What the Romans did from the founding of the city of Rome down to its capture—first under kings, then under consuls and dictators, decemvirs and consular tribunes, their wars abroad and their seditions at home—I have set out in five books: matters obscured by their very antiquity, like objects scarcely discerned across a great distance, and obscured too because in those days writing, the one faithful guardian of the memory of deeds done, was rare, and because even whatever record there was in the commentaries of the pontiffs and in other monuments, public and private, perished for the most part when the city was burned. From here on, from the city’s second origin—as though sprung again from its roots more luxuriantly and more fruitfully—a clearer and more certain account of her deeds at home and in the field will be set forth. For the rest, the city first stood propped upon the same support by which it had been raised up, with Marcus Furius at its head; and they did not suffer him to lay down the dictatorship until the year had run its course. It was resolved not to let the tribunes in whose magistracy the city had been taken hold the elections for the following year; the matter reverted to an interregnum. While the state was held fast in the unremitting toil and labor of rebuilding the city, meanwhile a day of trial was named for Quintus Fabius, the moment he had left office, by Gnaeus Marcius, tribune of the plebs, on the charge that, as an envoy to the Gauls—to whom he had been sent as a spokesman—he had fought against the law of nations; from which trial death snatched him away, so opportunely that a great many believed it self-inflicted. The interregnum began: Publius Cornelius Scipio as interrex, and after him Marcus Furius Camillus a second time. He created as military tribunes with consular power Lucius Valerius Publicola for the second time, Lucius Verginius, Publius Cornelius, Aulus Manlius, Lucius Aemilius, Lucius Postumius. When these men had entered at once upon their office from the interregnum, they consulted the Senate on no matter sooner than on the observances of religion. First of all they ordered that the treaties and the laws—these were the Twelve Tables and certain royal laws—be sought out, so far as they could be found; some of them were even published abroad to the common people, but those that bore upon sacred things were suppressed by the pontiffs, chiefly that they might hold the minds of the multitude bound fast by religion. Then they began to deliberate about the days of religious observance, and the day before the fifteenth of the Kalends of Sextilis, marked by a double disaster—the day on which the Fabii were cut down at the Cremera, and on which afterward the foul battle at the Allia was fought, with the ruin of the city—they named, from the later disaster, the Day of the Allia, and marked it out as a day for the conduct of no business, public or private. Some think that, because on the day after the Ides of Quintilis the military tribune Sulpicius had failed to win favorable omens, and because the Roman army, the peace of the gods unfound, was three days later thrown against the enemy, it was on that account ordered that on the day after the Ides too there should be a cessation of divine business; and from this, they suppose, it was handed down that the same scruple should hold for the days after the Kalends and the Nones as well.

Nor was it long permitted them to turn over in quiet their plans for raising the commonwealth up from so grievous a fall. On one side the Volsci, old enemies, had taken up arms to blot out the Roman name; on the other, traders brought word that the chief men of Etruria, drawn from all its peoples, had sworn a league of war at the shrine of Voltumna. A new terror too had been added by the revolt of the Latins and the Hernici, who, since the battle fought at Lake Regillus, had for nearly a hundred years remained in the friendship of the Roman people with a loyalty never in doubt. And so, when terrors so great stood round on every side, and it was plain to all that the Roman name was laboring not only under hatred among its enemies but under contempt among its allies, it was resolved that the commonwealth should be defended under the same auspices by which it had been recovered, and that Marcus Furius Camillus be named dictator. As dictator he named Gaius Servilius Ahala master of the horse; and, proclaiming a suspension of public business, he held a levy of the younger men in such fashion that he enrolled in centuries the older men too, those in whom some vigor still remained, sworn to his word. The army enrolled and armed, he divided into three parts: one part he set in the territory of Veii to face Etruria; the second he ordered to pitch camp before the city; over these Aulus Manlius was placed as military tribune, over those—since they were being sent against the Etruscans—Lucius Aemilius; the third part he led himself against the Volsci, and not far from Lanuvium—the place is called Ad Mecium—he set about assaulting their camp. They had set out to war from contempt, believing that nearly all the fighting youth of Rome had been destroyed by the Gauls; yet the mere news that Camillus was their commander had struck them with such terror that they fenced themselves behind a rampart, and the rampart with heaped-up trees, so that nowhere might the enemy find a way in to their defenses. When Camillus marked this, he ordered fire to be thrown into the barricade set against him; and there happened to be a great force of wind turned toward the enemy. And so the blaze not only opened a way, but, as the flames stretched toward the camp, with the heat and the smoke and the crackle of the green wood ablaze it so dismayed the enemy that it cost the Romans less labor to surmount the fortified rampart into the Volscian camp than it had cost them to cross the barricade consumed by the fire. The enemy routed and cut down, when the dictator had taken the camp by storm, he gave the plunder to the soldiers—the less looked for, since the commander was the least lavish of men, the more welcome to the soldiery on that account. Then, pursuing the fugitives, when he had laid waste the whole Volscian country, he forced the Volsci to surrender at last, in the seventieth year of the war. Victorious over the Volsci, he crossed over against the Aequi, who were themselves stirring up war; their army he crushed at Bolae, and, assailing not the camp only but the town as well, took it at the first onset.

While in that quarter where Camillus, the head of the Roman cause, was present such was their fortune, in another quarter a vast terror had come crashing on: nearly all Etruria in arms was besieging Sutrium, allies of the Roman people; and their envoys, begging help for their stricken affairs, when they had come before the Senate, carried back a decree that the dictator should bring aid to the people of Sutrium at the first possible moment. But when the fortune of the besieged could not endure delay even of this hope, and the scanty townsmen, worn out by the work, the watches, and the wounds that ever pressed upon the same men, had by a compact surrendered the city to the enemy and, disarmed, were leaving their homes in a pitiable column, sent forth each with a single garment, at that very moment, as it chanced, Camillus arrived with the Roman army. When the mournful throng had cast itself at his feet, and the weeping of the women and children who were being dragged along as companions of exile had taken up the plea of their leaders, wrung from them by the last extremity, he bade the people of Sutrium spare their laments: it was to the Etruscans that he was bringing grief and tears. Then he ordered the baggage to be set down and the people of Sutrium to settle there under a modest guard, and the soldiers to carry their arms with them. So, setting out with his army unencumbered for Sutrium, he found everything, as he had reckoned, loosened by success, as happens—no outpost before the walls, the gates open, the victors straying about and hauling plunder out of the houses of the conquered. And so a second time on the same day Sutrium is taken; the victorious Etruscans are butchered everywhere by the fresh enemy, and no room is given them to mass together, to combine into one body, or to take up arms. As each man for himself strove toward the gates, in hope of somehow flinging himself out into the fields, they found the gates shut—for that the dictator had ordered first of all. Then some snatched up arms, others, whom the uproar had caught already armed, called their fellows together to join battle; and the fight, kindled out of the enemy’s despair, would have blazed up, had not heralds, sent through the city, ordered arms to be laid down and the unarmed to be spared, and that none but the armed be harmed. Then even those whose spirits, in the last extremity of hope, had been set on fighting it out, once hope of life was given, flung their arms about on every side and, unarmed, offered themselves to the enemy—a thing fortune had made the safer course. A great multitude was parceled out into custody; the town was given back before nightfall to the people of Sutrium, unviolated and whole, untouched by any of the ravages of war, because it had not been taken by force but handed over on terms.

Camillus returned to the city in triumph, victor in three wars at once. By far the greatest number of captives he led before his chariot from among the Etruscans; and when these had been sold under the spear, so much bronze was raised that, after the matrons had been repaid the price of their gold, from what remained three golden bowls were made, which—inscribed with the name of Camillus—are known to have stood, before the Capitol was burned, in the shrine of Jupiter, at the feet of Juno. In that year those of the Veientes, the Capenates, and the Faliscans who in the course of those wars had deserted to the Romans were received into citizenship, and land was assigned to these new citizens. By a decree of the Senate there were also recalled to the city from Veii those who, from reluctance to build at Rome, had taken themselves off to Veii, seizing on the empty houses there. And at first there was a murmur of men spurning the order; but then a day appointed, and a capital penalty for whoever should not have removed back to Rome, made of the whole defiant body obedient men one by one, each through his own fear; and Rome began both to grow in numbers and to rise all at once in its buildings, the state helping with the expense, the aediles pressing the work on as though it were a public undertaking, and the private citizens themselves—for the need they felt urged them on—hastening to the completion of the work; and within the year the new city stood. At the year’s end elections were held for military tribunes with consular power. There were created Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus, Quintus Servilius Fidenas for the fifth time, Lucius Iulius Iulus, Lucius Aquilius Corvus, Lucius Lucretius Tricipitinus, Servius Sulpicius Rufus. They led one army against the Aequi—not to war, for they confessed themselves beaten, but out of hatred, to lay their borders waste, so that no strength might be left them for fresh designs—and another into the territory of Tarquinii; there the Etruscan towns of Cortuosa and Contenebra were taken by storm. At Cortuosa there was no fighting: attacking unforeseen, they took it at the first shout and onset; the town was sacked and burned. Contenebra held out under siege a few days, and the unbroken toil, relaxed neither by day nor by night, subdued them. When the Roman army, divided into six parts, relieved one another in the fighting by turns at six-hour intervals, while their fewness threw the same townsmen, weary, against a battle ever fresh, they gave way at last, and the Romans were given their chance to break into the city. The tribunes wished the plunder to be made public property; but the command came more sluggishly than the decision, and while they hesitated it was already the soldiers’ plunder, and could not be taken from them save by stirring resentment. In the same year, lest the city should grow by private works alone, the Capitol too was underbuilt with squared stone—a work to be admired even amid the magnificence of the city as it now stands.

And now the tribunes of the plebs, while the state was taken up with building, were trying to crowd their assemblies with agrarian laws. The Pomptine land was held out as a hope, then for the first time, after the Volscian power had been cut down by Camillus, securely in Rome’s possession. They charged that the land was far more endangered by the nobility than it had ever been by the Volsci; for by the latter only raids had been made into it, and that only so long as they had strength and arms; but the nobles were forcing their way into possession of the public land, and unless it were divided before they seized everything beforehand, there would be no room there for the plebs. They moved the plebs not greatly, since it was both thinly present in the Forum because of the care of building and drained by that same expense, and therefore unmindful of land which it had no resources to stock. In a state full of religious scruples, its leading men at that time made superstitious even by the recent disaster, the matter reverted to an interregnum, so that the auspices might be renewed. The interreges in succession were Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, Servius Sulpicius Camerinus, Lucius Valerius Potitus; this last at length held the elections for military tribunes with consular power. He created Lucius Papirius, Gnaeus Sergius, Lucius Aemilius for the second time, Licinius Menenius, Lucius Valerius Publicola for the third time; these entered upon office from the interregnum. In that year the temple of Mars, vowed during the Gallic war, was dedicated by Titus Quinctius, duumvir for the performance of sacred rites. Four tribes were added from among the new citizens—the Stellatine, the Tromentine, the Sabatine, and the Arniensian—and these brought the number of tribes up to twenty-five.

