The consuls were now Gaius Plautius (for the second time) and Lucius Aemilius Mamercus, when messengers from Setia and Norba came to Rome to report the defection of the Privernates, together with complaints of a disaster they had suffered. It was likewise brought word that an army of the Volsci, with the people of Antium for its leader, had taken up position at Satricum. Both wars fell by lot to Plautius. Setting out first against Privernum, he at once joined battle in the open field; the enemy were beaten in no great struggle; the town was taken and restored to the Privernates, a strong garrison being placed in it; two-thirds of their land was taken away. From there the victorious army was led against the men of Antium at Satricum. There a savage battle was fought, with great slaughter on both sides; and when a storm parted the combatants while the hope of neither had inclined either way, the Romans, in no way wearied by a contest so doubtful, made ready for battle on the following day. But the Volsci, when they reckoned up what men they had lost in the line, had by no means the same spirit for renewing the danger; in the night, as good as beaten, they went off in a trembling column to Antium, leaving behind their wounded and part of their baggage. A great quantity of arms was found, both among the slain bodies of the enemy and in their camp. These the consul declared he gave to Mother Lua, and he laid waste the enemy’s territory right up to the sea-coast. To the other consul, Aemilius, when he had entered the Sabellian country, there was no camp of the Samnites, no legions anywhere set against him; and as he was ravaging their fields with fire and sword, envoys of the Samnites came to him suing for peace. Referred by him to the Senate, and given leave to speak, they laid aside their fierce spirits and begged for peace from the Romans and the right of war against the Sidicini: this they sought the more justly, they said, because they had come into the friendship of the Roman people in their own prosperity, not in adversity as the Campanians had, and because they were taking up arms against the Sidicini, their own perpetual enemies and never friends of the Roman people—men who had neither, like the Samnites, sought friendship in peace, nor, like the Campanians, aid in war, and who were neither under the protection nor under the dominion of the Roman people.

When Titus Aemilius the praetor had consulted the Senate about the demands of the Samnites, and the fathers had resolved that the treaty should be restored to them, the praetor answered the Samnites that it had not been the fault of the Roman people that their friendship was not perpetual, nor was there any objection to its being renewed afresh, since the Samnites themselves had taken a weariness of the war contracted by their own fault; and as for the Sidicini, no obstacle was raised to the Samnite people’s having free decision of peace and war. The treaty struck, when the envoys had returned home, the Roman army was at once withdrawn from there, after receiving a year’s pay and three months’ corn, which the consul had stipulated in order to allow time for a truce until the envoys should return. The Samnites, setting out against the Sidicini with the same forces they had used in the war against Rome, were in no doubtful hope of soon getting possession of the enemy’s city, when a surrender to the Romans first began to be made by the Sidicini. Then, after the fathers spurned it as offered too late and wrung from them only at the last extremity of necessity, the surrender was made to the Latins, who were already moving to arms of their own accord. Not even the Campanians—so much more present was the memory of the Samnites’ injury than of the Romans’ kindness—held back from these arms. Out of all these peoples one huge army, under a Latin commander, entered the territory of the Samnites and did more harm by ravaging than by battles; and although the Latins were the superior in the engagements, they withdrew not unwillingly from the enemy’s land, that they might not have to fight too often. This gave the Samnites time to send envoys to Rome; who, when they had come before the Senate, complaining that they, though allied, were suffering what enemies had suffered, begged in the most abject prayers that the Romans should reckon it enough to have snatched from the Samnites the victory over the Campanian and Sidicine foe; that they should not allow them to be conquered as well by the most cowardly of peoples; that they should keep the Latins and Campanians off Samnite soil by their authority, if these were under the dominion of the Roman people, or, if they refused that command, coerce them by arms. To this an ambiguous answer was given, because it irked the Romans to confess that the Latins were no longer in their power, and they feared that by reproaching them they might drive them off altogether: the case of the Campanians was different, who had come into their protection not by treaty but by surrender; and so the Campanians, whether they would or no, would keep quiet; but in the treaty with the Latins there was nothing to forbid their making war on whomever they pleased.

This answer, while it sent the Samnites away in doubt as to what they should suppose the Roman would do, alienated the Campanians through fear, and made the Latins fiercer, as though the Romans now conceded everything. And so, under the show of preparing war against the Samnites, by proclaiming frequent councils, their leaders in all their deliberations were secretly cooking up among themselves a war against Rome. In this war too, against their own preservers, the Campanians took part. But although everything was deliberately concealed—for they wished the Samnite enemy to be cleared from their rear before the Romans should stir—nevertheless, through certain men joined to Rome by private ties of hospitality and kinship, hints of that conspiracy leaked out to the city; and the consuls being ordered to lay down their magistracy before the term, that new consuls might be created the sooner against so great a mass of war, a scruple of religion arose at holding the elections under men whose authority had been thus diminished. And so an interregnum was begun. There were two interreges, Marcus Valerius and Marcus Fabius; the latter created as consuls Titus Manlius Torquatus (for the third time) and Publius Decius Mus. It is agreed that in this year Alexander king of Epirus brought a fleet to Italy; and that war, had its first ventures been prosperous enough, would beyond doubt have reached the Romans. To the same age belong the exploits of Alexander the Great—the son of this man’s sister—whom, unconquered in his wars in another quarter of the world, fortune cut off by disease while still a young man. But the Romans, although the defection of their allies and of the Latin name was beyond doubt, nevertheless, as though it were the Samnites and not themselves about whom they were concerned, summoned ten chief men of the Latins to Rome, to lay upon them what commands they pleased. Latium had then two praetors, Lucius Annius of Setia and Lucius Numisius of Circeii, both from Roman colonies, through whom—besides Signia and Velitrae, themselves also Roman colonies—even the Volsci had been roused to arms; these it was resolved should be summoned by name. No one doubted on what business they were being called for; and so the praetors, before they set out for Rome, having first held a council, informed it that they had been summoned by the Roman Senate, and laid before it what they believed would be transacted with them, asking what answer it was thought best to make.

When different men advised different things, then Annius said: "Although it was I myself who raised the question of what answer it is best to give, yet I judge that it bears more upon the sum of our fortunes what we are to do than what we are to say. Once our designs are laid out, it will be easy to fit words to the facts. For if even now, under the shadow of an equal treaty, we can endure servitude, what is to keep us from betraying the Sidicini and obeying the word not of the Romans only but of the Samnites too, and from answering the Romans that we will lay down our arms the moment they give the nod? But if at last the longing for liberty gnaws at our hearts—if there is a treaty, if alliance is an equality of right, if we may now glory in being kinsmen of the Romans, of which we were once ashamed, if that allied army of theirs is the one by whose joining they double their strength, which they are unwilling to part from when wars of their own are to be laid down or taken up—why is not all made equal? Why is not one consul given by the Latins? Where there is a share of the strength, there too is a share of the command. This demand of ours is in itself not over-great, seeing that we concede Rome to be the head of Latium; but that it could even seem great, our long endurance has made it. And yet, if ever you longed for a time to share the command and to claim your liberty, lo, this time is at hand, given you both by your own valor and by the goodwill of the gods. You tried their patience by refusing soldiers; who doubts that they blazed up when we broke a custom of more than two hundred years? Yet they bore that smart. We waged war in our own name with the Paeligni; and they, who before would not grant us even the right of defending our own borders by ourselves, raised no objection. They heard that we had received the Sidicini into our protection, that the Campanians had come over from them to us, that we were preparing armies against the Samnites, their own allies, and they did not stir from the city. Whence comes this great forbearance in them, if not from a consciousness of the strength both of us and of themselves? I have trustworthy authorities that, to the Samnites complaining of us, the answer given by the Roman Senate was such that it was easily plain that not even they themselves now demand that Latium be under Roman command. Only put it to use by demanding what they tacitly concede to you. If fear keeps anyone from saying this, lo, I myself, in the hearing not of the Roman people and Senate alone but of Jupiter himself, who dwells upon the Capitol, profess that I shall say it: that, if they would have us in treaty and alliance, they must accept one consul from us and a part of their Senate." When he thus fiercely not only advised but promised, with shouting and assent they all empowered him to do and say whatever should seem to be in keeping with the interest of the Latin name and his own good faith.

When they had come to Rome, audience of the Senate was given them on the Capitol. There, when the consul Titus Manlius had dealt with them, on the authority of the fathers, that they should not make war upon the Samnites, their allies, Annius—as though he were a victor who had taken the Capitol by arms, and not an envoy speaking safe under the law of nations—said: "It was time, Titus Manlius, and you, conscript fathers, that at last you should treat with us in nothing as by command, seeing that you behold Latium now most flourishing, by the goodwill of the gods, in arms and in men—the Samnites conquered in war, the Sidicini and Campanians our allies, and now the Volsci too joined to us; even your own colonies have preferred Latin to Roman rule. But since you do not bring yourselves to set a bound to your unbridled tyranny, we, although we could by arms vindicate Latium into liberty, will nevertheless grant this much to kinship, that we propose terms of peace equal for both sides, since it has pleased the immortal gods that our strength too be made equal. One consul must be created from Rome, the other from Latium; the Senate must be in equal part from each people; one people, one commonwealth must be made; and, that the seat of empire be the same and the name the same for all, since concession must of necessity be made by one side or the other, let this—and may it turn out well for both—be the favored fatherland, and let us all be called Romans." It chanced to fall out that the Romans had in Titus Manlius a consul to match this man’s ferocity, who so far from restraining his wrath that he openly declared that, if such madness should seize the conscript fathers that they took laws from a man of Setia, he would come into the Senate girt with a sword, and would slay with his own hand whatever Latin he saw in the Curia. And turning to the image of Jupiter, "Hear, Jupiter, these crimes," he cried; "hear, Right and Holiness. Foreign consuls and a foreign Senate are you to behold, Jupiter, in your own temple of augury, yourself a captive and crushed? Were these the treaties that Tullus, a Roman king, made with the Albans, your fathers, you Latins—these that Lucius Tarquinius made afterward with you? Does the battle at Lake Regillus not come to mind? Have you so far forgotten both your ancient defeats and our kindnesses toward you?"

When the indignation of the fathers had followed the consul’s words, it is handed down to memory that, over against the frequent appeal to the gods—whom the consuls again and again called to witness the treaties—the voice of Annius was heard scorning the divine power of Roman Jupiter. Certainly, when, stirred by anger, he flung himself from the porch of the temple at a headlong pace, he slipped down the steps and, his head heavily dashed against the lowest stone, was so stricken that he swooned. That he was killed outright, since not all authorities affirm it, let it be left in doubt by me as well—as also whether, amid the calling of the gods to witness the broken treaties, a storm burst with a vast crash of the sky; for these things may be both true and feigned to set the wrath of the gods fittingly before our eyes. Torquatus, sent by the Senate to dismiss the envoys, when he had seen Annius lying there, cried out, in such fashion that his voice was heard alike by people and fathers: "It is well; the gods have set on foot a righteous war. There is a heavenly power; you are, great Jupiter; not in vain did we hallow you in this seat as father of gods and men. Why do you delay, Quirites, and you, conscript fathers, to take up arms with the gods for leaders? Even so will I lay the legions of the Latins low, as you see the envoy lying." The consul’s words, taken up with the people’s assent, kindled so great an ardor in their spirits that the envoys, as they departed, were sheltered from men’s wrath and onset more by the care of the magistrates, who escorted them by the consul’s order, than by the law of nations. The Senate too agreed upon war; and the consuls, two armies having been enrolled, setting out through the Marsi and the Paeligni, and joining to themselves the army of the Samnites, pitched camp at Capua, where the Latins and their allies had already gathered. There, in their sleep, the same apparition is said to have appeared to both consuls, of a man of greater than human stature and more august, declaring that from the one battle-line the commander, from the other the army, was owed to the Manes (the gods of the dead) and to Mother Earth; that of whichever army the commander should have devoted to death the enemy’s legions, and over and above them himself, of that people and that side would the victory be. When the consuls had compared these nocturnal visions with each other, they resolved that victims should be slain to avert the gods’ wrath; and at the same time, that if the entrails should portend the same as had appeared in the dream, one or other of the consuls should fulfill the fates. When the responses of the soothsayers agreed with the silent religious feeling already seated in their minds, then, the lieutenants and tribunes being called in and the commands of the gods openly set forth—lest the voluntary death of a consul should terrify the army in the line—they arranged between themselves that, from whichever side the Roman army should begin to give way, from that side the consul should devote himself for the Roman people and the Quirites. It was discussed too in the council that, if ever any war had been administered under stern command, then military discipline should be brought back to the ancient ways. Their care was whetted by this, that they had to make war against the Latins, who agreed with them in language, in customs, in their kind of arms, and above all in their military institutions: soldier had been mingled with soldier, centurion with centurion, tribune the equal and colleague of tribune in the same garrisons, often in the very same maniples. So, lest the soldiers should be caught out by any such mistake, the consuls proclaim that no man should fight against the enemy out of his rank.

