In the consulship of Lucius Genucius and Servius Cornelius there was, for the most part, a respite from foreign wars. Colonies were planted at Sora and at Alba. To Alba, in the country of the Aequi, six thousand colonists were enrolled; Sora had belonged to Volscian territory, but the Samnites had taken possession of it—there four thousand men were sent. That same year citizenship was given to the people of Arpinum and of Trebula. The Frusinates were fined a third part of their land, because it was found that the Hernici had been stirred up by them; and the ringleaders of that conspiracy, after an inquiry held by the consuls in accordance with a decree of the senate, were beaten with rods and beheaded. Yet, that they might not pass the year wholly unwarlike, a small expedition was made into Umbria, because word came that raids of armed men were being made into the fields out of a certain cave. Into that cave they pushed with the standards, and in it, the place being dark, they took many wounds, chiefly from the casting of stones, until—the cave having another mouth, for it ran clean through—both openings were found and set ablaze with heaped-up wood. So within, by smoke and heat, about two thousand armed men, rushing at the last into the very flames as they strove to win their way out, were destroyed. In the consulship of Marcus Livius Denter and Marcus Aemilius the war with the Aequi was renewed. Ill-brooking the colony planted among them like a citadel set upon their borders, they set about storming it with all their might, and were beaten off by the colonists themselves. Yet they wrought such terror at Rome—since it was scarcely credible that the Aequi, in a condition so broken, should have risen by themselves alone to war—that on account of that tumult a dictator was named, Gaius Iunius Bubulcus. Setting out with Marcus Titinius as his master of the horse, he subdued the Aequi at the first encounter, and on the eighth day, having returned in triumph to the city, dedicated as dictator the temple of Salus which he had vowed as consul and let out to contract as censor.

That same year a fleet of the Greeks, under the command of Cleonymus the Lacedaemonian, having put in to the shores of Italy, took the city of Thuriae in the country of the Sallentini. Against this enemy the consul Aemilius was sent, and routing him in a single battle drove him to his ships; Thuriae was restored to its old inhabitants, and peace was won for the Sallentine country.—In some annals I find that it was Iunius Bubulcus, named dictator, who was sent into the Sallentine country, and that Cleonymus, before it came to a clash with the Romans, withdrew from Italy.—Sailing thence round the promontory of Brundisium, and borne by the winds up the middle of the Adriatic gulf, with the harborless shores of Italy on his left, and on his right the Illyrians, the Liburnians, and the Histri—savage peoples and for the most part of ill fame for piracy at sea—to terrify him, he came at last, far up, to the shores of the Veneti. Having put ashore a few men to reconnoiter the ground, when he heard that there was a thin strip of beach stretched before him, beyond which, once it was crossed, lay shallows flooded by the sea-tides; that level fields were to be seen not far off, and hills beyond them; that there was the mouth of a very deep river by which ships might be brought round into a safe anchorage—it was the river Meduacus—he ordered the fleet to be brought in there and to make its way up against the stream. The channel of the river would not bear the heaviest of the ships; the throng of armed men, passing over into lighter craft, came to the thickly-settled fields where three coastal villages of the Patavini tilled that shore. There, disembarking and leaving a light guard with the ships, they storm the villages, fire the roofs, drive off the plunder of men and cattle, and, in the sweetness of plundering, push ever farther from their ships. When this was reported at Patavium—and the neighboring Gauls always kept the townsmen under arms—they divide their fighting men into two parts. The one was led into the region where the wide-ranging devastation was reported; the other, that it might fall in with none of the raiders, was led by another route to the station of the ships, which was fourteen miles from the town. An attack was made upon the ships, the guards being slain unawares, and the terrified sailors were forced to take the vessels across to the other bank of the river. On land too the battle against the scattered plunderers had been equally successful, and as the Greeks fled back to their station the Veneti barred the way; so, hemmed in the midst, the enemy were cut down. A part, taken prisoner, disclose the fleet, and that king Cleonymus was three miles off. Then, the captives given into custody in the nearest village, the Patavini man—part with river-boats fashioned with flat bottoms apt for surmounting the shoals of the shallows, part with the captured craft—and, setting out for the fleet, they beset the ships, which lay motionless, their crews fearing the unknown waters more than the enemy; and pursuing them, as they fled to the deep, more keenly than the men fought back, right up to the mouth of the river, they take and burn certain of the enemy’s ships which their panic had driven aground in the shoals, and return victorious. Cleonymus, with scarcely a fifth part of his ships unharmed, departed, having found success in no quarter of the Adriatic sea. The beaks of the ships and the spoils of the Laconians, fixed up in the old temple of Juno, many are still alive who have seen at Patavium. In memorial of the sea-fight, on the day each year on which it was fought, a solemn contest of ships is held in the midst of the town.