The Pomptine land was brought forward by Lucius Sicinius, tribune of the plebs, before a people now more numerous and more easily moved to a craving for land than it had been. And mention made in the Senate of a war with the Latins and Hernici was put off through concern for a greater war, since Etruria was in arms. The matter came round again to Camillus as military tribune with consular power; five colleagues were added to him—Servius Cornelius Maluginensis, Quintus Servilius Fidenas for the sixth time, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, Lucius Horatius Pulvillus, Publius Valerius. At the year’s beginning men’s concerns were turned away from the Etruscan war, when a column of fugitives from the Pomptine country, suddenly pouring into the city, brought word that the people of Antium were in arms, and that the peoples of Latium had sent their fighting youth to that war—denying that it had been a public decision, on the ground that they merely said volunteers, unforbidden, were soldiering where they pleased. By now men had ceased to make light of any war. And so the Senate gave thanks to the gods that Camillus was in office: for he would have had to be named dictator, had he been a private man; and his colleagues acknowledged that the direction of all affairs, whenever any terror of war came crowding in, lay in one man, and that they had resolved in their hearts to yield their command to Camillus, believing that nothing was taken from their own dignity by what they conceded to the dignity of that man. The tribunes were praised by the Senate, and Camillus himself, his feelings overcome, gave thanks. A vast burden, he then said, was laid upon him by the Roman people, who had now created him a fourth time; a great one by the Senate, through such judgments of that order concerning him; the greatest of all by the deference of colleagues so honored; and so, if any toil and watching could be added, vying with his own self he would strive to make the opinion the state held of him, by so great a consent of theirs—the highest there could be—an opinion constant as well. As to the war and the people of Antium, there was in it more of menace than of danger; yet he advised, as he counseled nothing to be feared, so nothing to be despised. The city of Rome was beset by the envy and hatred of its neighbors; and so the commonwealth must be administered with several commanders and several armies. "You, Publius Valerius," he said, "as partner of my command and my counsel, it is my wish should lead the legions with me against the enemy of Antium; you, Quintus Servilius, with a second army drawn up and ready, to keep camp in the city, watchful whether in the meanwhile Etruria stir itself, as of late, or this new anxiety—the Latins and the Hernici—be moved; I hold it for certain that you will so conduct the matter as is worthy of your father, your grandfather, of yourself, and of your six tribunates. Let a third army be enrolled by Lucius Quinctius from the invalided and the elders, to be a guard for the city and its walls. Let Lucius Horatius see to the arms, the weapons, the grain, and whatever else the occasions of war shall demand. You, Servius Cornelius, we your colleagues make president of this public council, guardian of the rites, of the elections, of the laws, of all the city’s affairs." When all had freely pledged their service to the parts of their charge, Valerius, chosen partner in the command, added that Marcus Furius would be to him in a dictator’s place, and he himself to Camillus in a master of the horse’s place; and that therefore they should hold such hope of the war as was their opinion of their sole commander. And the fathers, lifted up with joy, cried aloud that they indeed had good hope both of the war and of peace and of the whole commonwealth; and that the state would never have need of a dictator, if it had such men in office, joined in spirits so harmonious, ready alike to obey and to command, and bringing their praise into the common store rather than drawing from the common store to themselves.

A suspension of business proclaimed and a levy held, Furius and Valerius set out for Satricum, where the men of Antium had gathered not only the youth of the Volsci, chosen from a new generation, but a vast force of Latins and Hernici from peoples wholly unworn by a long peace. And so the new enemy, joined to the old, shook the spirit of the Roman soldier. When the centurions reported this to Camillus as he was already drawing up his line—that the soldiers’ minds were in disorder, that arms had been taken up sluggishly, that the men had come out of camp hesitating and hanging back, nay that words too had been heard, that single men would have to fight a hundred enemies apiece, and that so great a multitude could scarcely be withstood unarmed, much less in arms—he sprang onto his horse and, turning to face the line, riding between the ranks, cried: "What gloom is this, soldiers, what unwonted hesitation? Is it the enemy you do not know, or me, or yourselves? What is the enemy but the perpetual matter of your valor and your glory? You, on the other hand, under my leadership—to say nothing of Falerii and Veii taken, and of the legions of the Gauls cut down in the captured fatherland—only the other day, with a threefold victory, held a triple triumph over these very Volsci, and over the Aequi, and over Etruria. Or do you not own me your leader, because I have given you the signal not as dictator but as tribune? For my part I crave no greatest powers over you, and it befits you to look in me to nothing beyond my very self; for the dictatorship never gave me spirit, even as exile never took it away. We are therefore all the same men we were; and since we bring to this war all the same things we brought to the wars before, let us look for the same outcome of war. The moment you have charged, each man will do what he has learned and grown used to: you will conquer, they will flee."

Then, the signal given, he leaped down from his horse and, seizing the nearest standard-bearer by the hand, dragged him with him against the enemy, crying again and again, "Forward with the standard, soldier!" When they saw this—Camillus himself, now by old age unfit for the body’s tasks, striding upon the enemy—they all rushed forward together, a shout raised, each man for himself crying, "Follow the commander!" They report too that at Camillus’s order a standard was hurled into the enemy line, and that the front-rank men were spurred on to recover it; there first the Antiate was driven back, and the terror was carried not only into the foremost line but even to the reserves. Nor was it the force of the soldiers alone, roused by the presence of their leader, that prevailed, but that to the minds of the Volsci nothing was more dreadful than the figure of Camillus himself, presented to them by chance; so that, wherever he had carried himself, he drew victory with him beyond all doubt. This was most plainly seen when, on the left wing, now all but broken, snatching a horse on the sudden and riding up with a foot soldier’s shield, by the mere sight of him he restored the battle, pointing to the rest of the line winning the day. The day was already turning, but the very throng of the enemy hindered their flight, and so great a multitude had to be finished off in a long slaughter by men now weary, when suddenly a rain poured down in mighty squalls and broke off a victory now certain rather than a battle still in doubt. Then, the signal for retreat given, the night that followed finished the war for the Romans as they rested; for the Latins and the Hernici, abandoning the Volsci, set out for their homes, having won outcomes to match their evil counsels; and the Volsci, when they saw themselves deserted by those in whose confidence they had renewed the war, left their camp and shut themselves within the walls of Satricum; these Camillus first set about to ring with a rampart and to assault with mound and siege-works. But when he saw them hindered by no sally, reckoning there was less spirit in the foe than that he should wait over it for a victory of so slow a hope, he urged his soldiers not to wear themselves out in a long labor as though besieging Veii—victory was in their hands—and, the soldiers assailing the walls on every side with vast eagerness, took the town with scaling-ladders. The Volsci threw down their arms and surrendered.

But the leader’s mind was bent on a greater object, Antium: that was the head of the Volsci, that the origin of the late war. Yet since so strong a city could not be taken save with great preparation, with engines and siege-machines, leaving his colleague with the army he set out for Rome, to urge the Senate to the razing of Antium. In the midst of his speaking—it was, I believe, dear to the gods that the affair of Antium should remain longer unfinished—envoys came from Nepete and Sutrium, seeking aid against the Etruscans, and warning that the chance to bring help was brief. Thither fortune turned the force of Camillus away from Antium. For since those places lay over against Etruria and were, as it were, the bars and the gates on that side, it was the care of the Etruscans to seize them whenever they were planning anything new, and of the Romans to recover and to guard them. And so it was resolved by the Senate to deal with Camillus that, Antium let go, he should take up the Etruscan war; the city legions over which Quinctius had been set were decreed to him. Though he would have preferred the tried army, used to his command, that was among the Volsci, he made no objection; he demanded only Valerius as partner of the command. Quinctius and Horatius were sent into the Volscian country as successors to Valerius. Setting out from the city for Sutrium, Furius and Valerius found one part of the town already taken by the Etruscans, and in the other part the townsmen, with the streets barricaded across, with difficulty keeping the enemy’s force off from themselves. Both the coming of Roman aid and the name of Camillus, most renowned among enemies and allies alike, propped up the tottering cause for the present and gave space for bringing help. And so, dividing the army, Camillus ordered his colleague, leading his forces round, to assail the walls on that side which the enemy held—not so much in hope that the city could be taken by ladders as that, with the enemy turned thither, the toil of the townsmen, now weary with fighting, might be eased, and he himself might have room to enter the walls without a struggle. When this had been done on both sides at once, and a twofold terror beset the Etruscans, and they saw both that the walls were being stormed with the utmost force and that the enemy was within the walls, in panic they flung themselves out in a single column through the one gate that chanced not to be invested. A great slaughter of the fugitives was made both within the city and through the fields: more were cut down within the walls by Furius’s men, while Valerius’s, less encumbered, were the readier at the pursuit, and they made no end of the killing until night, which took away the power to see. Sutrium recovered and restored to the allies, the army was led to Nepete, which, received by surrender, the Etruscans now held entire.

It seemed that there would be more labor in recovering that city, not only because it was wholly in the enemy’s hands but also because the surrender had been made by a part of the Nepesines betraying their state; yet it was resolved to send to their leading men, that they should sever themselves from the Etruscans and themselves keep the faith which they had implored from the Romans. And when from them the answer was brought back that nothing lay in their own power, that the Etruscans held the walls and the watches of the gates, terror was first applied to the townsmen by the ravaging of their land; then, since the faith of surrender was held more sacred than that of alliance, bundles of brushwood gathered from the fields, the army was led up to the walls, the ditches were filled, the ladders set against them, and at the first shout and onset the town was taken. To the Nepesines then it was proclaimed to lay down their arms, and order was given to spare the unarmed: the Etruscans, armed and unarmed alike, were cut down. The authors of the surrender among the Nepesines too were struck with the axe: to the guiltless multitude their goods were restored, and the town left with a garrison. So, two allied cities recovered from the enemy, the tribunes led the victorious army back to Rome with great glory. In the same year satisfaction was demanded of the Latins and the Hernici, and it was asked why through those years they had not, as the established usage required, furnished a soldier. It was answered, in a full council of each people, that there was in this no public fault nor public design, that some of their youth had soldiered among the Volsci; that these men, however, had the penalty of their own ill counsel, and that not one of them had come back; but that the cause of no soldier’s being furnished had been the unremitting terror from the Volsci, a plague clinging to their side which they had been unable to drain away through so many wars, one upon another. This, reported to the fathers, was judged to have rather an unfit season than no just cause for war.

In the following year—when Aulus Manlius, Publius Cornelius, Titus and Lucius Quinctius Capitolinus, Lucius Papirius Cursor a second time, and Gaius Sergius a second time were military tribunes with consular power—a grievous war arose abroad and a graver sedition at home: the war from the Volsci, with the revolt of the Latins and Hernici joined to it; the sedition from the quarter where it could least be feared, from a man of patrician stock and famous renown, Marcus Manlius Capitolinus. He, overweening of spirit, while he despised the other leading men, envied one alone, eminent at once in honors and in worth—Marcus Furius; and he bore it ill that this man alone counted in the magistracies, alone with the armies; that he now towered so high that those created under the same auspices he held not as colleagues but as servants—when meanwhile, if any would judge truly, the fatherland could not have been recovered by Marcus Furius from its siege by the enemy, had not the Capitol and the citadel first been saved by himself; and that the one had fallen upon the Gauls amid their taking of the gold and with their minds unstrung in the hope of peace, while he himself had thrust back armed men in the very act of seizing the citadel; that of the other’s glory a man’s share belonged to all the soldiers who had conquered along with him, but of his own victory no mortal in the whole world was a partner. His mind puffed up with these notions, and over and above this headstrong and ungovernable by a flaw of temperament as well, when he marked that his own power stood out among the fathers not so far as he reckoned just, he—first of all the fathers to turn popular—began to share counsels with the plebeian magistrates; by accusing the fathers, by enticing the plebs to himself, he was now borne along by the breeze of favor rather than by counsel, and chose to be of great fame rather than of good. And not content with agrarian laws, which had always been the tribunes’ matter for sedition, he began to undermine credit: for the goads of debt, he said, are sharper, threatening not poverty and disgrace alone but terrifying a free man’s body with the fetter and the chain. And there was a great mass of debt, contracted by building—a thing most ruinous even to the rich. The Volscian war, therefore, grievous in itself and loaded with the revolt of the Latins and Hernici, was paraded as the show of a pretext, that a greater power might be sought; but it was Manlius’s new designs that drove the Senate the more to the naming of a dictator. Aulus Cornelius Cossus, named dictator, made Titus Quinctius Capitolinus his master of the horse.