By chance, among the other prefects of squadrons who had been sent out in all directions to reconnoiter, Titus Manlius, the consul’s son, came out above the enemy’s camp with his troopers, so that he was scarcely a spear’s cast from the nearest outpost. There were the Tusculan horsemen; over them was Geminus Maecius, a man distinguished among his own folk both by birth and by deeds. When he recognized the Roman horsemen, and among them, riding conspicuously in front, the consul’s son—for they were all known to one another, and the men of mark especially—he said: "Are you going to wage war with the Latins and their allies with a single squadron? What meanwhile will the consuls do, what the two consular armies?" "They will be here in good time," said Manlius, "and with them will be Jupiter himself, witness of the treaties you have violated, who is mightier and prevails more. If at Lake Regillus we fought you to your fill, here too we shall surely bring it about that you take no great delight in a line of battle and standards joined with ours." To this Geminus, riding out a little from his men: "Will you, then, while that day comes on which you set your armies in motion with so great an effort, meanwhile yourself meet me in single combat, that from the outcome of us two it may even now be discerned how far the Latin horseman surpasses the Roman?" Anger, or shame at declining the contest, or the insuperable force of fate, moves the fierce-spirited youth. And so, forgetful of his father’s command and the consuls’ edict, he is driven headlong to that contest, in which it mattered little whether he conquered or was conquered. The other horsemen being drawn aside as if to a spectacle, over the stretch of open field that lay between, they spur their horses at each other; and when they had charged with leveled lances, Manlius’s lance glanced over the helmet of his foe, Maecius’s across the neck of the horse. Then, the horses wheeled about, when Manlius, the first to rise for a second stroke, fixed his javelin between the horse’s ears. At the feeling of this wound the horse, rearing up on its forefeet, tossed its head with great force and shook off its rider; and as Maecius, propping himself on lance and shield, was raising himself from the heavy fall, Manlius pinned him to the earth through the throat, so that the steel came out among his ribs; and, having gathered the spoils, riding back to his men, with his squadron exulting in joy he makes for the camp, and from there for the headquarters, to his father, knowing nothing of his fate and of what was to come—whether praise or punishment had been earned. "That all men may truly call me sprung of your blood, father," he said, "I, challenged, bring these equestrian spoils, taken from a slain enemy." When the consul heard this, he straightway turned away from his son and ordered an assembly to be summoned by the trumpet. When it had gathered in full numbers, he said: "Since you, Titus Manlius, reverencing neither the consular command nor a father’s majesty, have fought against our edict out of your rank, and, so far as in you lay, have unloosed the military discipline by which the Roman state has stood firm to this day, and have brought me to this necessity, that I must forget either the commonwealth or myself and my own—we shall sooner be punished for our own offense than the commonwealth atone for our sins at so great a loss to itself; we shall be a grim example, but a wholesome one for the future, to the young. For my part, both the inborn love of children and that proof of valor of yours, deceived though it was by a vain image of honor, move me toward you; but since either the consuls’ commands must be sanctioned by your death, or by impunity annulled forever, I would not think that even you, if there is anything of our blood in you, would refuse to restore by your punishment the military discipline that has slipped through your fault—go, lictor, bind him to the stake." All, struck dumb by a command so dreadful, and seeing the axe drawn against each man as though against himself, kept still through fear rather than self-restraint. And so, as though their spirits were sunk in awe, when they had stood fixed in silence, suddenly, after his neck was cut and the blood gushed out, voices broke forth in lament so unrestrained that they spared neither weeping nor curses; and the young man’s body, covered with the spoils, was burned on a pyre built outside the rampart, with all the honor that any funeral can be solemnized with by the zeal of soldiers; and the "Manlian commands" were a thing of horror not only at the time but as a grim example for after days.

Yet the dreadfulness of the punishment made the soldier the more obedient to his leader; and, besides that the guards and watches and the order of the outposts were everywhere kept with more attentive care, in the final struggle too, when the descent into the line of battle was made, that severity was of profit. The battle, moreover, was most like a civil war; so wholly was there nothing among the Latins discordant from the Roman manner, except their spirits. The Romans formerly used the round shield (clipeus); then, after they became stipend-paying, they made the oblong shield (scutum) in its place; and what before had been phalanxes after the Macedonian fashion came afterward to be a line drawn up by maniples, the rearmost arrayed in several ranks. The first line were the hastati, in fifteen maniples set a small space apart; the maniple held twenty light-armed soldiers and, for the rest, a throng of shield-bearers; "light-armed" they called those who carried only a spear and javelins (gaesa). This first front in the line held the flower of the young men coming of age for service. Behind these followed the sturdier age, in as many maniples, whose name is principes, all shield-bearers, and most distinguished in their arms. This body of thirty maniples they called the antepilani, because beneath the standards another fifteen ranks were posted, of which each rank had three sections—the first of each they called the pilus. The rank consisted of three banners (vexilla); each banner had sixty soldiers, two centurions, one standard-bearer; there were a hundred and eighty-six men in it. The first banner led the triarii, veteran soldiers of proved valor; the second the rorarii, men of less strength in age and in deeds; the third the accensi, a band of least reliance, who were therefore thrown back into the rearmost line. When the army had been drawn up in these ranks, the hastati first of all entered the fight. If the hastati could not overthrow the enemy, they fell back at a slow pace, and the principes received them into the gaps between the ranks. Then the fight was the principes’; the hastati followed. The triarii crouched beneath the standards, the left leg stretched out, their shields propped against their shoulders, holding their spears fixed in the ground with the points raised, so that the line bristled just as if hedged about with a rampart. If the fighting among the principes too had not gone prosperously enough, they fell back slowly from the front line to the triarii; whence, when things go hard, the proverb grew current, "the matter has come back to the triarii." The triarii, rising up, when they had received the principes and the hastati into the gaps of their ranks, at once, the ranks closed, shut the lanes as it were, and in one unbroken column, with no hope now left behind, fell upon the enemy; and that was most fearful to the foe, when, having pursued men as good as beaten, they suddenly beheld a fresh line risen up and swollen in number. There were enrolled, moreover, about four legions, of five thousand foot apiece, with three hundred horsemen to each legion. As much again was added from the Latin levy, who at that time were enemies to the Romans and had drawn up their line in the same order; and each man knew that he must engage not standard against standard only, the whole body of hastati against hastati, principes against principes, but centurion too against centurion, if the ranks were not thrown into disorder. There were two leading centurions (primi pili), one from each line, the Roman by no means strong enough in body, but otherwise a vigorous man and skilled in soldiering, the Latin huge in strength and a warrior of the first rank, the two very well known to each other because they had always led equal ranks. To the Roman, not trusting enough in his strength, leave had already been given at Rome by the consuls to choose for himself whatever sub-centurion he wished, to guard him against the one enemy marked out for him; and this youth, presented to the foe in the line, carried off the victory over the Latin centurion. The battle was fought not far from the foot of Mount Vesuvius, where the road led toward Veseris.

The Roman consuls, before they led out into the line, offered sacrifice. To Decius the soothsayer is said to have shown the liver’s head cut on the side that pertained to himself: otherwise the victim was acceptable to the gods; Manlius had obtained excellent omens. "Why, it is well," said Decius, "if my colleague’s offering has found favor." The ranks drawn up as has been said before, they advanced into the line; Manlius commanded the right wing, Decius the left. At first the matter was waged on both sides with equal strength and the same ardor of spirit; then, on the left wing, the Roman hastati, not bearing the pressure of the Latins, fell back upon the principes. In this disorder the consul Decius calls out in a great voice to Marcus Valerius. "There is need of the gods’ help, Marcus Valerius," he said; "come now, public pontiff of the Roman people, dictate to me the words by which I may devote myself for the legions." The pontiff bade him take the bordered toga (toga praetexta) and, with his head veiled and one hand thrust out beneath the toga to his chin, standing upon a spear laid under his feet, speak thus: "Janus, Jupiter, father Mars, Quirinus, Bellona, Lares, you New-settled Gods (Di Novensiles), you Native Gods (Di Indigetes), you Gods in whose power are both we and our enemies, and you Gods of the dead (Di Manes): I pray to you, I adore you, I beg and crave your grace, that you prosper the might and victory of the Roman people of the Quirites, and visit the enemies of the Roman people of the Quirites with terror, with dread, and with death. As I have pronounced in words, so for the commonwealth of the Roman people of the Quirites, for the army, the legions, and the auxiliaries of the Roman people of the Quirites, do I devote the legions and auxiliaries of the enemy, together with myself, to the Gods of the dead and to Tellus." Having so prayed, he bids the lictors go to Titus Manlius and quickly carry word to his colleague that he had devoted himself for the army; he himself, girded in the Gabine cincture and armed, leaped upon his horse and flung himself into the midst of the enemy, conspicuous from both lines, somewhat more august than a human aspect, as though sent from heaven to be an expiation of all the gods’ wrath, to carry off destruction from his own and bear it against the foe. So all terror and panic, borne along with him, first threw the standards of the Latins into confusion, then spread deep into the whole line. This was most plain to see in that, wherever he rode his horse, there men quailed as if smitten by some pestilent star; but when he fell, overwhelmed with weapons, from that moment the cohorts of the Latins, now beyond doubt panic-stricken, took to flight and made desolation far and wide. At the same time the Romans, their spirits loosed from religious dread, as though only then, at the giving of the signal, springing up, put forth a fresh battle; for the rorarii too had run forward among the antepilani and had added their strength to the hastati and principes, and the triarii, resting on the right knee, were awaiting the consul’s nod to rise.