That same year, at Rome, a treaty was struck with the Vestini, who sought our friendship. Then a manifold terror arose. Word came that Etruria was in revolt, the disorder having sprung from the sedition of the people of Arretium, where the Cilnian house, overweening in its wealth, had begun to be driven out by force through envy; and at the same time that the Marsi were defending by force the land into which the colony of Carseoli had been planted, four thousand men being enrolled for it. And so, on account of these tumults, Marcus Valerius Maximus was named dictator and chose for himself as master of the horse Marcus Aemilius Paulus.—This I believe rather than that Quintus Fabius, at that age and with those honors, was set under Valerius; though I would not deny that the error sprang from the surname Maximus.—Setting out with his army, the dictator routed the Marsi in a single battle. Then, having driven them into their fortified towns, he took Milionia, Plestina, and Fresilia within a few days, and, having fined the Marsi of a part of their land, restored the treaty. Then the war was turned against the Etruscans; and when the dictator had set out for Rome to renew the auspices, the master of the horse, going out to forage, was surrounded from an ambush, and, with the loss of several standards and a foul slaughter and flight of his men, was driven back into camp.—Which terror is so out of keeping with Fabius, not only because, if by any other quality he matched his surname, it was above all by his renown in war, but also because, mindful of the harshness of Papirius, he could never have been brought to fight without the dictator’s command.—

The report of that disaster stirred up at Rome a greater terror than the matter warranted; for, as though the army had been destroyed, a cessation of public business (iustitium) was proclaimed, watches set at the gates, guards mounted street by street, arms and missiles heaped upon the walls. All the younger men being bound by the military oath, the dictator was sent to the army, and found everything calmer than he had hoped and set in order by the care of the master of the horse: the camp drawn back to a safer place, the cohorts that had lost their standards posted outside the rampart without tents, the army eager for battle, that the disgrace might the sooner be wiped out. And so at once he pushed the camp forward thence into the territory of Rusellae. Thither the enemy too followed, and although from their well-fought action they had the highest confidence in their strength even in open battle, yet they made trial of the foe by an ambush also, in which they had had happy success. Not far from the Roman camp were the half-ruined buildings of a village, burnt in the wasting of the fields. There, with armed men hidden, cattle were driven forward within sight of the Roman outpost, over which Gnaeus Fulvius, a lieutenant, was in command. When at this bait no one stirred from the Roman post, one of the herdsmen, advancing right up to the fortifications, calls out to the others, who were driving the cattle hesitantly from the ruins of the village, why they hung back, when they could drive them in safety through the very midst of the Roman camp. When certain men of Caere interpreted this to the lieutenant, and through all the maniples of the soldiers there was a great indignation, yet they durst not move without orders, he bids men skilled in the tongue mark whether the herdsmen’s speech was nearer to the rustic or to the city kind. When they reported that the sound of the tongue, and the bearing and sleekness of the bodies, were too cultivated for herdsmen, "Go, then," said he, "tell them to uncover the ambush they have hidden in vain: the Roman knows all, and can no more now be taken by guile than be conquered by arms." When this was heard and carried to those who had settled in the ambush, there was a sudden rising up from the lurking-places, and the standards were borne out into the plain, open to view on every side. To the lieutenant the battle-line seemed greater than could be withstood by his own outpost; and so in haste he sends to the dictator to summon aid, while he himself meanwhile sustains the enemy’s onset.