The dictator, though he saw a greater struggle set before him at home than abroad, nevertheless—whether because swiftness was needed for the war, or because he reckoned that by a victory and a triumph he would add strength to the dictatorship itself—held a levy and pressed on into the Pomptine country, whither he had heard the army summoned against him by the Volsci. I do not doubt that to readers, beyond their surfeit of the wars so unremittingly waged against the Volsci through so many books already, this thought too will occur, which was a marvel to me as I reviewed the authors nearer in time to these events: from what source, with the Volsci and Aequi so often beaten, soldiers were supplied. Since this has been passed over in silence by the ancients, of what thing—save my own opinion, which each man may have for himself as he conjectures—can I be the warrant? It is like the truth that either, in the intervals of the wars, just as now happens in Roman levies, they used one growth of younger men after another to renew the wars so many times; or that the armies were not always enrolled from the same peoples, although the same nation always brought on the war; or that there was a countless multitude of free persons in those regions which now scarce keep their Roman slaves from desolation, with a thin seed-plot of soldiers left. At any rate the Volscian army—as is agreed among all the authors—was vast, though their strength had lately been cut down under the leadership and auspices of Camillus; and to this had been added the Latins and the Hernici, and certain men of Circeii, and even Roman colonists from Velitrae. The dictator, having pitched camp that day, on the next, when he had come forth under the auspices and, the victim slain, had besought the peace of the gods, rejoiced and went out to the soldiers, who at first light, as had been proclaimed, were already taking up their arms toward the appointed signal for battle. "The victory is ours, soldiers," he said, "if the gods and their seers see anything of what is to come. And so, as befits men full of sure hope and about to join hands with an unequal foe, let us set our javelins before our feet and arm our right hands with the sword alone. I would not even have a charge made out from the line, but that you, planting yourselves with a steady step, should receive the enemy’s onset. When they have cast their missiles in vain and, pouring out, have flung themselves on you who stand fast, then let the swords flash, and let it come into each man’s mind that there are gods who aid the Roman, gods who sent him into battle under favorable birds. You, Titus Quinctius, hold the cavalry intent upon the first beginning of the contest once it is set in motion; when you see the line now locked foot to foot, then carry the terror of horsemen against men already seized by another panic, and, charging in, scatter the ranks of the fighters." So the horse, so the foot fight, as he had directed; and neither did the leader fail his legions nor fortune the leader.

The multitude of the enemy, relying on nothing but their number and measuring each line by the eye, rashly entered the battle and rashly let it go; in shouting alone, in their missile weapons, and in the first onset of the fight they were fierce, but could not bear the swords, the locked step, and the foe’s face flashing with the ardor of his spirit. The front line was driven in, and the panic was carried back into the reserves; and the cavalry brought its own terror; then in many places the ranks were broken, and all was in motion, and the line was like a thing tossed on the waves. Then, after each man saw, as the foremost fell, that the slaughter would presently reach himself, they turned their backs. The Roman pressed on; and so long as they went off armed and in close order, the toil of pursuit fell to the foot: but after it was marked that arms were being flung away on every side and the enemy’s line scattered in flight across the fields, then the squadrons of horse were loosed, with the signal given that they should not, by lingering over the killing of single men, give the multitude meanwhile room to escape: enough that their course be hindered by missiles and terror, and the column held by riding round it, until the foot could come up and finish the enemy in a proper slaughter. There was no end of flight and pursuit before night. The camp of the Volsci too was taken and sacked that same day, and all the plunder, save the free persons, was granted to the soldiery. The greatest part of the captives were from among the Latins and the Hernici, and not men of the plebs, such as might be believed to have soldiered for pay, but certain leaders of the youth were found among them—plain proof that the Volscian enemy had been helped by public aid. Some men of Circeii too were recognized, and colonists from Velitrae; and all, sent to Rome, when the chief of the fathers questioned them, declared without much evasion, each man, the revolt of his own people, the same things they had told the dictator.

The dictator was keeping the army in a standing camp, in no doubt that the fathers would order war against those peoples, when a greater mass of trouble, risen at home, forced him to be summoned to Rome, the sedition swelling day by day, which its author made more to be feared than was its wont. For now it was not the speeches alone of Marcus Manlius, but his deeds—popular in show, yet riotous all the same—that had to be looked into for the mind in which they were done. When he had seen a centurion, noted for his deeds in war, condemned for debt and being led off, he ran up with his troop into the middle of the Forum and laid his hand upon him; and crying out upon the pride of the fathers, the cruelty of the moneylenders, and the miseries of the plebs, upon that man’s worth and ill fortune, "Then truly," he said, "shall I in vain have saved the Capitol and the citadel with this right hand, if I am to see a fellow citizen and comrade-in-arms led off into slavery and chains, as though taken by the victorious Gauls." Thereupon he paid the man’s debt to the creditor before the people, and, freed by the scales and the bronze, sent him away, calling gods and men to witness that they should render thanks to Marcus Manlius, his liberator, the father of the Roman plebs. Received at once into the riotous throng, he himself swelled the riot, displaying the scars he had taken in the Veientine war, the Gallic, and in the other wars one after another: he, while he soldiered, while he restored the overthrown household gods, his principal many times over already paid off, with the interest forever sinking the principal, had been buried under usury; that he saw the light, the Forum, the faces of his fellow citizens, by Marcus Manlius’s doing; that all a parent’s benefits he had from him; to him he devoted what was left of his body, his life, and his blood; whatever right he had had with his fatherland, with the public and private household gods, was now bound up in this one man. The plebs, stirred by these cries, when they were already this one man’s, had besides another matter added, of a counsel handier for throwing all into confusion. He put up to the crier a farm in the Veientine country, the chief part of his patrimony: "That I may not suffer," he said, "any one of you, Quirites, while anything remains in my estate, to be led off as adjudged or made over to a creditor." This indeed so kindled their spirits that they seemed ready to follow this champion of liberty through every right and wrong. Besides this, his harangues at home, in the manner of one addressing an assembly, full of charges against the fathers; among which—throwing them out with no distinction whether what he hurled were true or empty—he flung the charge that the treasures of Gallic gold were being hidden by the fathers, and that they were no longer content to possess the public land unless they made off with the public money too; if this thing were brought to light, the plebs could be freed of its debt. When this hope was held out, it seemed an outrage indeed that, when gold had had to be contributed to ransom the state from the Gauls, and the contribution made by a tax, the same gold, taken from the enemy, should have passed into the plunder of a few. And so they pressed on, asking where the theft of so great a thing was hidden away; and to him, putting it off and saying he would disclose it in his own good time, the cares of all, leaving everything else, were turned to that one point, and it was plain that there would be neither moderate gratitude for a true disclosure nor moderate resentment for a false one.

So, with matters thus in suspense, the dictator, summoned from the army, came to the city. On the next day, holding the Senate, when he had tested men’s wills enough and had forbidden the Senate to depart from him, he set his chair in the comitium and, hedged about by that multitude, sent a beadle to Marcus Manlius; who, summoned at the dictator’s command, when he had given his men the sign that the contest was at hand, came to the tribunal in a vast column. On this side the Senate, on that the plebs, each gazing on its own leader, had taken their stand as though in line of battle. Then the dictator, silence made, said: "Would that in other matters too I and the Roman fathers might come to agreement with the plebs as readily as, in what concerns you and the thing I am about to ask you of, I am confident enough we shall agree. I see that hope has been given by you to the state that, with good faith unimpaired, debt can be discharged out of the Gallic treasures, which the chief of the fathers are hiding. So far am I from being a hindrance to this that, on the contrary, I exhort you, Marcus Manlius: free the Roman plebs from usury, and roll those men who brood over the public treasures out of their clandestine plunder. But if you do not do this—whether that you may yourself be a sharer in the plunder, or because the disclosure is empty—I shall order you to be led off to prison, and shall no longer suffer the multitude to be roused by you with a deceiving hope." To this Manlius replied that it had not escaped him that the dictator had been created not against the Volsci—enemies as often as it suits the fathers—nor against the Latins and the Hernici, whom they drove to arms on false charges, but against himself and the Roman plebs; that now, the pretended war laid aside, the assault was made on him; that now the dictator avowed himself the patron of the moneylenders against the plebs; that now out of the favor of the multitude a charge and his ruin were being sought against him. "Does it offend you, Aulus Cornelius, and you, conscript fathers, the throng poured about my side? Why do you not draw it off from me, each of you by your own benefits—by interceding, by taking your fellow citizens out of the stocks, by hindering the adjudged and the made-over from being led off, by sustaining the necessities of others out of that which overflows from your wealth? But why do I urge you to spend of your own? Remit the principal that is left; from the capital subtract what has been paid over in interest; then my throng will be no more conspicuous than any man’s. But why, you ask, do I alone take care of my fellow citizens? I have no more to answer than if you should ask why I alone saved the Capitol and the citadel. Then I brought aid to all together, as well as I could; now I will bring it to single men. As for the Gallic treasures, your questioning makes a hard matter of one easy by its own nature. For why do you ask what you know? Why do you bid that to be shaken out which is in your own bosom, rather than lay it down—unless some fraud lies beneath? The more you bid your own conjuring tricks to be exposed, the more I fear that you have made off even with the eyes of the onlookers. It is not for me to point out your plunder to you, but you who must be compelled to bring it into the midst."

When the dictator bade him have done with evasions, and forced him either to make good his disclosure or to confess the crime of having charged the Senate with a falsehood and fastened on it the odium of an empty theft, Manlius said he would not speak at the bidding of his enemies; whereupon the dictator ordered him led off to prison. Seized by the beadle, "Jupiter," he cried, "most good, most great, and Queen Juno, and Minerva, and the rest of the gods and goddesses who dwell in the Capitol and the citadel—do you so suffer your soldier and defender to be harried by his enemies? Shall this right hand, with which I routed the Gauls from your shrines, now be in fetters and chains?" No man’s eyes or ears could bear the indignity; but the state had made for itself a certain unconquerable temper, most patient of just authority, and neither the tribunes of the plebs nor the plebs itself dared to lift their eyes against the dictator’s force or to open their mouths. With Manlius flung into prison, it is well agreed that a great part of the plebs put on mourning, that many men let their hair and beard grow long, and that a sorrowing throng beset the entrance of the prison. The dictator triumphed over the Volsci, and the triumph was more a thing of odium than of glory; for men murmured that it had been earned at home and not in war, and that the business done was against a citizen, not an enemy: one thing only, they said, had been wanting to its arrogance—that Marcus Manlius had not been led before the chariot. And now the matter was not far from open sedition; to soothe which—though none demanded it—the Senate of a sudden turned a voluntary giver and ordered a colony of two thousand Roman citizens to be led out to Satricum. Two iugera and a half of land apiece were assigned; and since they read this as both too little, and given to too few, and a wage for the betrayal of Marcus Manlius, the sedition was inflamed by its remedy. And now the Manlian throng was more conspicuous still in its squalor and the look of accused men; and the terror that had been removed, after the triumph, by the laying down of the dictatorship had set free both the tongues and the spirits of men.

