The History of Rome, Book 7

This year will be marked by the consulship of a new man, marked too by two new magistracies, the praetorship and the curule aedileship; these honors the patricians sought for themselves in exchange for the one consulship conceded to the plebs. The plebs gave the consulship to Lucius Sextius, by whose law it had been won; the fathers, by canvassing on the Campus, took the praetorship for Spurius Furius Camillus, son of Marcus, and the aedileship for Gnaeus Quinctius Capitolinus and Publius Cornelius Scipio, men of their own clans. To Lucius Sextius there was given as colleague, from the fathers, Lucius Aemilius Mamercus. At the beginning of the year there was talk both of the Gauls—who, scattered at first through Apulia, were now by report gathering together—and of the defection of the Hernici. Since everything was deliberately put off, that nothing might be transacted through a plebeian consul, there was a silence over all affairs and a leisure like a suspension of public business; except that the tribunes would not let it pass in silence that, in place of the one plebeian consul, the nobility had taken to itself three patrician magistrates, seated in curule chairs and clad in the bordered toga like consuls—the praetor indeed even administering justice, and made colleague to the consuls and under the same auspices. From this a shame was laid upon the Senate against ordering the curule aediles to be chosen from the fathers. At first it had been agreed that they should be chosen from the plebs in alternate years; afterward it was open to either order. Then, in the consulship of Lucius Genucius and Quintus Servilius, when affairs were quiet from both sedition and war, lest men should ever be free from fear and danger, a great pestilence arose. They report that a censor, a curule aedile, and three tribunes of the plebs died, and that, in proportion among the multitude, there were many other deaths; but most of all the death—as untimely as it was bitter—of Marcus Furius made that pestilence memorable. For he was truly in every fortune a man without peer: first in peace and war before he went into exile, more illustrious in exile—whether from the longing of the state, which, once taken, implored the aid of the absent man, or from the good fortune by which, restored to his country, he restored that country itself along with himself; and for five and twenty years thereafter—for so long he afterward lived—he remained equal to the title of so great a glory, and was held worthy to be named the second founder of the city of Rome after Romulus.

In this year and the next, in the consulship of Gaius Sulpicius Peticus and Gaius Licinius Stolo, there was pestilence. In it nothing worthy of memory was done, except that, for the sake of beseeching the peace of the gods, there was then a lectisternium—the third since the founding of the city; and when the violence of the disease was relieved neither by human counsels nor by divine aid, their minds overcome by superstition, scenic games too—a novelty for a warlike people, for hitherto the spectacle had been only that of the circus—are said to have been instituted among the other appeasements of the wrath of heaven. But it was a small thing, as nearly all beginnings are, and that small thing itself was foreign. Without any song, without the miming of songs to be imitated, players summoned from Etruria, dancing to the measures of the piper, gave not ungraceful movements in the Tuscan manner. Then the young men began to imitate them, at the same time flinging jests at one another in rough verses; nor were their movements out of keeping with the voice. And so the thing was taken up, and by frequent use was quickened. To the native performers the name histriones was given, because in the Tuscan word a player was called ister; and these no longer, as before, hurled at one another in turn an unpolished verse, like the Fescennine, thrown out at random and rude, but performed medleys filled with measures, the chant now set to the piper and the movement made to match it. Livius, some years afterward, who first dared to weave a plot with a story out of the medleys, being—as all then were—himself the actor of his own pieces, is said, when, recalled again and again, he had worn out his voice, to have asked leave and set a boy to sing before the piper, and to have acted the canticum with movement considerably more vigorous, because the use of the voice did not hinder him. From that time the players began to be sung to for their gestures, and only the dialogue was left to their own voice. After by this rule the matter of plays was drawn away from laughter and unbridled jest, and the sport had gradually turned into an art, the young men, leaving the acting of plays to the histriones, began among themselves in the old fashion to toss about jests woven into verse; whence afterward they were called exodia, and were joined for the most part with the Atellan plays; which kind of entertainment, taken over from the Oscans, the youth kept to itself and would not suffer to be defiled by the histriones. Hence it remains an established rule that the actors of Atellan plays are neither removed from their tribe nor do their military service, as men untouched by the player’s art. Among the small beginnings of other things the first origin of the games too has seemed worth setting down, that it might appear from how sound a start the matter has come to this madness, scarcely to be borne even by wealthy kingdoms.

And yet neither did the first beginning of the games, granted for the propitiation of religious scruples, free men’s minds of superstition or their bodies of disease; nay rather, when by chance the circus, flooded by an overflow of the Tiber, had interrupted the games in their midst, this in truth, as though the gods were now turned away and spurning the appeasements of their wrath, caused a vast terror. And so, in the second consulship of Gnaeus Genucius and Lucius Aemilius Mamercus, when the search for expiations afflicted men’s minds more than the disease their bodies, it is said that it was recalled from the memory of the elders that a pestilence had once been allayed by a nail driven in by a dictator. Moved by this scruple the Senate ordered a dictator to be named for the driving of the nail; praetor-b23/">Lucius Manlius Imperiosus was named, and he named Lucius Pinarius master of the horse. There is an ancient law, written in archaic letters and words, that whoever is praetor maximus should drive a nail on the Ides of September; it was fixed on the right side of the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, on the part where the shrine of Minerva is. This nail, because in those times letters were rare, they say was a mark of the number of years, and that the law was for that reason dedicated to the temple of Minerva because number is Minerva’s invention.—At Volsinii too nails marking the number of years, fixed in the temple of Nortia, an Etruscan goddess, are to be seen, as Cincius, a careful authority on such monuments, affirms.—Marcus Horatius the consul dedicated the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest in accordance with the law, in the year after the kings were driven out; afterward the solemn rite of driving the nail was transferred from the consuls to the dictators, because their authority was greater. Then, the custom having lapsed, the matter seemed worthy in itself that a dictator should be created on its account. For which cause Lucius Manlius was created; but, as though he had been created for the conduct of business and not for the discharge of a religious duty, in his eagerness for the Hernican war he harassed the young men with a harsh levy; and at last, when all the plebs/">tribunes of the plebs had risen against him, overcome whether by force or by shame, he laid down the dictatorship.

None the less, at the beginning of the following year, in the consulship of Quintus Servilius Ahala and Lucius Genucius, a day of trial was named for Manlius by Marcus Pomponius, plebs/">tribune of the plebs. The harshness in the levy—carried out not only by the fining of citizens but even by the mangling of their bodies, some being beaten with rods who had not answered to their names, others led off into chains—was hated; and hated above all was the man’s own savage temper and the surname Imperiosus, grievous to a free state, won from a display of cruelty which he practiced no less upon his own kin and his own blood than upon strangers. And among the other charges the tribune brought against him this: that his son, a young man convicted of no fault, he had driven out from the city, from home, from the household gods, from the Forum, from the light of day, from the company of his equals, and given over to servile labor, almost to a prison-house and a workhouse, where a young man of the highest birth, son of a dictator, might learn by daily wretchedness that he was indeed sprung from an "imperious" father. And for what offense? Because he was somewhat halting of speech and slow of tongue. Ought a father, if there were anything of human feeling in him, to have nursed this defect of nature, or to have chastised it and made it conspicuous by ill-usage? Even dumb beasts feed and cherish their offspring no less if any of them turns out somewhat ill-favored; but Lucius Manlius, by heaven, heaped evil upon his son’s evil, and pressed his dullness of wit down yet further, and, if there were any small spark of natural vigor in him, quenched it by a boorish life and a rustic keeping among the cattle.

By these accusations the spirit of all men, rather than of the young man himself, was provoked; nay on the contrary, taking it ill that he too should be to his parent a cause of odium and of charges, that all gods and men might know that he chose rather to bring aid to his parent than to his parent’s enemies, he formed a plan, rude indeed and of a rustic mind, and though no model for citizens, yet praiseworthy in its filial devotion. Without anyone’s knowledge, a knife girded at his side, early in the morning he came into the city and from the gate went straight to the house of Marcus Pomponius the plebs/">tribune; he tells the doorkeeper that he must meet his master at once, and that he should announce it was Titus Manlius, son of Lucius. Soon he was brought in—for there was hope that, stirred by anger against his father, he would bring either some new charge or some counsel for the matter in hand; greetings given and returned, he says that there is something he wishes to discuss with him with the witnesses removed. When all had been ordered to withdraw far off, he draws his knife and, standing over the couch with the steel held ready, threatens that he will run him through at once unless he swears, in the words which he himself should dictate, that he will never hold an assembly of the plebs to accuse his father. The tribune, terrified—seeing the steel flashing before his eyes, himself alone and unarmed, the other a young man of great strength and, what was no less to be feared, stupidly fierce in that strength—swears to the words to which he was forced; and afterward he openly declared that, subdued by this violence, he had abandoned his undertaking. And though the plebs would have preferred that the power of casting their votes upon so cruel and arrogant a defendant be granted them, yet they did not take it ill that the son had dared this for his parent; and it was the more praiseworthy because the father’s great harshness had in no way turned the young man’s spirit from filial devotion. And so not only was the pleading of his case remitted to the father, but the affair was even an honor to the youth himself; and when in that year it had first been resolved that the military tribunes for the legions should be made by vote—for before, just as now those whom they call Rufuli, the commanders themselves used to appoint them—he obtained the second of the six places, with no services at home or in war to win him favor, as one who had spent his youth in the country and far from the gatherings of men.

In the same year, whether from an earthquake or from some other force, the middle of the Forum is said to have collapsed into a vast chasm of immense depth; nor could that gulf be filled by the casting in of earth, though each man brought his share, until at the prompting of the gods they began to inquire wherein the greatest strength of the Roman people lay; for that, the seers chanted, must be dedicated to that place, if they wished the Roman commonwealth to be everlasting. Then, they report, Marcus Curtius, a young man distinguished in war, rebuked those who doubted whether there was any good more Roman than arms and valor; and, silence made, gazing upon the temples of the immortal gods that overhang the Forum, and upon the Capitol, and stretching out his hands now to heaven, now to the gaping clefts of the earth toward the gods below, he devoted himself; then, mounted upon a horse caparisoned as splendidly as he could make it, armed, he flung himself into the chasm; and gifts and fruits of the earth were heaped over him by the throng of men and women, and the Lacus Curtius was named not from that ancient Curtius Mettius, the soldier of Titus Tatius, but from this man. Diligence would not be wanting, if any path led the inquirer toward the truth; as it is, we must abide by the report of events, where antiquity denies us sure faith; and the name of the lake is the more notable from this more recent tale. After the expiation of so great a portent, in the same year the Senate, consulted about the Hernici, when it had sent the fetials in vain to demand restitution, resolved that on the very first day a proposal should be brought before the people for declaring war on the Hernici, and the people in full assembly ordered that war. To the consul Lucius Genucius that command fell by lot. The state was in suspense, because that first consul from the plebs was about to wage war under his own auspices, ready to reckon the shared honors as well or ill bestowed according as the matter should turn out. As chance would have it, Genucius, having set out against the enemy with a great effort, fell headlong into an ambush, and, the legions routed by sudden panic, the consul was surrounded and slain by men who did not know whom they had cut off. When this was announced at Rome, the fathers, by no means so grieved at the public calamity as fierce at the unlucky leadership of a plebeian consul, murmured everywhere: let them go and create consuls from the plebs, let them transfer the auspices where it was an impiety; the fathers could be driven from their honors by a plebiscite—had the unauspicious law prevailed even against the immortal gods? The gods had vindicated their own divinity, their own auspices, which, as soon as they were touched by one for whom neither human nor divine right allowed it, the destruction of the army together with its leader had served as a lesson, that thereafter elections should not be held with the law of the clans confounded. With these cries the senate-house and the Forum ring. Appius Claudius—because he had spoken against the law, and now with greater authority arraigned the outcome of the counsel he had censured—the consul Servilius, with the consent of the patricians, names dictator; and a levy and a suspension of public business were proclaimed.