When the message was brought, the dictator orders the standards to be borne forward and the men under arms to follow; but almost everything was swifter than his command; in a moment the standards and arms were snatched up, and the men were scarcely held back from charge and run. Now the wrath at the disaster lately suffered goaded them, now the shout from the swelling fight, falling ever louder upon them, spurred them the more. And so they press one another and urge the standard-bearers to go faster. The more he sees them hastening, the more earnestly does the dictator hold back the column and bid it advance at a gentle pace. The Etruscans, on the other side, roused at the battle’s beginning, were present with all their forces; and messenger upon messenger reports to the dictator that all the legions of the Etruscans had joined the fight, and that his men could no longer hold out, while he himself perceives from the higher ground in how great a peril the outpost stood. Yet, confident enough that even now the lieutenant was equal to enduring the struggle, and that he himself, the avenger of the danger, was not far off, he wishes the enemy to be wearied to the utmost, that he might fall upon them spent while his own men were fresh. Slowly though they advance, there was now nevertheless a moderate space for taking up the charge, at least for the cavalry. The standards of the legions led the way in front, that the enemy might fear nothing hidden or sudden; but he had left gaps between the ranks of the foot, where, the space being wide enough, the horses might be let go. With one accord the line raised the shout, and the cavalry, loosed, in free career bears down upon the enemy and pours a sudden panic over men unprepared against a cavalry storm. And so, as a help all but too late for men now near to being surrounded, so it was an utter respite that was given. Fresh men took up the battle, and even that was neither long nor doubtful. The enemy, routed, make for their camp, and as the Romans now press on with the standards they give way and crowd together into the farthest part of the camp. The fleeing throng jams in the narrows of the gates; a great part climbs the mound and rampart, to see whether they might either defend themselves from a higher place or somewhere get over and escape. By chance, at one spot, the mound, ill-packed, sank under the weight of those standing upon it into the ditch, and there, when they had cried aloud that the gods were opening a way of flight, more got away unarmed than armed. In this battle the strength of the Etruscans was broken a second time; and on the terms of a year’s pay and two months’ grain it was granted by the dictator that they should send envoys to Rome to treat of peace. Peace was refused; a truce of two years was given. The dictator returned in triumph to the city.—I have authorities who say that Etruria was pacified by the dictator without any battle worth recording, only the sedition of the people of Arretium being composed and the Cilnian house brought back into favor with the commons.—Marcus Valerius was made consul out of the dictatorship. Some have handed down that he was elected not seeking it, and indeed even absent, and that those elections were held by an interrex; this one thing is not in dispute, that he held the consulship with Apuleius Pansa.

In the consulship of Marcus Valerius and Quintus Apuleius affairs abroad were quiet enough: the Etruscan was held still by his reverses in war and by the truce; the Samnite, tamed by the disasters of many years, did not yet repent of his new treaty; at Rome too the commons were kept quiet by the throng drawn off into colonies. Yet, that things might not be tranquil on every side, a contention was set on foot among the foremost men of the state, patricians and plebeians, by the tribunes of the plebs Quintus and Gnaeus Ogulnius, who, having sought on every hand occasions for bringing the fathers into disrepute with the commons, after other attempts had been made in vain, took up that proceeding by which they might inflame, not the lowest of the commons, but the very heads of the commons—plebeian men of consular and triumphal rank, to whose honors nothing was wanting save the priesthoods, which were not yet open to both orders. They therefore promulgated a bill that, whereas there were at that time four augurs and four pontiffs, and it was thought good that the number of the priests be increased, four pontiffs and five augurs, all from the plebs, should be added to the colleges.—How that college of augurs could have been reduced to the number of four save by the death of two, I do not discover, since it is agreed among the augurs that the number ought to be uneven, so that the three ancient tribes—the Ramnes, the Titienses, and the Luceres—may each have its own augur, or, if more be needed, may multiply the priests by an equal number among themselves; as they were multiplied when, five being added to four, they filled out the number nine, so that there were three to each tribe.—But because they were being added from the plebs, the fathers took the matter as ill as when they had seen the consulship made common. They pretended that it concerned the gods rather than themselves: the gods would see to it that their own rites were not polluted; for their part they prayed only this, that no disaster might come upon the commonwealth. But they strove less hard, being now used to be beaten in contests of this kind; and they saw their adversaries not, as once they had scarcely hoped, reaching after great honors, but already possessed of all those things for the hope—doubtful then—of which the struggle had been waged: consulships and censorships and triumphs many times over.

Yet they say the chief contest in urging and opposing the law lay between Appius Claudius and Publius Decius Mus. When they had argued much the same things about the right of the fathers and of the commons that had once been said for and against the Licinian law, when the consulship was being sought for plebeians, Decius is said to have called up the image of his own father, such as many who were in the assembly had seen him—girt in the Gabine fashion, standing over his spear, in which garb he had devoted himself for the Roman people and the legions. Then, said he, the consul Publius Decius had seemed to the immortal gods as pure and holy as if his colleague Titus Manlius were the one devoted; could not that same Publius Decius have been lawfully chosen to perform the public rites of the Roman people? Was this the danger—that the gods would hear his prayers less than those of Appius Claudius? Did Appius perform his private rites more chastely and worship the gods more scrupulously than he himself? Whom did it repent of the vows which so many plebeian consuls, so many dictators, had pronounced on behalf of the commonwealth, whether going to the armies or in the very midst of wars? Let the commanders of those years be numbered, in which affairs had begun to be conducted under the leadership and auspices of plebeians; let the triumphs be numbered. By now the plebeians did not repent even of their own nobility. He held it for certain that, if some sudden war should arise, the senate and people of Rome would have no more hope in patrician than in plebeian leaders. "And since this is so," said he, "to which of gods or men can it seem unworthy that those men whom you have honored with curule chairs, with the bordered toga, the palm-broidered tunic, the embroidered toga, and the triumphal crown and laurel—men whose houses you have made conspicuous among the rest by the enemy’s spoils fixed upon them—should add the insignia of the pontiffs and of the augurs? He who, adorned with the array of Jupiter Best and Greatest, borne in a gilded chariot through the city, has gone up to the Capitol—shall he not be looked upon with the bowl and the augur’s staff, when, with veiled head, he slays the victim or takes an augury from the citadel? On whose portrait’s title the consulship and the censorship and the triumph shall be read with an even mind, will the eyes of the readers not endure it, if you add the augurship or the pontificate? For my part—and may I say it with the gods’ leave—I hope that we are now, by the favor of the Roman people, such men as may render to the priesthoods, by the worth we are thought to have, no less of honor than we receive, and may seek, more for the gods’ sake than our own, that those whom we worship in private we may worship in the name of the state.