And so there were heard openly the voices of those who reproached the multitude that they ever raised their defenders by their favor to a sheer and dizzy height, and then, at the very crisis of peril, abandoned them: thus Spurius Cassius, while he called the plebs to the fields; thus Spurius Maelius, while he warded off famine from the mouths of his fellow citizens at his own cost, had been crushed; thus Marcus Manlius, while he dragged into liberty and the light the part of the state sunk and buried under usury, was betrayed to his enemies; the plebs fattened its champions only that they might be butchered. Was this to have been borne—that a man of consular rank, because he answered not to the dictator’s nod, should be led to prison? Let them suppose he had lied before, and so had nothing to answer then: to what slave was ever imprisonment the penalty of a lie? Did not the memory of that night come before them, which had been all but the last and everlasting night for the Roman name? Not the sight of the Gallic column climbing the Tarpeian rock? Not Marcus Manlius himself, such as they had seen him, armed, drenched with sweat and blood, with Jove himself wellnigh snatched from the enemy’s hands? Was it with a half-pound of spelt that thanks had been rendered to the savior of the fatherland? And the man whom they had made nigh a god—at least in surname the equal of Capitoline Jove—would they suffer him, bound in prison, in the dark, to draw out a life subject to the executioner’s pleasure? So in this one man had there been help enough for all, and was there no help for one in so many? Now not even by night did the throng slip away from that place, and they threatened to break open the prison, when, by remitting what they were about to seize, by decree of the Senate Manlius was set free from his chains; by which deed the sedition was not ended but a leader was given to the sedition. In those same days, to the Latins and Hernici, and likewise to the colonists of Circeii and Velitrae, when the Volsci were clearing themselves of the charge of war and demanding the captives back, that they might punish them under their own laws, grim answers were returned—grimmer to the colonists, because Roman citizens had entered upon the unspeakable design of assaulting their fatherland. And so they were not only refused as to the captives, but—a thing they had nevertheless forborne toward allies—it was proclaimed to them in the Senate’s words to get themselves quickly out of the city, away from the sight and eyes of the Roman people, lest the law of embassy, framed for the foreigner and not for the citizen, shield them not at all.

As the Manlian sedition broke out afresh, toward the end of the year the elections were held, and there were created as military tribunes with consular power Servius Cornelius Maluginensis a second time, Publius Valerius Potitus a second time, Marcus Furius Camillus a fifth time, Servius Sulpicius Rufus a second time, Gaius Papirius Crassus, and Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus a second time. At the opening of that year peace abroad was given most opportunely to both fathers and plebs: to the plebs, because, not called off by a levy, it conceived the hope—while it had so powerful a leader—of storming usury down; to the fathers, lest their minds be called away by any terror from abroad from the healing of the maladies at home. So, when each party had risen up somewhat the keener, the contest was already at hand. And Manlius, having summoned the plebs to his house, plied his designs for revolution by day and by night with the chiefs of the movement, fuller by far of spirit and of anger than he had been before. His anger had been kindled by his recent disgrace, in a mind untried by insult before; spirit was given him by this—that the dictator had not dared the same against him as Quinctius Cincinnatus against Spurius Maelius, and that the odium of his imprisonment not only the dictator had fled by laying down the dictatorship, but the Senate too had been unable to bear. Puffed up and embittered at once by these things, he goaded the spirits of the plebs, already kindled of themselves. "How long, pray, will you be ignorant of your own strength, which nature has not willed even the beasts to be ignorant of? Count at least how many you yourselves are, how many adversaries you have. For as many clients as each of you once stood about his single patron, so many will you now be against your single enemy. Were you about to set upon them one against one, even so I should believe you would fight the more keenly for your liberty than they for their mastery. Only make a show of war; you shall have peace. Let them see you ready for force; they will of themselves remit the law. Something must be dared by all together, or all things suffered by single men. How long will you keep looking round to me? I, for my part, will fail none of you; see to it that my fortune fail me not. I myself, your champion, the moment it seemed good to my enemies, was suddenly nothing; and you saw led off to prison, all of you, the man who had thrust off your chains from each of you one by one. What am I to hope, if my enemies dare more against me? Am I to look for the end of a Cassius and a Maelius? You do well to cry out against the omen. The gods will forbid these things; but never for my sake will they come down from heaven; it is for you they must give the mind to forbid them—as they gave to me, armed and in the toga, to defend you from the barbarian enemy, from the haughty citizen. Is the spirit of so great a people so small that it is always enough for you to have help against your enemies, and you know no contest against the fathers save so far as you suffer command to be laid on you? Nor is this inborn in you by nature, but you are possessed by habit. For why do you bear so much spirit against foreigners that you reckon it just to rule them? Because you are used to contend with them for empire, but against these to make trial of liberty rather than to guard it. Yet, whatever leaders you have had, whatever you yourselves have been, all things, however great, that you have so far sought you have obtained, whether by force or by your fortune. It is time to attempt even greater things. Only make trial of your own good luck and of me, who have, I hope, made trial of mine luckily: with less trouble will you set up one to command the fathers than you have set up men to resist those commanding. Dictatorships and consulships must be leveled with the ground, that the Roman plebs may be able to lift its head. Therefore stand by me; forbid the law of debts to be pronounced. I profess myself the patron of the plebs, a name with which my care and my faith have clothed me: if you call your leader by some name more marked of command or honor, you will find him the mightier for the obtaining of what you wish." From this, they say, arose the first beginning of the design of kingship; but neither with whom, nor to what end, the plots reached, is handed down plainly enough.

But on the other side the Senate took counsel concerning the secession of the plebs into a private house—set, as it chanced, even upon the citadel—and the mass of danger overhanging liberty. A great part cried out that there was need of a Servilius Ahala, who should not, by ordering a public enemy led to prison, goad him on, but should by the loss of one citizen make an end of intestine war. They came down to a sentence milder in words, yet holding the same force: that the magistrates should see to it that the commonwealth take no harm from the destructive designs of Marcus Manlius. Then the tribunes with consular power and the tribunes of the plebs—for these too, since they saw the same limit set to their own power as to the liberty of all, had given themselves over to the authority of the fathers—all of them then deliberated what needed to be done. When nothing occurred to any man save force and bloodshed, and it was plain this would be a struggle of huge violence, then Marcus Menenius and Quintus Publilius, tribunes of the plebs, said: "Why do we make a contest of fathers and plebs out of what ought to be the state’s against one pestilent citizen? Why do we set upon him along with the plebs, when it is safer to set upon him through the plebs itself, that he may fall crushed under his own strength? It is in our mind to name him a day of trial. Nothing is less popular than kingship. The moment that multitude sees that the strife is not against itself, and from his advocates are made his judges, and accusers from the plebs look upon a patrician defendant, with the charge of kingship set in the midst, they will favor nothing more than their own liberty."

All approving, they name Manlius a day. When this was done, at first the plebs was moved—above all after they saw the defendant in mourning, and with him not one of the fathers, no, nor even his kinsmen or connections, not even at last his brothers Aulus and Titus Manlius; whereas down to that day it had never come to pass that, in so great a peril, even a man’s nearest did not change their garb with him: when Appius Claudius was led to prison, Gaius Claudius, his enemy, and the whole Claudian house had gone into mourning; by a common consent, they said, a man popular with the people was being crushed, because he had been the first to fall away from the fathers to the plebs. When the day came, what was brought against the defendant by the accusers that bore properly on the charge of kingship—apart from the gatherings of the multitude, the seditious speeches, the largesse, and the deceiving disclosure—I find in no author; nor do I doubt it was no small matter, since the cause of the plebs’s delay in condemning lay not in the case but in the place. This seems worth noting, that men may know what and how great glories a foul lust for kingship rendered not merely thankless but hateful: he is said to have brought forward nigh four hundred men to whom he had advanced moneys without interest, whose goods he had kept from sale, whom he had kept from being led off as made over; and besides these to have not merely recounted but actually displayed, for the eye to behold, the decorations of war—spoils of slain enemies to the number of thirty, gifts from commanders to the number of forty, among them two notable mural crowns and eight civic crowns; and over and above to have brought forward citizens saved from the enemy, among whom Gaius Servilius, master of the horse, was named, though absent; and when he had told over the deeds done in war too, in a speech magnificent to match the height of the matters, equaling the deeds with words, he bared his breast, marked with the scars taken in war, and again and again, gazing toward the Capitol, called down Jupiter and the other gods to the aid of his fortunes, praying that the mind they had given him while he protected the Capitoline citadel, for the safety of the Roman people, they would give to the Roman people in his own crisis; and he begged them, one and all, to give judgment on him while they gazed upon the Capitol and the citadel, while they turned to the immortal gods. When in the Field of Mars the people was being called up by centuries, and the defendant, stretching out his hands toward the Capitol, had turned his prayers from men to the gods, it became plain to the tribunes that, unless they freed men’s eyes too from the memory of so great a glory, there would never be room for a true charge in minds preoccupied by the benefit. So, the day adjourned, the assembly of the people was proclaimed in the Petelline grove outside the Flumentane gate, whence there was no view of the Capitol. There the charge prevailed, and with hardened hearts a grim judgment was given, hateful even to the judges. There are those who maintain that he was condemned by duumvirs created to inquire into treason. The tribunes hurled him from the Tarpeian rock; and the same spot was, for one man, both a monument of surpassing glory and the place of the uttermost penalty. There were added to the dead man marks of infamy: one public—since his house had stood where now is the temple and mint of Moneta, it was proposed to the people that no patrician should dwell on the citadel or the Capitol; the other of his house—it was provided by decree of the Manlian clan that none thereafter should be called Marcus Manlius. Such was the end of a man who, had he not been born in a free state, would have been memorable. The people, a little after, when there was no longer any peril from him, recalling his virtues for their own sake, were seized with longing for him. A pestilence too, following shortly, with no causes to be found for so great a calamity, seemed to a great part to have arisen from the punishment of Manlius: the Capitol, they said, had been defiled by the blood of its savior, and it had not been pleasing to the gods that his punishment should have been brought, well-nigh before their eyes, by the very man from whom their temples had been snatched out of the enemy’s hands.

The pestilence, the dearth of crops, and the report of both evils spread abroad—these the following year a manifold war succeeded, when Lucius Valerius for the fourth time, Aulus Manlius for the third, Servius Sulpicius for the third, Lucius Lucretius, Lucius Aemilius for the third, and Marcus Trebonius were military tribunes with consular power. New enemies, besides the Volsci—given, as if by some lot, to exercise the Roman soldier almost into eternity—and the colonies of Circeii and Velitrae, long now plotting revolt, and a suspected Latium, sprang up suddenly even at Lanuvium, which had been the most faithful of cities. The fathers, reckoning that this came of contempt, because the revolt of their own citizens of Velitrae had so long gone unpunished, decreed that at the first opportunity a measure should be brought before the people for declaring war on them. And that the plebs might be the readier for that campaign, they created a board of five to divide the Pomptine land and a board of three to lead out a colony to Nepete. Then a measure was brought before the people that they should order the war, and, despite the tribunes of the plebs vainly speaking against it, all the tribes ordered war. The war was made ready that year, but the army was not led out because of the pestilence, and that delay had given the colonists room to entreat the Senate; and a great part of men were inclining to send a suppliant embassy to Rome, had not—as happens—the public peril been entangled with private, and the authors of the revolt from the Romans, fearing lest, left alone to bear the charge, they be given up as expiations of the Romans’ wrath, turned the colonies away from counsels of peace. And not only was the embassy hindered by them in the Senate, but a great part of the plebs was incited to march out to plunder into Roman territory. This fresh injury drove out all hope of peace. Of the revolt of the Praenestines, too, a report first arose that year; and when the men of Tusculum, Gabii, and Labici, into whose borders the raids had been made, charged them with it, the answer was given by the Senate so mildly that it was plain less credence was put in the charges because they wished them not to be true.