Before the dictator and the new legions came into the country of the Hernici, under the leadership of Gaius Sulpicius the lieutenant a notable exploit was performed as occasion offered. When the Hernici, at the death of the consul, were approaching the Roman camp contemptuously, with no doubtful hope of storming it, a sally was made, the lieutenant urging it on and the soldiers’ spirits full of anger and indignation. The Hernici fell far short of their hope of reaching the rampart; so, their ranks thrown into disorder, they drew off. Then, at the dictator’s arrival, the new army is joined to the old and the forces are doubled; and before the assembly the dictator, by praising the lieutenant and the soldiers, by whose valor the camp had been defended, at once, in the hearing of those who had earned them, lifts up their spirits with the praises they merited, and at once whets the rest to emulate their valor. Nor with less vigor was war made ready against the enemy, who—mindful of the honor they had won before, and not ignorant of the increased strength of their foe—increase their own strength too. The whole Hernican name, every man of military age, is called out; eight cohorts of four hundred each, picked flowers of their manhood, are enrolled. This choice bloom of their youth—and the more so because they had decreed that they should receive double pay—they filled with hope and spirit; they were exempt too from military fatigues, that, reserved for the one labor of battle, they might know they must strive harder than each man’s single share; they were stationed also outside the line in the battle-array, that their valor might be more conspicuous. A plain of two miles divided the Roman camp from the Hernici; there, in the middle, at a space nearly equal on either side, the battle was fought. At first the fight stood with doubtful hope, the Roman cavalry having often tried in vain to throw the enemy’s line into disorder by their charge. After the cavalry-fight proved emptier in result than in effort, the horsemen, having first consulted the dictator and then by his leave left their horses, with a great shout dash forward before the standards and begin a fresh battle; nor could they be withstood, had not the extraordinary cohorts thrown themselves against them with equal strength of body and spirit.

Then the fight is waged among the foremost of the two peoples; whatever the common Mars of war takes from this side or that, the loss is many times greater than its mere number. The rest of the armed throng, as though the battle had been made over to the chief men, stake their own outcome on another’s valor. Many fall on both sides, more receive wounds; at last the horsemen, upbraiding one another, asking what would then be left if they had neither driven back the enemy from horseback nor the footmen made any difference—what third kind of battle were they waiting for? to what end had they leapt out fierce before the standards and were fighting on ground not their own?—stirred by these words among themselves, with a renewed shout they press forward, and first moved the enemy a step, then drove him back, and at last beyond doubt put him to flight; nor is it easy to say what gave the victory, the strengths being so equal, save that the unbroken fortune of each people could both lift up spirits and lower them. The Roman follows the fleeing Hernici right up to their camp; from the assault of the camp they refrained, because it was late in the day;—the long failure to win favorable omens had held back the dictator, so that he could not give the signal before midday, and so the struggle had been drawn out into the night.—On the next day the camp of the Hernici was found deserted in their flight, and some wounded men left behind; and the column of fugitives, when their thinned standards were sighted past the walls of the men of Signia, was routed by them and scattered in trembling flight across the fields. Nor for the Romans was the victory bloodless: a fourth part of the soldiers was lost, and, where the loss was no less, some Roman horsemen fell.

In the following year, when the consuls Gaius Sulpicius and Gaius Licinius Calvus had led an army against the Hernici, and, finding no enemy in the field, had taken their city Ferentinum by storm, the men of Tibur shut their gates against them as they returned from there. This was the final cause—though many complaints had before been bandied to and fro—why, restitution having been demanded through the fetials, war was declared against the people of Tibur. That the dictator that year was Titus Quinctius Poenus, and the master of the horse Servius Cornelius Maluginensis, is sufficiently agreed. Licinius Macer writes that he was named by the consul Licinius for the holding of the elections, because, while his colleague hastened to prefer war to the elections in order to prolong his consulship, the perverse desire had to be met. This praise, sought for his own family, makes Licinius the lighter authority; since I find no mention of the matter in the older annals, my mind inclines rather to think the dictator was created on account of a Gallic war. That year at any rate the Gauls had their camp at the third milestone on the Salarian Way, beyond the bridge of the Anio. The dictator, having proclaimed a suspension of business on account of the Gallic alarm, bound all the younger men by the military oath, and, setting out from the city with a huge army, pitched camp on the nearer bank of the Anio. The bridge lay between, neither side breaking it, that it might not be a sign of fear. There were frequent skirmishes for the possession of the bridge, and, the strengths being uncertain, it could not well be told who should master it. Then a Gaul of extraordinary bodily size advanced onto the empty bridge and, as loud as his voice could reach, said: "Let the man whom Rome now holds bravest come on, then, to the fight, that the outcome between us two may show which nation is the better in war."

Long there was silence among the foremost of the young Romans, since they were both ashamed to refuse the contest and unwilling to claim the foremost lot of danger; then Titus Manlius, son of Lucius, who had rescued his father from the tribune’s harassment, goes from his post to the dictator. "Without your order, commander," he says, "I would never fight out of the line, not though I saw victory certain: if you permit me, I wish to show that beast yonder—since he prances so fierce before the enemy’s standards—that I am sprung from the family that hurled the column of the Gauls down from the Tarpeian rock." Then the dictator says: "A blessing on your valor, Titus Manlius, and on your devotion to father and fatherland. Go, and with the gods to aid you make good the unconquered Roman name." Then his comrades arm the young man; he takes a footman’s shield, is girt with a Spanish sword fit for closer fighting. Armed and equipped, they lead him forth against the Gaul—stupidly exultant and, since this too seemed to the ancients worth remembering, even thrusting out his tongue in derision. They then withdraw to their post; and the two armed men are left in the middle, after the manner more of a spectacle than of the law of war, by no means equal to the eye and in seeming. The one was of a body extraordinary in size, gleaming in a many-colored garment and in arms painted and chased with gold; in the other the stature was a soldier’s, the middling sort, and the look of his serviceable arms was useful rather than ornamental: no singing, no leaping and idle brandishing of arms, but a breast full of spirit and of silent wrath; all his fierceness he had put off to the very crisis of the contest. When they had taken their stand between the two battle-lines, with the minds of so many mortals round about hanging between hope and fear, the Gaul, like a mass looming from above, thrust forward his shield with his left hand and brought down his sword with a slashing stroke and a great clatter upon the arms of his advancing foe, doing no harm; the Roman, his point raised, when he had struck the bottom of the Gaul’s shield with his own shield and, having got with his whole body within the reach of a wound, had worked himself in between the body and the arms, with one and then another thrust drained the belly and the groin and stretched the enemy out, falling, over a vast stretch of ground. Then he despoiled the body as it lay, untouched by any further outrage, of its one torque alone, which, spattered with blood, he set about his own neck. Terror together with wonder had fixed the Gauls fast: the Romans, eager, advancing from their post to meet their fellow-soldier, with congratulation and praise lead him to the dictator. Amid certain rough jests after the fashion of camp-songs the surname Torquatus was heard; thereafter, made famous, it was an honor even to the family’s descendants. The dictator added a golden crown as a gift and praised that fight before the assembly with wondrous praises.

And in truth that single combat was of so great moment to the outcome of the whole war that the army of the Gauls, abandoning its camp in alarm the next night, crossed into the country of Tibur, and there, a fellowship of war being struck and provisions kindly furnished them by the men of Tibur, soon passed over into Campania. This was the reason why in the next year the consul Gaius Poetelius Balbus, when the Hernici had fallen by lot to his colleague Marcus Fabius Ambustus, led an army by order of the people against the men of Tibur. To whose aid, when the Gauls had returned from Campania, foul ravagings were done in the Labican, the Tusculan, and the Alban country, beyond doubt with the men of Tibur for guides; and, though the commonwealth was content with a consul as its leader against the enemy of Tibur, the Gallic alarm forced a dictator to be created. Quintus Servilius Ahala, created dictator, named Titus Quinctius master of the horse and, on the authority of the fathers, vowed the Great Games if that war should turn out well. The dictator, bidding the consular army stay to hold the men of Tibur in by a war of their own, bound by oath all the younger men, no one shirking the service. The battle was fought not far from the Colline gate, with the strength of the whole city, within sight of parents and wives and children; and these things—great spurs to the spirit even when absent—then, set before their eyes, kindled the soldier with shame and pity together. With great slaughter dealt on both sides, the Gauls’ line is at last turned. In flight they make for Tibur as the citadel of the Gallic war; scattered, they were intercepted by the consul Poetelius not far from Tibur, and, the men of Tibur having come out to bring aid, are driven together with them within the gates. The matter was admirably handled both by the dictator and by the consul. And the other consul, Fabius, in fights at first small, at last in one notable battle, when the enemy had attacked with all their forces, utterly defeats the Hernici. The dictator, after praising the consuls magnificently in the Senate and before the people, and remitting to them the honor of his own achievements as well, laid down the dictatorship. Poetelius celebrated a double triumph over the Gauls and the men of Tibur; to Fabius it seemed enough to enter the city in ovation. The men of Tibur mocked Poetelius’s triumph: where, indeed, had he clashed with them in line of battle? A few spectators of the flight and panic of the Gauls had gone out beyond the gates, and, when they saw the attack made upon them too and all in their path cut down without distinction, had withdrawn within the city; this it was that had seemed to the Romans worthy of a triumph. Let them not reckon it too marvelous and great a thing to stir up an alarm at the enemy’s gates: they would see a greater panic before their own walls.

And so in the following year, in the consulship of Marcus Popilius Laenas and Gnaeus Manlius, setting out in the first silence of night from Tibur in a hostile column, they came to the city of Rome. The suddenness of the thing and the nighttime panic struck terror into men roused all at once from sleep, and besides the ignorance of many as to who the enemy were or whence they had come; nevertheless the call to arms was quickly raised, and the gates were secured with pickets and the walls with guards. And when the first light showed a moderate multitude before the walls and no enemy other than the men of Tibur, the consuls, going out by two gates, attack on either side the line of those already coming up to the walls; and it became plain that they had come relying on opportunity rather than valor: so scarcely did they sustain the first onset of the Romans. Indeed it was agreed that their coming had been a good thing for the Romans, and that the sedition between fathers and plebs now rising had been checked by the fear of a war so near. Another coming of enemies was more terrible to the fields than to the city: the Tarquinienses, ravaging, ranged over the Roman borders, chiefly on the side where they adjoin Etruria, and, restitution being demanded in vain, the new consuls Gaius Fabius and Gaius Plautius declared war by order of the people; and that command fell to Fabius, the Hernici to Plautius. The rumor of a Gallic war too was growing. But amid many terrors it was a comfort that peace was granted to the Latins at their request, and a great force of soldiers received from them under an ancient treaty, which they had let lapse for many years. And when the Roman state was propped by this support, it weighed the less that the Gauls had soon come to Praeneste and thence encamped around Pedum. It was resolved to name Gaius Sulpicius dictator; the consul Gaius Plautius, summoned for this, named him; Marcus Valerius was given to the dictator as master of the horse. These led the picked strength of the soldiers from the two consular armies against the Gauls. That war was somewhat slower than pleased either side. Since at first the Gauls had been so eager for battle, and then the Roman soldier, by rushing to arms and combat, somewhat outdid the Gallic ferocity, it by no means pleased the dictator—when no necessity compelled—to commit himself to fortune against an enemy whom time made worse day by day, lingering in a foreign land without prepared provisions, without a firm fortification, and besides with bodies and spirits whose whole force lay in the charge, and which slackened with even a small delay. By these counsels the dictator was protracting the war, and had proclaimed a heavy penalty if anyone should fight the enemy without orders. The soldiers, ill brooking this, at first in their pickets and watches carped at the dictator among themselves, and now and then jointly railed at the fathers because they had not ordered the war to be conducted through the consuls: an extraordinary commander had been chosen, a peerless leader, who thinks that, while he does nothing, victory will fly down from heaven into his lap. Then these same things they flung about by day openly and more fiercely: that they would either fight without the commander’s order, or march in a column to Rome. And the centurions mingled with the soldiers; and not in knots only was there murmuring, but now in the headquarters and at the general’s tent the talk was run together into one, and the crowd grew to the size of an assembly, and there was an outcry from every quarter that they should go at once to the dictator: let Sextus Tullius speak for the army, as befitted his valor.