"But why have I argued thus far as though the cause of the patricians touching the priesthoods stood untouched, and we were not already in possession of one most ample priesthood? We see the decemvirs for the conduct of sacred rites—interpreters of the Sibyl’s verses and of this people’s destinies, and the same who preside over the rite of Apollo and over the other ceremonies—men of the plebs; nor was any injury done to the patricians then, when the number was increased, on the plebeians’ account, beyond the two men for the conduct of the sacred rites; and now a tribune, a brave and energetic man, has added five places for augurs and four for pontiffs, that plebeians may be named to them—not, Appius, to thrust you from your place, but that plebeian men may help you in the management of divine things too, even as in all other human affairs they help you with a man’s full share. Blush not, Appius, to have as colleague in a priesthood one whom you might have had as colleague in the censorship, as colleague in the consulship, whose master of the horse you may be when he is dictator, as well as his dictator when he is master of the horse. A Sabine newcomer, the founder of your nobility—call him Attius Clausus or Appius Claudius, whichever you prefer—those ancient patricians received into their number: do not disdain to receive us into the number of the priests. We bring many distinctions with us—nay, all the very same that made you proud. Lucius Sextius was the first consul made from the plebs, Gaius Licinius Stolo the first master of the horse, Gaius Marcius Rutulus the first both dictator and censor, Quintus Publilius Philo the first praetor. Always have we heard the same things: that the auspices rest with you, that you alone have a clan, you alone a lawful command and auspice at home and in the field; thus far the plebeian command has been as prosperous as the patrician, and so it shall be henceforth. Did you ever yet hear it told that the patricians at the first were not sent down from heaven, but were made—men who could name a father, that is, nothing more than freeborn? A consul I can now name as my father, and my son will be able to name a grandfather. There is nothing else in the matter, Quirites, save that we should obtain all the things once denied us; the patricians seek the contest only, and care not what issue the contests may have. This law—and may it be good, auspicious, and happy for you and for the commonwealth—I move be ordered as you propose."

The people were for calling the tribes to vote at once, and it was plain that the law would be accepted; that day, nevertheless, was lost by an intercession. On the next day, the tribunes being overawed, it was accepted with vast unanimity. The pontiffs created were the law’s mover Publius Decius Mus, Publius Sempronius Sophus, Gaius Marcius Rutulus, and Marcus Livius Denter; the five augurs, likewise from the plebs, were Gaius Genucius, Publius Aelius Paetus, Marcus Minucius Faesus, Gaius Marcius, and Titus Publilius. So the number of the pontiffs was made eight, of the augurs nine. In the same year the consul Marcus Valerius carried a law concerning appeal (provocatio), more carefully sanctioned. This was now the third time it had been passed since the kings were driven out, always by the same family. The cause of renewing it so often I take to have been none other than that the wealth of a few availed more than the liberty of the commons. Yet the Porcian law alone seems to have been passed in defense of the citizens’ persons, since it sanctioned with a heavy penalty the scourging or putting to death of a Roman citizen; the Valerian law, when it had forbidden that one who had appealed be beaten with rods or slain with the axe, added, if any did contrary to this, nothing more than that it was "wickedly done." So strong, I believe, was the sense of shame in men in those days, that this was held a bond of the law strong enough; now scarcely would anyone in earnest so threaten. A war by no means worth recording was waged by the same consul against the revolting Aequi, who, besides their fierce tempers, had nothing left of their old fortune. The other consul, Appuleius, besieged in Umbria the town of Nequinum. The place was steep, and on one side sheer—where Narnia now stands—and could be taken neither by force nor by siegework. And so the new consuls, Marcus Fulvius Paetus and Titus Manlius Torquatus, took over the business unfinished. In that year, when all the centuries were naming Quintus Fabius consul though he did not seek it, Licinius Macer and Tubero record that Fabius himself was the author of putting off the consulship for himself to a more warlike year: in that year he would be of greater use to the commonwealth in a magistracy held in the city; and so, neither hiding what he preferred nor yet seeking it, he was made curule aedile with Lucius Papirius Cursor. That I should not set this down for certain, Piso, the older authority of the annals, has caused, who records that in that year the curule aediles were Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, son of Gnaeus, and Spurius Carvilius Maximus, son of Quintus. That surname, I believe, made the error in the aediles, and a story followed, mixed from the aedilician and the consular elections, to suit the error. And in that year the lustrum was closed by the censors Publius Sempronius Sophus and Publius Sulpicius Saverrio, and two tribes were added, the Aniensis and the Terentina. These things were done at Rome.