In the following year Spurius and Lucius Papirius, the new military tribunes with consular power, led the legions to Velitrae, with four colleagues—Servius Cornelius Maluginensis for the third time, Quintus Servilius, Gaius Sulpicius, and Lucius Aemilius for the fourth time—left as tribunes for the guard of the city and against any new disturbances reported from Etruria, for all things from that quarter were under suspicion. At Velitrae a battle was fought, with success, against the auxiliaries of the Praenestines—almost greater than the very multitude of the colonists themselves—so that the nearness of the city was for the enemy both the cause of a quicker flight and the one refuge from flight. The tribunes abstained from assaulting the town, both because it was a doubtful venture and because they judged they ought not to fight for the colony’s destruction. A dispatch to Rome to the Senate, along with the messengers of victory, was sent sharper against the Praenestine than against the Veliternian enemy. And so, by decree of the Senate and order of the people, war was declared on the Praenestines; who, joined with the Volsci, in the year following stormed by force Satricum, a colony of the Roman people, stubbornly defended by the colonists, and foully wreaked their victory upon the captured. The Romans, bearing this hard, created Marcus Furius Camillus military tribune for the sixth time. Added as his colleagues were Aulus and Lucius Postumius Regillensis and Lucius Furius, with Lucius Lucretius and Marcus Fabius Ambustus. The Volscian war was decreed to Marcus Furius out of the ordinary course; an aide from among the tribunes was given him by lot—Lucius Furius—not so much for the public good as that there might be matter for his colleague’s every praise, both publicly, in that he restored the cause that had slipped through the other’s rashness, and privately, in that out of the man’s blunder he sought rather his goodwill than his own glory. Camillus was now of an age outworn, and at the elections, when he was ready to swear the formula customary for excusing himself on the ground of health, the consent of the people had withstood him; yet a vigorous mind throve in his lively breast and flourished with senses unimpaired, and, though he now went about civic affairs not greatly, wars roused him. Four legions of four thousand each enrolled, with the army summoned to the Esquiline gate for the day following, he set out for Satricum. There the stormers of the colony, no whit dismayed, trusting in the number of soldiers, in which they were somewhat the stronger, awaited him. When they perceived the Romans drawing near, at once they advanced into line, meaning in no way to put off the trial of the whole stake: so little, they thought, would the arts of a single commander, in which alone they trusted, avail against the fewness of the enemy.

The same ardor was in the Roman army too, and in the other leader, and nothing delayed the fortune of immediate battle save one man’s counsel and command—who by drawing out the war sought occasion to help his strength by stratagem. The more for this the enemy pressed on, and now not only deployed their line before their own camp but advanced into the middle of the plain and, by bringing their standards almost up to the enemy’s rampart, made parade of an overweening confidence in their strength. This the Roman soldier bore ill, and much more ill the other of the military tribunes, Lucius Furius, headstrong in his years and his temper alike, and puffed up by the hope of a multitude that took its courage from the most uncertain of grounds. He, of himself already, further goaded on the soldiers, who were inflamed, by belittling—in the one way he could—the authority of his colleague through his age, saying again and again that wars belonged to the young, and that with the body the spirit flourished and withered away; that a most keen warrior had been turned into a delayer, and that one wont, on arriving, to snatch camps and cities at the first onset now sat idle within the rampart, wearing away the time—hoping what would be added to their own strength or taken from the enemy’s? What occasion, what moment, what place was he arraying for an ambush? The old man’s counsels were cold and numb. But Camillus had had enough both of life and of glory; what need that the strength of a state, which ought to be immortal, should grow old along with one mortal body? By these speeches he had turned the whole camp to himself; and when on every side battle was demanded, "We cannot, Marcus Furius," he said, "hold back the onset of the soldiers, and the enemy, whose spirits we have raised by delaying, now insults us with a pride no longer to be borne; yield, one to all, and suffer yourself to be conquered in counsel, that you may the sooner conquer in war." To this Camillus answered that, of the wars waged down to that day under his own sole auspices, in none had either himself or the Roman people repented of his counsel or his fortune; that now he knew he had a colleague equal in right and command, and his superior in the vigor of his years; that therefore, so far as concerned the army, he was wont to rule, not to be ruled; his colleague’s command he could not hinder. With the gods’ good help let him do what he judged good for the commonwealth: for his own age he begged even indulgence, that he might not be in the front line. The offices that are an old man’s in war, in those he would not fail; this he prayed of the immortal gods, that no chance might make his counsel the praiseworthy one. Neither was the saving counsel heard from men, nor were prayers so dutiful heard from the gods. The author of the battle drew up the front line; Camillus made strong the reserves and set a stout guard before the camp; he himself, on a raised spot, took his stand, a watcher intent on the issue of another’s counsel.

As soon as, at the first encounter, the arms clashed, the enemy fell back—by craft, not from fear. There was a gentle slope behind, between the line and the camp; and, since their multitude allowed it, they had left several stout cohorts armed and arrayed in the camp, to burst out, when the battle was already joined and the enemy had drawn near the rampart. The Roman, by following the yielding enemy in disorder, was dragged into unfavorable ground, opportune for this sally; and so the terror, turned upon the victor, by the new enemy and the upward-sloping valley, bent back the Roman line. The fresh Volsci, who had made their charge from the camp, pressed on; those too renewed the fight who had given way in a feigned flight. Now the Roman soldier was no longer recovering himself, but, unmindful of his recent fierceness and his old renown, was turning his back everywhere and making for the camp at headlong speed, when Camillus, lifted onto a horse by those around him and swiftly setting the reserves in the way, cried: "Is this, soldiers, the battle you demanded? What man, what god is there whom you can accuse? It was your rashness, it is your cowardice, that has done this. You followed another leader; follow now Camillus, and conquer, as under my leadership you are wont. Why do you look to the rampart and the camp? Those will receive none of you save as victor." Shame at first held the scattered men; then, when they saw the standards wheeled about and the line turned upon the enemy, and the leader—besides being marked by so many triumphs, venerable too by his age—offering himself among the foremost standards, where most was the toil and the peril, each man fell to chiding himself and the others, and the exhortation, passing to and fro, ran through the whole line with a lively shout. Nor was the other tribune wanting to the occasion, but, sent by his colleague—who was restoring the line of foot—to the horsemen, not to chide them (for the fellowship of fault had made him too light a censurer for that) but, turned wholly from command to entreaty, he begged them one and all to free him, the man accused at the bar of that day’s fortune, from the charge: "Against my colleague’s refusal and prohibition I gave myself to be a partner rather of the rashness of all than of the prudence of one. Camillus, in either fortune of yours, sees his own glory; I, unless the battle is restored, shall—what is most wretched—feel my ill fortune with all, my infamy alone." It seemed best, in the wavering line, to give over their horses and assail the enemy in a foot-fight. On they go, marked by their arms and their spirits, where they see the forces of foot pressed hardest. Nothing of the height of the contest’s ardor is slackened, either among the leaders or among the men. The issue therefore felt the help of strenuous valor; and the Volsci, where but now they had given way in feigned fear, there, scattered in true flight, a great part both in the very battle and afterward in flight were cut down, the rest in the camp, which was taken in the same rush; yet more were captured than slain.

There, when in the mustering of the captives some men of Tusculum were recognized, they were set apart from the rest and brought before the tribunes, and on being questioned confessed that they had soldiered by public counsel. Stirred by the fear of a war so near, Camillus said he would at once lead the captives to Rome, that the fathers might not be ignorant that the Tusculans had fallen away from the alliance: meanwhile let his colleague, if it seemed good, take charge of the camp and the army. One day had been a lesson to him not to prefer his own counsels to better ones; yet it seemed that neither he himself nor any man in the army would bear, with a mind well enough appeased, the fault of one by which the commonwealth had been thrust into so headlong a hazard; and both in the army and at Rome there was one steady report of all, that, of the affair waged in Volscian country with varying fortune, the blame of the adverse battle and flight lay with Lucius Furius, but all the honor of the favorable one rested with Marcus Furius. The captives brought into the Senate, when the fathers had resolved that the Tusculans should be pursued with war, and had committed that war to Camillus, he asked for one aide to that task, and, leave being given him to choose from his colleagues whom he would, against the expectation of all chose Lucius Furius; by which moderation of spirit he both lightened his colleague’s infamy and won for himself enormous glory. Nor was there any war with the Tusculans: by a steadfast peace they warded off the Roman force which by arms they could not. As the Romans entered their borders, there was no removal from the places near the road, no breaking-off of the tillage of the fields; with the city’s gates standing open, the townsmen in their togas came thronging out to meet the commanders; supplies were carried for the army into the camp, courteously, from city and from fields. Camillus, having pitched camp before the gates, desiring to know whether the same look of peace that was displayed in the fields was also within the walls, entered the city; and when he saw the doors standing open, and in the open shops all things set out in full view, and the craftsmen each intent on his own work, and the schools of letters loud with the voices of learners, and the streets filled, amid the common crowd, with boys and women going hither and thither as each one’s business led, nothing anywhere like the bearing not merely of frightened men but even of men astonished, he looked round on everything, searching with his eyes for where there had been a war; so wholly was there nowhere any trace either of a thing removed or of a thing readied for the moment, but all so calm with a steadfast tranquil peace that the very rumor of war could scarce seem to have reached the place.

Overcome, therefore, by the enemy’s patience, he ordered their Senate to be summoned. "You alone so far, men of Tusculum," he said, "have found the true arms and the true strength by which to guard your goods from the wrath of the Romans. Go to Rome, to the Senate; the fathers will weigh whether you deserved more of punishment before, or now of pardon. I will not forestall the favor of a public benefit; the power of entreaty you shall have had from me; to your prayers the Senate will grant such issue as shall seem good." After the Tusculans came to Rome, and the Senate of allies but a little before faithful was seen, sorrowing, in the vestibule of the Curia, the fathers, moved at once, ordered them to be called in even then more in the manner of hosts than of foes. The dictator of Tusculum spoke thus: "You on whom you declared and brought war, conscript fathers—even as you now see us standing in the vestibule of your Curia, so, armed and ready, we came out to meet your commanders and legions. This was our bearing, this our plebs’s, and ever shall be, save if at any time we receive arms from you and on your behalf. We give thanks both to your leaders and your armies, that they trusted their eyes rather than their ears, and where there was nothing hostile did nothing hostile themselves. The peace which we ourselves have shown, that we ask of you; the war, wherever it be, we pray you turn it elsewhere; what your arms avail against us, if it must be tried by our enduring, we will try unarmed. This is our mind—may the immortal gods make it as fortunate as it is dutiful. As for the charges by which, being moved, you declared war, though it is to no purpose to confute by words what has been refuted by deeds, yet, even were they true, we judge it safe to confess them, since our repentance has been so plain. Let wrong be done against you, so long as you be worthy that satisfaction be so made you." Such, well-nigh, were the words made by the Tusculans. They obtained peace for the present, and not long after the citizenship besides. From Tusculum the legions were led back.

Camillus—distinguished for his counsel and valor in the Volscian war, for his good fortune in the Tusculan expedition, and in both for a singular patience and moderation toward his colleague—left office, when there had been created as military tribunes for the following year Lucius and Publius Valerius (Lucius for the fifth time, Publius for the third), Gaius Sergius for the third, Licinius Menenius for the second, Publius Papirius, and Servius Cornelius Maluginensis. The year had need of censors too, chiefly because of the uncertain report of debt, the tribunes of the plebs aggravating its sum so as to swell the odium of it, while it was made light of by those to whom it was expedient that credit should seem to suffer from the bad faith rather than the bad fortune of the debtors. There were created as censors Gaius Sulpicius Camerinus and Spurius Postumius Regillensis; and the business, once begun, was interrupted by the death of Postumius, since it was a matter of religious scruple to substitute a colleague to a censor. And so, when Sulpicius had laid down his office, the other censors, created with a flaw, did not exercise the magistracy; to create a third pair, as though the gods would not receive a censorship that year, was held a thing of scruple. But the tribunes denied that this mockery of the plebs was to be borne: the Senate, they said, fled the witnesses—the public tablets of each man’s census—because they would not have the sum of debt seen, which would show how one part of the state was sunk by the other, while meanwhile the debt-burdened plebs was thrown to one enemy after another; now wars were being sought everywhere without any distinction: from Antium to Satricum, from Satricum to Velitrae, thence the legions had been led to Tusculum; against the Latins, the Hernici, and the Praenestines arms were now being aimed more from hatred of citizens than of enemies, that they might wear out the plebs under arms, and not let it draw breath in the city, nor in leisure remember liberty, nor stand in the assembly where it might at last hear a tribune’s voice on the easing of usury and the ending of other wrongs. But if the plebs had a spirit mindful of their fathers’ liberty, they would suffer no Roman citizen to be made over for money lent, nor any levy to be held, until—the debt inspected, and a plan begun for diminishing it—each man might know what was his own, what another’s, whether his body remained free to him or that too were owed to the stocks. The wage of sedition set forth straightway stirred up sedition. For many men were being made over, and at the report of a Praenestine war the fathers had resolved that new legions be enrolled; and both these at once began to be hindered, by the tribunes’ aid and the plebs’s consent; for the tribunes suffered no man to be led off as made over, and the younger men gave in no names. While the fathers had less concern, for the present, to enforce the law of money lent than to hold the levy—for it was now reported that the enemy, set out from Praeneste, had encamped in the territory of Gabii—meanwhile that very report had goaded the tribunes of the plebs the more to the contest they had taken up rather than deterred them; nor did anything avail to quench the sedition in the city save a war brought wellnigh to the very walls.