Tullius was now leading the first centurion’s pilum for the seventh time, nor was there in the army any man—of those at least who had served on foot—more renowned for his deeds. He, going before the column of soldiers, makes for the tribunal, and to Sulpicius, who marveled no more at the throng than at Tullius as the throng’s leader, a soldier most obedient to commands, he says: "If it is allowed, dictator, the whole army, reckoning itself condemned by you for cowardice and well-nigh left without arms for ignominy’s sake, has begged me to plead its cause before you. For my part, if anywhere ground had been yielded, if backs had been turned to the enemy, if standards foully lost could be cast in our teeth, even so I should think it fair to obtain this much of you—that you should suffer us to correct our fault by valor and to blot out the memory of our disgrace by fresh glory. Even the legions routed at the Allia, having set out afterward from Veii, recovered by their valor the same fatherland which they had lost through panic. For us, by the gods’ kindness and by your good fortune and the Roman people’s, both our cause and our glory are unimpaired; though of glory I should scarcely dare to speak, if both the enemy mock us with every insult, hidden no otherwise than women within the rampart, and you, our commander—which we bear the more grievously—judge your army to be without spirit, without arms, without hands, and, before you had made trial of us, so despaired of us that you judged yourself to be the leader of the maimed and the crippled. For what other cause are we to believe there is, why a veteran leader, bravest in war, should sit, as they say, with his hands folded? For however the matter stands, it is nearer the truth that you seem to have doubted of our valor than we of yours. But if this is not your own counsel but the public one, and some agreement of the fathers, not a Gallic war, holds us banished from the city and from our household gods, I pray you to reckon what I shall say as said not by soldiers to a commander but by the plebs to the fathers—and if the plebs should say that, as you keep your counsels to yourselves, so it will keep its own, who, pray, would be angry?—that we are soldiers, not your slaves, sent to war and not into exile; that, if anyone give the signal and lead us out into line, we will fight as is worthy of men and Romans; that, if there be no need of arms, we will spend our leisure at Rome rather than in camp. Let this be said to the fathers. You, commander, we your soldiers beg to grant us the chance of fighting: we long to conquer, and to conquer with you for leader, to bring to you the signal laurel, to enter the city triumphing with you, and, following your chariot, to approach the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest with thanks and rejoicing." The prayers of the multitude took up Tullius’s speech, and on every side they shouted to him to give the signal, to bid them take up arms.

The dictator, though he judged that a good thing was being done by no commendable precedent, nevertheless took upon himself to do what the soldiers wished, and asks Tullius privately what this affair was, or in what manner it had been carried out. Tullius begged the dictator earnestly not to believe that he had forgotten military discipline, or himself, or his commander’s majesty; that he had not withdrawn himself as leader from an excited multitude—which is generally like its instigators—lest some other should arise of the sort that a stirred-up multitude is wont to produce; for, as for himself, he would do nothing save at the commander’s discretion. Yet the dictator too must see to it earnestly that he kept the army in his power: spirits so excited could not be put off; the men would take to themselves the place and time of fighting, if it were not granted them by the commander. While they speak of these things, two Roman soldiers took from a Gaul who was driving them off some draught-animals that chanced to be grazing outside the rampart. Stones were thrown at them by the Gauls; then from the Roman picket a shout arose, and there was a rush forward on both sides. And now the affair was not far from a regular battle, had not the contest been quickly parted by the centurions; at any rate Tullius’s credit with the dictator was confirmed by that chance; and, the matter now admitting no delay, proclamation is made that on the next day they would fight in line. The dictator nevertheless, as one who went down to the contest relying more on spirit than on strength, began to look all about and turn over every means, that by some device he might strike terror into the enemy. With a shrewd mind he contrives a new thing, which afterward many commanders, our own and foreign—some even in our own age—have used: he orders the pack-saddles to be stripped from the mules and, only two little saddle-cloths left on each, mounts the muleteers upon them, decked some in the arms of captives, some in those of the sick. Having made up about a thousand of these, he mixes in a hundred horsemen and orders them by night to climb past the camp into the hills and hide themselves in the woods, and not to stir from there before they should receive the signal from him. He himself, when day broke, began carefully to extend his line at the foot of the hills, that the enemy might take his stand facing the hills, the apparatus of an empty terror being arrayed—a terror which indeed availed almost more than true strength. At first the leaders of the Gauls believed the Romans would not come down into the level; then, when they suddenly saw them descend, they too, eager for battle, rush into the fight, and the combat began before the signal was given by their leaders.

The Gauls assailed the right wing more sharply; nor could it have been held, had not the dictator chanced to be at that spot, upbraiding Sextus Tullius by name and asking, was it thus he had pledged the soldiers would fight? Where were those shouts of men demanding arms, where the threats of joining battle without the commander’s order? Behold, the commander himself was calling them to battle with a clear voice and going armed before the front standards; would any of them follow, who had lately been about to lead—fierce in camp, fearful in the line? They were hearing the truth; and so shame applied so great a spur that they rushed upon the enemy’s weapons with their minds estranged from the memory of danger. This onset, at first almost frenzied, threw the enemy into confusion; then the cavalry, let loose, routed them in their disorder. The dictator himself, after he saw the line wavering on the one side, carries his standards to the left wing, where he perceived the enemy’s throng gathering, and gave to those who were on the hill the signal that had been agreed. When from there too a fresh shout arose, and they were seen making across the slope of the hill toward the camp of the Gauls, then, in fear of being cut off, the battle was abandoned, and in headlong course they were borne toward their camp. There, when Marcus Valerius the master of the horse, who, the right wing crushed, was riding up to the enemy’s fortifications, had met them, they turned their flight toward the hills and woods, and very many were there intercepted by the deceptive show of horsemen and by the muleteers; and of those whom panic had carried into the woods there was a savage slaughter after the battle was stilled. Nor did any, after Marcus Furius, celebrate a juster triumph over the Gauls than Gaius Sulpicius. Of gold too, from the Gallic spoils, he consecrated on the Capitol a weight large enough, walled about with squared stone. In the same year there was fighting also by the consuls, with varied success; for the Hernici were utterly defeated and subdued by Gaius Plautius, while Fabius his colleague fought against the Tarquinienses incautiously and rashly. Nor was the disaster received there so much in the line of battle as in this, that the Tarquinienses sacrificed three hundred and seven captured Roman soldiers; by the foulness of which punishment the disgrace of the Roman people was made a good deal more conspicuous. There was added to that disaster also a devastation of the Roman territory, which the Privernates, and then the Veliterni, made by a sudden inroad. In the same year two tribes, the Pomptine and the Publilian, were added; the votive games which Marcus Furius as dictator had vowed were held; and a bill concerning electoral bribery was then for the first time brought before the people by Gaius Poetelius, plebs/">tribune of the plebs, on the prompting of the fathers; and by that proposal they believed that the canvassing chiefly of new men—who had been wont to go round the market-days and the gathering-places—was checked.

Not so welcome to the fathers, in the following year, in the consulship of Gaius Marcius and Gnaeus Manlius, was the bill carried through by Marcus Duillius and Lucius Menenius, plebs/">tribunes of the plebs, concerning the rate of interest/">one-twelfth interest; and the plebs adopted it a good deal more eagerly. To the new wars marked out the year before, the Falisci too arose as enemies, on a double charge: both because their young men had served alongside the Tarquinienses, and because they had not given back, when the Roman fetials demanded them, those who had fled to Falerii after the ill-fought battle. That command fell to Gnaeus Manlius. Marcius led his army into the Privernate territory, untouched by a long peace, and filled the soldier with plunder. To the abundance of spoil he added open-handedness, in that, by setting nothing aside for the public treasury, he favored the soldier as he enriched his private substance. When the Privernates had encamped before their own walls in a well-fortified camp, calling the soldiers to assembly he said: "I now give you the enemy’s camp and city for plunder, if you promise me that you will do your work bravely in the line, and are not more ready for plunder than for battle." They demand the signal with a huge shout, and tall and fierce with no doubtful hope they advance into battle. There, before the standards, Sextus Tullius—of whom we spoke before—cries out: "Behold, commander," he says, "how your army makes good to you its promises," and, laying down his pilum, with drawn sword makes a charge upon the enemy. All the front-rank men follow Tullius, and at the first onset turn the enemy; routed thence, they pursued him to the town, and, when they were now bringing up ladders to the walls, received the city in surrender. A triumph was celebrated over the Privernates. By the other consul nothing memorable was done, except that by a new precedent he carried a law, at Sutrium, in the camp, tribe by tribe, concerning a five-percent tax on those who should be manumitted. The fathers, because by that law no small revenue was added to the needy treasury, gave their backing; but the tribunes of the plebs, moved not so much by the law as by the precedent—lest anyone thereafter should call the people apart—made it a capital offense: for there was nothing, however ruinous to the people, that could not be carried through soldiers sworn to a consul’s word, if that were allowed. In the same year Gaius Licinius Stolo was condemned by Marcus Popilius Laenas under Stolo’s own law to ten thousand asses, because, together with his son, he possessed a thousand iugera of land, and by emancipating his son had committed a fraud upon the law.

The new consuls then, Marcus Fabius Ambustus for the second time and Marcus Popilius Laenas for the second time, had two wars: the one easy, with the men of Tibur, which Laenas waged, who, the enemy driven into their city, laid waste their fields; the Falisci and the Tarquinienses routed the other consul in the first battle. Thereupon there was the greatest terror, because their priests, with blazing torches and snakes borne before them, threw the Roman soldier into confusion by their frenzied advance and the unaccustomed sight. And then indeed, like men crazed and thunderstruck, they tumbled in a trembling column within their own fortifications; afterward, when the consul and the lieutenants and the tribunes mocked and railed at them for fearing, like children, empty marvels, shame suddenly turned their spirits, and they rushed, as if blind, upon the very things from which they had fled. And so, the enemy’s vain apparatus shaken off, when they had borne in upon the armed men themselves, they turned the whole line, and, having that same day got possession even of their camp, returned victorious with vast plunder, mocking with soldiers’ jests both the enemy’s apparatus and their own panic. Then the whole Etruscan name is roused, and under the leadership of the Tarquinienses and the Falisci they reach the Salt-works. Against that terror Gaius Marcius Rutulus, the first dictator named from the plebs, named master of the horse likewise from the plebs, Gaius Plautius. But this indeed seemed to the fathers a thing unworthy, that even the dictatorship was now held in common; and they hindered with all their might that anything should be decreed or made ready for the dictator toward that war. The more readily, then, did the people order everything, the dictator proposing it. Setting out from the city on either side of the Tiber—the army being ferried over on rafts wherever the report of the enemy led—he overwhelmed many ravagers of the fields who roamed and straggled; the camp too he assailed unexpectedly and took, and, eight thousand of the enemy captured, the rest either cut down or driven from Roman soil, he triumphed without the authority of the fathers, by the order of the people. Because they wished the consular elections to be held neither by a plebeian dictator nor by a consul, and the other consul Fabius was detained by war, the matter reverted to an interregnum. The interreges in succession were Quintus Servilius Ahala, Marcus Fabius, Gnaeus Manlius, Gaius Fabius, Gaius Sulpicius, Lucius Aemilius, Quintus Servilius, Marcus Fabius Ambustus. In the second interregnum a contention arose, because two patrician consuls were being created, and, the tribunes interceding, the interrex Fabius said that there was a law in the Twelve Tables that whatever the people had last ordered, that should be law and binding; and that the people’s order was its votes too. When the tribunes by their intercession had availed for nothing but to put off the elections, two patrician consuls were created, Gaius Sulpicius Peticus for the third time and Marcus tribune/">Valerius Publicola, and on the same day they entered upon their magistracy,