But while the time was being wasted in a slack siege before the town of Nequinum, two of the townsmen, whose buildings adjoined the wall, having made a tunnel, come by a hidden path to the Roman outposts; brought thence to the consul, they undertake to receive an armed garrison within the walls. The thing seemed neither to be spurned nor to be trusted incautiously. With one of them—for the other was kept as a hostage—two scouts were sent through the passage; and when the matter had been sufficiently ascertained by them, three hundred armed men, with the deserter for guide, entering the city by night, seized the gate that was nearest. This being broken open, the consul and the Roman army burst into the city without a struggle. So Nequinum came under the sway of the Roman people. A colony was sent there against the Umbrians, called Narnia from the river; the army was led back to Rome with great booty. In the same year a war was prepared by the Etruscans against the truce; but as they were contriving other designs, a huge army of the Gauls, entering their borders, turned them for a while from their purpose. Then, trusting in their money, in which they were very strong, they try to make allies of the Gauls out of enemies, that with that army joined to them they might wage war upon the Romans. The barbarians do not refuse the alliance; the question is of the price. When this had been agreed and received, and the rest was ready for war, and the Etruscan bade them follow, they deny that they had bargained the price for making war upon the Romans: whatever they had received, they had received it that they should not lay waste the Etruscan land nor harry its tillers with arms; they would serve, nevertheless, if the Etruscans absolutely wished it, but on no other wage than that they be received into a share of the land and settle at last in some fixed seat. Many councils of the peoples of Etruria were held about this, and nothing could be brought to pass—not so much because the land would be diminished, as because each shuddered to join to himself, as neighbors, men of so savage a race. So the Gauls were dismissed, and carried off a vast sum of money gotten without toil or peril. At Rome the rumor of a Gallic tumult added to the Etruscan war caused terror; and the more readily, on that account, was a treaty struck with the Picentine people.

To the consul Titus Manlius the province of Etruria fell by lot; who, scarcely having entered the enemy’s borders, while he was exercising among the cavalry, was thrown by the swift wheeling of his galloping horse and almost at once gave up the ghost; the third day after that fall was the end of the consul’s life. When the Etruscans had taken this as an omen of the war, declaring that the gods had joined the war on their behalf, they lifted up their spirits. At Rome the news was sad, both for the longing felt for the man and for the unseasonableness of the time. The elections for substituting a consul were held according to the mind of the leading men: all the centuries named Marcus Valerius consul, whom the senate had been about to order named as dictator, so that the fathers deterred him from naming a dictator. Then straightway he was bidden set out into Etruria to the legions. His coming so curbed the Etruscans that none durst go forth beyond the fortifications, and their own fear was like a siege; nor could the new consul draw them out to battle by laying waste the fields and burning the buildings, though everywhere not only farmsteads but crowded villages too smoked with the fires. While this war proved slacker than was thought, the rumor of another war arose—one not undeservedly terrible, for the many disasters suffered on either side in turn—through the information of the Picentines, our new allies: that the Samnites were looking to arms and rebellion, and that they themselves had been solicited by them. Thanks were given to the Picentines, and a great part of the fathers’ care was turned from Etruria to the Samnites. The dearness of grain too kept the state anxious, and it would have come to the utmost of scarcity—so those have written who hold that Fabius Maximus was aedile that year—had not the care of that man, such as it had been on many occasions in matters of war, been then at home in the dispensing of the grain-supply, in the laying in and bringing together of corn. In that year—and the cause is not handed down—an interregnum was begun. The interreges were Appius Claudius, then Publius Sulpicius. He held the consular elections; he created as consuls Lucius Cornelius Scipio and Gnaeus Fulvius. At the beginning of this year envoys of the Lucanians came to the new consuls to complain that, because they could not be enticed by terms into an alliance of arms, the Samnites had entered their borders with a hostile army and were laying them waste, driving them by war to war. The Lucanian people had erred once amply enough and more; now their minds were so set that they thought it more tolerable to bear and suffer all things than ever afterward to violate the Roman name. They prayed the fathers both to receive the Lucanians into their protection and to ward off from them the force and the wrong of the Samnites; they themselves, although by undertaking war with the Samnites their faith toward the Romans had now been made necessary, were nevertheless ready to give hostages.