As the contest then went forward, when in other parts the multitude of the Latins was prevailing, the consul Manlius, hearing of his colleague’s end—and having, as right and religion required, honored so memorable a death with tears no less than with the praises that were its due—hesitated a little whether it were now the time for the triarii to rise; then, thinking it better that they be kept fresh for the final crisis, he bids the accensi advance before the standards from the rearmost line. When these came up, the Latins straightway, as though their adversaries had done the same, roused their own triarii; who, for some while in savage fighting, when they had both worn themselves out and had either broken or blunted their spears, were nonetheless driving the enemy before them, reckoning the war already won and the last line reached, when the consul cried to the triarii: "Rise up now, fresh against the weary, mindful of your country and your parents, of your wives and children, mindful of the consul who lies dead for your victory." When the triarii rose up fresh, their arms flashing, and a new line started up unlooked-for, the antepilani being received into the gaps of the ranks, with a shout raised they throw the Latin front into confusion, and, piercing their faces with the spears, after the main strength of their men had been cut down they made their way through the other maniples almost untouched, as if through unarmed men, and broke through the wedges with so great a slaughter that they left scarcely a fourth part of the enemy. The Samnites too, drawn up at a distance beneath the foot of the mountain, struck terror into the Latins. But among all, citizens and allies alike, the chief glory of that war rested with the consuls, of whom the one had turned upon himself alone all the threats and dangers from the gods above and below, while the other was of such valor and such judgment in the battle that it was readily agreed among the Romans and Latins who have handed down the memory of that fight that whichever side Titus Manlius had led, its victory would beyond doubt have been. The Latins in their flight betook themselves to Minturnae. The camp was taken after the battle, and many men were caught there alive, the Campanians especially. The body of Decius was not found that day; night overtook the searchers; on the next day it was found amid the greatest heap of the enemy, covered over with weapons, and his colleague gave him a funeral worthy of his death. This it seems worth adding: that it is lawful for a consul and a dictator and a praetor, when he devotes the enemy’s legions, to devote not necessarily himself but whatever citizen he will out of an enrolled Roman legion; if the man who is devoted dies, it is held to have been duly done; if he does not die, then an image seven feet high or higher is buried in the earth and an expiatory victim slain; where that image has been buried, it is unlawful for a Roman magistrate to set foot. But if he choose to devote himself, as Decius devoted himself, then, if he does not die, he can perform no sacred rite duly, neither his own nor the state’s, whether with a victim or with whatever else he will. He who has devoted himself has the right to dedicate his arms to Vulcan, or to whatever other god he will. The spear upon which the consul stood as he prayed must not fall into the enemy’s possession; if it does, an expiation must be made to Mars with the suovetaurilia.

These things, although all memory of divine and human usage has been effaced by the preferring of everything new and foreign to the old and ancestral, I have thought it not amiss to report in the very words in which they have been handed down and pronounced. In some authors I find that the Samnites came to the Romans’ aid only after the battle had at last been fought, the issue of the fight having been awaited. To the Latins too aid began to be brought from Lavinium, while they wasted time in deliberating, only when they were already beaten; and when the foremost standards and part of the column had already gone out of the gates, word being brought of the Latins’ disaster, as they turned their standards and went back into the city, their praetor, Milionius by name, is reported to have said that for a very little march a great price would have to be paid to the Romans. Those of the Latins who had survived the battle, scattered by many roads, when they had massed themselves into one body, found a refuge in the city of Vescia. There, in their councils, their commander Numisius affirmed that the common Mars of war had in very truth laid both lines low with equal slaughter, and that the Romans held the name of victory alone, while for the rest they bore the fortune of the conquered: that the two consuls’ headquarters were defiled, the one by the murder of a son, the other by the slaying of a devoted consul; that the whole army had been butchered, the hastati and principes cut down, slaughter wrought both before the standards and behind them, and the triarii had restored the day only at the last. The forces of the Latins, though cut down to a like degree, had nonetheless their reinforcement nearer at hand, whether in Latium or among the Volsci, than the Romans had; and so, if it seemed good to them, he would, the youth being hastily called out from the Latin and Volscian peoples, return with a hostile army to Capua, and would strike to the ground the Romans, who were then expecting anything sooner than a battle, by his unlooked-for coming. Deceiving letters being sent about Latium and the Volscian name—since those who had not been present at the battle were the readier to believe rashly—a hastily levied army, conscripted in a rush from every quarter, came together. This column the consul Torquatus met at Trifanum, a place between Sinuessa and Minturnae. Before a site for a camp was chosen, the baggage thrown into a heap on either side, the fight was fought and the war finished; for so far were their fortunes cut down that, when the consul led his victorious army to ravage their fields, all the Latins surrendered themselves, and the Campanians followed that surrender. Latium and Capua were mulcted of land. The Latin territory, with the Privernate land added, and the Falernian, which had belonged to the Campanian people, as far as the river Volturnus, are divided among the Roman plebs. Two iugera apiece were granted in the Latin land, made up to the full with three-quarters of a iugerum from the Privernate, and three iugera in the Falernian, a quarter being added besides for the distance. Exempt from punishment among the Latins were the Laurentes, and among the Campanians the horsemen, because they had not revolted; with the Laurentes it was ordered that the treaty be renewed, and it is renewed from that time every year on the tenth day after the Latin Festival. To the Campanian horsemen Roman citizenship was given, and for a memorial of it they fixed a bronze tablet in the temple of Castor at Rome. The Campanian people too was ordered to pay them a yearly tribute, each man—and they were sixteen hundred—of four hundred and fifty denarii.

The war so concluded, rewards and punishments paid out to each according to his desert, Titus Manlius returned to Rome; and it is agreed that, as he came, only the elders went out to meet him, while the young men both then and ever afterward through his whole life turned from him and cursed him. The men of Antium made incursions into the Ostian, the Ardeate, and the Solonian territory. The consul Manlius, because by reason of ill health he could not himself prosecute that war, named as dictator Lucius Papirius Crassus, who chanced then to be praetor; by him Lucius Papirius Cursor was named master of the horse. Nothing worth remembering was done against the men of Antium by the dictator, though he held a standing camp in the Antiate territory for several months. To a year marked by victory over so many and so powerful peoples, and besides by the noble death of one consul and the command of the other—as savage as it was bright in memory—there succeeded as consuls Titus Aemilius Mamercinus and Quintus Publilius Philo; and not to a like matter of affairs, themselves too mindful of their own interest, or of their party in the commonwealth, more than of their country. The Latins, rebelling out of resentment at the loss of their land, they routed in the Fenectane plains and stripped of their camp. There, while Publilius, under whose conduct and auspices the campaign had been fought, was receiving in surrender the Latin peoples whose youth had been cut down on the spot, Aemilius led the army to Pedum. Pedum was protected by the people of Tibur, of Praeneste, and of Velitrae; aid had come too from Lanuvium and Antium. When the Roman, though superior in the battles, had still the whole labor remaining at the city of Pedum itself and at the camp of the allied peoples that adjoined the town, the consul suddenly abandoned the war half-done and—because he heard a triumph decreed to his colleague—himself too, a clamorer for a triumph before the victory, returned to Rome. The fathers, offended at this greed and refusing a triumph unless Pedum were taken or surrendered, thereby alienated Aemilius, who from then on conducted a consulship like a seditious tribunate. For neither, so long as he was consul, did he cease to arraign the fathers before the people—his colleague by no means opposing, because he too was of the plebs—and the niggardly division of the land in the Latin and Falernian territory furnished matter for the charges; and afterward, when the Senate, desiring to put an end to the consuls’ command, ordered a dictator to be named against the rebelling Latins, Aemilius, whose were then the fasces, named his colleague dictator; by him Junius Brutus was named master of the horse. The dictatorship was a popular one, both for its speeches accusing the fathers, and because it carried three laws most favorable to the plebs and adverse to the nobility: one, that plebiscites should bind all the Quirites; a second, that of laws which should be brought before the comitia centuriata the fathers should give their sanction before the voting began; a third, that one censor at least—now that it had come to where it was lawful for both to be made plebeian—should be created from the plebs. The fathers believed that more loss was taken at home that year from the consuls and the dictator than the empire was increased abroad from their victory and their feats of war.

In the year following, in the consulship of Lucius Furius Camillus and Gaius Maenius, that the business neglected by Aemilius, the previous year’s consul, might be cast in his teeth the more markedly, the Senate clamored that Pedum must be stormed and destroyed with arms and men and every force, and the new consuls, compelled to set everything else aside for that, set out. Latium was now in such a state that it could endure neither war nor peace: for war its resources failed; peace it spurned out of resentment for the land taken away. It seemed they must keep to a middle counsel—to hold themselves within their towns, lest, provoked, the Roman should have a cause of war, and, if the siege of any town were reported, to bring aid to the besieged from every quarter and from all the peoples. And yet by only very few peoples were the Pedani aided. The men of Tibur and Praeneste, whose land was nearer, reached Pedum; the Aricini, the Lanuvini, and the Veliterni, as they were joining the Antiate Volsci at the river Astura, Maenius assailed unawares and routed. Camillus at Pedum fought with the men of Tibur, a very strong army, with greater toil though with an issue equally happy. The chief tumult was made by a sudden sally of the townsmen in the midst of the battle; against whom, turning a part of his army, Camillus not only drove them within their walls but on the very same day, when he had broken both them and their auxiliaries, took the town with scaling-ladders. It was then resolved, with greater enterprise and spirit, to lead the victorious army round from the storming of one city to the utter subduing of Latium; nor did they rest until, by storming or by receiving into surrender the cities one by one, they had brought all Latium under. Then, garrisons being stationed throughout the recovered towns, they withdrew to Rome to the triumph decreed them by the consent of all. To the triumph there was added the honor that equestrian statues were set up to them in the Forum—a thing rare in that age. Before the consuls held the elections for the following year, Camillus laid before the Senate the matter of the Latin peoples and spoke thus: "Conscript fathers, what had to be done in Latium by war and arms is now, by the goodwill of the gods and the valor of our soldiers, brought to its end. The armies of the enemy were cut down at Pedum and the Astura; all the Latin towns, and Antium of the Volsci, are held by your garrisons, taken either by storm or received in surrender. It remains for us to deliberate—since they trouble us by rebelling again and again—by what means we may keep them quiet in lasting peace. The immortal gods have made you so far masters of this decision that they have put it in your hand whether there shall thenceforth be a Latium or not; and so, as regards the Latins, you can win for yourselves a peace for all time, either by severity or by forgiveness. Would you take cruel counsel against the surrendered and the conquered? It is open to you to wipe out all Latium, to make vast solitudes there, out of which, through many great wars, you have often availed yourselves of an excellent army of allies. Would you, after the example of your forefathers, enlarge the Roman state by receiving the conquered into citizenship? Material for growth, to the height of glory, lies ready at hand. That empire is surely far the firmest which subjects rejoice to obey. But there is need of haste in whatever you resolve to settle: you hold so many peoples in suspense between hope and fear, and it behooves you both to discharge your own anxiety about them as soon as may be, and to forestall their minds, while they are still stunned with waiting, whether by punishment or by kindness. It was ours to bring it about that the power of deciding all should be yours; it is yours to decree what is best for you and for the commonwealth."