in the four-hundredth year after the city of Rome was founded, the thirty-fifth after it was recovered from the Gauls, the consulship having been taken from the plebs after the eleventh year. Empulum was that year taken from the men of Tibur in a contest not worth recording—whether the war there was waged under the auspices of the two consuls, as some have written, or whether at the same time the fields of the Tarquinienses too were laid waste by the consul Sulpicius, while tribune/">Valerius led his legions against the men of Tibur. At home the consuls had a greater contest with the plebs and the tribunes. They reckoned it now a matter not only of their valor but of their faith, that, as two patricians had received the consulship, so they should commit it to two patricians: either they must give it up altogether, if the consulship were now to become a plebeian magistracy, or they must possess it whole, since they had received the possession unimpaired from the fathers. The plebs, on the other side, murmurs: why do they live, why are they reckoned as part of the citizen body, if what was won by the valor of two men, Lucius Sextius and Gaius Licinius, they cannot all together keep? Either kings, or decemvirs, or, if there be any grimmer name of dominion, must be endured, rather than that they should see both consuls patrician, and that there be no obeying and commanding by turns, but that the one order, set in everlasting command, should suppose the plebs born for nothing else than to serve. Tribunes are not wanting as promoters of the disturbances; but among men all stirred up of themselves, leaders scarcely stand out. Several times, when there had been a fruitless descent to the Campus, and many days appointed for the elections had been passed in seditions, at last the perseverance of the consuls won out: the plebs’ grief broke out so far that, while the tribunes cried that liberty was undone, and that not the Campus now only but the city too must be abandoned, captured and crushed beneath the patricians’ tyranny, the mournful plebs followed them. The consuls, abandoned by part of the people, none the less without slackening complete the elections through the thin attendance. There were created two patrician consuls, Marcus Fabius Ambustus for the third time, Titus Quinctius. In certain annals I find, in place of Titus Quinctius, Marcus Popilius as consul.

Two wars were that year successfully waged: with the Tarquinienses and the men of Tibur it was fought to a surrender. Sassula, one of their cities, was taken; and the other towns would have had the same fortune, had not the whole nation laid down its arms and come into the consul’s protection. A triumph was celebrated over the men of Tibur; otherwise the victory was mild. Against the Tarquinienses there was bitter savagery: of the many mortals cut down in the line, out of the huge number of captives three hundred and fifty-eight were chosen, the noblest of all, to be sent to Rome; the rest of the throng was butchered. Nor was the people milder toward those who had been sent to Rome: in the middle of the Forum they were all beaten with rods and struck with the axe. This was rendered to the enemy as a penalty for the Romans sacrificed in the Tarquinienses’ forum. These deeds well done in war brought it about that the Samnites too sought friendship. To their envoys a kindly answer was given by the Senate; by a treaty they were received into alliance. The Roman plebs had not the same fortune at home as in the field. For although, the rate of interest/">one-twelfth interest having been set, the usury had been eased, by the principal itself the needy were overwhelmed and entered into bondage; therefore the plebs admitted to mind neither the two patrician consuls nor the care of the elections nor public concerns, in face of their private troubles. Each consulship remains with the patricians; the consuls created were Gaius Sulpicius Peticus for the fourth time, Marcus Valerius Publicola for the second. The state being bent upon the Etruscan war—because report said that the people of Caere, out of pity of kinship, had joined the Tarquinienses—Latin envoys turned its attention to the Volsci, announcing that an army enrolled and armed was now threatening their own borders, and that thence, ravaging, they would come into Roman territory. The Senate therefore resolved that neither matter should be neglected; it ordered legions to be enrolled for both, and the consuls to draw lots for their commands. The greater part of the concern then inclined to the Etruscan war, after it was learned by a letter of the consul Sulpicius, to whom Tarquinii had fallen as his command, that the territory around the Roman salt-works had been ravaged, and a part of the plunder carried off into the lands of the people of Caere, and that beyond doubt the young men of that people had been among the plunderers. And so the Senate ordered the consul Valerius—who had been posted against the Volsci and was keeping his camp on the Tusculan border—to be recalled thence and to name a dictator. He named Titus Manlius, son of Lucius. He, when he had named for himself as master of the horse Aulus Cornelius Cossus, content with the consular army, declared war on the people of Caere by the authority of the fathers and the order of the people.

Then for the first time the men of Caere—as though there were in the enemy’s words a greater force toward the signifying of war than in their own deeds, who had provoked the Romans by ravaging—were seized by a true terror of war, and saw how little that contest lay within their own strength; and they repented of the ravaging and execrated the Tarquinienses as the authors of the revolt; nor did anyone make ready arms or war, but each man for himself bade envoys be sent to seek pardon for the error. The envoys, when they had approached the Senate, and from the Senate were referred to the people, besought the gods—whose rites, received in the Gallic war, they had duly tended—that there might seize the Romans in their flourishing the same pity of them that had once seized themselves in the afflicted estate of the Roman people; and, turning toward the shrine of Vesta, they invoked the hospitality of the flamens and the Vestals, kept by them chastely and religiously: could anyone believe that men who had so deserved had suddenly, without cause, been made enemies? or that, if they had done anything in hostile fashion, they had done it lapsing through deliberation rather than through madness, so as to corrupt their own old benefits—placed especially among men so grateful—by new wrongs, and to choose for themselves as an enemy the flourishing and most fortunate-in-war Roman people, whose friendship they had won when it was afflicted? Let them not call it deliberation, what ought to be called force and necessity. The Tarquinienses, passing in a hostile column through their territory, when they had asked for nothing but a road, had drawn along certain of the country-folk as companions of that ravaging which was now laid to their charge. These men, whether it pleased the Romans that they be given up, they were ready to give up; or that they be visited with punishment, they would pay the penalty. Caere, the sanctuary of the Roman people, the lodging of its priests and the refuge of the Roman rites, let them, for the sake of the Vestals’ hospitality and the gods there tended, leave untouched and unviolated by the charge of war. The people was moved not so much by the present cause as by the old service, so as to be forgetful rather of the wrong than of the benefit. And so peace was granted to the people of Caere, and it was resolved that a truce, made for a hundred years, be entered in a decree of the Senate. Against the Falisci, guilty on the same charge, the force of war was turned; but the enemy were nowhere found. When their borders had been ranged over with ravaging, the assault of their cities was forborne; and, the legions led back to Rome, the rest of the year was spent in repairing the walls and towers, and the temple of Apollo was dedicated.

At the end of the year the consular elections were broken off by a contest of the fathers and the plebs, the tribunes denying that they would suffer the elections to be held unless they were held according to the Licinian law, the dictator obstinate to take the consulship wholly out of the commonwealth rather than to make it common to fathers and plebs. The elections being put off, then, when the dictator had gone out of office, the matter reverted to an interregnum. When the interreges found the plebs hostile to the fathers, there was strife in sedition down to the eleventh interrex. The tribunes kept flaunting the patronage of the Licinian law; nearer to the plebs was the grief of the worsening usury, and private cares broke out amid the public contests. Wearied of these, the fathers ordered Lucius Cornelius Scipio as interrex, for concord’s sake, to observe the Licinian law at the consular elections. To Publius tribune/">Valerius Publicola was given as colleague from the plebs Gaius Marcius Rutulus. Men’s minds once inclined toward concord, the new consuls set about easing the matter of debt also, which alone seemed to keep men’s minds divided, and turned the discharge of debt into a public care, five men being created whom they called mensarii from the disbursing of money. They so earned men’s gratitude by their fairness and care that they were famous by name throughout the records of all the annals; and they were Gaius Duillius, Publius Decius Mus, Marcus Papirius, Quintus Publilius, and Titus Aemilius. They sustained a matter most difficult to handle and for the most part grievous to both sides, certainly always to one, with both moderation otherwise and at a public cost rather than a public loss. For the slow debts, and those clogged more by the idleness of the debtors than by their means, the treasury either discharged with tables of bronze set up in the Forum—security being first given to the people—or an appraisal at fair prices set them free, so that not only without injustice but even without complaints of either side the vast mass of debt was drained off. Then a vain terror of an Etruscan war, when the rumor was that twelve peoples had conspired, forced a dictator to be named. He was named in the camp—for thither the decree of the Senate was sent to the consuls—Gaius Iulius, to whom was added as master of the horse Lucius Aemilius. But abroad all was quiet.

An attempt at home, through the dictator, to have two patrician consuls created brought the matter to an interregnum. Two interreges, Gaius Sulpicius and Marcus Fabius, interposed, obtained what the dictator had striven for in vain—the plebs being now milder, on account of their recent relief of debt—that two patrician consuls should be created. Created were Gaius Sulpicius Peticus himself, who first went out of the interregnum, and Titus Quinctius Poenus—some add the praenomen Caeso to Quinctius, others Gaius. Both setting out to war, Quinctius against the Falisci, Sulpicius against the Tarquinienses, nowhere meeting the enemy in line of battle, they waged their wars by burning and ravaging the fields rather than against men; by the wasting decay of this, as of a slow consumption, the obstinacy of each people was overcome, so that they sued for a truce, first from the consuls, then by their leave from the Senate. They obtained it for forty years. The care of the two wars that threatened being thus laid aside, while there was some rest from arms, because the discharge of debt had changed the owners of many things, it was resolved that a census be taken. But when the elections for creating censors had been proclaimed, Gaius Marcius Rutulus, who had been the first dictator from the plebs, by professing that he sought the censorship, disturbed the concord of the orders; which indeed he seemed to have done at an unfavorable time, because both consuls then chanced to be patrician, who said they would take no account of his candidacy; but he both by his constancy held to his undertaking, and the tribunes aided him with all their might, as men about to recover the right lost at the consular elections; and, since the man’s own greatness matched the summit of any honor, the plebs also wished that the censorship too should be called into a share through the same man who had opened the way to the dictatorship. Nor was there any wavering at the elections, but that Marcius was created censor with Manlius. This year had a dictator too, Marcus Fabius—from no terror of war, but that the Licinian law might not be observed at the consular elections. Quintus Servilius was added to the dictator as master of the horse. Yet the dictatorship did not make the agreement of the fathers more powerful at the consular elections than it had been at the censorial:

Marcus Popilius Laenas was given as consul by the plebs, Lucius Cornelius Scipio by the fathers. Fortune too made the plebeian consul the more illustrious; for when it was announced that a huge army of the Gauls had pitched camp in the Latin country, and Scipio was entangled in a grave illness, the Gallic war was given to Popilius out of the regular order. He, energetically enrolling an army, when he had ordered all the younger men to assemble in arms outside the Capene gate at the temple of Mars, and the quaestors to bring the standards thither from the treasury, four legions filled up, handed over what was left of the soldiers to the praetor Publius Valerius Publicola, advising the fathers to enroll a second army as a reserve for the commonwealth against the uncertain outcomes of war. He himself, all things now sufficiently equipped and made ready, makes for the enemy; and, that he might learn their strength before he should try it in the last peril, on a knoll, the nearest to the Gauls’ camp that he could seize, he began to draw a rampart. A fierce nation, and of a temper greedy for battle, when, the Roman standards seen from afar, it had deployed its line as though to begin battle at once, after it saw neither the column come down onto the level, and that the Romans were sheltered both by the height of the ground and even by a rampart, thinking them stricken with panic—and at the same time the more vulnerable because they were then most intent on their work—attacks with a savage shout. By the Romans neither was the work broken off—it was the triarii who were fortifying—and by the hastati and principes, who stood intent and armed before the workers, the battle was begun. Besides valor, the higher ground too helped, so that all the javelins and spears fell not vainly, as though hurled from level ground—which mostly happens—but, all poised with their own weight, stuck fast; and the Gauls, loaded with weapons—their bodies pierced, or their shields weighed down by those clinging in them—when at a run they had come almost up the slope, at first halted, uncertain; then, when the very hesitation had both lessened their spirits and increased the enemy’s, driven back they tumbled one upon another, and gave among themselves a havoc fouler than the slaughter itself; so many more were crushed by the headlong throng than slain by the sword.

