There follows upon this year the Caudine Peace, famous for the Roman disaster, in the consulship of Titus Veturius Calvinus and Spurius Postumius. The Samnites that year had as their commander Gaius Pontius, son of Herennius, sprung from a father by far the most prudent of men, himself foremost as a warrior and a general. When the envoys who had been sent to make restitution came back with the peace unconcluded, he said: "Do not think that nothing has been accomplished by this embassy: whatever there was of the anger of heaven against us for the broken treaty has now been expiated. I know full well that, to whatever gods it was pleasing that we should be driven to the necessity of surrendering the property demanded back from us under the treaty, to those same gods it was not pleasing that our atonement for the treaty should be so haughtily spurned by the Romans. For what more could be done to appease the gods and soften men than what we have done? The enemy’s goods, taken as plunder, which by the law of war seemed ours, we gave back; the authors of the war, since we could not surrender them living, we surrendered now that they had paid their debt to fate; their property, that no part of the taint of their guilt might remain with us, we carried to Rome. What more do I owe you, Roman—what to the treaty, what to the gods who witnessed the treaty? Whom shall I bring you as judge of your anger, whom of my own sufferings? I shun no one, neither people nor private man. But if nothing of human right is left to the powerless against the more powerful, yet I will take refuge with the gods who avenge intolerable arrogance, and I will pray them to turn their wrath upon those whom neither the giving back of their own property nor the heaping up of what is another’s can satisfy—men whose savagery neither the death of the guilty, nor the surrender of lifeless bodies, nor the goods that follow their owner into surrender can glut, who cannot be appeased unless we give them our blood to drink and our flesh to tear. The war is just, Samnites, for those to whom it is necessary, and the arms are holy for those to whom no hope is left save in arms. Therefore, since it is of the greatest moment in human affairs whether men do their work with the gods propitious or adverse, be assured that your former wars you waged against the gods more than against men; this war that now hangs over you, you shall wage with the gods themselves for leaders."

Having so prophesied—words no more welcome than they were true—he led out his army and pitched camp around Caudium as secretly as he could. From there he sent to Calatia, where he now heard that the Roman consuls and their camp lay, ten soldiers in the dress of shepherds, bidding them, scattered apart in different directions, pasture their flocks here and there not far from the Roman outposts; and when they fell in with foragers, all were to keep to one same tale—that the legions of the Samnites were in Apulia, were besieging Luceria with all their forces, and were near to taking it by storm. This rumor, already spread abroad of set purpose, had reached the Romans; but the captives strengthened their belief in it, above all because the story agreed among them all. There was no doubt that the Roman would carry aid to the Lucerians, good and faithful allies, and at the same time lest all Apulia should fall away in its present terror; the only deliberation was by what route they should go. Two roads led to Luceria: the one along the shore of the Adriatic, open and exposed, but, in the measure that it was safer, by just so much the longer; the other through the Caudine Forks, the shorter—but the place is formed thus: there are two deep, narrow, wooded passes, joined to one another by unbroken mountains on either hand. Between them lies a plain fairly wide, grassy and well-watered, shut in upon the middle, through whose midst the road runs; but before you come to it, the first defiles must be entered, and you must either go back by the same way by which you found your way in, or, if you press on forward, escape by another pass, narrower and more difficult. When the Romans had led their column down into that plain by the one road, through a sunken gorge, and were pressing straight on to the other defile, they found it barred by a mass thrown in their way, a felling of trees and huge boulders. When the enemy’s treachery stood revealed, a garrison too is descried on the crest of the pass. Hurried back from there the way they had come, they go to seek that road again; this too they find closed with its own barrier and with armed men. Then they halt their march at no man’s order, and a stupor seizes the minds of all, and a kind of strange numbness their limbs; and gazing one upon another—since each thought the other more master of his wits and judgment—they stay long motionless and silent. Then, when they saw the consuls’ tents being raised and certain men making ready the tools for the work, although they perceived that to fortify, in a case so desperate and with all hope taken from them, would be a mockery, yet, lest they should add fault to their misfortunes, each of his own accord, with none urging or commanding, turning to the labor of entrenchment, they ringed a camp with a rampart hard by the water—themselves, with pitiable confession, making sport of their own toil and labor as wasted, besides what the enemy hurled at them in scorn. To the consuls, downcast, not even calling a council—since there was place neither for counsel nor for help—the lieutenants and the tribunes gather of their own accord; and the soldiers, turning toward the headquarters, demand of their leaders the aid that scarcely the immortal gods could bring.

Lamenting rather than deliberating, night overtook them, while each man, after his own temper, raised his cry: one, "Through the barriers of the roads," another, "Over the mountain heights, through the woods, wherever arms can be borne, let us go; only let it be granted us to reach the enemy, whom now for nearly thirty years we have been conquering: all will be level and smooth for a Roman fighting against a treacherous Samnite"; another, "Whither, or by what way, shall we go? Are we making ready to heave the mountains from their seat? While these ridges hang over us, by what road will you come at the enemy? Armed or unarmed, brave or cowardly, alike we are all captured and conquered; the foe will not so much as offer us the steel for an honorable death; sitting still, he will finish the war." With such talk turn and turn about, heedless alike of food and of rest, the night was passed away. Not even to the Samnites, in a case so glad, was counsel at once at hand; and so they resolve, all of them, to consult Herennius Pontius, the commander’s father, by letter. He was now heavy with years and had withdrawn not only from military but from civil duties as well; yet in his frail body the force of his mind and judgment was still in its vigor. When he heard that the Roman armies were shut in at the Caudine Forks between the two passes, and was consulted by his son’s messenger, he gave it as his judgment that they should all be sent away thence, as soon as might be, unharmed. When that opinion was spurned, and the same messenger, coming back again, consulted him a second time, he gave it as his judgment that they should all, to the last man, be put to death. When answers so discordant the one with the other had been given, as from a double-tongued oracle, although the son himself was among the first now to think that his father’s mind too had grown old along with his enfeebled body, nevertheless he was overborne by the general wish to summon the old man himself to the council. Nor did the old man, they say, make any difficulty, but was carried in a wagon to the camp, and, called into the council, spoke in such a sort that he changed nothing of his opinion, but only added the reasons: by his first counsel, which he reckoned the best, he was establishing, through an immense benefit, a lasting peace and friendship with a most powerful people; by his second, he was putting war off for many an age, in which, those two armies lost, the Roman state would not easily recover its strength; a third counsel there was none. When his son and the other chief men pressed him by asking what if a middle course of counsel were taken—that they be both let go unhurt and, as men conquered by the law of war, have terms imposed upon them—"That counsel of yours," said he, "is of the kind that neither makes friends nor takes enemies away. Only keep alive the men whom you will have galled with disgrace; that is the Roman race, which, beaten, knows not how to rest. Whatever this present necessity shall have branded into them will live forever in their breasts, nor will it let them rest until they have exacted of you a manifold revenge." Neither opinion being accepted, Herennius was carried home again from the camp.

And in the Roman camp, when many attempts to break out had been made in vain and there was now a lack of all things, beaten by necessity they send envoys, who should first sue for an equal peace, and, if they could not obtain peace, should challenge to battle. Then Pontius answered that the war was finished; and, since not even conquered and captive did they know how to own their fortune, he would send them under the yoke, unarmed, with a single garment apiece; the other conditions of the peace should be equal for vanquished and victors alike: if they would withdraw from the territory of the Samnites and lead away their colonies, the Roman and the Samnite should thenceforth live each under his own laws, in an equal treaty; on these conditions he was ready to strike a treaty with the consuls; if any of these terms displeased them, he forbade the envoys to come back to him. When this embassy was reported, so great a groan from all at once arose, and so deep a sadness came over them, that they would not have seemed to take it more heavily had word been brought that they must all meet death in that place. When there had been a long silence, and the consuls could open their lips neither for a treaty so shameful nor against a treaty so necessary, Lucius Lentulus, who was then first among the lieutenants in valor and in honors, said: "My father, consuls, I have often heard relate that he alone, upon the Capitol, was not for the senate’s ransoming the state from the Gauls with gold, seeing that they were not shut in by ditch and rampart by an enemy most slothful at siegeworks and entrenching, and could sally out, if not without great peril, yet without certain destruction. But if, as it was open to them to run down armed from the Capitol upon the foe—the way in which the besieged have often broken out upon their besiegers—so to us there were but the chance of crossing swords with the enemy on ground level or unlevel, then the temper bred in me from my father would not fail me in the giving of counsel. I confess indeed that death for one’s country is a glorious thing, and I am ready either to devote myself for the Roman people and the legions, or to hurl myself into the midst of the enemy; but here I behold my country, here whatever there is of Roman legions, which, unless they would rush upon death for their own sakes, what have they that by their death they may save? The roofs of the city, some one will say, and the walls, and that throng by which the city is peopled. But no, by Hercules—all those are betrayed, not saved, by the destruction of this army. For who shall guard them? The unwarlike, forsooth, and unarmed multitude. Just as much, by Hercules, as it defended them from the onset of the Gauls. Or will they call from Veii for an army and Camillus to lead it? Here are all our hopes and resources, which by saving we save our country; by giving it up to the slaughter, we forsake and betray our country. But the surrender is foul and ignominious. Yet such is the love of country that we should save her as much by our disgrace, if need be, as by our death. Therefore let this indignity, however great, be undergone, and let us yield to the necessity which not even the gods overcome. Go, consuls, redeem with arms the state which your forefathers redeemed with gold."

The consuls, having set out to a conference with Pontius, when the victor would treat of a treaty, said that a treaty could not be made without the people’s command, nor without the fetials and the other solemn ceremony. And so the Caudine Peace was made not, as is commonly believed and as Claudius too writes, by a treaty, but by a sponsion. For what need were there either of sureties or of hostages in a treaty, where the business is transacted by the imprecation, "By whatsoever people it shall come to pass that the terms here pronounced be not abided by, may Jupiter so smite that people as the fetials smite the swine"? The consuls, the lieutenants, the quaestors, and the military tribunes gave the pledge, and the names of all who pledged are extant—whereas, had the matter been done by treaty, none would be extant save those of the two fetials. And on account of the necessary postponement of the treaty, six hundred horsemen besides were demanded as hostages, who should answer with their lives if the compact were not kept. A time was then appointed for the surrender of the hostages and the sending away of the disarmed army. The consuls’ coming renewed the grief in the camp, so that men scarcely kept their hands off those by whose rashness they had been brought into that place, by whose cowardice they would go away from it more foully than they had come: they had had no guide of the ground, no scout; like beasts they had been sent blind into a pit. They look one upon another; they gaze at the arms soon to be given up, and the right hands that would be unarmed, and the bodies that would lie at the enemy’s mercy; they set before their own eyes the hostile yoke, and the victor’s mockeries, and his haughty looks, and their march unarmed through armed men, and then the wretched road of that shameful column through the cities of their allies, and the homecoming into their fatherland, to their parents, whither they themselves and their forefathers had so often come in triumph: they alone were conquered without a wound, without the sword, without a line of battle; to them it had not been granted to draw their swords, nor to join hand with the foe; in vain had arms, in vain strength, in vain spirit been given them. While they raged at this, the fatal hour of their disgrace came on, destined to make all things harsher in the suffering than they had forecast in their minds. First of all, with a single garment apiece, unarmed, they are bidden go forth beyond the rampart; and first the hostages are handed over and led off into custody. Then the lictors are bidden withdraw from the consuls, and the consuls’ war-cloaks are stripped away; and this wrought so great a pity among those who a little before had been cursing them and crying that they should be given up and torn to pieces, that each, forgetting his own condition, turned his eyes away from that defacement of so great a majesty as from a thing unspeakable to look upon.

The consuls first, well-nigh half-naked, were sent under the yoke; then, as each man was nearest in rank, so was he set out to the disgrace; then, one after another, the several legions. Around them stood the enemy in arms, reviling and mocking; swords too were leveled at many, and some were wounded and slain if their looks, made fiercer by the indignity of the thing, had offended the victor. So they were led under the yoke, and—what was almost the heavier—under the eyes of the enemy; and when they had got clear of the pass, though they seemed like men drawn up from the underworld, then first beholding the light, yet the very light, as they looked upon that disfigured column, was sadder to them than any death. And so, though they might have reached Capua before nightfall, uncertain of their allies’ loyalty and held back by shame, they flung their bodies down upon the ground all along the road, in want of everything, not far from Capua. When this was reported at Capua, a just pity for their allies overcame the pride inborn in the Campanians. Forthwith they kindly send to the consuls their own insignia—the fasces, the lictors—and to the soldiers arms, horses, clothing, and provisions; and as they came toward Capua the whole senate and people went out to meet them, and discharged every duty of hospitality, private and public. Yet to those men neither the courtesy of their allies, nor their kindly looks, nor their words of comfort could draw out so much as speech, nor even bring them to lift up their eyes or look back upon the friends who consoled them; so far did a kind of shame, over and above their grief, drive them to flee from converse and the gatherings of men. On the next day, when the young nobles who had been sent from Capua to escort them on their way as far as the Campanian border had come back, and, summoned into the senate-house, in answer to their elders’ questions reported that the men had seemed to them far sadder and more downcast in spirit; that the column had marched so silent and well-nigh dumb; that the old Roman temper lay prostrate, and their spirits had been carried off together with their arms; that they returned no greeting, gave no answer to those who saluted them, and that not a man could open his lips for fear, as though they still bore upon their necks the yoke under which they had been sent; that the Samnites held a victory not glorious only but lasting, for they had taken not Rome, as the Gauls before, but—what was far more warlike—the Roman valor and ferocity,—

While these things were being said and heard, and the Roman name was well-nigh bewailed as lost in the council of faithful allies, Aulus Calavius, son of Ovius, a man famous in birth and in deeds, and then venerable too in years, is reported to have said that the matter stood far otherwise: that obstinate silence, those eyes fixed upon the ground, those ears deaf to every comfort, and that shame at looking on the light, were the tokens of a mind heaving up from its depths a vast mass of wrath; either he knew not the Roman temper, or that silence would soon stir up among the Samnites lamentable outcries and groans, and the memory of the Caudine Peace would be by far the more grievous to the Samnites than to the Romans; since each side would carry its own spirit wheresoever they should meet, but the Caudine passes would not be everywhere for the Samnites. By now at Rome too their own disgraceful disaster was known. They heard first that the armies were besieged; then came a message sadder than the danger—of the ignominious peace. At the rumor of the siege a levy had begun to be held; then the array of reinforcements was dismissed, after they learned that the surrender had been made so foully; and at once, without any public authority, men agreed of one mind upon every form of mourning. The shops around the Forum were shut, and a cessation of business (iustitium) in the Forum began of itself before it was proclaimed; the broad stripes and the gold rings were laid aside; the citizenry was well-nigh sadder than the army itself, and was angry not only with the leaders and the authors and sureties of the peace, but hated even the guiltless soldiers, and said they should not be received in the city or beneath their roofs. But this ferment of feeling was broken by the coming of the army, pitiable even to the angry. For not as men returning home unhoped-for and unharmed, but in the garb and with the look of captives, they entered the city late in the day, and each so hid himself in his own house that on the next day and the days after not one of them would look upon the Forum or the public ways. The consuls, shut up in private, did nothing in their office save what was wrung from them by a decree of the senate, that they should name a dictator to hold the elections. They named Quintus Fabius Ambustus, and Publius Aelius Paetus master of the horse; and these being faultily created, there were substituted in their stead Marcus Aemilius Papus as dictator and Lucius Valerius Flaccus as master of the horse. Nor were the elections held by them; and because the people had grown weary of all that year’s magistrates, the matter came back to an interregnum. The interreges were Quintus Fabius Maximus and Marcus Valerius Corvus. The latter created as consuls Quintus Publilius Philo and Lucius Papirius Cursor (for the second time), by the unhesitating consent of the state, since no leaders at that season were more renowned.