For when it had been reported to the Praenestines that no army had been enrolled at Rome, no leader settled on, that fathers and plebs were turned upon their own selves, their leaders, reckoning it their occasion, made a column in haste, and, the fields laid waste straightway along their march, brought their standards up to the Colline gate. There was huge alarm in the city. The cry was raised, "To arms," and there was a running together to the walls and the gates; and at last, turned from sedition to war, they created Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus dictator. He named Aulus Sempronius Atratinus master of the horse. When this was heard—so great was the terror of that magistracy—at once the enemy drew back from the walls, and the younger Romans gathered at the proclamation without holding back. While the army was being enrolled at Rome, the enemy’s camp meanwhile was pitched not far from the river Allia; thence, ravaging the country far and wide, they boasted among themselves that they had seized a place fated against the city of Rome; that thence there would be the like panic and flight as there had been in the Gallic war; for if the Romans feared a day tainted with religion and marked by the name of that place, how much more would they shrink from the Allia itself, the monument of so great a disaster, on the Allian day? Surely there would be before their eyes and in their ears the grim shapes of the Gauls and the sound of their voice. Turning over these empty thoughts of empty things, they had bequeathed their hopes to the fortune of the place. The Romans, on the other side, knew well enough that, wherever the Latin enemy might be, he was the one they had held bound, beaten at Lake Regillus, by a hundred years’ submissive peace: that a place notable in the memory of a disaster would rouse them rather to blot out the memory of disgrace than to make them afraid—lest any land be unhallowed to their victory; nay, that if the Gauls themselves should offer themselves to them in that place, they would fight as they had fought at Rome in winning back their fatherland, as on the day after at Gabii, when they had brought it about that no enemy who had entered the Roman walls carried home the message of fortune good or ill.

With these spirits on either side they came to the Allia. The Roman dictator, after the enemy were in sight, arrayed and intent, said: "Do you see, Aulus Sempronius, that they have taken their stand at the Allia, trusting in the fortune of the place? May the immortal gods have given them nothing of surer confidence or greater help than that. But you, trusting in arms and courage, charge with spurred horses upon the middle of their line; I with the legions will bear the standards against them as they are thrown into disorder and panic. Be with us, you gods, witnesses of the treaty, and exact the penalties due, at once for the outrage done you and for ourselves deceived through your divine name." Neither the horse nor the foot did the Praenestines withstand. At the first charge and shout their ranks were scattered; then, after the line stood firm in no place, they turned their backs, and, driven headlong, and carried by panic even past their own camp, did not check their disordered course before Praeneste was in sight. There, scattered from flight, they seized a place to fortify with hurried work, lest, if they had withdrawn within the walls, their land should at once be burned and, all being laid waste, a siege be brought against the city. But after the victorious Roman was at hand, the camp at the Allia plundered, that fortification too was abandoned; and, scarce reckoning their walls safe, they shut themselves up in the town of Praeneste. There were besides eight towns under the sway of the Praenestines. Against these the war was carried round, and, they being taken one after another in no great struggle, the army was led to Velitrae; that too was stormed. Then they came to Praeneste, the head of the war. It was received not by force but by surrender. Titus Quinctius—once victor in the field, with two camps of the enemy and nine towns taken by storm, and Praeneste received in surrender—returned to Rome, and in triumph bore up to the Capitol the image of Jupiter the Commander brought down from Praeneste. It was dedicated between the shrine of Jupiter and that of Minerva, and beneath it was fixed a tablet, a monument of the deeds done, inscribed with letters nearly to this effect: "Jupiter and all the gods granted that Titus Quinctius the dictator should take nine towns." On the twentieth day after he had been created, he laid down the dictatorship.

Elections were then held for military tribunes with consular power, in which the number of patricians and plebeians was made equal. From the fathers were created Publius and Gaius Manlius, with Lucius Julius; the plebs gave Gaius Sextilius, Marcus Albinius, and Lucius Antistius. To the Manlii, because in birth they surpassed the plebeians, in influence Julius, the Volscian command was given without lot, without comparison, out of the ordinary course; whereof both they themselves afterward, and the fathers who had given it, repented. Without scouting, they sent out cohorts to forage; and when it was falsely reported that these were as it were surrounded, while they were rushing headlong to be a guard for them, without even keeping safe the informer—the Latin enemy who had cheated them in the guise of a Roman soldier—they themselves plunged into an ambush. There, while in an unfavorable place, holding out by the soldiers’ valor alone, they killed and were killed, the enemy meanwhile assailed from the other side the Roman camp, which lay in the plain. On both sides the affair was betrayed by the rashness and ignorance of the leaders; whatever remained of the Fortune of the Roman people, that the steady valor of the soldiers, even without a director, kept safe. When this was reported at Rome, at first it was resolved that a dictator be named; then, after word came that things were quiet among the Volsci, and it was plain that they knew not how to use a victory and the moment, the armies and leaders were even recalled from there; and thence there was peace, so far as concerned the Volsci; only this much was disturbed at the year’s end, that the Praenestines, having roused the peoples of the Latins, renewed the war. In that same year new colonists were enrolled for Setia, at the complaint of its own people of a scarcity of men; and amid affairs not prosperous in war, the peace at home—which the influence and dignity of the military tribunes of plebeian stock obtained among their own—was a solace.

The beginnings of the following year blazed up at once in a huge sedition, when Spurius Furius, Quintus Servilius for the second time, Licinius Menenius for the third, Publius Cloelius, Marcus Horatius, and Lucius Geganius were military tribunes with consular power. The matter and the cause of the sedition was debt; for the looking into which Spurius Servilius Priscus and Quintus Cloelius Siculus, made censors, were hindered from carrying out the business by war; for messengers in alarm at first, and then flight from the fields, brought word that the legions of the Volsci had entered the borders and were laying the Roman country waste far and wide. In which alarm so far was the terror from abroad from checking the civil strifes that, on the contrary, the tribunician power was the more violent in hindering the levy, until conditions were imposed on the fathers, that no man, so long as the war lasted, should pay tribute or have the law of money lent pronounced against him. This relaxation taken for the plebs, there was no delay to the levy. New legions enrolled, it was resolved that two armies should be led into the Volscian country, the legions divided. Spurius Furius and Marcus Horatius made to the right, toward the sea-coast and Antium; Quintus Servilius and Lucius Geganius to the left, toward the mountains and Ecetra. On neither side did an enemy meet them. The ravaging, therefore, was not like that roving sort which the Volscian, in the manner of brigandage, trusting in the discord of the enemy and dreading their valor, had hurriedly made amid alarm, but, done by a regular army in just wrath, was the heavier for the space of time as well. For by the Volsci, fearing lest meanwhile the army should march out from Rome, incursions had been made into the edges of the borders; but the Roman, on the contrary, had cause to linger even in the enemy’s land, that he might lure the enemy out to a contest. And so, all the farmhouses everywhere and even certain villages burned, no fruit-bearing tree, no crops left for the hope of a harvest, all the plunder of men and beasts that was outside the walls driven off, the armies were on both sides led back to Rome.

A small interval given the debtors to take breath, after things were quiet on the side of the enemy, the pronouncing of the law was thronged anew; and so far was there from being hope of easing the old usury that a new usury was contracted, in a tribute let out by the censors for the building of a wall of squared stone; to which burden the plebs was forced to submit, because the tribunes of the plebs had no levy to hinder. Constrained too by the power of the chief men, it made all the military tribunes patricians—Lucius Aemilius, Publius Valerius for the fourth time, Gaius Veturius, Servius Sulpicius, and Lucius and Gaius Quinctius Cincinnatus. By the same power they obtained that, against the Latins and Volsci, who with their legions joined kept camp at Satricum, with none hindering and all the younger men bound by the oath, they should enroll three armies: one for the guard of the city; a second that, if any disturbance arose elsewhere, could be sent against the sudden chances of war; the third, by far the strongest, Publius Valerius and Lucius Aemilius led to Satricum. There, when they had found the enemy’s line drawn up on level ground, battle was joined at once; and a rain, poured down in mighty squalls, broke off a fight of victory not yet clear enough, but of prosperous hope. On the next day the battle was renewed; and for some while, with equal valor and fortune, the Latin legions above all, schooled in Roman warfare by long alliance, held out. But the cavalry, loosed upon them, threw their ranks into disorder; against the disordered the standards of the foot were brought, and as far as the Roman line bore itself forward, so far were the enemy moved from their ground; and once the battle had inclined, the Roman force was now unbearable. The enemy routed, when they made for Satricum, which was two miles off, not for their camp, they were cut down chiefly by the cavalry: the camp was taken and plundered. From Satricum, on the night next after the battle, in a column like to flight, they made for Antium; and though the Roman army followed almost on their tracks, yet fear had more of swiftness than wrath. And so the enemy entered the walls before the Roman could pluck at the rear of the column or delay it. Thereafter some days were spent in laying the country waste, the Romans being neither well enough furnished with the apparatus of war for assaulting the walls, nor they for taking up the hazard of battle.

A sedition then arose between the men of Antium and the Latins, when the Antiates, conquered by their misfortunes and worn down by a war in which they had both been born and grown old, looked to surrender, while the Latins—their fresh revolt after a long peace making them, with spirits still raw, fiercer to persist in the war. The end of the strife came after it was plain to both that neither party stood in the other’s way to keep them from following their own designs. The Latins set out, freeing themselves from the partnership of a peace, as they reckoned, dishonorable; the Antiates, the troublesome witnesses of their saving counsels removed, surrendered their city and lands to the Romans. The wrath and madness of the Latins, because they had been able neither to harm the Romans by war nor to keep the Volsci under arms, broke out so far that they burned with fire the city of Satricum, which had been their first refuge after the adverse battle. Nor did any other roof of that city survive—since they flung firebrands alike on the sacred and the profane—save the temple of Mater Matuta; and from this, it is said, neither their own scruple nor reverence of the god kept them back, but a dread voice, sent forth from the temple with grim threats, unless they removed the unspeakable fires far from the shrine. Kindled by that madness, their onset carried them to Tusculum, out of wrath because, deserting the common council of the Latins, they had given themselves not into Roman alliance only but even into Roman citizenship. When, the gates standing open, they had fallen on it unforeseen, at the first shout the town, save the citadel, was taken. Into the citadel the townsmen fled with their wives and children, and sent messengers to Rome to make the Senate the surer of their plight. With no less speed than was worthy of the good faith of the Roman people, an army was led to Tusculum; Lucius Quinctius and Servius Sulpicius, military tribunes, led it. They see the gates of Tusculum shut, and the Latins, with the spirit at once of besiegers and besieged, on this side guarding the walls, on that storming the citadel—terrifying and afraid in one. The coming of the Romans had changed the spirits of both parties: the Tusculans, from huge fear to the height of eagerness; the Latins, from an almost sure confidence of soon taking the citadel—since they held the town—to a scant hope concerning themselves. A shout is raised from the citadel by the Tusculans; a somewhat greater one answers from the Roman army. On both sides the Latins are pressed: they neither withstand the charge of the Tusculans running down from the higher ground, nor can they keep off the Romans coming up to the walls and heaving at the bars of the gates. First the walls were taken by ladders, then the fastenings of the gates broken; and when the enemy, on both sides, pressed them from front and rear, and there was left neither any force for fighting nor any room for flight, they were cut down in the midst, every one. Tusculum recovered from the enemy, the army was led back to Rome.