Nor yet was the victory sure for the Romans; another mass awaited them as they came down into the plain. For the multitude of the Gauls, surpassing all sense of such a loss, as though a fresh line were rising anew, was rousing unspent soldiery against a now victorious foe; and the Roman halted, his charge checked, both because the contest had to be undertaken a second time by men already weary, and because the consul, while he ranged incautiously among the foremost, had given ground a little from the line, his left shoulder almost pierced through by a pike. And now the victory was being let slip by delay, when the consul, his wound bound up, riding back to the front standards, said: "Why do you stand, soldier? It is not with a Latin or a Sabine enemy that you have to do, whom, conquered in arms, you may make an ally out of an enemy; against beasts we have drawn the sword: blood must be drained, or given. You have driven them from their camp, you have driven them headlong down the sloping valley, you stand over the strewn bodies of the enemy; fill the plains with the same havoc with which you have filled the hills. Do not wait until they flee from you as you stand: the standards must be borne forward, and we must advance upon the enemy." Roused by these exhortations once more, they drive the foremost maniples of the Gauls from their place; then in wedges they break through into the middle of the column. Thereupon the barbarians, scattered, having neither sure commands nor leaders, turn their charge upon their own men; and, routed across the plains and carried in their flight even past their own camp, they make for the Alban citadel, which, the highest among the level knolls, met their eyes. The consul, not pursuing beyond the camp—because his wound weighed him down and he was unwilling to lead his army up under the knolls held by the enemy—gave all the plunder of the camp to the soldiers and led back to Rome an army victorious and rich with Gallic spoils. The consul’s wound brought delay to his triumph, and the same cause made the Senate feel the want of a dictator, that there might be one to hold the elections while the consuls were sick. Lucius Furius Camillus was named dictator, with Publius Cornelius Scipio added as master of the horse, and he restored to the fathers their former possession of the consulship. He himself, on account of that service created consul with the fathers’ great zeal, named as colleague Appius Claudius Crassus.

Before the new consuls entered upon their magistracy, a triumph was celebrated by Popilius over the Gauls, with great favor of the plebs; and, murmuring among themselves, they kept asking whether anyone repented of a plebeian consul; and at the same time they railed at the dictator, who had taken the reward of the scorned Licinian law—the consulship—a thing fouler from private greed than from public wrong, so that he, the dictator, created himself consul. The year was marked by many and various commotions: the Gauls, because they had not been able to bear the violence of winter, roamed through the plains and the maritime regions, ravaging; the sea was infested by the fleets of the Greeks—the shore-line of the Antiate coast, and the Laurentine tract, and the mouths of the Tiber—so that the sea-robbers, having once clashed in an indecisive battle with the land-robbers, parted in doubt—the Gauls to their camp, the Greeks back to their ships—whether to reckon themselves conquered or conquerors. Among these, by far the greatest terror arose: the councils of the Latin peoples held at the grove of Ferentina, and the answer given, by no means ambiguous, to the Romans demanding soldiers—that they should cease to command those whose aid they needed: the Latins would bear arms for their own liberty rather than for another’s dominion. Amid two foreign wars at once, the Senate, anxious also at the defection of its allies, when it saw that those whom faith had not held must be held by fear, ordered the consuls to stretch all the forces of empire by holding a levy: it must rely upon a citizen army, since the allied gathering was deserting it. From every quarter, not only from the city’s youth but even from the country’s, ten legions are said to have been enrolled, of four thousand two hundred foot and three hundred horse each—a number which, if some foreign force were now to assail, these resources of the Roman people, which the circle of the lands scarcely contains, gathered into one, could not easily make up; so far have we grown only in the things for which we toil, riches and luxury. Among the other griefs of that year the one consul, Appius Claudius, dies in the very preparation of war; and the matter had returned to Camillus, to whom, as sole consul, it seemed to the fathers not seemly enough that a dictator be foisted—whether on account of his other dignity, not to be subjected to a dictatorship, or on account of the lucky omen of his surname against the Gallic alarm. The consul, two legions set over the city, eight divided with the praetor Lucius Pinarius, mindful of his father’s valor, takes the Gallic war to himself outside the lot, and ordered the praetor to guard the coast and to keep the Greeks from the shores. And when he had gone down into the Pomptine country, because he wished neither to engage on the plains, no necessity compelling, and believed the enemy sufficiently tamed by being kept from ravaging—men whom necessity forced to live by plunder—he chose a fit place for a standing camp.

There, while they wore away the time quietly with pickets, a Gaul came forward, conspicuous in size and arms; and, shaking his shield with his spear, when he had made silence, he challenges, through an interpreter, one of the Romans to decide the matter with the sword against him. There was Marcus plebs/">tribune/">Valerius, a young military tribune, who, reckoning himself no less worthy of that honor than Titus Manlius, first having sounded the consul’s will, came forward armed into the midst. The human contest was made less notable by the interposed power of the gods; for, as the Roman was now joining hands, a raven suddenly settled on his helmet, turned toward the enemy. This at first the tribune received gladly as an augury sent from heaven, and then prayed that, whether it was a god or a goddess who had sent him the bird, he would be present, willing and propitious. Wonderful to tell, the bird not only kept the seat it had once seized, but, as often as the contest was joined, rising on its wings, attacked the enemy’s face and eyes with beak and talons, until, terrified at the sight of such a portent and troubled at once in eyes and mind, Valerius cut him down; and the raven, borne out of sight, made for the east. Thus far the pickets on both sides had been quiet; but after the tribune began to despoil the body of the slain enemy, neither did the Gauls keep to their post, and the Romans’ rush toward the victor was even swifter. There, the contest drawn together around the lying body of the Gaul, a savage fight is stirred up. Now the matter is waged not by the maniples of the nearest pickets but by legions poured out on both sides. Camillus orders the soldier—glad at the tribune’s victory, glad at going into battle with the gods so present and favorable—to advance; and, showing the tribune conspicuous in his spoils, "Imitate this man, soldier," he said, "and around your fallen leader lay low the troops of the Gauls." Gods and men were present at that fight, and it was fought out with the Gauls in a contest by no means doubtful; so had each line foreboded in its mind the outcome of the two soldiers between whom it had been fought. Among the foremost, whose clash had roused the rest, the fight was savage; the rest of the multitude turned their backs before they came within javelin-cast. At first they were scattered through the Volscian and the Falernian country; thence they made for Apulia and the lower sea. The consul, an assembly called, praised the tribune and presented him with ten oxen and a golden crown; and he himself, ordered by the Senate to take charge of the maritime war, joined camp with the praetor. There, because matters seemed to be dragged out by the sloth of the Greeks, who would not commit themselves to a line of battle, he named, for the sake of the elections, by the authority of the Senate, Titus Manlius Torquatus dictator. The dictator, Aulus Cornelius Cossus named master of the horse, held the consular elections, and proclaimed as consul, in his absence, the rival of his own glory, Marcus Valerius Corvus—for that was his surname thereafter—with the people’s highest favor, at three and twenty years of age. As colleague to Corvus, from the plebs, was given Marcus Popilius Laenas, about to be consul for the fourth time. With the Greeks nothing memorable was done by Camillus; neither were they warriors by land nor the Roman by sea. At last, when they were kept from the shores, and water too, besides the other necessaries of use, was failing, they left Italy. Of what people, of what nation, that fleet was, there is nothing certain. I should most readily believe they were tyrants of Sicily; for the farther Greece, in that season, wearied with civil war, was already dreading the power of the Macedonians.

The armies disbanded, when there was both peace abroad and quiet at home in the concord of the orders, lest things should be too cheerful, a pestilence, assailing the state, forced the Senate to order the decemvirs to inspect the Sibylline books; and at their warning there was a lectisternium. In the same year Satricum was settled as a colony by the men of Antium, and the city which the Latins had razed was restored. And a treaty was struck at Rome with Carthaginian envoys, who had come seeking friendship and alliance. The same quiet at home and abroad remained in the consulship of Titus Manlius Torquatus, for the second time, and Gaius Plautius. The interest was made only one-twenty-fourth out of one-twelfth, and the discharge of debt was apportioned into equal installments over three years, in such wise that a quarter should be paid down at once; and even so, with part of the plebs distressed, public faith was nevertheless a greater care to the Senate than private difficulties. Affairs were eased chiefly because tribute and levy were forborne. In the third year after Satricum was restored by the Volsci, Marcus Valerius Corvus, made consul for the second time with Gaius Poetelius, when it had been announced from Latium that envoys from Antium were going round the Latin peoples to stir up war, was ordered to bear arms against the Volsci before more of the enemy should arise, and makes for Satricum with a hostile army. There, when the men of Antium and the other Volsci, with forces prepared beforehand in case anything should move from Rome, had met him, no delay in fighting was made between men hostile through long-standing hatred. The Volsci, a nation fiercer for rebelling than for warring, conquered in the contest, in headlong flight make for the walls of Satricum; and, when not even in their walls they had hope firm enough—since, the town girdled by a ring of soldiers, it was now being taken by ladders—about four thousand soldiers, besides the unwarlike multitude, surrendered themselves. The town was razed and burned; from the temple of the Mother Matuta alone they withheld the fire; all the plunder was given to the soldiers. Outside the plunder were reckoned the four thousand who had surrendered; these the consul, triumphing, drove in chains before his chariot; then, having sold them, he brought a great sum of money into the treasury. There are those who write that this captive multitude was of slaves, and that is more like the truth than that men who had surrendered were sold.

These consuls were followed by Marcus Fabius Dorsuo and Servius Sulpicius Camerinus. Then an Auruncan war was begun by a sudden raid; and from fear that this deed of one people might be the plan of the whole Latin name, Lucius Furius was created dictator—as though against an already armed Latium—and named Gnaeus Manlius Capitolinus master of the horse; and when—as was wont to be done amid great alarms—a suspension of business having been proclaimed, a levy without exemptions had been held, the legions were led against the Aurunci as fast as could be hastened. There the spirits of robbers rather than of enemies were found; and so it was fought to a finish in the first line of battle. The dictator, nevertheless, because they had both made war unprovoked and offered themselves to the contest without shrinking, thinking that the help of the gods too must be brought in, in the very midst of the fight vowed a temple to Juno Moneta; and, bound by this vow, when he had returned to Rome victorious, he laid down the dictatorship. The Senate ordered duumvirs to be created to build that temple in keeping with the greatness of the Roman people; a place was appointed on the citadel, which had been the site of the house of Marcus Manlius Capitolinus. The consuls, using the dictator’s army for the Volscian war, took Sora from the enemy, assailing them off their guard. In the year after the temple was vowed, the temple of Moneta is dedicated, in the consulship of Gaius Marcius Rutulus for the third time and Titus Manlius Torquatus for the second. A portent at once followed the dedication, like the ancient portent of the Alban mount; for it both rained stones and night seemed to spread in the daytime; and, the books inspected, when the state was full of religious dread, it pleased the Senate that a dictator be named for the appointing of holy days. Publius Valerius Publicola was named; Quintus Fabius Ambustus was given him as master of the horse. It pleased them that not the tribes only should go to make supplication, but the neighboring peoples too, and an order was set for them, on what day each should make supplication. Grim judgments of the people, it is handed down, were that year passed against the money-lenders, to whom a day of trial had been named by the aediles; and the matter, with no cause notable for memory, reverts to an interregnum. Out of the interregnum, so that it might be seen this had been its purpose, both consuls created were patrician, Marcus Valerius Corvus for the third time and Aulus Cornelius Cossus.