On the very day they were elected—for so it had pleased the fathers—they entered on their magistracy; and when the customary decrees of the senate had been gone through, they brought forward the matter of the Caudine Peace. And Publilius, in whose hands the fasces were, said: "Speak, Spurius Postumius." He, rising, with that same look with which he had been sent under the yoke, said: "I am not unaware, consuls, that I have been called up to speak first not for honor but for disgrace, and bidden to speak not as a senator but as a defendant, answerable alike for an unhappy war and an ignominious peace. Yet I—since you have brought forward the matter neither of our guilt nor of our punishment—will pass over a defense, which would be no very hard thing before men not ignorant of the fortunes and necessities of mankind, and will run briefly through my opinion on the matter you have proposed; which opinion shall be a witness whether I spared myself or your legions when I bound myself by a sponsion, base it may be or necessary; by which sponsion, nevertheless, since it was made without the people’s command, the Roman people is not bound, nor is anything owed to the Samnites out of it save our own persons. Let us be given up by the fetials, stripped and bound; let us release the people from their religious obligation, if by any we have bound them, that nothing divine or human may stand in the way of a just and pious war’s being begun anew. Meanwhile let it be the consuls’ pleasure to enroll, arm, and lead out an army, and not to enter the enemy’s borders before all that is due touching our surrender has been duly performed. You, immortal gods, I pray and beseech: if it was not your pleasure that the consuls Spurius Postumius and Titus Veturius should wage war prosperously with the Samnites, yet hold it enough to have seen us sent under the yoke, to have seen us bound by an infamous sponsion, to see us given up to the enemy naked and in chains, taking upon our own heads all the wrath of the foe; and grant that the new consuls and the Roman legions may so wage war with the Samnite as all wars were waged before us consuls." When he had said this, so great an admiration and pity for the man came over them all at once that now they could scarce believe him the same Spurius Postumius who had been the author of so foul a peace, now they pitied that such a man should suffer a singular punishment among the enemy for their wrath at the peace undone. When all, attending him with nothing but praises, were going over to his opinion on foot, an intercession was for a little while attempted by Lucius Livius and Quintus Maelius, tribunes of the plebs, who said that neither was the people released from religion by their surrender, unless all things were restored to the Samnites as they had been at Caudium, nor had they themselves earned any punishment for having, by pledging the peace, saved the army of the Roman people, nor, in the end, since they were sacrosanct, could they be given up to the enemy or violated.

Then Postumius said: "Meanwhile give up us profane men, whom you may give up without offense to religion; you will give up afterward those sacrosanct men too, as soon as they shall have gone out of office; but, if you will hear me, before they are given up let them be flogged with rods here in the comitium, that they may have this much, as it were, the interest of a postponed punishment. For as to their denying that the people is released from religion by our surrender, who is so ignorant of the fetial law as not to know that they say this rather to keep from being given up themselves than because the matter stands so? Nor do I deny, conscript fathers, that sponsions as well as treaties are sacred among those men among whom human faith is reverenced side by side with the religion of the gods; but I deny that anything can be ratified, without the people’s command, that should bind the people. Or, had the Samnites with the same arrogance with which they wrung that sponsion from us compelled us to pronounce the lawful words of men surrendering their cities, would you tribunes say that the Roman people had been surrendered, and that this city, the temples, the shrines, the borders, the waters, were the Samnites’? I leave the surrender aside, since it is the sponsion that is in question: what, pray, if we had pledged that the Roman people would abandon this city? would burn it? would have no magistrates, no senate, no laws? would be under kings? ’The gods send better,’ you say. And yet the indignity of the things lessens not the bond of the sponsion; if there is anything in which the people can be bound, it can be bound in all. Nor does even this matter—a thing that perhaps moves some—whether a consul, or a dictator, or a praetor gave the pledge. And this the Samnites themselves judged, for whom it was not enough that the consuls should pledge, but they compelled the lieutenants, the quaestors, and the military tribunes to pledge besides. Let no one now ask of me why I pledged, since it was neither the consul’s right, nor could I pledge them a peace which was not mine to give, nor pledge for you who had given no charge. Nothing at Caudium, conscript fathers, was done by human counsels; the immortal gods took the wits from your commanders and from the enemy’s alike. We took not care enough in the war, and they ruined ill an ill-won victory, while they scarce trust the very ground on which they conquered, while they hasten on any terms to strip of their arms men born for arms. Had they had a sound mind, was it hard for them, while they send home for old men to take counsel, to send envoys to Rome? to treat with the senate, with the people, of peace and a treaty? It was a three days’ journey for men unencumbered; meanwhile the matter would have rested under a truce, until envoys from Rome should bring them either a sure victory or peace. That, in the end, would have been a sponsion which we had pledged by the people’s command. But neither would you have ratified it, nor would we have pledged it; nor was it lawful that the issue of the affair should be any other than that they should be mocked, all in vain, by a dream gladder than their minds could grasp, and that the same fortune which had hampered our army should set it free, that a vain victory should be made vainer by a fruitless peace, and that a sponsion should be interposed which bound none but the pledger. For what was transacted with you, conscript fathers, what with the Roman people? Who can call you to account, who can say that he was deceived by you? An enemy, or a citizen? To the enemy you pledged nothing; you bade no citizen pledge on your behalf. Therefore you have nothing to do either with us, to whom you gave no charge, nor with the Samnites, with whom you transacted nothing. To the Samnites we are sureties, debtors rich enough in that which is our own, in that which we can render—our bodies and our souls; against these let them rage, against these whet their steel and their wrath. As for the tribunes, take counsel whether their surrender can be made at once or be put off to another day; meanwhile let us, Titus Veturius and the rest of you, offer up these worthless lives in payment of the sponsion, and by our punishment set free the arms of Rome."

The conscript fathers were moved both by the cause and by its author—and not the rest only, but the tribunes of the plebs too, so far that they said they would be at the senate’s disposal. They straightway abdicated their magistracy and were handed over to the fetials to be led, with the others, to Caudium. When this decree of the senate had been passed, a kind of light seemed to have dawned upon the state. Postumius was on every tongue; they bore him to the skies with praises; they set him level with the self-devotion of the consul Publius Decius, with other shining deeds: by his counsel and his agency the state had emerged from a peace that bound it; he was offering himself to torments and to the enemy’s wrath, an expiation on behalf of the Roman people. All men look to arms and to war: would there ever come a day when it might be granted to close, armed, with the Samnite? In a state burning with wrath and hatred the levy was made up almost wholly of volunteers. New legions, re-enrolled out of the same soldiery, were led to Caudium. The fetials went before; and when they had reached the gate, they bid the sponsors of the peace be stripped of their garments and their hands bound behind their backs. When the attendant, out of respect for Postumius’s dignity, was binding him loosely, "Why do you not," said he, "draw the thong tight, that the surrender may be made in due form?" Then, when they had come into the assembly of the Samnites and before the tribunal of Pontius, Aulus Cornelius Arvina, a fetial, spoke thus: "Inasmuch as these men, without the command of the Roman people of the Quirites, pledged that a treaty should be struck, and on that account have wrought wrong, that the Roman people may be loosed from impious guilt I give up these men to you." As the fetial said this, Postumius struck him on the thigh with his knee, as hard as ever he could, and cried in a clear voice that he himself was now a citizen of the Samnites, and that this man, an envoy of the fetials, had been violated by him against the law of nations—so much the more justly would the Romans wage their war.

Then Pontius said: "Neither will I accept that surrender, nor will the Samnites hold it ratified. Why do you not, Spurius Postumius, if you believe there are gods, either undo all, or stand by your compact? The Samnite people is owed all those whom it had in its power, or a peace in their stead. But why do I appeal to you, who restore yourself, a captive, to the victor with what faith you may? It is the Roman people I appeal to; which, if it repents of the sponsion made at the Caudine Forks, let it set the legions back within the pass where they were hemmed in. Let no man have deceived any; let all be as though undone; let them take back the arms they surrendered by the compact; let them return into their own camp; let them have whatever they had the day before they came to the conference; then let war and bold counsels find favor, then let the sponsion and the peace be cast aside. With that fortune, in those places which we held before peace was named, let us wage the war; let the Roman people not blame the consuls’ sponsion, nor we the faith of the Roman people. Will a pretext never fail you why, beaten, you should not abide by your compact? You gave hostages to Porsenna; you spirited them away by stealth. You ransomed your city from the Gauls with gold; in the very taking of the gold they were cut down. You made peace with us on condition we restore your captured legions; that peace you make void—and always you set some show of right upon your fraud. Does the Roman people not approve of legions saved by an ignominious peace? Let it keep its peace, and give the captured legions back to the victor; this had been worthy of your good faith, of treaties, of the fetial rites. But that you should keep what you sought by the compact—so many citizens safe—and I should not keep the peace which I bargained for by sending these men back to you: is this, Aulus Cornelius, is this, you fetials, the law you lay down for the nations? For my part I neither accept those whom you make a show of surrendering, nor account them surrendered, nor hinder them from returning into a state bound by a sponsion now forfeit, with all the gods, whose divinity is mocked, in wrath. Wage war, since Spurius Postumius has but now struck a fetial envoy with his knee. So the gods will believe that Postumius is a Samnite citizen and not a Roman, and that a Roman envoy has been violated by a Samnite, and that therefore a just war has been undertaken by you against us. That men should not blush to bring such mockeries of religion into the light, and that old men, men of consular rank, should hunt out shifts scarce worthy of children for the breaking of their faith! Go, lictor, take the bonds from the Romans; let no man stay them from departing when they please." And they indeed—their public faith perhaps, their own assuredly discharged—returned unharmed from Caudium into the Roman camp.

The Samnites, seeing that in place of their arrogant peace a most hostile war had been reborn, had all that thereafter befell not in their minds only but well-nigh before their eyes; and too late and in vain did they praise old Pontius’s two counsels, between which, slipping into the middle course, they had bartered the possession of victory for an uncertain peace; and that, the occasion of both kindness and injury thrown away, they would now fight with men whom they might have removed forever, either as enemies or made into friends. So far had men’s tempers shifted after the Caudine Peace, though as yet no battle had turned the balance of strength, that the surrender made Postumius more renowned among the Romans than the bloodless victory made Pontius among the Samnites, and the Romans counted the mere power to wage war a victory assured, while the Samnites believed that the Roman had at one stroke both renewed the war and won it. Meanwhile the Satricans went over to the Samnites, and the colony of Fregellae was seized by night at the unlooked-for coming of the Samnites—it is well agreed that the Satricans too were with them. Thereafter a mutual fear held both sides quiet until daybreak; the dawn was the beginning of the fight, which for a while the Fregellans held even—both because they fought for altar and hearth, and because from the rooftops the unwarlike multitude lent its aid—until treachery turned the issue: for they suffered the herald’s voice to be heard, that whoever laid down his arms should depart unharmed. That hope unstrung their spirits from the struggle, and on every side they began to throw down their arms. The more stubborn part, in arms, broke out through the rear gate, and their boldness proved safer for them than their incautious readiness to believe proved for the rest, whom the Samnites ringed with fire and burned alive, as they called in vain upon the gods and upon good faith. The consuls, having divided the provinces between them, Papirius makes for Apulia and Luceria, where the Roman knights given as hostages at Caudium were kept under guard; Publilius halted in Samnium over against the Caudine legions. This drew the Samnites’ minds two ways, since they durst neither go to Luceria, lest the enemy press upon their rear, nor stay, lest Luceria be lost meanwhile. It seemed best to commit the matter to fortune and have the contest out with Publilius; and so they led their forces out into line of battle.