The leading men of the Senate praised the consul’s proposal touching the sum of affairs, but said that, since the case of different peoples was different, the deliberation could be set in order in this way: that they should bring forward each people by name, so that it might be decided according to each one’s desert. The several peoples were accordingly brought forward and a decree made. To the Lanuvini citizenship was given and their sacred rites restored to them, on the terms that the temple and grove of Juno Sospita should be held in common by the Lanuvine townsmen with the Roman people. The Aricini, the Nomentani, and the Pedani were received into citizenship on the same footing as the Lanuvini. To the Tusculans was preserved the citizenship they already had, and the charge of rebellion was shifted from the guilt of the state onto a few instigators. Against the Veliterni, old Roman citizens, because they had so often rebelled, there was grievous severity: their walls were thrown down, and their Senate carried off from among them and bidden to dwell across the Tiber, on the condition that, if any of them were caught on the hither side of the Tiber, the ransom (clarigatio) should be as much as a thousand pounds of bronze, and that the captor should not hold his prisoner out of chains until the money was paid. Colonists were sent into the senators’ land, and by their enrollment Velitrae recovered the look of its ancient populousness. To Antium too a new colony was sent, with the proviso that it should be allowed to the Antiates, if they too wished, to be enrolled as colonists; their warships were taken away, and the Antiate people was forbidden the sea, and citizenship was given them. The men of Tibur and Praeneste were mulcted of land, not for the recent guilt of rebellion alone, which was common to them with the other Latins, but because, out of weariness of Roman rule, they had once leagued their arms with the Gauls, a savage race. From the other Latin peoples they took away the rights of intermarriage, of trade, and of common councils among themselves. To the Campanians, in honor of their horsemen, because they had been unwilling to rebel with the Latins, and to the Fundani and Formiani, because their territory had always afforded a safe and peaceful road, citizenship without suffrage was given. The men of Cumae and of Suessula it was resolved should be of the same right and condition as Capua. Of the Antiates’ ships, part were drawn up into the docks at Rome, part burned, and it was resolved that with their beaks (rostra) a platform should be built and adorned in the Forum, and that consecrated place was named the Rostra.

In the consulship of Gaius Sulpicius Longus and Publius Aelius Paetus, when Rome held everything in good peace, not by her power so much as by the goodwill won through her kindnesses, a war arose between the Sidicini and the Aurunci. The Aurunci, received in surrender when Titus Manlius was consul, had thereafter made no move; for which reason their plea in seeking aid from the Romans was the more just. But before the consuls could lead an army out from the city—for the Senate had ordered that the Aurunci be defended—word was brought that the Aurunci had through fear deserted their town and, fleeing with their wives and children, had fortified Suessa, which is now called Aurunca, their ancient walls and city having been destroyed by the Sidicini. The Senate, incensed at the consuls, by whose delay the allies had been betrayed, ordered a dictator to be named. Gaius Claudius Inregillensis was named, and named Gaius Claudius Hortator master of the horse. A scruple of religion was thereupon cast upon the appointment, and, when the augurs had declared that they seemed to have been faultily created, the dictator and master of the horse abdicated their magistracy. In that year Minucia, a Vestal, suspect at first on account of a dress neater than was right, and then arraigned before the pontiffs on the information of a slave, when by their decree she had been ordered to abstain from the rites and to keep her household in her own power, after judgment given was buried alive beneath the earth at the Colline gate, to the right of the paved road, in the Field of Wickedness (Campus Sceleratus); I believe that the name was given to the place from her unchastity. In the same year Quintus Publilius Philo was made praetor, the first from the plebs, against the opposition of the consul Sulpicius, who declared he would take no account of his candidacy—the Senate, since it had not held its ground in the highest commands, striving the less in the matter of the praetorship.

The following year, in the consulship of Lucius Papirius Crassus and Kaeso Duillius, was marked by a war with the Ausones, more novel than great. That nation dwelt in the city of Cales; it had joined arms with its neighbors the Sidicini; and in a single battle, by no means memorable, the army of the two peoples was routed, being, by reason of the nearness of their cities, both the readier to flee and the safer in the flight itself. Yet the fathers did not on that account lay aside their care of that war, because so many times now the Sidicini had either themselves stirred up war, or borne aid to those who stirred it, or been the cause of arms. And so they strove with all their might to make the greatest commander of that time, Marcus Valerius Corvus, consul for the fourth time; as colleague to Corvus was added Marcus Atilius Regulus; and, lest perchance there should be a slip by lot, it was asked of the consuls that the province be Corvus’s outside the lot. Taking over the victorious army from the former consuls, he set out for Cales, whence the war had arisen, and, when he had routed the enemy—frightened from the memory of the earlier struggle too—with a shout and a first charge, he set about assaulting the very walls. And such indeed was the soldiers’ ardor that they wished even then to come up to the walls with ladders and contended that they would get over; but Corvus, because that was hard to do, chose to carry the undertaking through by the labor of his soldiers rather than at their peril. And so he raised a mound and mantlets (vineae) and brought up towers to the wall, the use of which a chance opportunity forestalled. For Marcus Fabius, a Roman captive, when through the carelessness of the guards on a festal day he had broken his chains and let himself down by his hands over the wall, among the Roman works, suspended by a rope tied to the wall’s battlement, persuaded the commander to attack the enemy while they were drowsy with wine and feasting; and with no greater struggle were the Ausones taken, together with their city, than they had been routed in the line. Vast booty was taken, and, a garrison being placed in Cales, the legions were led back to Rome. The consul triumphed by decree of the Senate, and, that Atilius might not be without a share of the glory, both consuls were ordered to lead the army against the Sidicini. But first, by decree of the Senate, they named, for the holding of the elections, Lucius Aemilius Mamercinus dictator; he named Quintus Publilius Philo master of the horse. The dictator holding the elections, there were created as consuls Titus Veturius and Spurius Postumius. Although a part of the war with the Sidicini remained, yet, to forestall the plebs’ desire by a kindness, they brought forward the matter of leading out a colony to Cales; and, a decree of the Senate being made that two thousand five hundred men should be enrolled for it, they created three men to lead out the colony and divide the land—Kaeso Duillius, Titus Quinctius, and Marcus Fabius.

The new consuls then, taking over the army from the old, entered the enemy’s borders and by ravaging made their way right up to the walls and the city. There, because the Sidicini, having got together a huge army, were seen to be in earnest to fight for their last hope, and there was a report that Samnium was being roused to war, a dictator was named by the consuls on the authority of the Senate—Publius Cornelius Rufinus—with Marcus Antonius as master of the horse. Then a scruple of religion arose that they had been created faultily, and they abdicated the magistracy; and because a pestilence followed, as though all the auspices had been tainted by that flaw, the matter came back to an interregnum. From the interregnum begun, it was only through the fifth interrex, Marcus Valerius Corvus, that there were created as consuls Aulus Cornelius (for the second time) and Gnaeus Domitius. Affairs being tranquil, a rumor of a Gallic war carried the weight of a tumult, so that it was resolved a dictator be named; Marcus Papirius Crassus was named, and Publius Valerius Publicola master of the horse. And when by them a levy was being held more strictly than against bordering wars, the scouts that were sent out brought back that all was quiet among the Gauls. Samnium too was for the second year now suspected of being stirred by new designs; for which cause the Roman army was not withdrawn from the Sidicine territory. But the war of Alexander of Epirus drew the Samnites away into Lucania; and those two peoples fought a pitched battle against the king as he was making a landing from Paestum. In that engagement Alexander was the superior—with what good faith he would have kept the peace, had the rest gone as well, is uncertain—and made peace with the Romans. In the same year a census was held and the new citizens enrolled. Two tribes were added on their account, the Maecian and the Scaptian; the censors who added them were Quintus Publilius Philo and Spurius Postumius. The Acerrani were made Romans by a law brought in by Lucius Papirius the praetor, by which citizenship without suffrage was given them. These were the doings of that year at home and in the field.

The following year was a deadly one, whether from the unwholesomeness of the heavens or from human guilt, in the consulship of Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Gaius Valerius.—I find the consul’s surname given variously in the annals as Flaccus and as Potitus; but in this it matters little what the truth is.—This I could heartily wish—and not all the authorities are for it—that it has been falsely handed down that those whose death made the year infamous for pestilence were carried off by poisons; nevertheless the matter must be set forth as it is reported, that I may not strip any of the authorities of credit. When the foremost men of the state were dying of like diseases and with much the same issue, a certain serving-woman came to Quintus Fabius Maximus, the curule aedile, and professed that she would point out the cause of the public sickness, if a pledge were given her that her information should bring her no harm. Fabius at once referred the matter to the consuls, the consuls to the Senate, and with the order’s consent a pledge was given to the informer. Then it was laid open that the state was being afflicted by women’s wickedness, that matrons were brewing those poisons, and that, if they would follow at once, they could be caught in the act. Following the informer, they found certain women brewing drugs, and others laid by; and these being carried into the Forum, and about twenty matrons, at whose houses they had been seized, summoned by an officer, two of them, Cornelia and Sergia, both of patrician birth, contending that those drugs were wholesome, were bidden by the informer who confuted them to drink, that they might convict her of having framed a falsehood; and, time taken for conferring, when, the people moved aside, they had laid the matter before the rest, and these too did not refuse to drink, they all drained the drug and perished by their own guile. Their attendants, seized forthwith, gave information against a great number of matrons; of whom up to a hundred and seventy were condemned; nor before that day had there been any inquiry at Rome touching poisonings. The thing was held in the place of a portent, and seemed the work of minds distraught rather than guilty; and so, the memory being fetched from the annals that of old, in the secessions of the plebs, a nail had been driven by a dictator, and that men’s minds, alienated by discord, had been brought to themselves again by that expiation, it was resolved that a dictator be created for the driving of the nail. Gnaeus Quinctilius was created and named Lucius Valerius master of the horse; who, the nail driven, abdicated their magistracy.

There were created as consuls Lucius Papirius Crassus (for the second time) and Lucius Plautius Venox; at the beginning of whose year envoys from the Volscian Fabraterni and from the Lucani came to Rome, praying to be received into protection: if they were defended from the arms of the Samnites, they would be faithfully and obediently under the command of the Roman people. Envoys were then sent by the Senate, and the Samnites were warned to keep their force off the borders of those peoples; and that embassy prevailed, not so much because the Samnites wished for peace as because they were not yet prepared for war. In the same year war was begun with Privernum, whose allies were the Fundani, and whose leader too was a man of Fundi, Vitruvius Vaccus, a man of note not at home only but at Rome; he had a house on the Palatine, where, the building pulled down and the ground confiscated, the place was called the Vacci Meadows (Vacci prata). Against this man, as he was ranging far and wide in ravaging the Setine and Norban and Coran territory, Lucius Papirius set out and pitched his camp not far from Vaccus’s. Vitruvius had neither the sense to keep himself within his rampart against a stronger enemy, nor the spirit to fight farther from his camp; with his line scarcely deployed in full outside the camp gate, his soldier looking rather to flight behind than to the battle or the enemy, he fights it out without plan, without daring. As he was beaten both by a slight effort and beyond doubt, so by the very narrowness of the ground and the easy retreat into a camp so near at hand he guarded his soldiers, not without difficulty, from much slaughter; and hardly anyone was cut down in the engagement itself, a few in the press of the rearmost flight, as they rushed into the camp; and at the first darkness they made from there for Privernum in a trembling column, to shelter themselves behind walls rather than a rampart. From Privernum the other consul, Plautius, having laid the fields waste far and wide and driven off booty, led his army into the Fundan territory. As he entered the borders, the Senate of Fundi met him; they said they had not come to plead for Vitruvius and those who had followed his faction, but for the Fundan people; that Vitruvius himself had judged the Fundan people free of the guilt of the war, since he had made Privernum, not his fatherland, the refuge of his flight. At Privernum, therefore, must the enemies of the Roman people be sought and pursued, who, forgetful at once of both their fatherlands, had revolted from the Fundani and the Romans alike; at Fundi there was peace, and Roman hearts, and a grateful memory of the citizenship they had received. They begged the consul to keep war off a harmless people; their fields, their city, their own persons and those of their wives and children were, and would be, in the power of the Roman people. The consul, having praised the Fundani and sent letters to Rome that the Fundani held to their duty, bent his march to Privernum. Claudius writes that first there was punishment exacted on those who had been the heads of the conspiracy; that about three hundred and fifty of the conspirators were sent in chains to Rome, and that that surrender was not accepted by the Senate, because they judged that the Fundan people wished to get off by the punishment of needy and lowly men.