From here on, greater wars will be told, both in the strength of the enemy and in the distance—whether of the regions, or of the span of time, in which they were waged. For in that year arms were set in motion against the Samnites, a nation strong in resources and in arms; the Samnite war, waged with doubtful Mars, was followed by Pyrrhus as an enemy, and Pyrrhus by the Carthaginians. What a mass of events! How often was the utmost of perils reached, that the empire might be raised to this greatness, which is scarcely sustained! But the cause of the war between the Samnites and the Romans, though they were joined by alliance and friendship, came from without; it did not arise between themselves. The Samnites, when they had brought unjust arms against the Sidicini, because they had the greater might, the poorer people, forced to flee to the aid of the more powerful, join themselves to the Campanians. The Campanians, when they had brought rather a name than strength to the protection of their allies, soft with luxury, driven back in the Sidicine territory by men hardened in the use of arms, then turned the whole mass of the war upon themselves. For the Samnites, leaving the Sidicini aside, attacked the very citadel of their neighbors, the Campanians, where the victory was equally easy and there was more of plunder and of glory; and, having seized with a strong garrison Tifata, the hills overhanging Capua, they come down thence in a square column into the plain that lies between Capua and Tifata. There again it was fought in line; and the Campanians, in an unsuccessful battle driven within their walls, when, the flower of their youth cut down, there was no near hope, were forced to seek aid from the Romans.

The envoys, brought into the Senate, spoke chiefly to this effect: "The Campanian people has sent us as envoys to you, conscript fathers, to seek of you friendship for all time, aid for the present. Had we sought it in our prosperity, then, as it would have been begun more quickly, so it would have been contracted by a weaker tie; for then, since we should remember that we had come into friendship on equal terms, we should perhaps be your friends no less than now, but less subject and beholden to you; now, won by your pity and defended by your aid in our doubtful estate, we must cherish also the benefit received, lest we seem ungrateful and unworthy of all help, divine and human. Nor, by heaven, do I think that, because the Samnites were made your friends and allies before us, this avails to keep us from being received into friendship, but only that they surpass us in antiquity and in degree of honor; for it was not provided in the treaty of the Samnites that you should join no new treaties. There was indeed always among you a sufficiently just cause of friendship—that he should wish to be your friend who sought you: the Campanians, though present fortune forbids us to speak grandly, yielding to no people but you in the greatness of our city, in the richness of our soil, come into your friendship no small addition, as I think, to your good fortune. To the Aequi and the Volsci, the eternal enemies of this city, whenever they shall stir, we shall be at their backs; and what you shall first have done for our safety, that we shall always do for your dominion and glory. With these nations subdued which lie between us and you—which your valor and your fortune promise will shortly be—you will have an unbroken dominion right up to us. It is bitter and wretched, what our fortune compels us to confess: it has come to this, conscript fathers, that we Campanians must be either your friends or your enemies. If you defend us, we shall be yours; if you desert us, we shall be the Samnites’; consider, then, whether you would rather that Capua and all Campania be added to your strength or to the Samnites’. It is fair, Romans, that your pity and your aid lie open to all, but most of all to those who, in giving aid to others who implored it beyond their own strength, have themselves come into this necessity. Although we fought in word for the Sidicini, in fact for ourselves, when we saw a neighboring people assailed by the wicked brigandage of the Samnites, and that, when the Sidicini had been consumed by fire, that conflagration would cross over to us. For not now, because the Samnites grieve at the wrong received, but because they rejoice that a cause has been offered them, do they come to assail us. Or, if this were the vengeance of anger and not the occasion of glutting greed, was it too little that they cut down our legions once in the Sidicine territory, again in Campania itself? What is that anger so deadly that blood poured out through two battle-lines could not glut it? Add to this the ravaging of the fields, the spoils of men and cattle driven off, the burnings and ruins of the country-houses, all laid waste by fire and sword. Could anger not be glutted by these things? But greed must be glutted. It is that which hurries them to the assault of Capua; they wish either to destroy a most beautiful city or to possess it themselves. But do you, Romans, rather seize it by your benefaction than suffer them to hold it by their wrongdoing. I do not speak before a people that refuses just wars; but yet, if you display your aid, I think you will not have need even of war. The contempt of the Samnites reaches up to us; above us it does not climb; and so by the shadow of your aid, Romans, we can be sheltered, ready to reckon whatever we shall thereafter have, whatever we ourselves shall be, all yours. For you the Campanian field will be plowed, for you the city of Capua will be peopled; you will be to us in the number of founders, of parents, of the immortal gods; no colony of yours shall surpass us in obedience and fidelity toward you. Grant, conscript fathers, your assent and your unconquered will to the Campanians, and bid us hope that Capua shall be safe. With what a throng of every kind of multitude escorting us do you believe we set out from there? How full of vows and tears did we leave everything? In what suspense now are the Campanian Senate and people, our wives and children? I hold it certain that the whole multitude stands at the gates, looking out along the road that leads from here. What do you bid us, conscript fathers, report to them, anxious and hanging in their minds? The one answer is safety, victory, light, and liberty; the other—I shudder to forebode what it may bring. Therefore take counsel for us as for men who shall be either your allies and friends in time to come, or nowhere and nothing."

The envoys then removed, when the Senate had been consulted, although to a great part the greatest and wealthiest city of Italy, with its most fertile field and near the sea, seemed likely to be a granary of the Roman people against the changes of the corn-supply, yet faith was older than so great an advantage, and the consul answered thus by the authority of the Senate: "The Senate judges you, Campanians, worthy of aid; but it is fitting that friendship be established with you in such wise that no older friendship and alliance be violated. The Samnites are joined with us by a treaty; and so we deny you arms against the Samnites, which would wrong the gods before men; envoys, as is right and lawful, we will send to our allies and friends, to entreat that no violence be done you." To this the head of the embassy—for so they had brought their instructions from home—said: "Since indeed you will not, by just force, protect our possessions against force and wrong, you will surely defend your own; and so the Campanian people, and the city of Capua, our fields, the shrines of the gods, all things divine and human, we have given over into your power, conscript fathers, and that of the Roman people, ready thenceforth to suffer whatever we shall suffer, as men surrendered to you." At these words all, stretching out their hands to the consuls, full of tears, fell prostrate in the vestibule of the senate-house. The fathers were moved at the turn of human fortunes—that that people, so mighty in resources, famed for luxury and pride, of whom but a little before their neighbors had sought aid, should now bear so broken a spirit that it made itself and all its possessions the property of another’s power. Then it now seemed a matter of faith not to betray men surrendered; and they judged that the Samnite people would not do what was fair, if it assailed a field and city made the Roman people’s by a surrender. And so it pleased them that envoys be sent at once to the Samnites. Instructions were given that they should set forth the prayers of the Campanians, the answer of the Senate mindful of the friendship of the Samnites, and lastly the surrender that had been made; that they should ask, for the sake of alliance and friendship, that they spare those who had surrendered to the Romans, and bring no hostile arms into that field which had been made the Roman people’s; if by acting gently they should profit too little, they should warn the Samnites, in the words of the Roman people and Senate, to keep away from the city of Capua and the Campanian field. As the envoys were urging these things in the council of the Samnites, so fiercely was answer made that they not only said they would wage that war, but their magistrates, going out from the senate-house while the envoys stood by, called the prefects of the cohorts and ordered them, with a clear voice, to set out at once to plunder in the Campanian field.

This embassy reported at Rome, the cares of all other matters laid aside, the fathers, fetials sent to demand restitution, and war—because it was not made good—declared in the solemn fashion, decreed that on the very first occasion the matter should be brought before the people; and by the order of the people both consuls, setting out from the city with two armies—plebs/">tribune/">Valerius into Campania, Cornelius into Samnium—pitch their camps, the one at Mount Gaurus, the other at Saticula. To Valerius, the first, the Samnite legions—for thither they reckoned the whole mass of the war would incline—come to meet him; and at the same time anger goaded them against the Campanians, so ready now to bear, now to summon aid against them. But when they saw the Roman camp, each man for himself fiercely demanded the signal from the leaders, declaring that the Roman would bring aid to the Campanian with the same fortune with which the Campanian had brought it to the Sidicine. Valerius, having delayed not so very many days for the sake of testing the enemy by light skirmishes, set up the signal for battle, exhorting his men in few words not to let a new war and a new enemy terrify them: the farther from the city they bore their arms, the more and more they were advancing against unwarlike nations. Let them not measure the valor of the Samnites by the disasters of the Sidicini and Campanians; whatever the quality of those who fought among themselves, one side must needs be conquered. The Campanians, indeed, had beyond doubt been conquered more by their own softness, their substance flowing away in excessive luxury, than by the enemy’s might. What, moreover, were two prosperous wars of the Samnites in so many ages against so many glories of the Roman people, who reckons almost more triumphs than years since the city was founded; who holds all around him—Sabines, Etruria, Latins, Hernici, Aequi, Volsci, Aurunci—subdued by arms; who, the Gauls cut down in so many battles, has at last driven them in flight to the sea and to their ships? Each man, as he ought to go into the line relying on his glory in war and his own valor, so too should consider under whose leadership and auspices the battle is to be entered—whether one who, merely to be heard, is a grand exhorter, fierce in words only, untried in soldiers’ tasks, or one who himself knows how to handle weapons, to go before the standards, to bear himself in the midst of the mass of the fight. "My deeds, not my words, soldiers," he said, "I wish you to follow, and to seek of me not discipline only but example as well. Not by factions, nor by the cabals customary among the nobility, but by this right hand have I won for myself three consulships and the highest praise. There was a time when this could be said: for you were a patrician, and sprung from the liberators of your country, and in the same year that family of yours held the consulship in which this city first held a consul: now the consulship lies open in common to us patricians and to you plebeians, and it is the reward not, as before, of birth, but of valor. Therefore look, soldiers, to each highest distinction. If, with the gods for authors, men have given me this new surname of Corvinus, the old surname of our family, the Publicolae, has not gone from memory; I always cherish, and have cherished, the Roman plebs in war and at home, as a private man, in magistracies small and great, as tribune no less than as consul, in the same tenor throughout all my successive consulships. Now, for what presses, with the gods kindly helping, seek with me a new and unbroken triumph over the Samnites."

