about gave its approval. The law being then rejected, the city began to be built up without plan. Tiles were furnished at the public charge; the right was granted to each to quarry stone and timber where he would, sureties being taken that they would finish the buildings within that year. Haste took away the care of keeping the streets straight, while, all distinction of one’s own ground and another’s being disregarded, men built upon vacant land. That is the reason why the old sewers, at first led through public ground, now run here and there beneath private houses, and the form of the city is liker to one seized than parceled out.