The senate’s deliberation was brief; to a man, all vote that a treaty be joined with the Lucanians and restitution be demanded from the Samnites. A kindly answer was given to the Lucanians, and the treaty was struck. Fetials were sent to bid the Samnite withdraw from the territory of the allies and lead his army out of the Lucanian borders; to meet whom were sent men by the Samnites to give warning that, if they should approach any council in Samnium, they would not depart unharmed. When these things were heard at Rome, the fathers voted, and the people ordered, war upon the Samnites. The consuls divided the provinces between them: to Scipio fell Etruria, to Fulvius the Samnites, and they set out, each his several way, to his own war. To Scipio, who looked for a slack war and like the campaign of the year before, the enemy came in battle-array at Volaterrae. The fight lasted the greater part of the day with great slaughter on both sides; night came on while it was uncertain to which side the victory had been given. The next day’s light showed the victor and the vanquished; for the Etruscans had left their camp in the silence of the night. The Roman, going out into the line, when he sees the victory yielded by the enemy’s departure, advancing to the camp, gets possession of it empty, with very much booty—for it had been a standing camp and deserted in haste. Then, leading his forces back into the Faliscan country, when he had left his baggage at Falerii with a moderate guard, he advances with a column lightened to lay waste the enemy’s borders. All things are wasted with sword and fire; booty is driven off on every side. Not only was a waste left to the enemy, but fire was carried into their forts and villages also: from the storming of the cities he held his hand—the cities into which fear had driven the Etruscans. The battle of the consul Gnaeus Fulvius in Samnium at Bovianum was a famous one, of a victory by no means doubtful. Then, attacking Bovianum, and not long after, he took Aufidena by storm.

In the same year the colony of Carseoli was planted in the territory of the Aequicoli. The consul Fulvius triumphed over the Samnites. When the consular elections were drawing near, a rumor arose that the Etruscans and the Samnites were enrolling huge armies; that openly, in all their councils, the chief men of the Etruscans were upbraided for not having drawn the Gauls into the war on any terms whatsoever; that the magistrates of the Samnites were chidden for having flung against the Romans an army that had been made ready against the Lucanian enemy; and so the enemy were rising up to war with their own and their allies’ strength, and the struggle to be gone through would be by no means an even one. This terror, though men of mark were seeking the consulship, turned all eyes upon Quintus Fabius Maximus, at first no candidate, and then, when he saw the inclination of men’s zeal, even refusing it. Why did they trouble him, now an old man and one who had done with toils and the rewards of toils? Neither the vigor of body nor of mind remained the same; and he feared Fortune herself, lest she should seem to some one of the gods too constant toward him already, and more steadfast than human affairs allow. He had himself grown up into the glory of his elders, and he looked gladly upon others rising toward their own glory; nor at Rome were great honors lacking to the bravest men, nor brave men to the honors. By this self-restraint, so just, he did but whet men’s zeal; which, thinking it must be quenched by a respect for the laws, he ordered the law to be read aloud by which it was not permitted that the same man be made consul again within ten years. The law was scarcely heard for the uproar, and the tribunes of the plebs said that this would be no hindrance; they would bring it before the people that he be loosed from the laws. And he indeed persisted in refusing: to what end, then, was it to pass laws, by which fraud was wrought through the very men who had passed them? The laws were now ruled, not ruling. The people none the less went on to vote, and as each century was called within, it named Fabius consul beyond doubt. Then at last, overcome by the consent of the state, "May the gods approve," said he, "what you do and are about to do, Quirites. But, since in my own case you will do what you wish, let there be a place, in the case of my colleague, for my favor with you: Publius Decius, a man proved to me in a harmonious colleagueship, worthy of you, worthy of his father—I beg you make him consul along with me." The plea seemed just. All the centuries that remained named Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius consuls. In that year a day for prosecution was appointed by the aediles against very many, because they held more land than the law had fixed as the limit; and scarcely anyone was cleared, and a vast curb was laid upon immoderate greed.