Against these, when the consul Publilius was about to fight, thinking the soldiers should first be addressed, he ordered an assembly to be called; but, just as men had run together to the headquarters with vast eagerness, so, for the clamor of those demanding battle, no exhortation of the commander was heard; each man’s own spirit, mindful of the disgrace, was there to exhort him. They go, then, into battle, urging on the standard-bearers; and, that there might be no delay at the encounter in hurling javelins and then drawing swords, they fling their javelins away as if a signal for it had been given, and with drawn swords charge at a run upon the foe. There was in that fight nothing of a general’s art, in posting the ranks or the reserves; military wrath drove all with well-nigh frenzied onset. And so the enemy were not only routed but, not daring even to use their own camp to hinder their flight, made scattered for Apulia; yet Luceria was reached by a column forced once more into one. The same wrath that had carried the Romans through the middle of the enemy’s line carried them into the camp as well; there more blood was shed in butchery than in the battle, and the greater part of the booty was spoiled by their rage. The other army, with the consul Papirius, had come by the coast roads to Arpi, all the way through country at peace—more from the wrongs and hatred of the Samnites than from any kindness of the Roman people; for the Samnites, dwelling in those days in the mountains village by village, used to lay waste the lowland and seaboard places, despising their softer tillers and, as commonly falls out, being themselves mountaineers and rustics of a kind like to their dwellings. Had that region been faithful to the Samnites, either the Roman army could not have reached Arpi, or, with a dearth of all things lying between, it would have cut them off from supplies and worn them to nothing. Even as it was, those who set out from there to Luceria, besiegers and besieged alike, were harried by want: everything was furnished the Romans from Arpi, yet so scantily that, while the foot-soldier was busy with outposts and watches and the work, the horseman carried grain in little sacks into the camp from Arpi, and now and then, falling in with the enemy, was forced to fling the grain from his horse and fight. To the besieged, before the other consul came up with his victorious army, both supplies had been brought in from the Samnite mountains and reinforcements let in. The coming of Publilius made all things straiter, for, handing over the siege to his colleague’s charge and free himself, he had made all the country hostile to the enemy’s supplies. And so, since there was no hope that the besieged would bear their want any longer, the Samnites who had their camp at Luceria were forced, drawing their strength together from every side, to join standards with Papirius.

At this time, while both sides were making ready for battle, Tarentine envoys came between, charging the Samnites and Romans to give over the war: against whichever side it should rest that they did not part from their arms, they themselves would fight on behalf of the other. Papirius, having heard this embassy, as though moved by their words, answered that he would confer with his colleague; and, sending for him, when he had spent all the interval in preparing for battle and had conferred with him on a matter past doubt, he displayed the signal for fight. While the consuls were performing the divine and human rites that are wont when battle must be joined, the Tarentine envoys came to meet them, awaiting their answer; to whom Papirius said: "The keeper of the chickens reports, men of Tarentum, that the auspices are favorable; the offering, besides, has been most happily accepted. With the gods, as you see, for our authors, we go forth to the business." Then he bade the standards be advanced and led out his forces, rebuking that emptiest of nations, which—unable to manage its own affairs for its quarrels and discords at home—thought it fair to set others a measure of peace and war. On the other side the Samnites, since they had let fall all care of war—either because they truly desired peace, or because it served them to feign it, to win the Tarentines to their side—when of a sudden they beheld the Romans drawn up for battle, cried out that they abode by the Tarentines’ authority, and would neither go down into the line nor bear arms beyond the rampart; deceived, they would rather suffer whatever chance might bring than be seen to have spurned the Tarentines, the makers of peace. The consuls say they accept the omen, and pray the enemy may keep that mind, so as not to defend even the rampart. Then, dividing their forces between them, they come up to the enemy’s works, and, falling on at once from every side, while part fill the ditches and part tear up the rampart and topple it into the ditches—and not their inborn valor only but wrath as well goaded spirits galled by disgrace—they burst into the camp; and each man for himself, crying that these were not the Forks, nor Caudium, nor pathless passes, where treachery had haughtily mastered a blunder, but Roman valor, which neither rampart nor ditch could keep off, cuts down alike the resisting and the routed, the unarmed and the armed, slave and free, the grown and the ungrown, men and beasts; nor would any living thing have been left, had not the consuls given the signal for recall and driven the soldiers, greedy for slaughter, out of the enemy’s camp by command and by threats. Therefore among men chafing at the breaking-off of the sweetness of their wrath a harangue was straightway delivered, that the soldier might be taught that to no one of the soldiers had the consuls yielded, or would yield, in hatred of the foe; nay, that the leaders, insatiable of punishment as of war, would have been so, had not regard for the six hundred knights held hostage at Luceria fettered their minds, lest, all hope of pardon lost, the enemy be driven blindly to wreak punishment upon them, choosing rather to perish after destroying them. The soldiers praised this and rejoiced that their wrath had been met halfway, and confessed that all must be endured rather than that the safety of so many of the chief men of the Roman youth be betrayed.

The assembly dismissed, a council was held, whether to press Luceria with all their forces, or with the one army and its leader to make trial of the Apulians round about, a people of will doubtful as yet. The consul Publilius, setting out to traverse Apulia, in a single campaign either subdued several peoples by force or received them into alliance on terms. To Papirius too, who had stayed behind as besieger of Luceria, the outcome before long answered his hope; for, all the roads being held by which supplies were carried up from Samnium, the Samnites who were in garrison at Luceria, mastered by famine, sent envoys to the Roman consul, that, on receiving back the knights who were the cause of the war, he should desist from the siege. To them Papirius answered that they should have consulted Pontius son of Herennius, by whose counsel they had sent the Romans under the yoke, as to what the conquered ought to suffer; but since they preferred that fair terms be set upon themselves by their enemies than borne by their own judgment, he bade them carry word to Luceria to leave within the walls their arms, their baggage, their beasts, and all the unwarlike multitude; the soldiery he would send under the yoke with a single garment apiece, avenging a disgrace inflicted, not inflicting a new one. Nothing was refused. Seven thousand soldiers were sent under the yoke, and a vast booty was taken at Luceria, all the standards and arms recovered that had been lost at Caudium, and—what surpassed every joy—the knights recovered whom the Samnites had given to be kept at Luceria as pledges of the peace. Hardly any victory of the Roman people is more famous for so sudden a reversal of fortune—if indeed it is also true (as I find in certain annals) that Pontius son of Herennius, the Samnite commander, to expiate the consuls’ disgrace, was sent under the yoke with the rest. But that this is obscure, touching the surrendered and dismissed enemy leader, I wonder at less; it is the more wonderful that men dispute whether it was Lucius Cornelius, dictator, with Lucius Papirius Cursor as master of the horse, who did these things at Caudium and thence at Luceria, and who, sole avenger of the Roman disgrace, triumphed—in perhaps the most just triumph to that age, next after Furius Camillus—or whether the honor was the consuls’, and Papirius’s chiefly. This error is followed by another: whether Papirius Cursor at the next elections, with Quintus Aulius Cerretanus, was for the good service done at Luceria made consul a third time with his magistracy continued, or whether it was Lucius Papirius Mugillanus and an error has crept into the surname.

It is agreed that from this point on the rest of the war was finished by the consuls. Aulius, in one successful battle, made an end of the Ferentani, and received the city itself—whither the routed line had betaken itself—into surrender on demanding hostages. With like fortune the other consul dealt with the Satricans, who, Roman citizens, had after the Caudine disaster gone over to the Samnites and received their garrison into the city. For when the army had been brought up to the walls of Satricum, and envoys had been sent to seek peace with prayers, a grim answer was returned by the consul: that, unless they slew or surrendered the Samnite garrison, they were not to come back to him. That utterance threw more terror into the colonists than the arms brought against them. And so, when the envoys went on asking the consul by what means he thought that a few weak men could bring force to bear upon a garrison so strong and well-armed, they were bidden to seek counsel from the same men by whose authority they had received the garrison into the city, and they departed; and, hardly obtaining leave to consult their senate upon the matter and to bring the answers back, they returned to their own. Two factions kept the senate divided: one whose leaders were the authors of the revolt from the Roman people, the other of the loyal citizens; yet by both it was contended that good service should be done the consul toward the reconciling of peace. The one party, since the Samnite garrison—nothing being prepared sufficiently for the enduring of a siege—was about to march out the next night, was content to make known to the consul at what hour of the night, by what gate, and onto what road the enemy would go forth; the other, against whose will the revolt to the Samnites had been made, that same night opened a gate as well to the consul and received the armed men into the city, the enemy not knowing it. So by a double betrayal both the Samnite garrison was unexpectedly overwhelmed in the wooded places beset around its road, and from the city, full now of enemies, a shout was raised; and in the space of a single hour the Samnite was cut down, the Satrican taken, and all was in the consul’s power; who, holding an inquiry by whose doing the revolt had been made, scourged with rods and beheaded those whom he found guilty, and, setting a strong garrison over them, took their arms from the Satricans. It is to this point that those writers bring down the triumph of Papirius Cursor going off to Rome, who hold that under his leadership Luceria was recovered and the Samnites sent under the yoke. And the man was beyond doubt worthy of all praise in war, excelling not in vigor of mind only but in bodily strength as well. There was in him a singular swiftness of foot, which even gave him his surname; and they tell that he was victor in the race over all of his age, whether by sheer force of strength or by much exercise, and that the same man was most capacious of food and wine; and that with no commander was service harder, for foot and horse alike, because he himself was of a body unconquered by toil. The horsemen even ventured once to ask of him that, for a thing well done, he relax somewhat of their labor; to whom he said: "That you may not say nothing has been remitted—I remit this: that you need not rub down your horses’ backs when you dismount." And there was in the man a vast force of command, over allies and citizens alike. The Praenestine praetor, through fear, had too sluggishly led his men from the reserves into the front line; whom, as he was walking before his tent, he ordered to be summoned, and bade the lictor make ready his axe. At which word, while the Praenestine stood lifeless, "Come now, lictor," said he, "cut out this root, a nuisance to those who walk," and, having drenched him in the dread of the uttermost punishment, dismissed him with a fine. Beyond doubt, in that age—than which none was more fruitful of excellences—there was no single man on whom the Roman state more leaned and stood. Nay, men mark him in their minds as a leader to match the great Alexander, had he, after subduing Asia, turned his arms upon Europe.

Nothing could seem to have been less my aim from the beginning of this work than to swerve more than was right from the order of events, and, by diversifying my work with variety, to seek out for my readers, as it were, pleasant by-paths, and for my own mind a rest; yet the mention of so great a king and captain calls forth into the open those reflections which I have often turned over in silent thought, so that it is a pleasure to inquire what issue for the Roman state there would have been, had it gone to war with Alexander. The things that seem to count for most in war are the number and valor of soldiers, the genius of commanders, and fortune—through all human affairs, but most of all in matters of war, most potent; these, whether one regards them severally or all together, readily show that, as against other kings and nations, so against this one too, the Roman empire would have stood unconquered. And first of all, to begin by matching the leaders: I do not, indeed, deny that Alexander was a distinguished captain; but what makes him the more renowned is that he was alone, and that he died a young man, in the increase of his fortunes, having not yet tasted the other face of fortune. To pass over other famous kings and captains, those great examples of human chance—what but a long life laid Cyrus, whom the Greeks most celebrate in their praises, open to a turning fortune, as, but lately, it laid Pompey the Great? Let me number over the Roman captains—not all of every age, but those very men with whom, as consuls or dictators, Alexander would have had to wage war: Marcus Valerius Corvus, Gaius Marcius Rutulus, Gaius Sulpicius, Titus Manlius Torquatus, Quintus Publilius Philo, Lucius Papirius Cursor, Quintus Fabius Maximus, the two Decii, Lucius Volumnius, Manius Curius. And after these follow men of vast stature, had he turned to the Punic war before the Roman and crossed into Italy at a riper age. In any one of these there was the same native bent of mind and genius as in Alexander; and besides, the military discipline, handed down from hand to hand from the very beginnings of the city, had come, by perpetual precepts, to the fashion of an art reduced to order. After this manner the kings had waged their wars; after this manner, thereafter, the expellers of the kings, the Junii and Valerii; after this manner, in their turn, the Fabii, the Quinctii, the Cornelii; after this manner Furius Camillus, whom those young men who would have had to fight with Alexander had seen as an old man. Would Alexander—who, in performing the soldier’s part in battle, was no less renowned (for that too makes him famous)—have found, forsooth, a match yielding to him, met in the line: a Manlius Torquatus, or a Valerius Corvus, soldiers of mark before they were captains? Would the Decii have yielded, who rushed upon the foe with bodies devoted? Would Papirius Cursor, with that bodily strength, that strength of mind? Would the counsels of one young man have overcome that senate which—he who said it was made up of kings, alone caught the true likeness of the Roman senate? Was this, then, the danger: that he should choose ground for his camp more skillfully than any one of those whom I have named, should order his supplies, guard against ambush, choose the time for battle, draw up his line, strengthen it with reserves? He would have said that it was not with a Darius that he had to do—a Darius whom, dragging a train of women and eunuchs, laden among purple and gold with the trappings of his own fortune, a booty rather than an enemy, he overcame without bloodshed, having dared nothing else than to despise empty show. Far other than India, through which he passed in revel-rout with a drunken column, would Italy have seemed to him, as he looked upon the passes of Apulia and the Lucanian mountains, and the fresh traces of the disaster in his own house, where his uncle, Alexander king of Epirus, had lately been cut off.