When Privernum was being besieged by the two consular armies, one of the consuls was recalled to Rome for the elections. In that year starting-stalls (carceres) were first set up in the circus. While they were not yet quit of their care over the Privernate war, a fearful rumor of a Gallic tumult fell upon them—a thing hardly ever neglected by the fathers. At once, therefore, the new consuls, Lucius Aemilius Mamercinus and Gaius Plautius, on the very day they entered office, the Kalends of Quinctilis, were ordered to arrange their provinces between them; and Mamercinus, to whom the Gallic war had fallen, to enroll an army with no grant of exemption: indeed even the common crowd of artisans and the sedentary sort, a kind least fit for service, are said to have been called out; and a huge army was concentrated at Veii, that they might go thence to meet the Gauls. It was not thought good to go farther off, lest the enemy, marching by another route, should give them the slip on his way to the city. Then, a few days later, the quiet of that season among the Gauls being well enough ascertained, all their force was turned upon Privernum. Of what followed there is a twofold report: some say the city was taken by force and Vitruvius came alive into their power; others are authority that, before the last violence was applied, the townsmen themselves surrendered to the consul, carrying the herald’s staff before them, and that Vitruvius was given up by his own men. The Senate, consulted about Vitruvius and the Privernates, summoned the consul Plautius to a triumph, the walls of Privernum being razed and a strong garrison placed there; it ordered Vitruvius to be kept under guard in prison until the consul should return, then to be scourged and put to death; his house, which was on the Palatine, to be pulled down; and his goods they decreed should be consecrated to Semo Sancus. From the bronze realized from them, bronze discs were made and set up in the chapel of Sancus over against the temple of Quirinus. Touching the Privernate Senate it was decreed that whatever senator had remained at Privernum after the revolt from the Romans should dwell across the Tiber under the same law as the Veliterni. These things thus decreed, there was silence about the Privernates until Plautius’s triumph; after the triumph, Vitruvius and his accomplices in the crime being put to death, the consul, judging that mention of the Privernates was now safe before men already sated with the punishment of the guilty, said: "Since the authors of the revolt have their deserved punishment both from the immortal gods and from you, conscript fathers, what is your pleasure should be done about the guiltless multitude? For my part, although it is my office rather to ask opinions than to give one, yet, since I see that the Privernates are neighbors to the Samnites, from whom our peace is now most uncertain, I should wish as little wrath as may be to be left between us and them."

While the matter was in itself doubtful, men advising more harshly or more mildly according to each one’s temper, one of the Privernate envoys made everything yet more uncertain, mindful more of the condition into which he had been born than of his present necessity; who, being asked by a certain proposer of the grimmer view what punishment he thought the Privernates deserved, said: "That which they deserve who think themselves worthy of liberty." When the consul saw that by this fierce answer those who before had been assailing the Privernates’ cause were made the more hostile, that he might himself draw a milder reply by a kindly question, he said: "What if we remit your punishment—what sort of peace may we hope to have with you?" "If you give a good one," said he, "both faithful and lasting; if a bad one, not for long." Then indeed certain men cried that the Privernate was threatening, and that not ambiguously, and that by such words peaceable peoples were being incited to rebel; but the better part of the Senate drew the answer toward the gentler side and said that the voice of a man, and of a free man, had been heard: could it be believed that any people, or any man at all, would remain in a condition that irked him any longer than it must? There was faithful peace only where men were peaceable of their own will, and faith was not to be hoped for in a place where men would have slavery. To this opinion the consul himself most of all inclined men’s minds, saying again and again to the consulars who led the votes—so that he might be overheard by the more part—that those alone who think of nothing but liberty are worthy to become Romans. And so they both carried their cause in the Senate, and on the authority of the fathers it was brought before the people that citizenship be given to the Privernates. In the same year three hundred colonists were sent to Anxur; they received two iugera of land apiece.

There followed a year marked by nothing of note in war or at home, in the consulship of Publius Plautius Proculus and Publius Cornelius Scapula, except that a colony was led out to Fregellae—that land had belonged to the Signini, then to the Volsci—and a distribution of meat was given to the people by Marcus Flavius at his mother’s funeral. There were those who interpreted that, under the show of honoring his parent, a deserved reward had been paid to the people, because they had acquitted him, on a day appointed by the aediles, of the charge of having debauched a married woman. The distribution of meat, given as thanks for the past favor of the verdict, was also the cause of an honor to him, and at the next elections, though absent, he was preferred to those candidates who sought the tribunate of the plebs. Palaepolis was not far from where Neapolis now stands; one people dwelt in the two cities. They were of Cumaean origin; the Cumaeans drew their descent from Euboean Chalcis. By the fleet in which they had been carried from home they had much power along the coast of that sea which they border, having first landed on the islands of Aenaria and Pithecusae, and then having dared to transfer their seat to the mainland. This state, relying both on its own strength and on the alliance—faithless toward the Romans—of the Samnites, or else trusting in the pestilence that was reported to have fallen upon the city of Rome, did many hostile things against the Romans dwelling in the Campanian and Falernian territory. And so, in the consulship of Lucius Cornelius Lentulus and Quintus Publilius Philo (for the second time), when the fetials had been sent to Palaepolis to demand redress, and a fierce answer had been returned by the Greeks, a race more vigorous in tongue than in deeds, the people, on the authority of the fathers, ordered war to be made upon the Palaepolitani. The provinces being arranged between the consuls, the prosecution of the war against the Greeks fell to Publilius; Cornelius, with the other army, was set against the Samnites if they should make any move—for there was a report that, threatening the defection of the Campanians, they would bring up their camp; and there it seemed best to Cornelius to keep a standing camp.

The Senate was informed by both consuls that there was but slight hope of peace with the Samnites: Publilius reported that two thousand soldiers of Nola and four thousand of the Samnites had been received into Palaepolis, more at the compulsion of the Nolans than by the will of the Greeks; Cornelius, that a levy had been proclaimed by the magistrates, that all Samnium was up in arms, and that the neighboring peoples—the Privernate, the Fundan, and the Formian—were being solicited beyond all doubt. For these reasons, when it had been resolved to send envoys to the Samnites before war was made, a fierce answer was returned by the Samnites. They went so far as to charge the Romans with wrongs, and yet no less carefully cleared themselves of what was laid against them: that the Greeks were aided by no public counsel or aid of theirs, and that neither the Fundan nor the Formian had been solicited by them; for indeed they had no cause to repent of their own strength, if war were their pleasure. But they could not dissemble that the Samnite state took it ill that the Roman people had restored Fregellae—taken from the Volsci and razed by the Samnites—and had planted in Samnite territory a colony which their colonists called Fregellae; that affront and wrong, unless it were removed by those who had done it, they would themselves repel with all their force. When the Roman envoy called them to plead the matter before their common allies and friends, "Why do we deal in riddles?" said one; "our disputes, Romans, no words of envoys, no human arbiter, but the Campanian plain, on which we must clash, and arms, and the common Mars of war, shall decide. So let us set camp against camp between Capua and Suessula, and decide whether Samnite or Roman shall rule Italy by his command." When the Roman envoys had answered that they would go, not where the enemy summoned them, but where their own commanders led... Publilius had by now, by seizing a position well placed between Palaepolis and Neapolis, severed the enemy from the partnership of mutual aid by which, as each place was pressed, they had availed themselves of one another. And so, since both the day of the elections was near and it was against the public interest that Publilius, threatening the enemy’s walls, should be called away from the hope—growing daily—of taking the city, it was arranged with the tribunes that they should propose to the people that, when Quintus Publilius Philo had gone out of the consulship, he should conduct the campaign as proconsul until the war with the Greeks was finished. To Lucius Cornelius, since it was thought best not to recall even him, now that he had entered Samnium, from the impetus of the war, letters were sent that he should name a dictator for the holding of the elections. He named Marcus Claudius Marcellus; by him Spurius Postumius was named master of the horse. Yet the elections were not held by the dictator, because it came into question whether he had been created with a flaw. The augurs, consulted, pronounced that the dictator seemed faulty. The tribunes made that matter suspect and infamous by their charges: for it had not been easy, they said, for that flaw to be known, since the consul, rising in the night, had named the dictator in silence; nor had anything been written by the consul to anyone, publicly or privately, on the matter; nor was there any mortal living who could say he had seen or heard anything to break the auspice; nor could the augurs, sitting at Rome, divine what flaw had befallen the consul in the camp: to whom was it not plain that the flaw the augurs saw was that the dictator was a plebeian? These and other things were bandied by the tribunes in vain; yet the matter came back to an interregnum, and, the elections being put off for one cause and another, at last the fourteenth interrex, Lucius Aemilius, created as consuls Gaius Poetelius and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus—in other annals I find the name "Cursor."

In the same year it is recorded that Alexandria in Egypt was founded, and that the lots of Dodonaean Jupiter were confirmed by the event in the death of Alexander, king of Epirus, slain by a Lucanian exile. Called into Italy by the Tarentines, he had been given the warning to beware the water of Acheron and the city of Pandosia: there a term was set to his fates. And so he crossed the more speedily into Italy, to be as far as possible from the city of Pandosia in Epirus and the river Acheron, which, flowing from Molossis into the Infernal Marshes, the Thesprotian gulf receives. But, as men commonly rush into the midst of their fates by fleeing them, when he had often routed the Bruttian and Lucanian legions, had taken from the Lucanians Heraclea, a colony of the Tarentines, and Siponto, and of the Bruttii Cosentia and Terina, and other cities besides of the Messapii and the Lucanians, and had sent three hundred illustrious families into Epirus to keep as hostages, he took post, not far from the city of Pandosia, on the verge of the Lucanian and Bruttian borders, upon three hills standing some way apart from one another, from which he might make incursions into every part of the enemy’s land; and he kept about him some two hundred Lucanian exiles as faithful men, though, as most tempers of that sort are, they bore a faith that shifted with fortune. Continual rains, all the plains being flooded, when they had cut off the army, parted in three, from mutual aid among themselves, two of the garrisons that were without the king were overwhelmed by the unforeseen coming of the enemy; and these destroyed, all turned to the siege of the king himself. From there messengers were sent by the Lucanian exiles to their own people, and, a return being bargained for, it was promised that they would deliver up the king, alive or dead, into their power. But he, with picked men, daring a notable deed, broke out through the midst of the enemy and cut down the Lucanian leader in close combat; and, gathering his men from their scattered flight, he came to a river that pointed out the way by the fresh ruins of a bridge which the force of the water had swept away. As the column was crossing it at an uncertain ford, a soldier, worn with fear and toil, railing at the abominable name of the river, said: "Rightly are you called Acheros." When this fell upon the king’s ears, he at once turned his mind to his own fates and halted, doubtful whether he should cross. Then Sotimus, an attendant from among the royal pages, asking why in so great a crisis of peril he hesitated, pointed out that the Lucanians were looking for a place for an ambush. When the king looked back and saw them coming in a body at a distance, he drew his sword and sent his horse through the midst of the stream; and now, as he was passing out into the shallows, a Lucanian exile transfixed him from afar with a javelin. The lifeless body, fallen with the weapon sticking in it, the river bore down to the enemy’s garrison. There a foul mangling of the body was done. For, cutting it in two at the middle, they sent part to Cosentia, and part was kept by themselves for mockery; and as this was assailed from afar with javelins and stones, one woman, mingling with the savaging throng beyond the measure of human anger, begged them to hold off a while, and, weeping, said that her husband and children were captives among the enemy; she hoped to ransom her own with the royal body, however mangled. That made an end of the mangling, and what was left of the limbs was buried at Cosentia by the care of one woman, and the bones were sent back to Metapontum to the enemy, and thence carried over to Epirus, to Cleopatra his wife and his sister Olympias, of whom the latter was the mother, the former the sister, of Alexander the Great. Let it be enough to have told these few things of the sad end of Alexander of Epirus—who, though fortune kept him from a war with Rome, yet waged his wars in Italy.