The new consuls, Quintus Fabius Maximus for the fourth time and Publius Decius Mus for the third, while they were debating between themselves which should choose the Samnites for his enemy, which the Etruscans, and how great forces were enough for this province or for that, and which of them was the fitter leader for which war, when envoys from Sutrium and Nepete and Falerii reported that the councils of the peoples of Etruria were being held about suing for peace, turned the whole weight of the war into Samnium. The consuls set out, and, that their supplies might be the readier and the enemy the more uncertain by what way the war would come, Fabius led his legions through the country of Sora, Decius through that of the Sidicini, into Samnium. When they had come into the enemy’s borders, each advances laying waste, with his column spread wide. Yet they scout more widely than they lay waste; and so the enemy did not escape them—drawn up at Tifernum in a hidden valley, where they were preparing to fall upon the Romans from the higher ground as they entered. Fabius, having removed his baggage to a safe place and set a moderate guard over it, and having forewarned the soldiers that a battle was at hand, comes up in square formation to the enemy’s lurking-place of which he had told. The Samnites, since their unforeseen surprise was now hopeless, and the matter would once for all issue into open decision, themselves too preferred to engage in a regular line. And so they come down into the level and commit themselves to fortune with more spirit than hope; but, whether because they had drawn together whatever strength there was from all the peoples of the Samnites, or because the crisis of their whole fortune wrung their hearts, they showed some terror even in the open fight. Fabius, when he saw the enemy moved from his place on no side, bids his son Maximus and Marcus Valerius, the tribunes of the soldiers, with whom he had run out to the front, go to the cavalry and exhort them that, if ever they remembered the commonwealth helped by the aid of the horse, on that day they should strive to keep the glory of their order unconquered: in the struggle of the foot the enemy stood unmoved; all the hope that was left lay in the charge of the cavalry. And he loads the young men themselves, each by name, with equal courtesy to both, now with praises, now with promises. But thinking that, should not even that force avail when tried, he must proceed by stratagem if strength helped nothing, he bids Scipio, his lieutenant, withdraw the hastati of the first legion from the line and lead them round to the nearest hills as secretly as he could; thence, by a hidden ascent, to raise his column onto the heights out of sight, and suddenly show himself in the enemy’s rear. The cavalry, under the lead of the tribunes, carried out before the standards unexpectedly, caused scarcely more confusion to the enemy than to their own side. Against the charging squadrons the Samnite line stood unmoved, and could on no part be driven back or broken through; and after the attempt had come to nothing, they were received behind the standards and withdrew from the fight. From this the enemy’s spirit grew, nor could the front line have sustained so long a struggle and a force swelling with self-confidence, had not the second line, by the consul’s order, come up into the first. There fresh strength halts the Samnite, who was now bearing in upon them; and at that moment the unlooked-for standards from the hills and the shout that went up terrified the Samnites’ minds with a fear more than the truth warranted; for both Fabius cried out that his colleague Decius was approaching, and each soldier for himself shouts in his joy that the other consul is at hand, that the legions are at hand; and a mistake, useful to the Romans, fell out, and filled the Samnites with flight and dread—most of all terrified lest, wearied as they were, they be overwhelmed by another army, fresh and untouched. And because they scattered every way in flight, the slaughter was less than so great a victory warranted: three thousand four hundred were slain, about eight hundred and thirty taken; twenty-three military standards captured.

The Apulians would have joined the Samnites before the battle, had not the consul Publius Decius set his camp against them at Maleventum, and then, having drawn them out to an engagement, routed them. There too there was more of flight than of slaughter; two thousand of the Apulians were slain; and, despising that enemy, Decius led his legions into Samnium. There the two consular armies, ranging over different quarters, laid all things waste over the space of five months. There were forty-five places in Samnium in which the camps of Decius stood, eighty-six of the other consul; nor were there left only the traces of rampart and ditch, but other monuments of devastation far more conspicuous than these, in the regions laid waste round about. Fabius took the city of Cimetra also. There two thousand nine hundred armed men were taken, and about nine hundred and thirty slain in the fight. Then, having set out for Rome on account of the elections, he hastened to push that business forward. When at the first call all the centuries were naming Quintus Fabius consul, Appius Claudius, a candidate of consular rank, a keen and ambitious man, not so much for the sake of his own honor as that the patricians might recover the two consular places, leaned with all his might—his own and that of the whole nobility—to have himself named consul along with Quintus Fabius. Fabius at first refused, saying much the same of himself as in the year before. All the nobility stand about his chair, beseeching him to draw the consulship out of the plebeian mire and to restore its old majesty both to the office and to the patrician houses. Fabius, when silence had been made, with a temperate speech laid the men’s zeal to rest; for he said that he would have so acted as to receive the names of two patricians, if he saw any other than himself made consul; but now he would not, by a most evil precedent, take his own candidacy into account at the elections, since it would be against the laws. So Lucius Volumnius, a plebeian, was made consul with Appius Claudius—the two having likewise been matched together in a former consulship. The nobility cast it in Fabius’s teeth that he had shrunk from Appius Claudius as a colleague, a man without doubt his superior in eloquence and in the civil arts.