At no other time was a leader more familiar to the soldier, by undergoing, without grudging, all duties among the lowest of the soldiers. In the soldiers’ sport, moreover, when men of equal age enter contests of swiftness and strength among themselves, he was kindly and easy: to conquer and to be conquered with the same countenance, and to scorn no one his equal who offered himself; bountiful in deeds according to his means, in words no less mindful of another’s freedom than of his own dignity; and—than which nothing is more winning of favor—by the same arts by which he had sought magistracies, he administered them. And so the whole army, having followed their leader’s exhortation with incredible alacrity, goes out of camp. The battle, as much as ever any was, was joined with hope equal on both sides, with strengths matched, with confidence in themselves without contempt of the enemy. To the Samnites their recent deeds and the victory doubled a few days before increased their fierceness; to the Romans, on the contrary, the distinctions of four hundred years and a victory as old as the founded city; yet to both a new enemy added care. The battle was a sign of what spirits they bore; for they so clashed that for some while the lines inclined to neither side. Then the consul, thinking that panic must be cast in, since they could not be driven by force, by sending in the cavalry tries to throw the enemy’s front standards into disorder. When he saw them wheeling their squadrons to no purpose in the scanty space, and unable to open a way against the enemy, riding back to the front-rank men of the legions, when he had leaped down from his horse, "Soldiers," he said, "that is the work of us footmen; come now—as you shall see me, wherever I advance into the enemy’s line making a way with the sword, so do each of you lay low those who meet you; all that space, where now the upright spears flash, you shall see laid open with a vast havoc." These words he had spoken, when the cavalry, by the consul’s order, ride off to the wings and open a way for the legions into the middle of the line. First of all the consul falls upon the enemy and cuts down the man with whom he chanced to close. Kindled by this spectacle, on the right hand and the left each man before himself stirs up a memorable fight; the Samnites stand braced, although they receive more wounds than they deal. For some while now it had been fought; there was savage slaughter around the Samnite standards, but flight as yet on no side: so were they resolved in their minds to be conquered only by death. And so the Romans, when they felt their strength now flowing away with weariness, and that not much of the day was left, kindled with anger, hurl themselves upon the enemy. Then for the first time it appeared that they gave ground and that the matter was inclining to flight; then the Samnite was taken and slain; nor would many have survived, had not night broken off the victory rather than the battle. And the Romans confessed that they had never clashed with a more stubborn enemy; and the Samnites, when it was asked what first cause had driven men so obstinate into flight, said that the eyes of the Romans had seemed to them to burn, and their faces to be wild, and their countenances raging; and that from this, more than from any other thing, terror had arisen. And this terror they confessed not only by the outcome of the battle but by their nighttime departure. On the next day the Roman gets possession of the enemy’s empty camp, into which the whole multitude of the Campanians poured out in congratulation.

But this joy was well-nigh marred by a great disaster in Samnium. For the consul Cornelius, setting out from Saticula, led his army incautiously into a pass passable by a hollow valley and beset round about by the enemy, nor did he see the enemy hanging over his head before the standards could not be safely withdrawn. While this is a delay to the Samnites—until he should let the whole column down into the lowest part of the valley—Publius Decius, a military tribune, espies one hill rising in the pass, overhanging the enemy’s camp, hard of approach for an encumbered column, not difficult for the unencumbered. And so to the consul, alarmed in spirit, he says: "Do you see, Aulus Cornelius, that summit above the enemy? That is the citadel of our hope and safety, if, since the Samnites in their blindness have left it, we seize it briskly. Give me no more than the principes and hastati of one legion; with these, when I shall have got out to the top, do you go on from here free of all fear, and save yourself and the army; for the enemy, lying beneath us, exposed to all our strokes, will not be able to stir without his own destruction. Then either the fortune of the Roman people or our own valor will deliver us." Praised by the consul, having received his detachment, he goes hidden through the pass, nor was he seen by the enemy before he drew near the place he was making for. Thence, while all in amazement were panic-struck, when he had turned the eyes of all upon himself, he both gave the consul time to withdraw his column into more level ground and himself took his stand on the highest top. The Samnites, while they turn their standards this way and that, lost the chance of either object, and can neither pursue the consul except through the same valley in which a little before they had had him exposed to their weapons, nor lead their column up to the knoll seized above them by Decius; but, while anger goads them more against these men who had snatched away the chance of doing the business, both the nearness of the place and its very scantiness urge them on; and now they wish to surround the hill on every side with armed men, to cut Decius off from the consul, now to open a way, to attack them when they have come down into the valley. Uncertain what they should do, night overtook them. Decius at first held the hope of fighting from the higher ground against those coming up the hill against him; then wonder came upon him that they neither joined battle nor, if deterred from that design by the unfavorableness of the ground, surrounded themselves with works and a rampart. Then, the centurions called to him: "What is that ignorance of war, that sloth? Or in what way did those men win their victory over the Sidicini and the Campanians? You see the standards moved this way and that, and now gathered into one, now led out; the work, indeed, no one begins, though by now we might have been surrounded with a rampart. Then truly let us be like them, if we tarry here longer than is convenient. Come now, go with me, that, while some light is left, we may explore in what places they post their guards, where a way out lies open from here." All this, clad in a common soldier’s cloak—the centurions too led in the dress of rank-and-file soldiers, lest the enemy should mark a leader going round—he surveyed.

Then, the watches posted, he orders the watchword to be given to all the rest: that when the signal had been given by the trumpet at the second watch, they should assemble to him, armed, in silence. When they had assembled there in silence, as had been ordered, "This silence, soldiers," he says, "must be kept—the soldier’s assent foregone—while you hear me. When I shall have gone through my counsel to you, then those to whom the same things seem good will pass in silence to the right; the side that is the greater, by that counsel will it stand. Now hear what I turn over in my mind. It is not as men brought here by flight, nor left here by sloth, that the enemy has surrounded you: by valor you took the place, by valor you must get out of it. By coming here you saved an excellent army for the Roman people; by breaking out from here, save your own selves; worthy are you, who, being few, brought aid to the many, yourselves needed no man’s help. The enemy with whom we have to do is one who yesterday made no use of the chance of destroying our whole army through carelessness, who did not see this hill, so convenient, overhanging his own head, before it was taken by us; who has neither barred us, so few, against so many thousands of men, from the ascent, nor, when we held the place, with so much of the day left, surrounded us with a rampart. Him, seeing and waking, you so eluded; asleep, you must deceive—nay, it is necessary; for our affairs are in such a place that I am to you rather a herald of your necessity than the author of a plan. For it cannot be deliberated whether you stay or depart hence, since fortune has left you nothing but arms and spirits mindful of arms, and we must die of hunger and thirst if we fear the sword more than befits men and Romans. Therefore the one safety is to break out from here and to go away; and this we must do either by day or by night. But see, here is another thing less doubtful: for, if daylight be awaited, what hope is there that the enemy will not fence us in with an unbroken rampart and ditch, who now, with his own bodies thrust forward, has girdled the hill on every side, as you see? But if the night is fit for a sally—as it is—this surely is the most suitable hour of the night. You have assembled at the signal of the second watch, a time which presses mortals down in deepest sleep; through their sleeping bodies you will pass, either by silence deceiving them off their guard, or, if they perceive you, ready to throw panic into them by a sudden shout. Only follow me, whom you have followed; I will follow the same fortune that led us here. To whom these things seem salutary, come now, pass on your feet to the right."

All crossed; and they followed Decius as he made his way through the spaces left between the guards. They had now got past the middle of the camp, when a soldier, climbing over the bodies of the sentinels strewn in sleep, by striking his shield gave out a sound; roused by which, the sentinel, when he had stirred the man next to him, and they, rising up, were alarming the rest—not knowing whether they were citizens or enemies, whether the garrison was breaking out or the consul had taken the camp—Decius, since they no longer escaped notice, ordered the soldiers to raise a shout, and drove the men, numb with sleep, out of their wits with panic on top of it, hampered by which they could neither briskly take up arms nor resist nor pursue. Amid the trembling and uproar of the Samnites, the Roman detachment, cutting down the guards in its path, breaks through to the consul’s camp. A good deal of the night was left, and they now seemed to be in safety, when Decius said: "A blessing on your valor, Roman soldiers; your march and your return all ages will celebrate with praise; but to behold so great a valor there is need of light and day, nor are you worthy that silence and night should cover you, brought back into camp with such glory; here let us await the light in quiet." His words were obeyed; and as soon as it grew light, a messenger sent on ahead to the consul, the camp is roused with vast joy; and when the watchword was given that those had returned safe who had exposed their own bodies, in no doubtful peril, for the safety of all, each man for himself, pouring out to meet them, praises them, congratulates them, calls them, singly and all together, his saviors, gives praise and thanks to the gods, exalts Decius to the sky. This was Decius’s camp-triumph, as he marched through the middle of the camp with his armed detachment, the eyes of all turned upon him and every honor making the tribune the equal of the consul. When they came to the headquarters, the consul calls an assembly by the trumpet, and, having begun the praises Decius had earned, at Decius’s own interruption put off the assembly; for Decius, urging that all else be postponed while the occasion was in hand, prevailed on the consul to attack the enemy—both stunned by their nighttime panic and scattered fort-wise about the hill—believing, too, that some had been sent out to follow him and were roaming through the pass. The legions, ordered to take up arms, went out of camp, and, the pass now better known through scouts, are led by a more open road against the enemy; whom, off their guard, they attacked unawares, and, when the Samnite soldiers, straggling everywhere, most of them unarmed, could neither gather into one nor take up arms nor withdraw within the rampart, they first drive them, panic-stricken, within their camp, then take the camp itself, the pickets thrown into confusion. The shout is carried round the hill, and routs each man from his own posts. Thus a great part gave way to an absent enemy; those whom panic had driven within the rampart—and they were about thirty thousand—were all cut down: the camp was plundered.

Things thus done, the consul, an assembly called, goes through the praises of Publius Decius—not only begun before but heaped up by his new valor—and, besides the military gifts, presents him with a golden crown and a hundred oxen and one outstanding white ox, fat, with gilded horns. The soldiers who had been with him in the detachment were presented with double grain rations forever, and for the present with an ox apiece and two tunics each. After the consul’s gift, the legions, approving the gift with a shout, place upon Decius the grassy crown of the siege; another crown, the token of the same honor, was placed on him by his own detachment. Decorated with these distinctions, he sacrificed the outstanding ox to Mars, and gave the hundred oxen as a gift to the soldiers who had been with him on the expedition. To these same soldiers the legions contributed a pound of spelt and a sextarius of wine each; and all this was done with vast alacrity, amid a soldiers’ shout, the token of universal assent. A third battle was joined at Suessula; for the Samnite army, routed by Marcus Valerius, having summoned from home all the flower of their youth, resolved to try its fortune in a last contest. From Suessula trembling messengers come to Capua, and thence horsemen, spurred, to the consul Valerius, to beg aid. At once the standards were moved, and, the baggage left in the camp with a strong guard, the column is driven hastily on; and not far from the enemy he took for his camp a very scanty space—since, apart from the horses, the throng of the other beasts of burden and of the camp-servants was absent. The Samnite army, as though there would be no delay at all to the fight, draws up its line; then, after no one came against it, it advances with hostile standards to the enemy’s camp. There, when it saw the soldier on the rampart, and those sent out from every side to reconnoiter how small a circle the camp was contracted into reported back—gathering thence the fewness of the enemy—the whole line clamored that the ditches must be filled and the rampart torn down and the camp burst into; and the war would have been finished by that rashness, had not the leaders held back the soldiers’ onset. But, because their own multitude was a burden for supplies, and, both from sitting before Suessula and now from the delay of the contest, they were not far from a dearth of everything, it pleased them, while the enemy was shut in and afraid, to lead the soldier off to forage through the fields—meanwhile the Roman, at rest, who had brought with him in light marching order only as much grain as could be carried on the shoulders among the arms, would run short of everything. The consul, when he saw the enemy straggling through the fields, the pickets left thin, having exhorted his soldiers in few words, leads them to assault the camp. And when he had taken it at the first shout and onset—more of the enemy cut down in their own tents than at the gates and the rampart—he ordered the captured standards to be brought together into one place; and, two legions left for guard and protection, warned by a stern edict to keep off the plunder until he himself returned, he set out, his column drawn up, and, the cavalry sent ahead to drive the scattered Samnites as in a hunting-ring, made a vast slaughter. For the terrified men could be sure neither by what signal to gather together, nor whether to make for the camp or to stretch their flight farther; and there was so much flight and dread that to the consul were brought about forty thousand shields—by no means so many slain—and military standards, with those that had been taken in the camp, to the number of a hundred and seventy. Then there was a return to the enemy’s camp, and there all the plunder was given to the soldier.