In the same year a lectisternium was held at Rome, the fifth since the founding of the city, the same gods being appeased as before. Then the new consuls, having sent by order of the people men to proclaim war on the Samnites, were themselves making all preparations with a greater effort than against the Greeks; and other new auxiliaries, undreamed of then by men who had no such thing in mind, came to them. The Lucani and Apuli, peoples who up to that day had had no dealings with the Roman people, came into their protection, promising arms and men for the war; they were therefore received into friendship by treaty. At the same time the affair in Samnium too was prosperously conducted. Three towns came into their power—Allifae, Callifae, and Rufrium—and the rest of the country, at the consuls’ first coming, was laid waste far and wide. This war so prosperously begun, an end was now at hand of the other war too, in which the Greeks were being besieged. For, besides that, the fortifications being walled across, part of the enemy was cut off from part, they were suffering within the walls things considerably more shameful than those with which the enemy terrified them, and, as though captives held by their own garrisons, were now enduring outrages unworthy even of their children and wives, the last extremities of captured cities. And so, when there was a rumor that fresh aid would come both from Tarentum and from the Samnites, they reckoned that there were more Samnites within their walls than they wished, while they awaited the youth of the Tarentines—Greeks awaiting Greeks, men through whom they might resist the Samnite and the Nolan no less than the Roman enemy. At last surrender to the Romans seemed the lightest of the evils. Charilaus and Nymphius, the chief men of the state, sharing their counsel between them, divided the parts for carrying out the business, so that the one should desert to the Roman commander, the other should stay behind to make the city ready for the design. Charilaus it was who came to Publilius Philo and said that—and may it be good, fortunate, and happy for the Palaepolitani and the Roman people—he had resolved to hand over the walls; whether by that deed his country would seem betrayed by him or saved, lay in Roman good faith. For himself, in his private capacity, he would neither bargain for anything nor ask anything; on the public behalf he asked rather than bargained that, if the undertaking should succeed, the Roman people would think rather with how great zeal and danger a return to its friendship had been made than with what folly and rashness there had been a departure from duty. Commended by the commander, he received three thousand soldiers to seize the part of the city which the Samnites held; over this garrison Lucius Quinctius, a military tribune, was set.

At the same time Nymphius too, approaching the praetor of the Samnites with craft, had prevailed on him that—since the whole Roman army was either around Palaepolis or in Samnium—he should let him sail round with the fleet to the Roman territory, to lay waste not the sea-coast only but the places near the very city; but that, to do it unseen, he must set out by night and the ships be launched at once. That this might be done the sooner, the whole youth of the Samnites, except the necessary garrison of the city, was sent to the shore. There, while Nymphius wasted the time in the darkness and amid a multitude that hampered itself, busily confounding one order with another, Charilaus, by agreement received into the city by his confederates, when he had filled the highest part of the city with the Roman soldier, ordered a shout to be raised; at which the Greeks, on the signal received from their chief men, kept quiet, while the Nolans fled through the rear part of the city by the road that leads to Nola. The Samnites, shut out from the city, found their flight readier for the moment, but the fouler once they had escaped the danger, since they returned home unarmed, with none of their goods but all left among the enemy, a mockery not to strangers only but to their own countrymen, despoiled and destitute. I am not unaware of the other opinion, by which this betrayal is said to have been wrought by the Samnites; but both because I have followed authorities who are the worthier to be believed, and because the Neapolitan treaty—for to Neapolis the chief power of the Greeks afterward passed—makes it the nearer to truth that they themselves returned into friendship. To Publilius a triumph was decreed, because it was believed sufficiently certain that the enemy, subdued by siege, had come into Rome’s protection. Two unique things first befell this man: a prorogation of command never before made in anyone’s case, and a triumph after his office was laid down.

Presently another war arose with the Greeks of the other coast. For the Tarentines, when they had for a while sustained the cause of Palaepolis with the empty hope of aid, after they learned that the Romans were masters of the city, fell to upbraiding the Palaepolitani, as though they had been deserted and were not themselves the deserters, and raged with anger and envy against the Romans, the more so because word was brought that the Lucani and Apuli—for both alliances were begun that year—had come into the protection of the Roman people: for it had now well-nigh reached their own doors, and the matter would soon be at the point where the Romans must be held either enemies or masters. The crisis of their own fortunes turned, surely, upon the Samnite war and its issue; that nation alone was left, and not even it strong enough, now that the Lucanian had revolted; whom it was still possible to recall and impel to abolish the Roman alliance, if any art were applied to the sowing of discord. These counsels having prevailed among men eager for change, certain of the Lucanian youth, suborned for a price, men of more note than honor among their people, having had themselves beaten with rods among themselves, when they had brought their bared bodies into the assembly of the citizens, cried out that, because they had dared to enter the Roman camp, they had been beaten with rods by the consuls and all but struck with the axe. A thing in its own nature unsightly, since it bore the look of injury rather than of guile, the people were stirred and by their outcry compelled the magistrates to summon the Senate; and some, standing round the council, demanded war on the Romans, others ran about to rouse the rustic multitude to arms, and, the tumult driving even sound minds distracted, it was decreed that the alliance with the Samnites be renewed, and envoys were sent for that purpose. The sudden affair, because it had as little credit as it had cause, drove them—compelled by the Samnites—both to give hostages and to receive garrisons in their fortified places; and, blind with deceit and anger, they refused nothing. Then in a short while the fraud began to come to light, after the authors of the false charges removed to Tarentum; but, all power over themselves being now lost, nothing more was left them than vainly to repent.

In that year there was for the Roman plebs, as it were, another beginning of liberty, in that men ceased to be bound over for debt (necti); and the law was changed on account of the lust, together with the notable cruelty, of a single moneylender. This was Lucius Papirius, to whom, when Gaius Publilius had bound himself over for his father’s debt, the age and beauty that might have drawn forth pity kindled his mind instead to lust and outrage. Reckoning the flower of the youth’s age an extra profit on his loan, he tried at first to seduce the young man with foul talk; then, after his ears spurned the infamy, to terrify him with threats and again and again to put him in mind of his fortune; at last, when he saw him mindful of his free birth rather than of his present condition, he bids him be stripped and the scourges brought. Mangled by these, when the youth had rushed out into the open, complaining of the moneylender’s lust and cruelty, a great force of men, kindled both by pity for his age and by indignation at the unworthy wrong, and by regard for their own condition and that of their children, ran together into the Forum, and from there, a column being formed, to the Senate-house; and when the consuls, compelled by the sudden tumult, were summoning the Senate, they kept showing the mangled back of the youth to the fathers as they entered the Curia, throwing themselves down at the feet of each man. On that day, through the lawless wrong of one man, a mighty bond of credit was overthrown, and the consuls were ordered to propose to the people that no one, unless he had deserved punishment for a crime, should be held in fetters or in the stocks until he had paid his penalty; and that for money lent the debtor’s goods, not his body, should be liable. So those bound over were released, and it was provided for the future that none should be bound over.

In the same year, while the Samnite war of itself, and the sudden defection of the Lucani, and the Tarentines as the authors of that defection, were keeping the fathers anxious, there came in addition that the Vestine people too joined itself to the Samnites. Which matter, just as in that year it was bandied more in the talk of men everywhere than in any public council, so to the next year’s consuls, Lucius Furius Camillus (for the second time) and Junius Brutus Scaeva, none seemed prior or weightier to lay before the Senate. And although it was no new matter, yet so great a care possessed the fathers that they feared it alike whether undertaken or neglected, lest either the impunity of the Vestines should rouse the neighboring peoples by its wantonness and pride, or the penalties exacted by war should rouse them by the near fear and anger; and the whole race was abundantly a match for the Samnites in war—the Marsi, the Paeligni, and the Marrucini, all of whom, if the Vestine were touched, must be reckoned enemies. Yet the side prevailed which for the moment could seem of greater spirit than judgment; but the event taught that fortune helps the brave. The people, on the authority of the fathers, ordered war against the Vestines. That province fell by lot to Brutus, Samnium to Camillus. Armies were led to both, and by the care of guarding their borders the enemies were prevented from joining arms. But the one consul, Lucius Furius, on whom the greater mass of affairs had been laid, fortune withdrew from the war, entangled in a grave illness; and, being ordered to name a dictator to conduct the campaign, he named by far the most renowned in war at that time, Lucius Papirius Cursor, by whom Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus was named master of the horse—a pair noble for the deeds done in that magistracy, but yet more noble for the discord by which it came almost to the utmost of strife. By the other consul a manifold war was waged among the Vestines, and nowhere with varying issue. For he both laid waste their fields and, by ravaging and burning the enemy’s dwellings and crops, drew them unwilling into the line; and so by a single battle the fortunes of the Vestines were so cut down—though by no means with a soldiery of his own unbloodied—that they fled not only into their camp, but, no longer trusting even to rampart and trenches, slipped away into their towns, to defend themselves by the situation of their cities and their walls. At last, setting about to storm their towns too by force, he took, first, Cutina, by the great ardor of his soldiers out of anger at their wounds, because hardly anyone had come out of the battle unhurt; then Cingilia. The booty of both cities he granted to the soldiers, because neither gates nor walls of the enemy had kept them out.

The advance into Samnium was made under uncertain auspices, the flaw of which fell out not upon the issue of the war, which was prosperously conducted, but upon the madness and the wrath of the commanders. For the dictator Papirius, warned by the keeper of the sacred chickens (pullarius), when he was setting out for Rome to take the auspices afresh, charged the master of the horse to keep to his post and not to engage the enemy in his absence. Quintus Fabius, when after the dictator’s departure he had learned through scouts that everything among the enemy was as loose as if no Roman were in Samnium, whether the fierce young man was kindled by indignation that everything seemed reposed in the dictator, or was drawn on by the chance of doing the business well, having got his army ready and arrayed, set out to Imbrinium—so they call the place—and clashed in pitched battle with the Samnites. Such was the fortune of the fight that nothing was left whereby, had the dictator been present, the matter could have been better managed; the leader was not wanting to the soldier, nor the soldier to the leader. The cavalry too, at the prompting of Lucius Cominius, a military tribune, who, after charging several times, could not break through the enemy’s column, drew the bridles off their horses and so urged them on with the spur that no force could hold them; through arms, through men, they dealt slaughter far and wide; the infantry, following the charge of the horse, brought their standards against the now-confounded enemy. Twenty thousand of the enemy are reported to have been slain that day. I have authorities that twice the standards were joined with the enemy in the dictator’s absence, and twice the matter excellently done; among the oldest writers this one battle is found; in certain annals the whole affair is passed over. The master of the horse, having gained much spoil from so great a slaughter, heaped the enemy’s arms into a vast pile and burned them, the fire set beneath—whether that was a vow to some one of the gods, or whether one may choose to believe Fabius the authority that it was done so that the dictator should not reap the fruit of his glory, nor write his name there, nor carry the spoils in his triumph. The letters too, sent about the success to the Senate and not to the dictator, were an argument of one by no means sharing the praises with him. So at least the dictator took the deed, that, while others rejoiced at the victory won, he bore himself with anger and gloom. And so, the Senate being suddenly dismissed, he flung himself out of the Curia, crying again and again that no less than the legions of the Samnites the dictatorial majesty and the military discipline had been conquered and overthrown by the master of the horse, if the contempt of his command should go unpunished. And so, full of threats and wrath, he set out for the camp; and though he had gone by the greatest marches, he could not yet outstrip the rumor of his coming; for there had run on ahead from the city men to announce that the dictator was coming greedy for punishment, praising in almost every other word the deed of Titus Manlius.