And we are speaking of an Alexander not yet sunk in prosperity—of which no man was less able to bear the weight. But if he be regarded from the habit of his new fortune and of the new temper, so to speak, that he had put on as victor, he would have come into Italy more like Darius than like Alexander, and would have led an army that had forgotten Macedon and was already degenerating into the manners of the Persians. It is irksome, in so great a king, to recall the haughty change of raiment, and the prostrations he required of men flung to the ground—grievous even to the vanquished Macedonians, much more to victors—and the foul tortures, and the slaughter of friends amid wine and feasting, and the vanity of a feigned descent. What if his love of wine grew fiercer day by day? what of his fierce and over-hot anger?—and I report nothing that is doubtful among the writers—do we count these no losses to a commander’s virtues? Was this, in truth, the danger—which the most frivolous of the Greeks, who favor even the renown of the Parthians against the Roman name, are wont to harp upon—that the Roman people would not have been able to bear up against the majesty of Alexander’s name, of whom I think they had not so much as heard by report? And against whom, at Athens, in a state broken by the arms of the Macedonians—and that at the very time when men beheld the well-nigh smoking ruins of Thebes—men dared to speak freely in the assembly, as is plain from the records of their orations: against him not one out of so many Roman chiefs would have sent forth a free word? Howsoever great a man’s greatness be conceived in the mind, yet it will be the greatness of one man, gathered in the good fortune of a little more than ten years; and they who exalt it on this ground—that the Roman people, though beaten in no war, was yet beaten in many battles, while to Alexander the fortune of no single fight was other than favorable—do not perceive that they are matching the deeds of one man, and that a young man, against the deeds of a people now waging war in its eight-hundredth year. Should we wonder if, when on the one side more ages are counted than years on the other, fortune varied more in so long a span than within the lifetime of thirteen years? Why do you not match man with man, leader with leader, fortune with fortune? How many Roman leaders could I name to whom the fortune of battle was never adverse! Page upon page in the annals and the registers of magistrates one may run through, of consuls and dictators of whose valor—nor of whose fortune either—the Roman people never on any day repented. And, to make them more wonderful than Alexander or any king: some held the dictatorship ten days, or twenty; no man the consulship more than a year; their levies were hindered by the tribunes of the plebs; they went late to their wars, were recalled before their time for the elections’ sake; in the very effort of their undertakings the year wheeled round upon them; now a colleague’s rashness, now his perversity, was a hindrance or a hurt; they succeeded to another’s ill-managed affairs; they took over an army of raw recruits, or one schooled in bad discipline. But, by Hercules, kings are not only free of all hindrances but lords of circumstance and season; they draw all things after their counsels, they do not follow them. Alexander, then, unconquered, would have waged war with unconquered captains, and would have laid the same pledges of fortune in the hazard; nay, he would have undergone the more peril, in that the Macedonians had but one Alexander, not only liable to many chances but offering himself to them, while the Romans had many a man a match for Alexander, whether in glory or in greatness of deeds, of whom each might live and die by his own destiny without peril to the state.

It remains that forces be matched against forces, whether in number, or in the kind of soldiers, or in the multitude of auxiliaries. The censuses of that age reckoned, at their five-year reckoning, two hundred and fifty thousand persons. And so, in every defection of the allies of the Latin name, ten legions were enrolled by a levy almost of the city alone; four or five armies often, through those years, waged war at once—in Etruria, in Umbria with the Gauls added for foes, in Samnium, among the Lucanians. Then all Latium, with the Sabines and the Volsci and the Aequi, and all Campania, and part of Umbria and Etruria, and the Picentes and the Marsi and the Paeligni and the Vestini and the Apulians, with all the seaboard of the Greeks on the lower sea added—from Thurii to Naples and Cumae, and thence as far as Antium and Ostia—all these he would have found either strong allies of the Romans or foes broken in war. He himself would have crossed the sea with his veteran Macedonians, not more than thirty thousand men and four thousand horse, chiefly Thessalian; for this was the flower of his strength. Had he added Persians and Indians and other nations, he would have dragged a hindrance after him rather than a help. Add that for the Romans there was a supply of recruits ready at home, while for Alexander, warring in a foreign land, his army would have grown old—as afterward befell Hannibal. Their arms were the round shield and the sarissa; the Roman’s the long shield, a greater covering for the body, and the javelin, a weapon far more forcible in stroke and in cast than the spear. Each was a stationary soldier, keeping his ranks; but that phalanx was unmoving and of a single kind, while the Roman line was more articulated, composed of more parts, easy to part for him who would divide it, easy to join. Then, at the work of entrenching, what soldier is the Roman’s match? who is the better at enduring toil? Beaten in one battle, Alexander would have been beaten in the war; but the Roman—whom neither Caudium nor Cannae broke—what line of battle could have broken him? Nay, often, even if his first ventures had prospered, he would have longed back for the Persians and the Indians and unwarlike Asia, and would have owned that he had been at war with women—even as they report that Alexander, king of Epirus, said, when struck with his death-wound, comparing the lot of the wars waged in Asia by this very youth with his own. Indeed, when I recall that in the first Punic war it was fought out with the Carthaginians by fleets for four-and-twenty years, I think the lifetime of Alexander would scarcely have sufficed for a single war. And perhaps, since both the Punic state was joined to the Roman by ancient treaties, and an equal fear of a common enemy would have armed those two cities, mightiest in arms and men, he would have been overwhelmed by the Punic and the Roman war at once. Not, indeed, with Alexander for leader, nor while the power of Macedon was yet unimpaired; but the Romans have, for all that, made trial of a Macedonian foe—against Antiochus, Philip, Perseus—not only with no disaster, but not even with any peril of their own. Let envy be far from the word, and let the civil wars keep silence: never have we been hard pressed by an enemy’s horse, never by his foot, never in open line, never on equal ground, least of all on our own; the heavy-armed soldier may well fear cavalry, and arrows, and choked passes, and country impassable to supplies. A thousand lines of battle heavier than the Macedonians’ and Alexander’s he has turned back, and will turn back—only let there be a lasting love of this peace in which we live, and care for civil concord.

Marcus Folius Flaccina next, and Lucius Plautius Venox, were made consuls. That year, when envoys from the populous peoples of the Samnites had moved the senate, prostrate upon the ground, about renewing the treaty, they were referred to the people and found their prayers by no means so effectual. And so a treaty was refused; a truce of two years, when for several days they had wearied men one by one with entreaties, was obtained. And out of Apulia the Teanenses and the Canusini, worn out with ravagings, gave hostages to the consul Lucius Plautius and came into surrender. In the same year prefects first began to be appointed at Capua, laws being given them by the praetor Lucius Furius—both which things the Capuans themselves had sought as a remedy for their sick estate, undone by intestine discord; and two tribes were added at Rome, the Ufentine and the Falernan. Their affairs in Apulia once inclining, the Teates also of Apulia came to the new consuls, Gaius Junius Bubulcus and Quintus Aemilius Barbula, to seek a treaty, offering themselves as warrants that peace should be kept toward the Roman people throughout all Apulia. By boldly pledging this they brought it about that a treaty was granted—yet not as an equal treaty, but that they should be under the dominion of the Roman people. Apulia subdued—for Junius had taken Forentum too, a strong town—the advance was pressed on into Lucania; and there, by the sudden coming of the consul Aemilius, Nerulum was taken by storm. And after report spread among the allies that affairs at Capua had been settled by Roman discipline, to the men of Antium also, who complained that they lived without fixed laws and without magistrates, were given by the senate patrons of the colony itself to set up their code; and not Roman arms only, but Roman law as well, was now of wide avail.

Gaius Junius Bubulcus and Quintus Aemilius Barbula, the consuls, at the year’s end had handed over the legions not to the consuls created by themselves, Spurius Nautius and Marcus Popilius, but to the dictator Lucius Aemilius; who, setting himself, with Lucius Fulvius as master of the horse, to assault Saticula, gave the Samnites cause to renew the war. Thence a twofold terror was brought upon the Romans: on the one side the Samnite, having gathered a great army to lift the siege from his allies, pitched his camp not far from the Roman camp; on the other, the Saticulani, with a great uproar, flung their gates suddenly open and ran out upon the enemy’s outposts. Then each party, trusting to another’s aid more than to its own strength, soon, when a regular battle had been joined, presses hard upon the Romans; and although the struggle was doubtful, yet on both fronts the dictator kept his line safe, because he both took a position not easy to surround and set his standards facing opposite ways. More fiercely, however, did he press against those who were breaking out, and with no great struggle drove them within their walls; then he turned his whole line against the Samnites. There was more of a contest there; the victory, late as it came, was neither doubtful nor wavering. The Samnites, routed, withdrew into their camp, and, putting out their fires by night, marched off in a silent column; and, casting away the hope of holding Saticula, themselves laid siege to Plistica, an ally of the Romans, that they might pay the enemy back a like grief.

The year coming round, the war was thereafter waged by the dictator Quintus Fabius. The new consuls, like their predecessors, stayed at Rome; Fabius came to Saticula with a draft of recruits, to take over the army from Aemilius. For the Samnites had not stayed at Plistica, but, summoning fresh soldiers from home and trusting in their numbers, had pitched camp in the same place as before, and by challenging the Romans to battle sought to draw them off from the siege. The dictator, all the more intent upon the enemy’s walls, reckoned that the only war was the assault upon the city, and went about his business the more securely as to the Samnites, setting outposts only against them, that no force might be brought against the camp. The Samnites, the more fiercely for that, rode up to the rampart and would suffer no quiet; and when the enemy was now well-nigh at the gates of the camp, Quintus Aulius Cerretanus, master of the horse, without consulting the dictator, rode out with all the squadrons of cavalry in great tumult and beat the enemy off. Then, in a kind of fighting that was least stubborn, fortune so played out her power that she brought forth signal disasters on both sides and the conspicuous deaths of the leaders themselves. First the Samnite commander, ill brooking that from the very place to which he had ridden so boldly he should be driven and routed, by praying and exhorting his horsemen renewed the fight; against him, conspicuous as he urged the battle among his own, the Roman master of the horse drove his horse with leveled lance so that with a single stroke he hurled him lifeless from his steed. And the multitude, as commonly happens, was rather goaded than dismayed by their leader’s fall; all who were near hurled their weapons at Aulius, who had rashly ridden in among the enemy’s squadrons; the chief glory of avenging the Samnite commander the gods gave to his brother. He, full of grief and wrath, dragged the victorious master of the horse from his steed and slew him; nor did much want but that the Samnites should get possession of his body too, since he had fallen among hostile squadrons. But at once the Romans dismounted, and the Samnites were forced to do the same; and a sudden line of battle, formed round the leaders’ bodies, joined a fight on foot, in which beyond doubt the Roman is the stronger, and the body of Aulius, recovered, the victors carry back into camp with grief mingled with joy. The Samnites, their leader lost, and having tried their strength in the cavalry engagement, gave up Saticula, which they thought they were defending in vain, and returned to the siege of Plistica; and within a few days the Roman took Saticula by surrender, the Samnite Plistica by storm.

Then the seat of the war was shifted; from Samnium and Apulia the legions were led across to Sora. Sora had gone over to the Samnites, the Roman colonists being slain. Thither, when the Roman army had come first by great marches, to avenge the slaughter of the citizens and recover the colony, and scouts scattered along the roads reported, one after another, that the Samnite legions were following and were now not far off, the enemy was met, and at Lautulae the battle was fought with doubtful issue. Neither slaughter nor flight of either side, but night, parted them, uncertain whether they were conquered or conquerors. I find in some authors that this fight was adverse to the Romans, and that in it fell Quintus Aulius, the master of the horse. Gaius Fabius, appointed master of the horse in Aulius’s room, came up from Rome with a fresh army; and, through messengers sent ahead—the dictator being consulted where he should halt, and at what time, and from what quarter he should attack the enemy—he halted, hidden, with all his plans well enough explored. The dictator, when for some days after the battle he had kept his men within the rampart, in the manner of one besieged rather than besieging, suddenly displayed the signal for battle; and, thinking it more effectual for kindling the spirits of brave men that no hope should anywhere be left to any save in himself alone, he kept the soldier in ignorance of the master of the horse and the new army, and, as though there were no hope save in a sally, said: "Caught, soldiers, in a narrow place, we have no road but the one we shall open by victory. Our standing camp is safe enough by its works, but is made dangerous by that same want; for all around have fallen away whence supplies could be carried up, and, even if men should wish to help, the ground is unfavorable. And so I will not cheat you by leaving a camp here, into which, our victory unaccomplished, you might withdraw as on the day before. Works should be made safe by arms, not arms by works. Let them keep and return to a camp whose interest it is to drag out the war; let us cut off from ourselves all looking back to anything but victory. Bear the standards against the enemy; when the column has gone out beyond the rampart, let those who are bidden fire the camp; your losses, soldiers, shall be made good by the plunder of all the peoples round about who have fallen away." And, kindled by the dictator’s speech—which was the token of an utmost necessity—the soldiers go against the enemy; and the very looking-back upon the burning camp—though it was only the nearest part that was set ablaze, for so the dictator had bidden—was no small spur. And so, like men frenzied, charging, at their first onset they throw the enemy’s standards into confusion; and in good time, when from afar he saw the camp ablaze—this was the signal agreed upon—the master of the horse fell upon the enemy’s rear. So the Samnites, surrounded, seek flight, each as he could, in opposite directions; a vast multitude, balled into one by fear and hampering itself by its own crowding, was cut down in the midst. The enemy’s camp was taken and plundered, and the dictator led the soldier, laden with its booty, back into the Roman camp—rejoicing by no means so much in the victory as that, except for a small part defaced by the fire, he found the rest, beyond hope, safe.

Thence there was a return to Sora; and the new consuls, Marcus Poetelius and Gaius Sulpicius, took over the army from the dictator Fabius, a great part of the veteran soldiers being dismissed and new cohorts brought up as a draft. But since, on account of the town’s difficult situation, no sufficiently sure plan of assault could be entered upon, and victory was either far off in time or headlong in peril, a Soran deserter, secretly leaving the town, when he had made his way to the Roman watches, bade himself be led at once to the consuls; and, being brought before them, he promised to deliver the town. Then, when he showed, to those who asked by what means he would make this good, that what he offered was no idle thing, he prevailed upon them to move the Roman camp, well-nigh joined to the walls, six miles back from the town: it would come to pass that the daytime guards and the nightly watches would be the less intent upon the keeping of the city. He himself, the following night, having bidden the cohorts take post below the town in the wooded places, led ten chosen soldiers with him up steep and well-nigh pathless ways into the citadel, more missile weapons than the number of the men being gathered there; besides which there were stones, both lying about at random, as happens in rough places, and heaped up of set purpose too by the townsmen, that the place might be the safer. There, when he had stationed the Romans and shown them a narrow and steep path running up from the town into the citadel, "By this ascent," said he, "even three armed men might keep off any multitude soever; you are ten in number, and—what is more—Romans, and the bravest of the Romans. The place is for you, and the night, which makes all things, out of uncertainty, greater to the frightened. I will now fill everything with terror; do you, intent, hold the citadel." Then he runs down, with as much uproar as he could, crying "To arms!" and "For your faith’s sake, citizens! the citadel is taken by the enemy! defend it! go!" These words he hurls at the doors of the chief men, these at those who met him, these at the panic-stricken running out into the open. The terror, taken from one man, many carry through the city. The magistrates, in alarm, when, having sent scouts to the citadel, they heard that weapons and armed men held it, its number multiplied, turn their minds from the hope of recovering it. Everything is filled with flight, and the gates are broken open by men half-asleep and for the most part unarmed; through one of these the Roman garrison, roused by the shout, bursts in, and cuts down the panic-stricken as they run hither and thither through the streets. Sora was already taken when the consuls came up at the first light and received into surrender those whom fortune had left over from the night’s slaughter and flight. Of these, two hundred and twenty-five, who by the consent of all were marked out as the authors both of the unspeakable slaughter of the colonists and of the revolt, they led bound to Rome; the rest of the multitude they left unharmed at Sora, a garrison being set over it. All who had been led to Rome were scourged with rods in the Forum and beheaded, to the utmost joy of the plebs, whose chief interest it was that the multitude, scattered abroad into colonies, should everywhere be safe.