By so much as, with the wars of that year prosperously fought, all was tranquil abroad, by so much in the city the violence of the fathers and the miseries of the plebs grew day by day, since by that very thing which made it necessary that debt be paid, the means of paying was hindered. And so, when now nothing could be given out of substance, the condemned and the made-over satisfied their creditors with reputation and body, and the penalty had come in turn for good faith. To such a degree, therefore, had not the lowest only but even the leading men of the plebs let their spirits sink in subjection that no man of keen and enterprising mind had heart not merely to seek the military tribunate among the patricians—which they had striven, with such force, to be allowed—but not even to take up and seek the plebeian magistracies; and it seemed that the fathers had recovered in perpetuity the possession of an honor only just usurped by the plebs for a few years. That this might not be too glad a thing for the one party, a small matter—as commonly happens—came between, the cause of setting a huge thing in motion. Of Marcus Fabius Ambustus, a man powerful both among men of his own order and even with the plebs, because he was by no means held a despiser of it among that class, two daughters were married, the elder to Servius Sulpicius, the younger to Gaius Licinius Stolo—an illustrious man indeed, yet a plebeian; and that very connection, not scorned, had won Fabius favor with the common folk. It chanced so to fall out that, while the Fabian sisters were in the house of Servius Sulpicius, the military tribune, wearing away the time, as happens, in talk with each other, the lictor of Sulpicius, when he was withdrawing from the Forum to his house, struck the door, as is the custom, with his rod. When at this the younger Fabia, unused to the custom, took fright, she was a cause of laughter to her sister, who marveled that her sister knew it not; but that laughter set goads beneath a woman’s mind, moved by small things. The throng too of those attending and asking whether she wished anything made, I believe, her sister’s marriage seem to her a fortunate one, and herself, by that ill judgment whereby each least wishes to be outdone by those nearest, repent of her own. When her father chanced to see her, confounded by the fresh sting in her mind, and asked, "Is all well?," she would have turned aside the cause of her grief—since it was neither dutiful enough toward her sister nor at all honoring to her husband—but he drew it out by kindly questioning, until she confessed that this was the cause of her grief, that she was joined to an unequal, wedded into a house which neither office nor influence could enter. Consoling his daughter then, Ambustus bade her be of good cheer: she would soon see at her own home the same honors that she saw at her sister’s. From that point he began to take counsel with his son-in-law, with Lucius Sextius called in, a vigorous young man, and one to whose hope nothing was wanting save patrician birth.

The occasion seemed ripe for revolution, because of the huge mass of debt, of which evil the plebs could hope no easing unless its own men were set in the highest command: they must gird themselves for that thought; by trying and acting the plebeians had now made a step to a point whence, if they pressed on further, they could reach the heights and be made equal to the fathers in honor as in worth. For the present it was resolved that they become tribunes of the plebs, in which magistracy they might open for themselves the road to the other honors; and, created tribunes, Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextius promulgated laws all directed against the power of the patricians and for the advantages of the plebs: one concerning debt, that, when had been deducted from the principal what had been paid over in interest, what remained should be discharged in three years in equal portions; a second concerning the limit of lands, that no man should possess more than five hundred iugera of land; a third, that there be no elections of military tribunes, and that one consul at all events be created from the plebs—all of them huge, and such as could not be obtained without the greatest struggle. So, with the issue set before them at once of all the things for which there is among mortals an immoderate craving—land, money, honors—the fathers, terrified, when they had been in alarm with public and private counsels, finding no other remedy save the intercession tried already in many a former struggle, arrayed colleagues against the tribunician bills. These, when they saw the tribes called by Licinius and Sextius to come up to the vote, hedged about with bands of the fathers, suffered neither the bills to be read nor any of the other solemn forms for the plebs’s enacting to be done. And now, when the assembly had often been summoned in vain, and the bills were as good as rejected, "Well, then," said Sextius; "since it pleases you that intercession should avail so much, with that very weapon we will guard the plebs. Come now, fathers, proclaim elections for creating military tribunes; I will see to it that that word veto, which now you hear our colleagues chanting so gladly, brings you no joy." Not idle did his threats fall: no elections were held save of aediles and tribunes of the plebs. Licinius and Sextius, re-elected tribunes of the plebs, suffered no curule magistrates to be created; and that solitude of magistrates—the plebs re-electing the two tribunes, and they doing away with the elections of military tribunes—held the city for five years.

The other wars opportunely lay quiet: the colonists of Velitrae, running riot in the leisure that came of there being no Roman army, both made several inroads into Roman territory and set about assaulting Tusculum; and that affair—the Tusculans, old allies, new citizens, begging help—stirred by very shame not the fathers only but even the plebs. The tribunes of the plebs relenting, the elections were held through an interrex; and there were created as military tribunes Lucius Furius, Aulus Manlius, Servius Sulpicius, Servius Cornelius, and Publius and Gaius Valerius. They found the plebs by no means so obedient in the levy as in the elections; and with a huge struggle, the army enrolled, they set out and not only dislodged the enemy from Tusculum but drove him within his own walls; and Velitrae was besieged with no little greater force than Tusculum had been besieged. Yet by those by whom it had begun to be besieged it could not be stormed; before that new military tribunes were created—Quintus Servilius, Gaius Veturius, Aulus and Marcus Cornelius, Quintus Quinctius, and Marcus Fabius. Nothing memorable was done even by these tribunes at Velitrae. Affairs at home were turning on a greater crisis. For besides Sextius and Licinius, the movers of the laws, now re-elected tribunes of the plebs for the eighth time, Fabius too, the military tribune, the father-in-law of Stolo, professed himself the undoubted advocate of the laws of which he had been the author; and whereas at first there had been eight intercessors of the laws out of the college of tribunes, there were now only five, and—as commonly do those who fall away from their own—taken and dazed of spirit, with the words of others, they put forward in justification of their intercession only what had been prompted them at home: that a great part of the plebs was away with the army at Velitrae; that the elections ought to be put off till the soldiers’ return, that the whole plebs might cast its vote concerning its own advantages. Sextius and Licinius, with part of their colleagues and with one of the military tribunes, Fabius—craftsmen now, by so many years’ practice, in handling the minds of the plebs—wearied the chief of the fathers, brought forward and questioned about the several things that were proposed to the people: did they dare to claim that, while two iugera of land apiece were divided to the plebs, they themselves should be allowed to have more than five hundred iugera, so that single men should possess the lands of nigh three hundred citizens, while to the plebeian man his own land scarce reached to the roof he needed or a place of burial? Or did it please them that the plebs, ensnared by usury, should, rather than pay the principal of the debt, give its body to the stocks and to torments, and be led off, made over, in droves daily from the Forum, and the houses of the noble be filled with men in chains, and, wherever a patrician dwelt, there be a private prison?

When they had hurled these things—unworthy and pitiable to hear—among men fearing for their very selves, with a greater indignation in the hearers than in themselves, they yet affirmed that there would never be for the fathers any limit either of seizing lands or of butchering the plebs by usury, unless they made one of the consuls from the plebs, a guardian of their liberty. The tribunes of the plebs were now despised, since that power broke its own force by intercession. There could be no dealing on equal terms where command was in their hands, with themselves only aid: unless command were shared, never would the plebs be on an equal footing in the commonwealth. Nor was there cause for any man to think it enough if account were taken of plebeians at the consular elections; unless it were of necessity that one consul at all events be made from the plebs, there would be none. Had it now slipped from memory that, when it had been resolved that military tribunes be created rather than consuls, for this very end—that the highest honor might lie open to plebeians too—in four-and-forty years no man of the plebs had been created military tribune? Who could believe that those who were wont to seize the eight places for creating military tribunes would now, of their own will, share the honor with the plebs in two, and would suffer a road to be made to the consulship who had kept the tribunate so long fenced about? What could not be obtained at the elections through favor must be obtained by law, and one consulship set apart, outside the strife, to which the plebs might have access, since, left within the strife, it would always be the prize of the more powerful. Nor could it now be said, what before they had been wont to fling out, that there were not among the plebeians men fit for curule magistracies. Was the commonwealth, then, administered any more slothfully or sluggishly after the tribunate of Publius Licinius Calvus, who was the first created from the plebs, than in those years in which none but patricians had been military tribunes? Nay, on the contrary, several patricians had been condemned after their tribunate, no plebeian. The quaestors too, like the military tribunes, had begun a few years before to be created from the plebs, and the Roman people had repented of none of them. The consulship remained for the plebeians; that was the citadel of liberty, that its pillar. If it were reached, then the Roman people would judge that the kings had been truly driven from the city and its liberty made stable; for from that day there would come to the plebs all the things in which the patricians excel—command and honor, the glory of war, birth, nobility—great for themselves to enjoy, greater to leave to their children. When they saw speeches of this kind received, they promulgated a new bill: that, in place of the duumvirs for performing the sacred rites, decemvirs be created, in such wise that part be made from the plebs, part from the fathers; and they put off the elections for all those bills until the coming of the army that was besieging Velitrae.

The year came round before the legions were led back from Velitrae; and so the matter of the laws, left in suspense, was deferred to the new military tribunes; for the same men as tribunes of the plebs—the two at all events, because they were the movers of the laws—the plebs re-elected. There were created as military tribunes Titus Quinctius, Servius Cornelius, Servius Sulpicius, Spurius Servilius, Lucius Papirius, and Lucius Veturius. At the very beginning of the year it came at once to the uttermost struggle over the laws; and when the tribes were being called, and the intercession of their colleagues was no hindrance to the movers, the fathers in alarm ran for the two last resorts, the highest command and the highest of citizens. It was resolved that a dictator be named; named was Marcus Furius Camillus, who took Lucius Aemilius as his master of the horse. The movers of the laws too, against so great an array of their adversaries, themselves armed the cause of the plebs with huge spirit, and, an assembly of the plebs proclaimed, called the tribes to the vote. When the dictator, hedged about by a column of patricians, full of wrath and threats, had taken his seat, and the matter was being carried on, at first by the usual struggle between the tribunes of the plebs proposing the law and those intercessing, and by how much the intercession was the stronger in right, by so much it was overcome by favor toward the laws themselves and their movers, and the first tribes were saying "As you propose," then Camillus said: "Since indeed, Quirites, it is now a tribune’s caprice, not his power, that rules you, and you are making void the intercession—gotten of old by the secession of the plebs—by the same force by which you got it, I, as dictator, no more for the sake of the whole commonwealth than for your own, will stand by the intercession, and with my command will guard your overthrown safeguard. And so, if Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextius yield to the intercession of their colleagues, I will thrust no patrician magistrate into the assembly of the plebs; but if, against the intercession, they strive to impose laws on the state as though it were a captured city, I will not suffer the tribunician power to be undone by its own self." When, against this, the tribunes of the plebs scornfully carried the matter on no whit the more slackly, then Camillus, stung with wrath, sent lictors to move the plebs out of the midst, and added threats that, if they persisted, he would bind all the younger men by the oath and lead the army at once out of the city. He had struck huge terror into the plebs: in the plebs’s leaders he kindled their spirits by the strife more than he diminished them. But, the matter inclining to neither side, he laid down his magistracy—whether because he had been created with a flaw, as some have written, or because the tribunes of the plebs proposed to the plebs, and the plebs enacted, that, if Marcus Furius did anything as dictator, there should be a fine of five hundred thousand upon him; but that he was deterred rather by the auspices than by a bill of unheard-of precedent I am the readier to believe, both from the temper of the man himself, and because there was at once substituted for him as dictator Publius Manlius—and to what end was he created for that contest in which Marcus Furius had been beaten?—and because the following year had the same Marcus Furius as dictator, who would surely not, without shame, have taken up again a command broken in his own hands the year before; and because at the time at which the bill about his fine is reported, either he could have withstood this bill too, by which he saw himself forced into the rank of a private man, or he could not have hindered even those for the sake of which this too was brought; and because, down to our own memory, while there has been contention between the tribunician and consular powers, the height of the dictatorship was always loftier.