The fortune of this contest both forced the Falisci, who were in a truce, to seek a treaty from the Senate, and turned the Latins—their armies now made ready—from a war against the Roman to one against the Paeligni. Nor did the fame of the deed keep itself within the borders of Italy; but the Carthaginians too sent envoys to Rome to congratulate, with the gift of a golden crown, to be placed in the Capitol in the cella of Jupiter; it was twenty-five pounds in weight. Both consuls triumphed over the Samnites, Decius following, conspicuous with praise and gifts, while in the rough soldiers’ jesting the tribune’s name was no less celebrated than the consuls’. Then the embassies of the Campanians and the men of Suessula were heard, and at their entreaty it was granted that a garrison be sent there into winter quarters, by which the inroads of the Samnites might be kept off. Even then Capua—least wholesome to military discipline—turned aside the soldiers’ minds, softened by the instrument of every pleasure, from the memory of their fatherland, and in the winter quarters plans were entered upon to take Capua from the Campanians by the same crime by which the Campanians had taken it from its ancient inhabitants: nor undeservedly would their own example be turned against them; for why should the Campanians, who could protect neither themselves nor their possessions, rather than a victorious army which had driven the Samnites from there by its own sweat and blood, hold the most fertile field of Italy and a city worthy of the field? Or was it fair that men who had surrendered to them should enjoy that fruitfulness and pleasantness, while they themselves, worn with soldiering, should struggle in the pestilential and dry soil around the city, or, settled in the city, endure the canker of usury growing day by day? These plans, debated in secret conspiracies and not yet spread to all, the new consul Gaius Marcius Rutulus discovered, to whom Campania had fallen by lot as his command, his colleague Quintus Servilius being left at the city. And so, since he held all those things, just as they had been done, ascertained through the tribunes, and, taught both by his age and his experience—seeing that he was now consul for the fourth time and had been dictator and censor—thinking it best, by deferring the hope of carrying out the plan whenever they should wish, to frustrate the soldiers’ impulse, he scattered a rumor that the garrisons would winter in the same towns the next year too—for they had been divided among the cities of Campania, and the plans had spread from Capua into the whole army. By this relief given to their thoughts, the sedition rested for the present.

The consul, the soldier led out into summer quarters, while he kept the Samnites quiet, set about purging the army by discharges of turbulent men—saying of some that their terms of service were fulfilled, of others that they were now heavy with age or not strong enough in body; others were sent off on furloughs, singly at first, then certain cohorts too, because they had wintered far from home and from their own affairs; under the pretext too of military needs, as some were sent one way, some another, a great part were sent off. This multitude the other consul at Rome, and the praetor, kept back by feigning one delay after another. And at first indeed, ignorant of the trickery, they revisited their homes by no means unwillingly; but after they saw that the first did not return to the standards, and that scarcely any others were being sent off than those who had wintered in Campania, and chiefly from these the authors of the sedition, first wonder, then no doubtful fear came upon their minds that their plans had leaked out: now there would be inquiries, now informations, now secret punishments of individuals, and they would suffer the unbridled and cruel tyranny of the consuls and the fathers over them. These things those who were in the camp sow in secret talk, seeing the sinews of the conspiracy picked out by the consul’s craft. One cohort, when it was not far from Anxur, took post at Lautulae, in a narrow pass between the sea and the mountains, to intercept those whom the consul, as was said before, kept sending off on one pretext and another. The band was now quite strong in number, nor was anything lacking to the form of a regular army but a leader. And so, in disorder, plundering, they reach the Alban country, and under the ridge of Alba Longa fence their camp with a rampart. The work finished there, they wrangle for the rest of the day with their opinions about choosing a commander, trusting none of those present enough: whom, moreover, could they summon from Rome? Who, of the fathers or the plebs, was there who would either knowingly offer himself to so great a peril, or to whom the cause of an army maddened by injury could rightly be committed? On the next day, when the same deliberation held them, certain of the wandering plunderers brought word that they had learned that Titus Quinctius was tilling the soil in the Tusculan country, unmindful of the city and of honors. This man was of a patrician family; and when one foot, lamed by a wound, had put an end to a soldiering passed with great glory, he had resolved to live his life in the country, far from ambition and the Forum. His name heard, they at once recognized the man, and—that it might turn out well—ordered him to be summoned. But there was little hope that he would do anything of his own will; it pleased them to apply force and fear. And so, in the silence of night, when those who had been sent for the purpose had entered the roof of the farmhouse, they dragged Quinctius—surprised, heavy with sleep, and warned that there was no middle course, but either command and honor, or, if he hung back, death unless he followed—into the camp. As he came, he is at once hailed commander, and they confer the insignia of honor upon him, terrified at the wonder of the sudden thing, and bid him lead to the city. By their own impulse, more than by their leader’s counsel, the standards torn up, they reach in a hostile column the eighth milestone of the road that is now the Appian; and they would have gone on at once to the city, had they not heard that an army was coming against them, and that Marcus Valerius Corvus had been named dictator against them, and Lucius Aemilius Mamercus master of the horse.

As soon as they came within sight and recognized the arms and the standards, at once the memory of their fatherland soothed the anger of all. They were not yet so hardened to citizens’ blood, nor had they known any but foreign wars, and the utmost madness was held to be secession from one’s own; and so now the leaders, now the soldiers on both sides, sought meetings and parleys: Quinctius, whom a surfeit even of arms borne for his country held, much more against his country; Corvinus, embracing all his fellow-citizens with affection, the soldiers especially, and before others his own army. He came forward to a parley. When he was recognized, silence was at once granted him, with no less respect from his adversaries than from his own men. "The immortal gods, soldiers," he said, "your gods and mine, setting out from the city I so adored, and as a suppliant so begged their pardon, that they would grant me, concerning you, the glory of a concord won, not of a victory. There was, and there will be, somewhere whence the honor of war may be gained: from here peace must be sought. What I begged of the immortal gods in pronouncing my vows, of that vow you can make me master, if you will remember that you have your camp not in Samnium nor among the Volsci but on Roman soil; that those hills which you see are your fatherland’s; that this is an army of your fellow-citizens; that I am your consul, under whose leadership and auspices last year you twice routed the legions of the Samnites, twice took their camp by storm. I am Marcus plebs/">tribune/">Valerius Corvus, soldiers, whose nobility you have felt by benefits toward you, not by wrongs—the author of no law proud against you, of no cruel decree of the Senate, in all my commands more severe upon myself than upon you. And if to anyone his birth, if to anyone his own valor, if to anyone even his majesty, if to anyone his honors could give airs, I was born to them, I had given that proof of myself, I had won the consulship at such an age, that I could, at three and twenty years old, be a consul fierce even toward the fathers, not toward the plebs alone. What deed or word of mine, as consul, did you hear that was harsher than as tribune? In the same tenor I held my two following consulships; in the same shall this imperious dictatorship be held: so that I shall be no milder to these soldiers of mine and of my fatherland than to you—I shudder to say it—the enemy. Therefore you would draw the sword upon me before I upon you; from that side the trumpets will sound, from that side the shout and the charge will begin first, if there must be fighting. Bring yourselves to do what your fathers and grandfathers did not bring themselves to—not those who seceded to the Sacred Mount, not these who afterward occupied the Aventine. Wait until to each of you, as once to Coriolanus, your mothers and wives come out from the city to meet you with hair unbound. Then the legions of the Volsci, because they had a Roman for their leader, rested: do you, a Roman army, not persist in an impious war. Titus Quinctius, in whatever place yonder, willing or unwilling, you have taken your stand, if there must be fighting, then betake yourself to the rearmost ranks; you will even more honorably have fled and turned your back to a citizen than have fought against your country. Now, for making peace, you will stand well and honorably among the foremost, and will be the saving spokesman of this parley. Demand fair terms and accept them; though even unfair terms must rather be abided than that we join impious hands among ourselves." Titus Quinctius, full of tears, turning to his own men, said: "Me too, soldiers, if there is any use of me, you have for a better leader of peace than of war. For those words were spoken not by a Volscian or a Samnite but by a Roman, your consul, your commander, soldiers, whose auspices, tried on your behalf, do not wish to try against you. The Senate had other leaders to fight with you more bitterly: it chose the one who would most spare you, his soldiers, the one in whom you, his soldiers, would most trust your commander. Even those who can conquer want peace: what ought we to want? Why do we not, anger and hope—those deceiving counselors—laid aside, commit ourselves and all our possessions to a loyalty we have proved?"

All approving with a shout, Titus Quinctius, going forward before the standards, said that the soldiers would be in the dictator’s power; he begged him to take up the cause of the wretched citizens, and, having taken it up, to guard it with the same loyalty with which he had been wont to administer the commonwealth: for himself, he made no provision privately; he wished to have his hope nowhere but in his innocence; for the soldiers there must be provision, such as had once been made for the plebs by the fathers, and a second time for the legions, that the secession should not be to their hurt. Quinctius praised, the rest bidden to be of good heart, the dictator, riding back to the city on a galloping horse, on the authority of the fathers brought before the people in the Petelline grove that the secession should be to the hurt of none of the soldiers. He also begged, by their good leave, of the Quirites that no one should reproach anyone with that matter, in jest or in earnest. A sacred military law too was carried, that the name of no enrolled soldier should be struck off except by his own will; and it was added to the law that no one, where he had been a military tribune, should afterward be a leader of ranks. This was demanded by the conspirators on account of Publius Salonius, who almost in alternate years was both a military tribune and a chief centurion—what they now call the primus pilus. The soldiers were hostile to him, because he had always opposed the new designs and, that he might not be a partner in them, had fled from Lautulae. And so, when this one thing, on Salonius’s account, was not obtained from the Senate, then Salonius, beseeching the conscript fathers not to value his honor more than the concord of the state, prevailed that this too be carried. Equally unbridled was the demand that from the pay of the cavalry—they earned triple at that time—the money should be docked, because they had opposed the conspiracy.

Besides these things, I find in certain authors that Lucius Genucius, a plebs/">tribune of the plebs, carried before the plebs that it should not be lawful to lend at interest; likewise that it was provided by other plebiscites that no one should hold the same magistracy within ten years, nor administer two magistracies in one year, and that it should be lawful for both consuls to be created plebeian. If all these things were conceded to the plebs, it appears that the defection had no small force. In other annals it is handed down that Valerius was not named dictator, but that the whole matter was managed through the consuls; and that it was not before they came to Rome, but at Rome, that that multitude of conspirators was driven, in panic, to arms; and that the night attack was made not on Titus Quinctius’s farmhouse but on the house of Gaius Manlius, and that he was seized by the conspirators to be their leader; that they thence set out to the fourth milestone and took post in a fortified place; and that no mention of concord arose from the leaders, but that suddenly, when the armed armies had advanced into line, a mutual salutation was made, and the soldiers, intermingling, began to join right hands and to embrace one another, weeping, and that the consuls, when they saw the soldiers’ minds turned away from fighting, were compelled to refer to the fathers about reconciling the concord. So far is it agreed among the ancient authorities of these matters that there was nothing but a sedition, and that it was composed. Both the fame of this sedition and the grievous war undertaken with the Samnites turned several peoples away from the Roman alliance; and, besides the now long-faithless treaty of the Latins, the Privernates too laid waste, by a sudden inroad, Norba and Setia, neighboring Roman colonies.