Fabius, an assembly being at once called, besought the soldiers that, with the same valor by which they had defended the commonwealth from its most hostile enemies, they would protect from the dictator’s ungoverned cruelty him under whose conduct and auspices they had conquered: the man was coming mad with envy, wroth at another’s valor and good fortune; he was raving that in his absence the commonwealth had been excellently served; he would rather, if he could change fortune, that the victory had been the Samnites’ than the Romans’. He kept crying that his command had been despised—as though he had not forbidden the fight in the same mind in which he now grieved that it had been fought. Then too it had been out of envy that he wished to fetter another’s valor, and he would have taken their arms from the soldiers most eager to use them, that they might not be able to stir in his absence; and now this was what he raved at, this what he took ill, that without Lucius Papirius the soldiers had not been unarmed nor maimed, that Quintus Fabius had borne himself as master of the horse and not as the dictator’s orderly. What would he have done if—what the chances of war and the common Mars bring—the battle had gone amiss, who now, the enemy beaten and the commonwealth so served that it could not have been better served by that one peerless leader, threatens punishment to the master of the horse, and that in the hour of victory? And he was no more hostile to the master of the horse than to the military tribunes, than to the centurions, than to the soldiers. If he could, he would have raged against all; since he could not, he raged against one. For envy, like fire, seeks the heights; it runs upon the head of the design, upon the leader; if he should put out Fabius together with the glory of the deed, then, lording it as in a captured army, he would dare against the soldiers whatever he had been suffered to do against the master of the horse. Let them therefore, in his cause, stand up for the liberty of all. If the dictator should see the same agreement of the army in guarding the victory that there had been in the battle, and that the safety of one was a care to all, he would incline his mind to the gentler view. In the end, he committed his life and his fortunes to their faith and valor.

A shout arose from the whole assembly that he should keep a good heart: no one would offer him violence while the Roman legions were safe. Not long after, the dictator arrived and at once summoned an assembly by trumpet. Then, silence being made, the herald cited Quintus Fabius, the master of the horse; who, as soon as he had come up from the lower ground to the tribunal, the dictator said: "I ask of you, Quintus Fabius, since the supreme command is the dictator’s, and to him the consuls—a kingly power—are obedient, and the praetors, created under the same auspices as the consuls, whether you judge it right or not that the master of the horse should hearken to his word; and this too I ask: when I knew that I had set out from home under uncertain auspices, whether the commonwealth ought to have been committed by me to hazard amid religion confounded, or the auspices taken afresh, that I might do nothing while the gods were in doubt; and at the same time this: whether that religious scruple which was a hindrance to the dictator in conducting affairs could leave the master of the horse loosed and free. But why do I ask these things, when, if I had departed in silence, your own judgment ought nonetheless to have been guided to the interpretation of my will? Why do you not answer whether I forbade you to do anything in my absence, whether I forbade you to join standards with the enemy? In contempt of that command of mine, under uncertain auspices, religion confounded, against the soldier’s usage and the discipline of our forefathers and the divine will of the gods, you dared to clash with the enemy. To these things, which you have been asked, make answer; but beyond them beware that you utter a word. Come forward, lictor." Against these points severally it was not easy to make answer; and now he complained that the same man was the accuser of his life and his judge, now he cried aloud that his life could sooner be torn from him than the glory of his deeds, and cleared himself by turns and in turn accused; then Papirius, his anger renewed, ordered the master of the horse to be stripped and the rods and axes made ready. Fabius, imploring the soldiers’ faith, the lictors tearing his garment, betook himself to the triarii, who were now stirring up a tumult in the assembly. Thence the clamor was carried into the whole assembly; here prayers, there threats were heard. Those who chanced to stand nearest the tribunal, because, set under the commander’s eyes, they could be recognized, begged him to spare the master of the horse and not condemn the army along with him; the farthest part of the assembly, and the knot of men round Fabius, railed at the unmerciful dictator, and were not far from sedition. Not even the tribunal itself was quiet enough; the lieutenants, standing about the chair, begged him to put the matter off to the next day and give his anger a respite and his judgment time: the youth of Fabius had been chastised enough, his victory disfigured enough; let him not press on to the utmost end of punishment, nor lay upon a peerless young man, nor upon his father, a most illustrious man, nor upon the Fabian clan, that disgrace. When they prevailed little by prayers, little by reasoning, they bade him look upon the raging assembly: it belonged not to his age, not to his prudence, to put fire and fuel to sedition with the soldiers’ minds thus inflamed; no one would impute that to Quintus Fabius pleading off his own punishment, but to the dictator, if, blinded by anger, he should by a wrongheaded contest turn a hostile multitude against himself. Lastly, that he might not think they gave this to favor of Quintus Fabius, they were ready to give their oath that it did not seem to them in the interest of the commonwealth that Quintus Fabius be punished at that time.

When by these words they were rather inciting the dictator against themselves than appeasing him toward the master of the horse, the lieutenants were ordered to come down from the tribunal; and, silence being attempted in vain by the herald, since for the din and tumult the voice neither of the dictator himself nor of his attendants could be heard, night, as in a battle, made an end of the contest. The master of the horse, ordered to be present on the morrow, when all assured him that Papirius would blaze up the more fiercely, provoked and embittered by the very strife, fled secretly from the camp to Rome; and, his father Marcus Fabius being the prompter—who had now been thrice consul and dictator—the Senate being at once convened, while Fabius was most loudly complaining before the fathers of the dictator’s violence and injustice, suddenly there was heard before the Curia the noise of lictors clearing the way, and the man himself was at hand in his wrath, having, when he learned that Fabius had set out from the camp, followed with light-armed cavalry. The contest is then renewed, and Papirius ordered Fabius to be seized. When, the chief men of the fathers and the whole Senate pleading against it, he persisted in his purpose with relentless mind, then the father, Marcus Fabius, said: "Since neither the authority of the Senate has weight with you, nor my age, for whom you are preparing childlessness, nor the valor and nobility of a master of the horse named by yourself, nor prayers, which have often softened an enemy, which appease the wrath of the gods, I appeal to the tribunes of the plebs and call upon the people, and to it—since you flee the judgment of your own army, flee the judgment of the Senate—I offer you a judge who is surely, by himself alone, more powerful and prevails more than your dictatorship. I shall see whether you will yield to an appeal, to which Tullus Hostilius, a Roman king, yielded." From the Curia they go forth into the assembly. Thither, when the dictator had gone up with a few, the master of the horse with the whole throng of the chief men, Papirius ordered him to be brought down from the Rostra to the lower place. The father, following, said: "You do well, in ordering us to be brought down to the place from which even private men might raise their voice." There at first were heard not so much continuous speeches as an altercation; then the voice and indignation of the elder Fabius overbore the din, as he railed at the pride and cruelty of Papirius: he too had been dictator at Rome, and by him no man, not even one of the plebs, not a centurion, not a soldier, had been outraged; Papirius was seeking from a Roman commander, as from the leaders of an enemy, victory and a triumph. How great the difference between the moderation of the ancients and this new pride and cruelty! The dictator Quinctius Cincinnatus, against the consul Lucius Minucius, snatched by him out of a siege, had raged no further than to leave him with the army as lieutenant in place of consul. Marcus Furius Camillus, against Lucius Furius, who, despising his old age and authority, had fought with a most foul issue, had not only at the moment kept his anger in check, that he might write nothing about his colleague otherwise to the people or the Senate, but, when he had returned, had chosen him above all the consular tribunes as the one whom—the option being given by the Senate—he would take from his colleagues as partner of his command. As for the people, indeed, in whose hands the power of all things lay, never had even its anger been more savage against those who by rashness and ignorance had lost armies than to fine them money: a capital trial of a commander for a war ill conducted had to that day befallen no one. Now upon leaders of the Roman people—what was not lawful even against the conquered—rods and axes were threatened, and against victors, men most justly deserving of triumphs. What, pray, would his son have suffered, had he lost the army, had he been routed, put to flight, stripped of his camp? How much further could his anger and violence have gone than to scourge and to kill? How fitting it was that, because of Quintus Fabius, the state should be in gladness, in victory, in thanksgivings and rejoicings, while the man because of whom the shrines of the gods stand open, the altars smoke with sacrifices and are heaped with honor and gifts, was stripped and torn with rods in the sight of the Roman people, gazing upon the Capitol and the citadel and the gods whom he had not in vain called upon in two battles! With what spirit would the army that had conquered under his conduct and auspices bear it? What grief there would be in the Roman camp, what gladness among the enemy! These things, at once chiding, complaining, calling gods and men to witness, and embracing his son, he urged with very many tears.

There stood with Fabius the majesty of the Senate, the favor of the people, the help of the tribunes, the memory of the absent army; on the other side were vaunted the unconquered command of the Roman people, and the discipline of war, and the dictator’s edict ever observed as a divine power, and the Manlian commands, and the love of a son set after the public good: this too Lucius Brutus, the founder of Roman liberty, had once done in the case of his two sons; now fathers, indulgent, and old men, easy in the matter of another’s command despised, as though it were a small thing, made light to the young of the overthrow of military discipline. He, however, would persist in his purpose, and would remit nothing of the just penalty to one who had fought against his edict amid religion confounded and the auspices in doubt. Whether the majesty of command should be everlasting was not in his power: Lucius Papirius would diminish nothing of it; he prayed that the tribunician power, itself inviolable, might not by its intercession violate the Roman command, nor the people, in his case above all when he was dictator, extinguish the force and right of the dictatorship. If it should do so, posterity would in vain accuse, not Lucius Papirius, but the tribunes, but the people’s perverse judgment, when, military discipline once defiled, the soldier should not obey the centurion’s command, nor the centurion the tribune’s, nor the tribune the lieutenant’s, nor the lieutenant the consul’s, nor the master of the horse the dictator’s; when no man should have reverence for men, none for gods; when neither the edicts of commanders nor the auspices should be observed; when soldiers without leave should stray, vagrant, in friendly and in hostile country; when, unmindful of their oath, they should at their own pleasure discharge themselves where they would; when the standards should be deserted and undermanned, men neither assembling at the edict nor distinguishing day from night, nor favorable ground from unfavorable, nor whether by the commander’s order or without it, but should fight, and keep neither standards nor ranks; when warfare, like brigandage, should be blind and haphazard instead of solemn and consecrated. "Of these crimes offer yourselves the defendants for all ages, tribunes of the plebs; expose your own liable heads for the license of Quintus Fabius."