Between the laying down of the former dictatorship and the new one entered upon by Manlius, an assembly of the plebs being held by the tribunes as though through an interregnum, it became plain which of the promulgated measures were more pleasing to the plebs, which to the movers. For they were ordering the bills on usury and land, and rejecting that on a plebeian consul; and both would have been carried through, had not the tribunes said that they were consulting the plebs on all at once. Then Publius Manlius the dictator inclined the matter to the plebs’s cause, by naming Gaius Licinius, who had been a military tribune, as master of the horse from the plebs. This, I find, the fathers bore ill: the dictator was wont to excuse himself before the fathers by his near kinship with Licinius, while at the same time denying that the command of a master of the horse was greater than that of a consular tribune. Licinius and Sextius, when the elections for creating tribunes of the plebs had been proclaimed, so bore themselves that, by denying that they now wished the honor continued to them, they most keenly kindled the plebs toward that which by dissembling they sought: for nine years now, they said, they had stood as it were in line of battle against the optimates, at the greatest private peril, with no public profit. There had grown old along with them both the bills promulgated and all the force of the tribunician power. First the fight against their laws had been by their colleagues’ intercession, then by the sending-away of the youth to the Veliternian war; last of all the dictatorial thunderbolt had been aimed at them. Now neither colleagues nor war nor dictator stood in the way—he who had even given an omen for a plebeian consul by naming a master of the horse from the plebs: the plebs itself was delaying its own advantages. They could have the city and Forum free of creditors, the lands free of unjust possessors, at once, if they would. When at length would they value these gifts with a grateful enough spirit, if, while they took the bills for their own advantages, they cut off the hope of honor for the movers of them? It was not of the modesty of the Roman people to demand that the people itself be eased of usury and brought into the land unjustly held by the powerful, while it left the tribunes through whom it had gained these things to grow old not only without honor but even without hope of honor. Therefore let them first settle in their minds what they wished; then at the tribunician elections declare their will. If they wished the bills promulgated by them to be carried together, there was cause to re-elect the same men tribunes of the plebs; for they would carry through what they had promulgated: but if they wished only that to be received which each privately needed, there was no need of the invidious continuation of the honor; neither would they hold the tribunate, nor the others those things that had been promulgated.

Against so obstinate a speech of the tribunes, when stupor and silence at the unworthiness of the matter had thereupon fixed the rest of the fathers fast, Appius Claudius Crassus, grandson of the decemvir, is said to have come forward to speak against it, out of hatred and wrath more than out of hope, and to have spoken in well-nigh this sense: "It would be neither new nor unlooked-for to me, Quirites, if that one thing which has ever been cast at our family by seditious tribunes I too should now hear—that to the Claudian clan, from its very beginning, nothing has been older in the commonwealth than the majesty of the fathers, and that they have always opposed the advantages of the plebs. The one of these I neither deny nor disclaim—that we, from the time we were received at once into the citizenship and the fathers, have strenuously given our toil that it might be said truly that by us the majesty of those clans among which you willed us to be was rather increased than diminished: that other I would dare to maintain, for myself and my forefathers, Quirites—unless one should think that the things which are done for the whole commonwealth are adverse to the plebs, as though it dwelt in another city—that we have done nothing, whether as private men or in magistracies, knowingly that was a hurt to the plebs, and that no deed or word of ours, against your advantage, can truly be alleged, though some have been against your wish. Or could I, if I were not of the Claudian family nor sprung of patrician blood but any one whatever of the Quirites who only knew himself born of two free parents and living in a free state, keep silent that this Lucius Sextius and this Gaius Licinius—perpetual tribunes, if it please the gods—have taken to themselves so much license in the nine years through which they reign that they deny they will allow you free power of suffrage, neither in the elections nor in the ordering of laws? ‘On a condition,’ he says, ‘you shall re-elect us a tenth time tribunes.’ What else is this than to say, ‘What others seek, we so disdain that we will not take it save for a great wage’? But what, pray, is this wage by which we are to have you always tribunes of the plebs? ‘That you receive,’ he says, ‘our bills, whether they please or displease, whether they are useful or useless, all together.’ I beseech you, Tarquinian tribunes of the plebs, suppose me, one citizen out of the midst of the assembly, to cry out: ‘By your good leave, let it be allowed to choose out of these bills those we judge wholesome for us, and to reject the rest.’ ‘It shall not be allowed,’ he says. ‘Are you to order what concerns you all, about usury and lands, and is this portent not to happen in the city of Rome, that you should see Lucius Sextius and this Gaius Licinius consuls—which you scorn, which you abhor? Either take all, or I propose nothing.’ As if one should set poison with food before a man whom hunger presses, and bid him either abstain from what is life-giving or mix the deadly with the life-giving. So, if this state were free, would not the assembled people have shouted at you, ‘Be off with your tribunates and your bills’? What? If you do not propose what it is to the people’s advantage to receive, will there be no one to propose it? If any patrician, if anyone—what they would have more invidious—any Claudius should say, ‘Either take all, or I propose nothing,’ who of you, Quirites, would bear it? Will you never look at the matters rather than the authors, but always receive with favorable ears all that yonder magistrate shall say, and with adverse ears what shall be said by any one of us? But, by Hercules, his speech is most uncivil; what? Of what sort is the bill, which they take it ill that you rejected? Most like to his speech, Quirites. ‘I propose,’ he says, ‘concerning the consuls, that it be not allowed you to make whom you will.’ Does he ask otherwise, who orders that at all events one consul be made from the plebs, and does not allow you the power of creating two patricians? If today there were wars, such as the Etruscan was when Porsenna held the Janiculum, such as the Gallic lately, when, save the Capitol and the citadel, all this was the enemy’s, and yonder Lucius Sextius were standing for the consulship along with this Marcus Furius and any other you please of the fathers, could you bear that Sextius were beyond doubt consul, and Camillus must struggle against defeat? Is this to call honors into common share, that it be allowed two plebeians to be made consuls, but not two patricians? And that it be of necessity that one be created from the plebs, while it be allowed to pass over both from the fathers? What partnership, what fellowship is this? Is it too little, if, of that whereof your share has so far been none, you come into a share, unless, by seeking a part, you draw the whole? ‘I fear,’ he says, ‘lest, if it be allowed that two patricians be created, you create no plebeian.’ What is that to say but, ‘Because you are not going to create men unworthy of your good will, I will lay on you the necessity of creating those you do not want’? What follows but that he owe not even thanks to the people, if, with two patricians, one plebeian stand, and say that he was created by the law, not by the vote?

They seek how they may wrest out honors, not how they may seek them; and they are going to obtain the greatest in such a way as to owe nothing even for the least; and they would rather seek honors by occasions than by worth. There is one who would disdain to be inspected, to be weighed, who would think it just that honors be certain for himself alone among struggling competitors, who would take himself out of your judgment, who would make your suffrages necessary instead of voluntary, and slavish instead of free. I leave out Licinius and Sextius, whose years in perpetual power you reckon up like the years of kings on the Capitol: who is there today in the state so lowly to whom the road to the consulship is not made easier, through the occasion of yonder man’s law, than for us and our children—if indeed you will sometimes not be able to create us even when you wish, but must create those men even if you wish not? Of the unworthiness enough has been said—for worthiness pertains to men: what shall I say of the religious observances and the auspices—the contempt and outrage of which is the immortal gods’ own concern? That this city was founded under the auspices, that under the auspices all things in war and peace, at home and abroad, are carried on—who is there that knows it not? In whose hands, then, are the auspices, by the custom of the forefathers? Surely in the fathers’ hands; for no plebeian magistrate is created under the auspices. The auspices are so wholly our own that not only do the people create the patrician magistrates whom they create no otherwise than under the auspices, but we ourselves too, without the people’s vote, name under the auspices an interrex, and have the auspices in a private capacity, which those men have not even in their magistracies. What else, then, does he do but take the auspices out of the state, who, by creating plebeian consuls, takes them from the fathers, who alone can have them? Let them mock now at the religious observances: ‘For what is it, if the chickens will not feed, if they come more slowly out of the coop, if a bird has uttered an ill note?’ These are small things; but by not despising these small things your forefathers made this state the greatest; and now we, as though there were now no need of the peace of the gods, defile all the ceremonies. Let pontiffs, then, and augurs, and sacrificing kings be created at random; let us set the cap of the Flamen Dialis on anyone you please, provided only he be a man; let us hand over the sacred shields, the inmost shrines, the gods and the care of the gods, to those for whom it is forbidden; let laws not be proposed under the auspices, nor magistrates created; let the fathers ratify neither the centuriate nor the curiate assemblies; let Sextius and Licinius, like Romulus and Tatius, reign in the city of Rome, because they give away other men’s moneys, other men’s lands. So great is the sweetness of plundering from the fortunes of others, and it comes not into mind that by the one law vast solitudes are made in the fields by driving the owners from their borders, by the other good faith is abolished, with which all human society is taken away. For the sake of all these things I move that those bills of yours be rejected. What you shall do, may the gods make prosper."

The speech of Appius availed only so far as to put off the time of ordering the bills. The same tribunes, Sextius and Licinius, re-elected for the tenth time, carried through the law for creating the decemvirs of the sacred rites in part from the plebs. Five of the fathers were created, five of the plebs; and by that step the road now seemed made to the consulship. Content with this victory, the plebs gave way to the fathers, that for the present, the mention of consuls dropped, military tribunes be created. There were created Aulus and Marcus Cornelius a second time, Marcus Geganius, Publius Manlius, Lucius Veturius, and Publius Valerius for the sixth time. When, save the siege of Velitrae—a matter of issue slow rather than doubtful—affairs abroad were quiet for the Romans, a sudden report of a Gallic war, brought in, drove the state to name Marcus Furius dictator a fifth time. He named Titus Quinctius Poenus master of the horse. That there was war with the Gauls that year about the river Anio, Claudius is the authority, and that the famous fight on the bridge—in which Titus Manlius, after closing hands with the Gaul who had challenged him, in the sight of two armies, cut him down and stripped him of his torque—was fought then. By more authorities I am led rather to believe that these things were done not less than ten years after, but that this year, in the Alban country, the standards were joined with the Gauls under the dictator Marcus Furius. Neither doubtful nor difficult was the victory for the Romans, although the Gauls had brought huge terror by the memory of the former disaster. Many thousands of the barbarians were cut down in the field, many at the taking of the camp; the rest, scattered, making mostly for Apulia, saved themselves from the enemy both by their far-off flight and because panic and bewilderment together had dispersed them everywhere. A triumph was decreed to the dictator by the consent of fathers and plebs. He had scarce gone through the war when a fiercer sedition at home met him, and through huge struggles the dictator and the Senate were beaten, so that the tribunician bills were accepted; and the elections of consuls were held against the will of the nobility, in which Lucius Sextius, of the plebs, was made the first consul. And not even this was the end of the struggles. Because the patricians denied they would ratify it, the matter came near to a secession of the plebs and to other dreadful threats of civil strife, when at last, through the dictator, the discords were settled on conditions: it was conceded by the nobility to the plebs concerning a plebeian consul, and by the plebs to the nobility concerning the creating from the fathers of one praetor, to pronounce the law in the city. So, the orders at last brought back from long-standing wrath into concord, when the Senate judged the thing worthy, and that for it—if ever at any other time—they would gladly, for the sake of the immortal gods, bring it to pass that the Great Games be held and one day added to the three, the plebeian aediles refusing that office, it was cried out by the patrician youths that they would gladly do that honor for the sake of the immortal gods, so as to be made aediles. When thanks had been given them by all, a decree of the Senate was made that the dictator should ask of the people two men as aediles from the fathers, and that the fathers should ratify all the elections of that year.