The consuls, setting out from Sora, carried the war into the fields and cities of the Ausones. For all had been stirred at the coming of the Samnites, when the fight took place at Lautulae, and conspiracies had been formed here and there about Campania, nor was Capua itself free of the charge; nay, the inquiry reached even Rome, and certain of the chief men. But the Ausonian nation, like Sora, came into the Romans’ power by the betrayal of its cities. Ausona and Minturnae and Vescia were the cities, from which the chief men of the youth, twelve in number, conspiring to betray their own cities, come to the consuls. They relate that their people, long since longing for the coming of the Samnites, as soon as they heard that the fight at Lautulae was over, had counted the Romans as good as beaten, and had helped the Samnite with their youth and their arms; that, the Samnites thereafter routed, they passed their days in an uncertain peace, neither shutting their gates against the Romans, lest they call down war, nor stubborn to shut them should an army be brought up; that in this wavering of men’s minds the unwary might be surprised. By these advisers the camp was moved nearer, and soldiers were sent at the same time about the three towns, part armed, to lie hidden in the places near the walls, part in civilian dress with swords covered under their garments, to enter the cities at daybreak when the gates were opened. By these the guards began at once to be cut down, and at the same time the signal was given the armed men to run together out of ambush. So the gates were seized and the three towns taken at the same hour and by the same design; but, because the assault was made in the leaders’ absence, there was no measure to the slaughter, and the Ausonian nation was wiped out, on a charge of revolt scarcely certain, just as if it had striven in a war of extermination.

In the same year Luceria, the Roman garrison being betrayed to the enemy, was made the Samnites’; nor was the deed long unpunished for the betrayers. Not far thence was a Roman army, by whose first onset the city, set in the plain, is taken. The Lucerini and the Samnites were cut down to the last man; and to such a pitch did anger go that at Rome too, when the senate was consulted about sending colonists to Luceria, many were for destroying the city. Besides the hatred—which was unspeakable against men twice taken—the distance too constrained them to shrink from banishing citizens so far from home among nations so hostile. Yet the opinion prevailed that colonists should be sent; two thousand five hundred were sent. In the same year, when all things were faithless to the Romans, at Capua also secret conspiracies of the chief men were formed. When report of these had been made to the senate, the matter was by no means neglected: inquiries were decreed, and it was resolved that a dictator be named to conduct them. Gaius Maenius was named; he named Marcus Folius master of the horse. Great was the terror of that magistracy; and so, whether by the force of fear or of a guilty conscience, the Calavii, Ovius and Novius—these had been the heads of the conspiracy—before they were named before the dictator, withdrew themselves from judgment by a death beyond doubt of their own contriving. Then, when the matter of the Campanian inquiry fell away, the affair was turned, by interpretation, to Rome: that the senate had bidden inquiry be made, not by name into who at Capua, but in general into who anywhere had banded together or conspired against the commonwealth, and that cabals formed for the gaining of office were against the commonwealth. And the inquiry was made broader, both in its matter and in its persons, the dictator not denying that the right of his inquiry was without any limit. Noble men, then, were summoned; and when they appealed to the tribunes, there was none to give help, so that their names were received. Thereupon the nobility—and not those only against whom the charge was aimed, but all of them—began at once to declare that this was no charge against nobles, to whom, if no fraud stood in the way, the road to office lay open, but against new men; and that the dictator himself and the master of the horse were fitter to be defendants on that charge than inquisitors into it, and that they would learn it was so as soon as they had gone out of office. Then indeed Maenius, mindful now rather of his fame than of his power, came forward into the assembly and spoke thus: "Both of my whole past life, Quirites, do I have you for witnesses, and this very honor conferred upon me is a witness of my innocence; for it was not—as often else, because the times of the commonwealth so demanded—the man most renowned in war, but the man who had lived his life most far from these cabals, who had to be chosen dictator for the conducting of the inquiries. But since certain noble men—for what cause it is better that you should judge than that I, holding magistracy, should say aught uncertain—have first striven with all their might to storm the inquiries themselves; then, after they were too weak for that, that they might not plead their cause, have fled, patricians though they are, into their adversaries’ strongholds, appeal and the tribunes’ help; and at the last, repelled thence—so much safer did all things seem to them than to clear their own innocence—have rushed upon us, and have not been ashamed, private men, to demand a dictator as a defendant: that all gods and men may know that by them even things impossible are attempted, that they may not render account of their lives, while I go to meet the charge and offer myself, a defendant, to my enemies—I abdicate the dictatorship. You I beseech, consuls, that, if the business be given you by the senate, you conduct your inquiries first upon me and this Marcus Folius, that it may appear that we are safe from these slanders by our innocence, not by the majesty of office." He then abdicates the dictatorship, and after him at once Folius the mastership of the horse; and, the first to be made defendants before the consuls—for to them the matter was entrusted by the senate—they are signally acquitted, against the testimony of the nobles. Publilius Philo too, with his highest honors many times multiplied, after so many deeds done at home and in war, yet hateful to the nobility, pleaded his cause and was acquitted. Nor did the inquiry, as commonly happens, flourish longer than while it was fresh, through the famous names of defendants: thereafter it began to slide down to meaner persons, until it was crushed by the very cabals and factions against which it had been got up.

The fame of these matters, but more the hope of a Campanian revolt—for which the conspiracy had been formed—called the Samnites, who had turned into Apulia, back again to Caudium, that from there, close at hand, if any rising should open an occasion, they might snatch Capua from the Romans. Thither the consuls came with a strong army. And at first, about the passes—since on either side the way to the enemy was unfavorable—they hung back; then the Samnites, by a short circuit through open ground, bring their column down into the level of the Campanian plains, and there first their camp was given to the enemy’s sight, and then by light engagements—of horse more often than of foot—trial was made on either side; nor was the Roman ill-pleased either with their outcomes or with the delay by which he drew out the war. To the Samnite leaders, on the contrary, it seemed that they were both nibbled away by small daily losses and that their strength was wearing out by the putting-off of the war. And so they advance into line, the cavalry divided to the wings, who were charged to be more intent on the looking-back to the camp, lest any force be brought against it, than to stand to the battle: the line would be kept safe by the foot. The consuls—Sulpicius took his stand on the right, Poetelius on the left wing. The right part, where the Samnites too had stood in thin ranks, either to surround the enemy or that they themselves might not be surrounded, stood spread the wider; the left—besides that they had stood more closely massed—had strength added by a sudden counsel of the consul Poetelius, who at once sent into the front line the reserve cohorts that were being kept fresh for the chances of a longer fight, and with his whole force at the first onset drove the enemy back. The line of Samnite foot being shaken, their horse comes up into the fight; against these, as they bore in with a column athwart between the two lines, the Roman cavalry sets its horses at speed, and throws into confusion the standards and ranks of foot and horse alike, until it turned the whole line in that quarter to flight. On that wing not Poetelius only but Sulpicius too had been at hand to hearten them, carried off from his own men—who had not yet joined hands—by the shout that had risen first on the left. Thence, perceiving a victory past doubt, while he made for his own wing with twelve hundred men, he found there a fortune unlike it, the Romans driven from their ground, the victorious enemy bearing his standards upon the dismayed. But the consul’s coming changed all things in a moment; for both was the soldiers’ spirit refreshed by the sight of their leader, and a help greater than its number had come up—brave men—and the victory of the other part, first heard of and soon seen as well, restored the battle. Then, now with all his line winning, the Roman, and the contest given over, the Samnites are cut down and taken—save such as fled to Maleventum, the city which now bears the name of Beneventum. As many as thirty thousand of the Samnites are recorded to have been slain or taken.

The consuls, a signal victory won, led their legions straightway thence to assault Bovianum; and there they passed the winter, until, under the new consuls Lucius Papirius Cursor (for the fifth time) and Gaius Junius Bubulcus (for the second), Gaius Poetelius, named dictator with Marcus Folius as master of the horse, took over the army. He, when he heard that the citadel of Fregellae had been taken by the Samnites, gave up Bovianum and made for Fregellae; whence, the Samnites fleeing by night and Fregellae recovered without a struggle, a strong garrison being set over it, he returned into Campania, chiefly to win back Nola by arms. Thither, against the dictator’s coming, all the multitude of the Samnites and the country folk of Nola had betaken themselves within the walls. The dictator, having surveyed the town’s site, that the approach to the walls might be the more open, burned all the buildings—and it was thickly inhabited there—that lay round about the walls; and not long after, whether by the dictator Poetelius or by the consul Gaius Junius—for both is handed down—Nola was taken. They who draw the honor of Nola’s capture to the consul add that Atina and Calatia were taken by the same man, and that Poetelius was named dictator for the driving of the nail, a pestilence having arisen. Suessa and Pontiae were that same year planted as colonies. Suessa had been the Aurunci’s; the Volsci had dwelt in Pontiae, an island set within sight of their own shore. And a decree of the senate was passed that a colony be led out to Interamna Sucasina; but it was the consuls following, Marcus Valerius and Publius Decius, who created the triumvirs and sent the four thousand colonists.

In the consulship of Marcus Valerius and Publius Decius, the Samnite war being well-nigh fought out, before that care should pass from the Roman fathers the rumor of an Etruscan war arose; nor was there at that time any other nation whose arms, after the Gallic tumults, were more terrible, both for the nearness of their land and for the multitude of their men. And so, while the one consul pursued the remnants of the war in Samnium, Publius Decius, who had stayed at Rome gravely sick, by the senate’s authority named Gaius Junius Bubulcus dictator. He, as the greatness of the matter demanded, binds all the younger men by the military oath, and with the utmost industry makes ready arms and whatsoever else the business required; nor, lifted up by such great preparations, does he set his mind on bringing on a war, being beyond doubt about to keep quiet unless the Etruscans should of their own accord bring arms. The same counsels in preparing and in holding back from war were among the Etruscans too; neither side went forth from its borders. And the censorship of Appius Claudius and Gaius Plautius was famous that year; yet the name of Appius is of happier memory to posterity, because he built a road and brought water into the city; and these things he accomplished alone, because his colleague, overcome by shame at the infamous and invidious choosing of the senate, had abdicated his magistracy, while Appius, displaying the family’s stubbornness, ingrained in it from of old, held the censorship alone. By the same Appius’s prompting, the Potitian house, which had held the priesthood of Hercules at the Greatest Altar as a charge of their own family, taught public slaves the rites of that worship, for the sake of handing the ministry over to them. Thereafter it is handed down—a thing marvelous to tell, and one that might well breed scruple at the removing of sacred things from their estate—that, whereas there were at that time twelve families of the Potitii, with grown men about thirty, all within the year were extinguished together with their stock; and that not the name only of the Potitii perished, but that the censor too, Appius, by the mindful wrath of the gods, after some years was robbed of his sight.

And so the consuls who followed that year, Gaius Junius Bubulcus (for the third time) and Quintus Aemilius Barbula (for the second), at the year’s beginning complained before the people that the order had been disfigured by a corrupt choosing of the senate, in which several worthier men had been passed over for some who were chosen, and declared that they would not observe that choosing, which had been made without distinction of right or wrong, to favor and to caprice; and they straightway called the senate in that order which had been before the censors Appius Claudius and Gaius Plautius. And two commands began that year to be given by the people, both pertaining to military matters: the one, that sixteen tribunes of the soldiers for four legions should be created by the people—offices which before had been, save for very few places left to the people’s vote, well-nigh the gifts of dictators and consuls (this proposal the tribunes of the plebs Lucius Atilius and Gaius Marcius carried)—the other, that the same people should appoint duumvirs of the navy for the fitting-out and refitting of the fleet; the mover of this plebiscite was Marcus Decius, tribune of the plebs. A thing of that same year, small to tell, I would pass over, did it not seem to touch upon religion. The flute-players, because they had been forbidden by the last censors to feast in the temple of Jupiter—which had been the custom handed down from of old—took it ill and went off in one body to Tibur, so that there was no one in the city to play before the sacrifices. The scruple of this thing held the senate, and they sent envoys to Tibur, to use diligence that those men should be restored to the Romans. The Tiburtines kindly promised, and first, summoning them into the senate-house, exhorted them to return to Rome; then, when they could not be prevailed upon, they set upon them by a device not unsuited to such men’s tempers. On a feast day, some invite some, others others, under show of celebrating the day with song and banquet, and, when they had loaded them with wine—of which that kind is commonly greedy—they lull them to sleep, and so, bound fast in slumber, fling them into wagons and carry them off to Rome; nor did they perceive it before, the wagons left standing in the Forum, the daylight, full of their carousing, surprised them. Then a concourse of the people was made, and, leave being obtained that they should stay, it was granted that for three days each year, decked out, they should range through the city with song and with this license that is now solemn; and the right of feasting in the temple was restored to those who played before the sacred rites. These things were going forward amid the care of two vast wars.