The tribunes, stunned and now more anxious for their own case than for his to whom aid was being sought from them, were freed of their burden by the consent of the Roman people, which turned to prayers and entreaty that the dictator would remit to them the punishment of the master of the horse. The tribunes too, following the matter as it inclined toward prayers, set themselves to begging the dictator that he would grant pardon to human error, pardon to the youth of Quintus Fabius; enough of penalties had he paid. Now the young man himself, now his father Marcus Fabius, forgetting their contention, fell to their knees and besought away the dictator’s wrath. Then the dictator, silence being made, said: "It is well, Quirites; military discipline has conquered, the majesty of command has conquered, which were this day in doubt whether they should after this day be anything at all. Quintus Fabius, who fought against his commander’s edict, is not acquitted of guilt; but, condemned of guilt, he is given as a gift to the Roman people, given as a gift to the tribunician power, which brings him aid by entreaty and not by right. Live, Quintus Fabius, happier in this consent of the state to defend you than in the victory with which a little while ago you exulted; live, having dared a deed for which not even your father, had he stood in the place where Lucius Papirius stood, would have granted you pardon. With me you shall return into favor as you will; to the Roman people, to whom you owe your life, you can render nothing greater than if this day shall have given you lesson enough that you can bear lawful commands in war and in peace." When he had declared that he detained the master of the horse no longer, as he came down from the temple the Senate glad, the people gladder, thronging round and congratulating on this side the master of the horse, on that the dictator, escorted him; and the military command seemed established no less by the peril of Quintus Fabius than by the piteous punishment of the young Manlius. It chanced so to fall out that year that, as often as the dictator withdrew from the army, the enemy in Samnium stirred. But before his eyes was the example of Quintus Fabius to Marcus Valerius the lieutenant, who was in charge of the camp, that he should fear no force of the enemy more than the dictator’s grim anger. And so, when a foraging party, surrounded from ambush, had been cut down on unfavorable ground, it was commonly believed that aid could have been brought them by the lieutenant, had he not shuddered at the grim edicts. That anger too alienated from the dictator the spirits of the soldiers, already incensed before, because he had been implacable toward Quintus Fabius, and had given to the Roman people the pardon he had refused to their own prayers.

After the dictator, having set Lucius Papirius Crassus in charge at Rome and forbidden the master of the horse Quintus Fabius to do anything in his office, returned to the camp, his coming was neither very welcome to the citizens nor brought any terror to the enemy. For on the next day, whether ignorant that the dictator had come, or counting it of little moment whether he were present or absent, they came up in line of battle to the camp. But so great was the weight of that one man, Lucius Papirius, that, had the leader’s counsels been seconded by the soldiers’ goodwill, it was held beyond doubt that the war with the Samnites could have been finished that day; so did he draw up the line, with its ground and its reserves, so did he strengthen it with every art of war: the soldier hung back, and on purpose, that the leader’s praises might be disparaged, the victory was thwarted. More of the Samnites fell, more of the Romans were wounded. The skilled leader perceived what thing stood in the way of victory: that his temper must be tempered, and severity mingled with affability. And so, taking the lieutenants with him, he himself went round the wounded soldiers, putting his head into the tents, and, asking each how he did, commended the care of them by name to the lieutenants and tribunes and prefects. A thing popular in itself he managed so deftly that, by the healing of their bodies, the soldiers’ minds were much sooner reconciled to their commander; nor was anything more effectual for their recovery than that the care was received with a grateful mind. The army restored, when he engaged the enemy, with no doubtful hope in himself and his soldiers he so routed and put the Samnites to flight that that was the last day on which they joined standards with the dictator. Then the victorious army marched wherever the hope of booty led, and ranged over the enemy’s fields, meeting no arms, no force, open or in ambush. Their eagerness was heightened because the dictator had proclaimed all the booty to the soldiers; nor did public anger whet them against the enemy more than private gain. Broken by these disasters, the Samnites sought peace from the dictator; with whom, having bargained that they should give each soldier a garment and a year’s pay, when they were bidden to go to the Senate, they answered that they would follow the dictator, committing their cause to his faith and valor alone. So the army was led back out of Samnium.

The dictator entered the city in triumph; and, when he wished to lay down the dictatorship, by order of the fathers, before he abdicated, he created as consuls Gaius Sulpicius Longus (for the second time) and Quintus Aemilius Cerretanus. The Samnites, the peace not concluded because the terms were still under discussion, carried home from the city a year’s truce; nor was even that faithfully kept; so far were their spirits roused to war once it was announced that Papirius had gone out of office. In the consulship of Gaius Sulpicius and Quintus Aemilius—some annals have Aulius—to the defection of the Samnites a new Apulian war was added. Armies were sent to both. The Samnites fell by lot to Sulpicius, the Apulians to Aemilius. There are those who write that war was not made on the Apulians themselves, but that the allied peoples of that nation were defended from the force and wrongs of the Samnites; but the fortune of the Samnites, who at that time were scarcely warding off war from themselves, makes it the nearer to truth that war was not brought by the Samnites against the Apulians, but that the Romans had war with both nations at once. Yet no memorable thing was done; the Apulian and Samnite territory was laid waste; the enemy was found neither here nor there. At Rome a nocturnal panic so roused the trembling state suddenly from sleep that the Capitol and the citadel and the walls and the gates were full of armed men; and when there had been a running to arms and a shouting in every quarter, at first light neither author nor cause of the panic appeared. In the same year there was a trial of the Tusculans before the people on the proposal of Flavius. Marcus Flavius, a tribune of the plebs, proposed to the people that the Tusculans be punished, because by their help and counsel the Veliterni and Privernates had made war on the Roman people. The Tusculan people came to Rome with their wives and children. That multitude, in changed garb and in the guise of accused men, went round the tribes, throwing themselves at the knees of all; and so pity availed more to obtain pardon of the penalty than the case to clear them of the charge. All the tribes rejected the law except the Pollian: the Pollian’s vote was that the grown men be scourged and put to death, their wives and children sold under the spear by the law of war. It is agreed that the memory of that anger against the authors of so cruel a penalty remained with the Tusculans down to our fathers’ time, and that hardly any candidate of the Pollian tribe was wont to carry the Papirian.

In the following year, in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Lucius Fulvius, Aulus Cornelius Arvina as dictator and Marcus Fabius Ambustus as master of the horse, for fear of a graver war in Samnium—for the youth was said to have been hired for pay from the neighboring peoples—a stricter levy being held, led an excellent army against the Samnites. The camp was pitched in hostile country so carelessly, as though the enemy were far off, when suddenly the legions of the Samnites came up with such ferocity that they brought their rampart-work right up to the Roman outpost. Night was now coming on; this hindered them from assailing the defenses; nor did they conceal that they would do it at daybreak on the morrow. The dictator, when he saw the struggle nearer than he had hoped, that there might be no room for loss to the soldiers’ valor, leaving many fires lit to baffle the enemy’s view, led the legions out in silence; nor could he yet escape notice, by reason of the nearness of the camps. The cavalry at once pursued and so pressed upon the column that, until it should grow light, they held off from battle; nor did even the foot forces leave the camp before light. The cavalry, daring at last by daylight to charge the enemy, by harrying the rearmost and pressing them on ground unfavorable for passage, detained the column. Meanwhile the foot came up with the horse, and now with all his forces the Samnite pressed. Then the dictator, since he could not advance without great loss, ordered the very ground on which he had halted to be marked out for a camp. But that, with the cavalry poured round on every side, could not be done—that the rampart be sought and the work begun. And so, when he saw that there was means neither of going nor of staying, he drew up his line, the baggage being removed from the column. The enemy too draw up against him, equal in spirits and in strength. And it had most of all raised their spirits that, not knowing the ground had been yielded to its unfavorableness and not to the enemy, they had followed—themselves the terrible ones—men as if fleeing and afraid. This for some while made the fight even, although the Samnite had long been unused to bear the shout of a Roman army; and, by heaven, that day, from the third hour of the day to the eighth, the contest is said to have stood so doubtful that neither was the shout, raised once at the first onset, repeated, nor were the standards moved forward from their place or carried back, nor was there a falling-back on any side. Each man, planted in his own footing, pressing with his shield, fought without drawing breath and without looking back; an even din and the same steady stress of the fight looked toward the last exhaustion or toward night. Now men’s strength was failing them, now the steel its force, now the leaders their counsels, when suddenly the Samnite horsemen, when one squadron, carried farther forward, had learned that the Romans’ baggage stood at a distance from the armed men, without guard, without rampart, in their greed for booty made an onset upon it. When a trembling messenger brought this to the dictator, "Only let them," said he, "entangle themselves with the booty." Then man after man cried out that the soldiers’ fortunes were being plundered and carried off on every side. Then, the master of the horse being summoned, "Do you see," said he, "Marcus Fabius, that the fight has been given up by the enemy’s horse? They are stuck fast, hampered by our baggage. Attack them—as befalls every multitude amid plundering—scattered: few you will find seated on their horses, few with steel in hand; and while they load their horses with booty, cut them down unarmed, and make the booty a bloody one for them. The legions and the infantry-fight shall be my care; yours be the glory of the horse."

The line of horse, as well-arrayed as any can be, charging upon the scattered and hampered enemy, fills all with slaughter. Amid the baggage suddenly cast down, lying in the way of the feet of fleeing and panic-stricken horses, masters of neither fight nor flight, they are cut down. Then, the enemy’s cavalry being all but destroyed, Marcus Fabius, his wings wheeled a little about, assails the infantry line from the rear. A new shout falling from that quarter both struck terror into the spirits of the Samnites, and the dictator, when he saw the enemy’s front-rank men looking back, the standards thrown into confusion, and the line wavering, then began to call upon, then to exhort the soldiers, summoning the tribunes and the chief men of the ranks by name to renew the fight with him. With a fresh shout the standards are borne forward, and the further they advanced, the more and more confounded they saw the enemy. The horse itself was now in sight of the front ranks; and Cornelius, looking back to the maniples of the soldiers, with his hand and with his voice, so far as he could, pointed out that he discerned the banners and the bucklers of his own horsemen. When this was at once heard and seen, so suddenly were they forgetful of the toil borne through almost a whole day, and of their wounds, that, no otherwise than if just then, fresh from camp, they had received the signal of battle, they hurled themselves upon the enemy. Nor could the Samnite any longer endure the terror of the horse and the violence of the foot; part were cut down in the midst, part scattered in flight. The foot cut down those who stood fast and were surrounded; by the horse a slaughter was made of the fleeing, among whom the commander himself fell. This battle at last so broke the Samnite cause that in all their councils they murmured that it was no wonder at all if in an impious war, undertaken against the treaty, with the gods deservedly more hostile than men, they fared in nothing prosperously: that war must be expiated and atoned for at a great price; the only question was whether they should furnish the punishment with the blood of a guilty few or of all the guiltless. And some now dared to name the authors of the arms. One name above all was heard by the consent of the shouters, that of Brutulus Papius; he was a man noble and powerful, beyond doubt the breaker of the late truce. About him the praetors, compelled to bring the matter forward, made a decree that Brutulus Papius be given up to the Romans, and that with him all the Roman booty and the captives be sent to Rome, and that whatever had been demanded back through the fetials under the treaty be restored according to right and religion. The fetials were sent to Rome, as they had voted, and the lifeless body of Brutulus; for he, by a voluntary death, had withdrawn himself from disgrace and punishment. It was resolved that his goods too be given up with the body. Yet none of those things, except the captives and whatever of the booty was recognized, was accepted; the surrender of the rest was void. The dictator triumphed by decree of the Senate.

Some authorities say that this war was waged by the consuls, and that they triumphed over the Samnites; that Fabius too advanced into Apulia and drove great booties thence. Nor is there disagreement that the dictator that year was Aulus Cornelius; the doubt is whether he was created for the conduct of the war, or that there might be one to give the signal for starting the four-horse chariots at the Roman Games—because Lucius Plautius the praetor chanced to be caught by a grave illness—and that, having discharged that ministry of an office by no means worth recording, he laid down the dictatorship. Nor is it easy to prefer one fact, or one authority, to another. I believe that the record has been corrupted by funeral eulogies and by false titles upon the images, while families draw to themselves, each by a lying invention, the fame of deeds done and of honors held; and thence, surely, both the achievements of individuals and the public monuments of events are thrown into confusion. Nor is there extant any writer contemporary with those times, on whose authority, certain enough, one might stand.