The consuls divided the provinces between them: to Junius fell by lot the Samnites, to Aemilius the new war of Etruria. In Samnium the Roman garrison of Cluviae, because it could not be taken by storm, the Samnites had besieged, starved into surrender, and, having foully mangled the surrendered men with stripes, had slain. Junius, incensed at this cruelty, holding nothing of more moment than the assault upon Cluviae, on the day he attacked the walls took it by storm and slew all the grown men. Thence the victorious army was led to Bovianum. This was the head of the Pentrian Samnites, by far the richest and most opulent in arms and men. There, because there was not so much of anger, the soldiers, kindled by the hope of plunder, take the town. So there was less savagery against the enemy, but more booty was carried off, well-nigh, than ever out of all Samnium, and it was all freely granted to the soldier. And after no lines of battle, no camps, no cities could withstand the Roman, supreme in arms, the cares of all the chief men in Samnium were bent upon this—that a place for an ambush should be sought, if by any license of ravaging the army, scattered abroad, could be caught and surrounded. Country deserters and certain captives—part offered by chance, part by design—bringing accounts that agreed (and these were true as well), that a vast herd of cattle had been driven together into a pathless glade, prevailed so far that the legions were led thither, lightly equipped, to plunder. There a huge army of the enemy had hidden and beset the ways; and, when it saw that the Romans had entered the glade, suddenly rising up, with shout and tumult it falls upon them unawares. And at first the strange thing made for trembling, while they take up arms and heap their baggage into the midst; then, after each had freed himself of his load and fitted himself with arms, they began to gather to the standards from every side, and, the ranks being known, by the old discipline of warfare the line was now of its own accord, without any man’s command, forming itself; and the consul, riding up to where the fight was most doubtful, leaps down from his horse, and calls Jupiter and Mars and the other gods to witness that he had come into that place seeking no glory of his own thence, but plunder for the soldier, and that nothing else could be blamed in him than too great a care to enrich the soldier from the enemy; from which disgrace nothing should rescue him save the soldiers’ valor. Only let them all strive with one heart to fall upon an enemy beaten in line, stripped of his camp, bared of his cities, now trying his last hope by the theft of an ambush and trusting to the ground, not to arms. But what place was now unconquerable to Roman valor? The Fregellan citadel and the Soran, and wheresoever a way had been won up unfavorable ground, were called to mind. Kindled by these words, the soldier, forgetful of all difficulties, goes against the enemy’s line that hung above him. There was a little toil while the column heaves itself up the facing slope; but after the foremost standards had gained the top of the level, and the line felt that it now stood on even ground, the terror was straightway turned upon the layers of the ambush, who, scattered and unarmed, sought again in flight those same hiding-places in which a little before they had covered themselves. But the places, sought out as difficult for the enemy, now hampered them too by their own craft. And so very few found a way of escape; as many as twenty thousand men were slain; and the victorious Roman ran this way and that to the cattle-plunder the enemy had offered.

While these things were being done in Samnium, already all the peoples of Etruria, save the Arretines, had gone to arms, beginning a vast war from the assault upon Sutrium, a city allied to the Romans and, as it were, the barrier of Etruria. Thither the one of the consuls, Aemilius, came with an army to free the allies from the siege. To the Romans, as they came up, the Sutrini kindly brought supplies into the camp pitched before the city. The Etruscans passed the first day in deliberating whether they should hasten or draw out the war; on the next, when to their leaders the speedier counsels pleased more than the safer, at sunrise the signal for battle was displayed, and the armed men advance into line. When this was reported to the consul, he straightway bids the watchword be given that the soldier should breakfast, and, his strength steadied with food, take up arms. The order is obeyed. The consul, when he saw them armed and ready, ordered the standards to be borne forth beyond the rampart, and drew up his line not far from the enemy. For a good while on either side they stood intent, awaiting that the shout and the fight should begin from their adversaries; and the sun had sloped past midday before a weapon was thrown from this side or that: then, that they might not go off with nothing done, the shout rises from the Etruscans, the trumpets sound together, and the standards are borne on. Nor more slackly is the fight begun by the Romans. They run together with hostile spirits; in number the enemy, in valor the Roman has the better; the doubtful battle carries off many on both sides, and the bravest first, nor was the issue inclined before the second Roman line came up, fresh men to the weary, to the front standards; the Etruscans, because their front line was stayed by no fresh reserves, fell, all of them, before the standards and round about. Never in any battle would there have been less of flight nor more of slaughter, had not night sheltered the Tuscans, stubborn to die—so that the victors, rather than the conquered, made an end of the fighting. After the setting of the sun the signal for recall was given; in the night there was a return on either side into camp. And thereafter nothing worth the recording was done that year at Sutrium, since of the enemy’s army the whole front line had been destroyed in one battle, only the reserves being left, scarce enough for a guard to the camp, and among the Romans there were so many wounds that more of the hurt died after the battle than had fallen in the line.

Quintus Fabius, the consul of the following year, took up the war at Sutrium; to Fabius for colleague was given Gaius Marcius Rutulus. And Fabius both brought a draft of recruits from Rome, and a new army, summoned from home, came to the Etruscans. For very many years now there had been no contests between the patrician magistrates and the tribunes, when out of that house—which was, as it were, fated to strife with the tribunes and the plebs—a contention arose. Appius Claudius the censor, when the eighteen months were gone round which the Aemilian law had set as the term of the censorship—though his colleague Gaius Plautius had abdicated his magistracy—could by no force be brought to abdicate. Publius Sempronius was tribune of the plebs, who had taken up the action of ending the censorship within its lawful time—an action no more popular than just, nor more grateful to the multitude than to every best man. He, reciting again and again the Aemilian law, and extolling with praises its author, the dictator Mamercus Aemilius, who had reduced the censorship—before a five-year power, and by its long continuance lordly—within the space of a year and six months, said: "Tell me, come, Appius Claudius, what you would have done, had you been censor at the time when Gaius Furius and Marcus Geganius were censors." Appius denied that the tribune’s question pertained in any great degree to his own cause; for, although the Aemilian law had bound those censors in whose magistracy it had been passed—because the people had ordered that law after those censors were created, and whatsoever the people had last ordered, that was law and ratified—yet neither he, nor any of those who had been created censors after that law was passed, could be bound by it.

While Appius cavilled at this without any man’s assent, "Behold," said he, "Quirites, the offspring of that Appius who, created decemvir for a year, in the second year created himself, and in the third, created neither by himself nor by any man, held, a private citizen, the fasces and command, nor ceased to prolong his magistracy until commands ill-gotten, ill-administered, ill-retained overwhelmed him. This is the same family, Quirites, driven by whose violence and wrongs you, exiles from your fatherland, seized the Sacred Mount; this, against which you provided yourselves the tribunes’ help; this, on whose account you, two armies, beset the Aventine; this, which has ever assailed the laws against usury, this, which has ever assailed the agrarian laws; this broke off the intermarriage of patricians and plebs; this barred the plebs’s road to the curule magistracies. This is a name far more hostile to your liberty than the Tarquins’. Is it so, then, Appius Claudius? Though it is now the hundredth year since Mamercus Aemilius was dictator, and there have been so many censors, men most noble and most brave—did none of them read the Twelve Tables? did none know that to be law which the people had last ordered? Nay, all of them knew it, and for that reason obeyed the Aemilian law rather than that ancient one by which censors were first created, because this last the people had ordered, and because, where two laws are contrary, the new ever repeals the old. Or do you say this, Appius—that the people is not bound by the Aemilian law? or that the people is bound, but you alone are outside the law? The Aemilian law bound those violent censors, Gaius Furius and Marcus Geganius, who showed what mischief this magistracy could do in the commonwealth, when, in anger at their power’s being cut short, they made Mamercus Aemilius—the first man of his age in war and at home—an aerarian; it bound thereafter all the censors within the space of a hundred years; it binds Gaius Plautius, your colleague, created under the same auspices, by the same right. Or did not the people create him as one created censor by the fullest right? Are you alone the exception, in whom this special and singular privilege avails? Whom would you create king of the sacrifices? Embracing the name of kingship, he will say he was created as one made king at Rome by the fullest right. Whom would you think content with a six-months’ dictatorship, with an interregnum of five days? Whom would you boldly create dictator for the driving of the nail or for the games? How stupid and dull do you think those men seem to him, who, after vast deeds done, abdicated the dictatorship within the twentieth day, or who, faultily created, went out of magistracy! Why should I fetch back ancient instances? Lately, within ten years, Gaius Maenius the dictator—because, when he was conducting inquiries more severely than was safe for certain powerful men, the taint of the very charge he was investigating was thrown upon him by his enemies—abdicated the dictatorship, that as a private man he might go to meet the charge. I do not ask that modesty of you; do not fall away from a most imperious house; go not out of magistracy a day, an hour, sooner than need be—only do not exceed the appointed time. Is it enough to add a day, or a month, to the censorship? "For three years," he says, "and six months beyond what the Aemilian law allows, will I hold the censorship, and hold it alone." This now is already like to a kingship. Or will you co-opt a colleague—one whom it is not lawful to co-opt even into a dead man’s place? For it irks you, religious censor that you are, that you have brought down a most ancient and solemn rite, instituted by the very god to whom it is paid, from the most noble priests of that worship to the ministry of slaves; a house older than the origins of this city, hallowed by the hospitality of the immortal gods, has, because of you and your censorship, within a year been extinguished from its stock—unless you shall have bound the whole commonwealth by that impious deed which the mind shrinks even to forebode. The city was taken in that lustrum in which, his colleague Gaius Julius the censor being dead, Lucius Papirius Cursor, that he might not go out of magistracy, co-opted Marcus Cornelius Maluginensis as colleague. And how much more modest was his desire than yours, Appius! Lucius Papirius held the censorship neither alone nor beyond the time fixed by law; yet he found no one to follow him afterward as a precedent; all the censors thereafter, on a colleague’s death, abdicated their magistracy. You, neither that the censorship’s term runs out, nor that your colleague has gone out of magistracy, nor law, nor shame restrains: you set your virtue in arrogance, in audacity, in contempt of gods and men. I, Appius Claudius, for the majesty and reverence of that magistracy which you have held, would have wished you not only not violated by my hand, but not even addressed by me in any harsher word; but both your obstinacy and your pride have forced me to speak the things I have spoken so far; and, unless you obey the Aemilian law, I will order you to be led to prison; nor, since it has been so ordained by our forefathers that at the censorial elections, unless two have completed the lawful votes, the elections are put off, the other not being declared, will I now suffer you, who alone cannot be created censor, alone to hold the censorship." When he had spoken these and like things, he ordered the censor to be seized and led to prison. Six tribunes approving their colleague’s action, three were a help to Appius as he appealed; and amid the utmost ill-will of all the orders he held the censorship alone.

While these things were being done at Rome, already Sutrium was being besieged by the Etruscans; and to the consul Fabius, as he led his men along the foot of the mountains to carry aid to the allies and to make trial of the works, if anywhere he could, the enemy’s line, drawn up, came in his way; whose vast multitude, when the plain spread wide below displayed it, the consul, that he might help the fewness of his men by the ground, bends his column a little aside up the slopes—they were rough places strewn with stones—and thence turns his standards against the enemy. The Etruscans, forgetting all save their own numbers, in which alone they trusted, enter the fight so hastily and greedily that, flinging away their missiles that they might the sooner join hands, they draw their swords as they advance upon the foe. The Roman, on the contrary, pours upon them now javelins, now stones, with which the very place armed him plentifully. And so, their shields and helmets struck—since even those whom they had not wounded were thrown into disorder, and it was not easy to come up to a closer fight, nor had they missiles to ply the matter from afar—standing, exposed to the blows, when now nothing well enough covered them, some even giving ground, the hastati and the principes, with a renewed shout and drawn swords, fall upon a line that wavered and could not keep its feet. That onset the Etruscans bore not, and, their standards turned, in headlong flight seek again their camp; but the Roman horse, having ridden out across the plain by the flank, when they had set themselves in the fugitives’ way, gave up the road to the camp and made for the mountains; thence, with a column well-nigh unarmed and harassed with wounds, they penetrated into the Ciminian forest. The Roman, having slain many thousands of the Etruscans and taken eight-and-thirty military standards, possessed himself of the enemy’s camp too, with vast booty. Then men began to debate of pursuing the enemy.

The Ciminian forest was in those days more impassable and dreadful than were of late the German woodlands, approached to that day by no one, not even by traders. To enter it scarcely any man dared save the leader himself; to all the rest the memory of the Caudine disaster had not yet been blotted out. Then one of those present, the consul’s brother—Marcus Fabius, some say Caeso, certain say Gaius Claudius, born of the same mother as the consul—professed that he would go to spy out the land, and would shortly bring back all things certain. He had been reared at Caere among friends of the family, and was thence learned in Etruscan letters and knew the Etruscan tongue well. I have authorities that in those days Roman boys were commonly schooled in Etruscan letters, as now in Greek; but it is nearer the truth that there was something exceptional in the man who mingled with the enemy by so bold a disguise. A slave, they say, was his one companion, reared along with him and therefore not ignorant of the same tongue; and the travellers took with them nothing else than a general knowledge of the nature of the region they had to enter and the names of the chief men among its peoples, lest, faltering at any notable point in their talk, they might be caught. They went in shepherds’ dress, armed with rustic weapons, with two bill-hooks and javelins apiece. But neither the command of the language nor the fashion of dress and arms covered them so well as did the fact that it was past belief that any stranger would enter the Ciminian passes. As far as the Camertine Umbrians, they say, they made their way; there the Roman dared to confess who they were; and, brought into the senate, he treated, in the consul’s name, of alliance and friendship, and, thence received in kindly hospitality, was bidden carry word to the Romans that supplies for the army for thirty days would be ready, if he entered those parts, and that the youth of the Camertine Umbrians would be in arms, ready to do his bidding. When this had been reported to the consul, the baggage being sent ahead at the first watch, and the legions ordered to march behind the baggage, he himself stayed with the cavalry, and at daybreak the next day rode up to the enemy’s outposts, which had been posted outside the forest; and when he had held the enemy long enough, he withdrew into camp, and, going out by the other gate, overtook his column before nightfall. The next day at first light he held the ridges of the Ciminian mountain; thence, looking out upon the rich fields of Etruria, he sends his soldiers forth. A vast booty being now driven off, hastily-mustered cohorts of Etruscan country folk, suddenly stirred up by the chief men of that region, meet the Romans, in such disorder that they who should have avenged the plunder were well-nigh themselves a plunder. These slain and routed, the country laid waste far and wide, the Roman returned victorious and rich in store of all things into camp. There, as it chanced, five envoys with two tribunes of the plebs had come, to charge Fabius, in the senate’s name, that he should not cross the Ciminian forest. Glad that they had come too late to be able to hinder the war, the messengers of victory return to Rome.

By this campaign of the consul the war had been spread more widely than crushed; for the seaboard lying beneath the roots of the Ciminian mountain had felt the wasting, and had stirred up, by its indignation, not the peoples of Etruria only but the borderers of Umbria. And so an army such as never before came to Sutrium; and not only was the camp pushed forward out of the woods, but also, in eagerness to fight as soon as might be, the line was brought down into the plains. Then, drawn up, they stood first in their own place, leaving the enemy room to draw up over against them: thereafter, when they perceived that the enemy shrank from battle, they come up to the rampart. And when they saw that even the outposts had been withdrawn within the works, a shout suddenly arose around the leaders, that they should bid the day’s rations be brought out to them there from the camp; they would stay under arms, and either by night or at least at first light would assail the enemy’s camp. The Roman army, no whit quieter, is held in check by its leader’s command. It was about the tenth hour of the day when the consul bids the soldiers take food; he charges them to be under arms at whatsoever hour of day or night he should give the signal. He addresses the soldiers in a few words; he extols the Samnite wars, makes light of the Etruscans; says that foe is not to be matched with foe, nor multitude with multitude; that there was, besides, another weapon hidden; they should know it in time; meanwhile there was need of silence. By these riddling words he feigned that the enemy was being betrayed, that the soldiers’ courage, terrified by the multitude, might be restored; and, because the enemy had encamped without works, what was feigned was the likelier. Their bodies cared for with food, they give themselves to rest, and about the fourth watch, roused without tumult, they take up their arms. Mattocks are dealt out to the camp-servants for tearing down the rampart and filling the ditches. Within the works the line is drawn up; chosen cohorts are placed at the gates’ outlets. Then, the signal being given a little before dawn—which, in summer nights, is the time of deepest sleep—the rampart torn down, the line burst forth, and falls upon the enemy lying scattered everywhere; some motionless, some half-asleep in their beds, the greatest part hurrying to their arms, the slaughter overwhelmed. To few was room given to arm themselves; and these very men, following no sure signal and no leader, the Roman routs, and pursues in their flight. To the camp, to the woods, they made off in different directions. The woods gave the safer refuge; for the camp, set in the plains, is taken that same day. The gold and silver were ordered to be brought to the consul; the rest of the booty was the soldier’s. As many as sixty thousand of the enemy were slain or taken that day. Some authorities hold that that so famous battle was fought beyond the Ciminian forest, at Perusia, and that the state was in great fear lest the army, shut in by so dangerous a pass, should be overwhelmed by Tuscans and Umbrians rising up on every side. But wheresoever the fight took place, the Roman cause was the upper. And so from Perusia and Cortona and Arretium, which were then well-nigh the chief states of the peoples of Etruria, envoys seeking peace and a treaty from the Romans obtained a truce for thirty years.

While these things were being done in Etruria, the other consul, Gaius Marcius Rutulus, took Allifae from the Samnites by storm. Many other forts and villages were either destroyed in hostile fashion, or came untouched into his power. About the same time the Roman fleet too, brought into Campania by Publius Cornelius, whom the senate had set over the seaboard, when it had put in at Pompeii, the naval allies set out thence to ravage the Nucerine territory; and, the nearest parts being hastily laid waste—whence there was a safe return to the ships—lured on, as happens, by the sweetness of plunder, they advanced too far and roused the enemy. As they straggled through the fields, no one met them, though they might have been slain to a man; but, as they were returning in a careless column not far from the ships, the country folk overtook them, stripped them of their booty, and slew part as well; the multitude that survived the slaughter was driven, in panic, to the ships. The setting-out of Quintus Fabius across the Ciminian forest, as much terror as it had bred at Rome, so glad a rumor had it carried into Samnium to the enemy—that the Roman army was cut off and besieged; and they recalled the image of the disaster, the Caudine Forks: that the nation, ever greedy of further conquest, had by the same rashness been led into pathless passes, and had been hemmed in no less by the unfavorableness of the ground than by the enemy’s arms. Now joy was mingling with a certain envy, that fortune had turned the glory of the Roman war away from the Samnites to the Etruscans. And so with arms and men they run together to crush the consul Gaius Marcius, meaning thence to make for Etruria forthwith, through the Marsi and the Sabines, if Marcius gave them no chance of fighting. The consul met them. The battle was fought, fierce on either side and of uncertain issue; and, though the slaughter was doubtful, yet the rumor of an adverse outcome fell upon the Romans, because of the loss of some of the equestrian order and of military tribunes, and one lieutenant, and—what was most marked of all—a wound of the consul himself. By reason of these things the report, swollen, as is its way, a vast terror fell upon the fathers, and it was resolved to name a dictator; nor did any man doubt that Papirius Cursor would be named, in whom at that time the chief stay of warfare was placed. But neither could a message be carried safely into Samnium, all the country being hostile, nor were they sure enough that Marcius the consul was alive. The other consul, Fabius, was privately at enmity with Papirius; and, lest that anger should stand in the way of the public good, the senate resolved that envoys from the number of the consulars should be sent to him, who might move him by their own authority too, and not the public alone, to lay aside, for his country’s sake, the memory of his feuds. The envoys, setting out to Fabius, when they had delivered the senate’s decree and added a speech suited to their charge, the consul, his eyes cast down to the ground, silent, withdrew from the envoys, who were left uncertain what he meant to do; then in the night’s silence, as is the custom, he named Lucius Papirius dictator. And when the envoys thanked him for his spirit so nobly conquered, he kept a stubborn silence, and dismissed the envoys without answer and without mention of his deed, so that it appeared that a signal grief was being held down by a mighty soul. Papirius named Gaius Junius Bubulcus master of the horse; and, as he was carrying the curiate law concerning his command, a grim omen broke off the day, because the Faucian curia was the first to vote—a curia marked by two disasters, the city’s capture and the Caudine Peace, since in the year of each it had been the first curia. Licinius Macer makes that curia abominable by a third disaster too, that which was suffered at the Cremera.

The dictator on the next day, the auspices retaken, carried the law through; and, setting out with the legions lately enrolled for the terror of the army that had been led across the Ciminian forest, he came to Longula, and, receiving the veteran soldiers from the consul Marcius, led his forces out into line. Nor did the enemy seem to decline battle. Then, when both stood drawn up and armed, and neither began the fight, night came upon them. For some while they held their standing camps near to one another, distrusting neither their own strength nor scorning the enemy. With the army of the Umbrians too the matter was fought out in the line; yet the enemy were routed rather than slain, because they could not endure a fight begun in fierce earnest; and at the lake Vadimon the Etruscans, mustering an army by the sacred law, when man had chosen man, with such forces and such spirits as never before fought at once; and the thing was waged with so great a contest of wrath that not a weapon was thrown from either side. With swords the fight began, and, joined most keenly, was the more kindled by the very struggle, which for some while was doubtful, so that it seemed a contest not with the Etruscans, so often conquered, but with some new nation. Nowhere on any side is there any movement of flight; the front-rankers fall, and, lest the standards be left bare of defenders, of the second line is made the first. Then from the last reserves the soldier is called up; and to such an extremity of toil and peril was it come, that the Roman knights, leaving their horses, made their way through arms, through bodies, to the foremost ranks of the foot. This, like a fresh line arisen among the weary, threw the Etruscan standards into confusion; then the rest of the multitude, following up their onset, however spent it was, at last breaks through the enemy’s ranks. Then their stubbornness began to be conquered and certain maniples to turn; and, once these had given their backs, the rest too took a surer flight. That day first broke the powers of the Etruscans, abounding in their old fortune; the flower of their strength was cut down in the line; their camp was taken and plundered in that same charge.

Thereafter the war among the Samnites was of like peril and like glory of outcome; who, besides the rest of their preparations for war, did this, that their line might gleam with new devices of arms. There were two armies; the shields of the one they chased with gold, of the other with silver; the shape of the shield was this: broad at the top, where it covers the breast and the shoulders, with a level upper edge; toward the bottom more wedge-shaped, for the sake of ease in handling. A sponge was the covering for the breast, and the left leg was covered with a greave. Their helmets were crested, to add to their stature an appearance of height. The tunics of the gilded soldiers were of many colors, of the silvered, of white linen. To the latter the right wing was given; the former take their stand on the left. Already this array of glittering arms was known to the Romans, and they had been taught by their leaders that a soldier ought to be rough—not chased with gold and silver, but trusting to iron and to spirit; that those things were a booty rather than arms, gleaming before the action, but hideous amid blood and wounds; that the soldier’s ornament was valor; that all those things follow upon victory, and a rich enemy is the prize of however poor a victor. With these words Cursor, having kindled his soldiers, leads them into battle. He himself takes his stand on the right wing, and set the master of the horse over the left. As soon as the lines met, there was a vast struggle with the enemy, and one no less keen between the dictator and the master of the horse, from which side the victory should begin. It chanced that Junius first shook the enemy—his left against their right—the soldiers consecrated after the Samnite fashion, conspicuous therefore in white raiment and in arms matching it in whiteness; these, crying that he was offering them up to Orcus, when Junius had borne in his standards, he threw their ranks into disorder and beyond doubt drove back their line. When the dictator perceived this, "Shall the victory begin from the left wing," said he, "and shall the right wing, the dictator’s own line, follow another’s fight, and not draw to itself the greatest share of the victory?" He stirs up the soldiers; nor do the horse yield to the valor of the foot, nor the zeal of the lieutenants to the leaders. Marcus Valerius from the right, Publius Decius from the left wing, both consulars, ride out to the cavalry posted on the wings, and, having exhorted them to take with him a share of the glory, charge athwart upon the enemy’s flanks. This fresh terror added, when from either side it had hemmed in the line, and when, to the enemy’s dismay, the Roman legions with renewed shout had advanced their step, then flight began on the Samnites’ part. Now the plains began to be filled with the carnage of men and of glorious arms; and at first their camp received the panic-stricken Samnites, then not even that was held; taken and plundered before night, it was set on fire. The dictator, by decree of the senate, triumphed, and in his triumph the captured arms afforded by far the greatest show. So much magnificence was seen in them that the gilded shields were distributed among the owners of the bankers’ shops to adorn the Forum. From this is said to have arisen the beginning of the Forum’s being adorned by the aediles when the sacred cars were led in procession. And the Romans indeed used the enemy’s splendid arms to the honor of the gods; the Campanians, on the other hand, out of pride and out of hatred of the Samnites, arrayed in that fashion the gladiators who furnished a spectacle at their feasts, and called them by the name of Samnites. In the same year the consul Fabius fought with the remnants of the Etruscans at Perusia, which had itself broken the faith of the truce, in a victory neither doubtful nor difficult. The town itself—for he came up to its walls a victor—he would have taken, had not envoys come out to surrender the city. A garrison being set in Perusia, and the embassies of Etruria, which sought friendship, sent before him to Rome to the senate, the consul, triumphing in a victory even more distinguished than the dictator’s, rode into the city; nay, the glory of the conquered Samnites was in great part turned to the lieutenants, Publius Decius and Marcus Valerius, whom at the next elections the people, with vast accord, declared the one consul, the other praetor.

To Fabius, for the eminent subduing of Etruria, the consulship is continued; Decius is given him for colleague. Valerius was created praetor for the fourth time. The consuls divided the provinces; Etruria fell to Decius, Samnium to Fabius. Setting out to Nuceria Alfaterna, when he had spurned those who sought peace—because they had been unwilling to use it when it was offered—he reduced them to surrender by assault. With the Samnites it was fought in the line. The enemy were beaten in no great struggle; nor would the memory of that battle have been handed down, had not the Marsi in that fight first warred with the Romans. The Paeligni, following the revolt of the Marsi, had the same fortune. To Decius too, the other consul, the fortune of war was favorable. He had forced the Tarquinian by fear to furnish corn to the army and to sue for a truce of forty years. Some forts of the Volsinienses he took by storm; certain of these he razed, that they might not be a refuge to the enemy; and, carrying the war round on every side, he made such terror of himself that the whole Etruscan name sought a treaty from the consul. And of that indeed nothing was obtained; a year’s truce was granted. The army’s pay was paid by the enemy for that year, and two tunics apiece were exacted for the soldier; that was the price of the truce. The affairs of Etruria, now tranquil, were thrown into confusion by a sudden revolt of the Umbrians, a nation untouched by the disasters of war, save that their land had felt the passage of an army. These, having stirred up all their youth and driven a great part of the Etruscans to rebellion, had made so great an army that, leaving Decius behind them in Etruria, they boasted—speaking magnificently of themselves and contemptuously of the Romans—that they would go thence to assault Rome. When this undertaking of theirs was reported to the consul Decius, he made for the city from Etruria by great marches, and sat down in the Pupinian territory, intent upon the report of the enemy. Nor at Rome was the Umbrian war made light of; and the very threats had bred fear in men who had learned, by the Gallic disaster, how unsafe a city they dwelt in. And so envoys were sent to the consul Fabius, that, if there were any respite from the Samnite war, he should lead his army speedily into Umbria. The consul obeyed the order, and by great marches made for Mevania, where the Umbrian forces then were. The consul’s sudden coming—whom they had believed far from Umbria, occupied with another war in Samnium—so terrified the Umbrians that some thought they should withdraw to fortified cities, certain that the war should be given up; but one district—they themselves call it Materina—not only held the rest in arms but drove them forthwith to battle. They fell upon Fabius as he was entrenching his camp. When the consul saw them rushing in disorder upon the works, he recalled his soldiers from their labor and drew them up, as the nature of the place and the time allowed; and, having exhorted them by a true rehearsal of the glory won both in Etruria and in Samnium, he bids them finish this little appendage of the Etruscan war, and exact the penalties of the impious utterance by which they had threatened to assault the city of Rome. These things were heard with such alacrity of the soldiers that a shout, arising of its own accord, broke in upon the leader as he spoke. Then, before the command, at the concord of trumpets and horns, they are borne in a headlong rush upon the enemy. They charge not as upon men or armed foes; a thing marvelous to tell, the standards first began to be snatched from the standard-bearers, then the standard-bearers themselves to be dragged to the consul, and armed men to be carried from line to line; and, wherever there is a struggle, the business is waged with shields rather than swords; with bosses and the dashing of shoulder against them the enemy are laid low. More men are taken than slain, and one cry, of men bidding lay down arms, is carried through the whole line. And so, in the very struggle, surrender was made by the first authors of the war. On the next and the following days the rest of the Umbrian peoples too surrender: the Ocriculani were received into friendship by sponsion.

Fabius, victor in a war of another’s allotment, led his army back into his own province. And so, for deeds so happily done, as the people in the former year had continued his consulship, so the senate prolonged his command for the year following—in which Appius Claudius and Lucius Volumnius were consuls—Appius most of all opposing it. I find in certain annals that Appius, while censor, sought the consulship, and that his elections were interrupted by Lucius Furius, tribune of the plebs, until he abdicated his censorship. Created consul, when to his colleague a new war, the Sallentine enemy, was assigned, he stayed at Rome, that by city arts he might increase his power, since the glory of war was in others’ hands. Volumnius had no cause to repent of his province. He fought many successful battles; some cities of the enemy he took by storm. He was a lavish giver of plunder, and helped a kindness, of itself welcome, with affability, and by these arts had made the soldier greedy of both peril and toil. Quintus Fabius, as proconsul, near the city of Allifae engaged the Samnite army with standards joined. The matter was in no way doubtful; the enemy were routed and driven into their camp; nor would the camp have been held, had not a little of the day remained; yet before night it was beset, and guarded through the night, that none might slip away. The next day, scarcely yet in sure light, the surrender began to be made, and those who were Samnites bargained to be let go with single garments apiece; these were all sent under the yoke. For the allies of the Samnites nothing was provided; about seven thousand were sold under the crown. Those who had declared themselves Hernican citizens were kept apart in custody; all these Fabius sent to Rome to the senate; and, when it had been inquired whether they had warred for the Samnites against the Romans by levy or as volunteers, they are given to the Latin peoples to be kept, and the new consuls, Publius Cornelius Arvina and Quintus Marcius Tremulus—for these had now been created—were bidden to lay that whole matter, untouched, before the senate. The Hernici took this ill; and, the Anagnini holding a council of all the peoples in the circus which they call the Maritime, all the peoples of the Hernican name, save the Aletrinate and the Ferentinate and the Verulan, declared war upon the Roman people.

In Samnium too, because Fabius had departed thence, new movements arose. Calatia and Sora, and the Roman garrisons that were in them, were stormed, and foul savagery was wreaked upon the bodies of the captive soldiers. And so Publius Cornelius was sent thither with an army. To Marcius new enemies—for war had now been ordered against the Anagnini and the other Hernici—were assigned. At first the enemy so intercepted all the convenient places between the consuls’ camps that not even a light-armed messenger could get through, and for several days, uncertain of all things and in suspense about the other’s state, each consul went on, and to Rome this fear flowed, so that all the younger men were bound by the oath, and for sudden emergencies two full armies were enrolled. But the Hernican war was in no way answerable to the present terror and the nation’s ancient glory: daring nothing anywhere worth the telling, stripped of three camps within a few days, they bargained for a thirty days’ truce, on condition of sending envoys to Rome to the senate, with two months’ pay and corn and a tunic apiece for the soldier. They were referred by the senate to Marcius, to whom by decree of the senate the matter of the Hernici had been committed; and he received that nation into surrender. And in Samnium the other consul, the stronger in force, was the more hampered by the ground. The enemy had barred all the roads and seized the passable glades, that no supplies could be carried up; nor, though the consul daily led his standards out into line, could he draw them out to a contest; and it was plain enough that neither would the Samnite bear a present struggle nor the Roman a putting-off of the war. The coming of Marcius—who, the Hernici subdued, hastened to come to his colleague’s aid—took from the enemy the power of delaying the battle. For, as men who had not believed themselves a match for even one army in a contest, and at all events thought that, were the two consular armies allowed to join, no hope would be left, they attack Marcius as he came up in a disordered column. Hastily the baggage was heaped into the midst, and, as the time allowed, the line was drawn up. The shout, first carried to the standing camp, then the dust seen from afar, made an uproar in the other consul’s camp; and he, at once bidding arms be taken up and the soldiers be led hastily into line, falls upon the enemy’s line athwart, busied as it was with another struggle, crying out that it would be the utmost disgrace if they should suffer the other army to become master of both the victories, and not claim to themselves the glory of their own war. Where he had charged he breaks through, and through the midst of the line makes for the enemy’s camp, and takes it, empty of defenders, and fires it. When the soldiers of Marcius saw it blazing, and the enemy looked back, then the flight of the Samnites began everywhere; but slaughter holds all, nor is there safe refuge in any quarter. Now thirty thousand of the enemy being slain, the consuls had given the signal for recall, and were gathering their forces into one, congratulating one another in turn, when suddenly fresh cohorts of the enemy, which had been enrolled as a draft, were seen at a distance, and renewed the slaughter. Against these the victors advance, neither by the consuls’ command nor at a signal received, crying that the Samnite must be steeped in an ill apprenticeship. The consuls indulge the legions’ ardor, as men who knew well that the enemy’s new soldiery, among veterans dismayed by flight, would not be equal to the contest even by the trying of it. Nor did the belief deceive them: all the Samnite forces, old and new, seize the nearest mountains in flight. Thither the Roman line too climbs, and there is no place safe enough for the conquered, and they are routed from the ridges they had seized; and now with one voice all sought peace. Then, three months’ corn being demanded, and a year’s pay and a tunic apiece for the soldier, ambassadors of peace were sent to the senate. Cornelius was left in Samnium; Marcius, triumphing over the Hernici, returned to the city, and an equestrian statue was decreed him in the Forum, which was set up before the temple of Castor. To three peoples of the Hernici—the Aletrinate, the Verulan, the Ferentinate—because they preferred it to citizenship, their own laws were restored, and intermarriage among themselves, which for some while they alone of the Hernici had, was permitted. To the Anagnini and those who had borne arms against the Romans, citizenship without the right of suffrage was given: their councils and their intermarriages were taken away, and they were forbidden magistracies, save the charge of the sacred rites. In the same year the temple of Salus was contracted for by Gaius Junius Bubulcus the censor, which as consul he had vowed in the Samnite war. By the same man and his colleague, Marcus Valerius Maximus, roads through the fields were made at the public charge. And with the Carthaginians in the same year a treaty was renewed for the third time, and to their envoys, who had come for that purpose, gifts were courteously sent.

The same year had as dictator Publius Cornelius Scipio, with Publius Decius Mus as master of the horse. By these, for the purpose for which they had been created, the consular elections were held, because neither of the consuls had been able to be absent from the war. The consuls created were Lucius Postumius and Tiberius Minucius. Piso sets these consuls down after Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius, two years being struck out, in which we have handed down that Claudius and Volumnius, and Cornelius with Marcius, were made consuls. Whether his memory failed him in arranging the annals, or whether of set purpose he passed over the two pairs of consuls, thinking them false, is uncertain. In the same year inroads of the Samnites were made into the Stellate plain of the Campanian land. And so both consuls were sent into Samnium; and when they had made for opposite regions—Postumius for Tifernum, Minucius for Bovianum—the fight took place first, under Postumius’s leadership, at Tifernum. Some hand down, beyond doubt, that the Samnites were conquered and twenty thousand men taken; others, that they parted on even terms, and that Postumius, feigning fear, withdrew his forces by a night march secretly into the mountains, and that the enemy followed, and themselves sat down two miles thence in fortified places. The consul, that he might seem to have sought a standing camp safe and well-supplied—and such it was—after he had both strengthened the camp with works and furnished it with every store of useful things, leaving a strong garrison, about the third watch led his legions, lightly equipped, by the nearest way to his colleague, who likewise sat over against other enemies. There, on Postumius’s prompting, Minucius joins standards with the enemy; and when the battle, hanging in the balance, had gone on far into the day, then Postumius with fresh legions fell unawares upon the enemy’s now wearied line. And so, since weariness and wounds had hindered even flight, the enemy were slain to a man, one-and-twenty standards taken, and thence the march was pressed on to Postumius’s camp. There the two victorious armies fell upon an enemy now smitten by rumor, and rout and chase him; six-and-twenty military standards were taken, and the Samnite commander Statius Gellius and many other men besides, and both camps were taken. And the city of Bovianum, the assault begun the next day, is shortly taken, and with great glory of their deeds the consuls triumphed. Some authorities say that the consul Minucius, carried back into camp with a grievous wound, died, and that Marcus Fulvius was made consul in his room, and that by him, sent to Minucius’s army, Bovianum was taken. In that year Sora, Arpinum, Cesennia were recovered from the Samnites; a great image of Hercules was set up and dedicated on the Capitol.

In the consulship of Publius Sulpicius Saverrio and Publius Sempronius Sophus, the Samnites, seeking either an end or a putting-off of the war, sent envoys to Rome about peace. To them, as they pleaded humbly, it was answered that, had not the Samnites often, while preparing war, sought peace, the matter of peace might have been transacted by parley back and forth: now, since words had thus far been empty, they must stand by deeds. Publius Sempronius the consul would shortly be in Samnium with an army; he could not be deceived as to whether their minds inclined to war or to peace; he would report to the senate all that he had ascertained; and, as the consul withdrew from Samnium, the envoys should follow him. That year, when the Roman army had traversed a pacified Samnium, supplies being kindly furnished, the ancient treaty was restored to the Samnites. Then against the Aequi—old enemies, but for many years quiet under the show of a faithless peace—the Roman arms were turned; because, while the Hernican name was yet whole, they had again and again sent auxiliaries, together with them, to the Samnite, and, after the Hernici were subdued, well-nigh the whole nation, without dissembling their public counsel, had revolted to the enemy; and, after the treaty was struck at Rome with the Samnites, when the fetials had come to demand satisfaction, they said it was a device—that, terror of war being struck into them, they might suffer themselves to be made Romans; how greatly that was to be longed for, the Hernici had taught, when those of them who had the choice had preferred their own laws to the Roman citizenship; but to those who had no liberty to choose what they would rather have, the citizenship, forced upon them, would be in place of a punishment. For these things, bandied about commonly in their councils, the Roman people ordered war to be made upon the Aequi; and both consuls, setting out to the new war, encamped four miles from the enemy’s camp. The army of the Aequi—as men who in their own name had passed very many years unwarlike—like a hasty levy, without sure leaders, without command, were in a flutter. One thinks they should go out into line, others that the camp should be defended; the ravaging of their fields to come, and thereafter the destruction of their cities, left with weak garrisons, moves the most. And so, after among many opinions one was heard—which, the care of common things laid aside, turned each man to the regard of his own affairs—that at the first watch they should go off, in different directions, from the camp into their cities, to carry off everything and defend themselves behind their walls, all received that opinion with vast assent. The enemy scattered through the fields, the Romans at first light, the standards brought forward, take their stand in line; and, when no one came against them, they make for the enemy’s camp at full pace; but after they saw there neither outposts before the gates, nor any man on the rampart, nor the wonted murmur of a camp, moved by the unwonted silence, they halt, in fear of an ambush. Then, having crossed the rampart, when they found all deserted, they go on to follow the enemy by his tracks; but the tracks, leading equally in every direction, as of men slipped away on all sides, at first made for bewilderment. Afterward, the enemy’s plans being learned through scouts, by carrying the war round to the several cities they took one-and-thirty towns within fifty days, by assaulting them all; of which the most were razed and burned, and the name of the Aequi was well-nigh blotted out to extinction. A triumph was held over the Aequi; and their disaster was a warning, so that the Marrucini, the Marsi, the Paeligni, the Frentani sent spokesmen to Rome to seek peace and friendship. To these peoples, seeking a treaty, it was granted.

In the same year Gnaeus Flavius, son of Gnaeus, a scribe, sprung from a freedman father of humble fortune, but for the rest a shrewd man and eloquent, was curule aedile. I find in certain annals that, while he was attending upon the aediles and saw that he was being made aedile by his tribe, but that his name was not received because he plied the scribe’s trade, he laid down his writing-tablet and swore that he would ply the scribe’s trade no more; but that he had ceased to ply it some while before, Licinius Macer argues, from a tribunate held earlier, and from two triumvirates—one for the night-watch, the other for the leading-out of a colony. For the rest—and on this there is no disagreement—he vied in stubbornness against the nobles who scorned his lowliness; he published the civil law, laid up in the inner shrines of the pontiffs, and set out the calendar round the Forum on a white board, that it might be known when an action at law could be brought; he dedicated a temple of Concord in the precinct of Vulcan, to the utmost ill-will of the nobles; and Cornelius Barbatus, the pontifex maximus, was compelled by the people’s consent to lead him in the words, though after the manner of the ancestors he denied that any but a consul or a commander could dedicate a temple. And so, on the senate’s authority, it was carried to the people that no one should dedicate a temple or an altar without the command of the senate or of the greater part of the tribunes of the plebs. I will relate a thing not memorable in itself, save that it be a proof of plebeian liberty against the pride of the nobles. Flavius had come to visit his colleague, who was sick, and, by the agreement of the young nobles who sat beside him, no one rose for him; he bade his curule chair be brought thither, and from the seat of his own honor looked upon his enemies, who were vexed with envy. But Flavius had been made aedile by the faction of the Forum, which had gathered strength from the censorship of Appius Claudius—who first had defiled the senate by choosing freedmen’s sons, and, after no one held that choice ratified, nor had he won in the senate-house the city power he had sought, by distributing the lowly throughout all the tribes corrupted the Forum and the Field. And Flavius’s election carried so much of indignity that very many of the nobles laid aside their gold rings and their trappings. From that time the state split into two parts; the one held the sound people, the favorer and cultivator of the good, the other the faction of the Forum—until Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius were made censors, and Fabius, both for concord’s sake and that the elections might not be in the hand of the lowest, gathered out all the throng of the Forum and threw it into four tribes, which he called the city tribes. And so gratefully, they say, was this thing received that the surname Maximus, which by so many victories he had not won, by this tempering of the orders he won. By the same man it is said to have been instituted that the knights should ride in procession on the Ides of Quinctilis.