The elections being finished, the old consuls were ordered to wage the war in Samnium, their command being prolonged for six months. And so in the following year too, in the consulship of Lucius Volumnius and Appius Claudius, Publius Decius—who had been left in Samnium as consul by his colleague—as proconsul did not cease to lay waste the fields, until at last he drove the Samnite army, which nowhere committed itself to battle, out of its own borders. Driven thence, they made for Etruria; and, thinking they would accomplish more efficaciously by so great a column of armed men, with terror mingled into their prayers, what they had often tried in vain by embassies, they demanded a council of the chief men of Etruria. This being gathered, they set forth through how many years they had been fighting for liberty against the Romans: they had tried all things, whether by their own strength they could bear so great a weight of war; they had tried also the aids—of no great moment—of the neighboring peoples. They had sought peace of the Roman people, when they could not endure the war; they had renewed the war, because peace to men in servitude was heavier than war to free men. One hope was left them, resting in the Etruscans. They knew that nation to be the richest in Italy in arms, in men, in money; they had as neighbors the Gauls, born amid steel and arms, fierce both by their own nature and against the Roman people, whom—and it was no idle boast—they recalled to have been taken by themselves and ransomed with gold. Nothing was lacking, if the Etruscans had the spirit that Porsenna once and their forefathers had, but that they should drive the Romans from all the land this side the Tiber and compel them to fight for their own safety, not for an intolerable dominion over Italy. The Samnite army had come to them ready, equipped with arms, with pay, and would follow on the instant, even if they should lead it to the storming of the very city of Rome.

While they were thus vaunting and contriving war in Etruria, at home the Roman was scorching them. For Publius Decius, when he learned by his scouts that the Samnite army had departed, having called a council, said: "Why do we wander through the fields, carrying the war about village by village? Why do we not assail their cities and walls? No army now guards Samnium; they have quitted their borders and doomed themselves to exile." All approving, he leads them to the storming of Murgantia, a strong city; and so great was the soldiers’ ardor, both from love of their leader and from the hope of greater booty than from the plundering of the countryside, that in a single day they took the city by force of arms. There two thousand one hundred Samnites, fighting, were surrounded and taken, and other booty, vast in amount, was captured. And that it might not load the column with heavy baggage, Decius bids the soldiers be called together. "Will you," said he, "be content with this one victory or this one booty? Do you wish to bear hopes that match your valor? All the cities of the Samnites, and the fortunes left within the cities, are yours, since their legions, routed in so many battles, you have at last driven from their borders. Sell these things, and lure the trader with gain to follow the column; I will from time to time supply you what you may sell. Let us go from here to the city of Romulea, where no greater toil, but a greater booty, awaits you." The booty being sold off, of their own accord urging on their commander, they push on to Romulea. There too, without works, without engines, the moment the standards were brought up, deterred by no force from the walls, where each found it nearest, with ladders hastily set up, they climbed onto the ramparts. The town was taken and plundered; about two thousand three hundred were slain and six thousand men taken, and the soldier got vast booty, which he was forced to sell, like the former. Thence to Ferentinum—although no rest was given—he was nevertheless led with the utmost alacrity. But there was more of toil and peril: the walls were defended with the utmost force, and the place was safe by fortification and by nature; but the soldier, used to plunder, overcame all. About three thousand of the enemy were slain about the walls; the booty fell to the soldier. The greater part of the credit for these stormed cities is in certain annals drawn to Maximus; they record that Murgantia was stormed by Decius, and Ferentinum and Romulea by Fabius. There are those who give this glory to the new consuls, and some not to both but to one of them, Lucius Volumnius, to whom, they say, Samnium had fallen as his province.

While these things were being done in Samnium, under whosesoever leadership and auspices, the Romans meanwhile had a huge war stirred up against them in Etruria out of many nations, of which Gellius Egnatius, a Samnite, was the prime mover. Almost all the Etruscans had declared for the war; the contagion had drawn in the nearest peoples of Umbria, and Gallic auxiliaries were being solicited for pay; all that multitude was gathering at the camp of the Samnites. When this sudden tumult was reported at Rome—since the consul Lucius Volumnius had already set out into Samnium with the second and third legions and fifteen thousand of the allies—it was resolved that Appius Claudius go into Etruria at the first possible time. Two Roman legions followed, the first and the fourth, and twelve thousand of the allies; the camp was pitched not far from the enemy. But more was accomplished by the fact that they had come in good time—so that the fear of the Roman name restrained certain peoples of Etruria already looking to arms—than that anything was there done, under the consul’s leadership, skilfully or fortunately enough: many battles were fought on unfavorable ground and at unfavorable times, and the hope of each day made the enemy heavier; and it was now well-nigh come to this, that neither did the soldiers trust their leader nor the leader his soldiers enough. That a letter was sent to summon his colleague out of Samnium I find in three annals; yet I am loath to set it down for certain, since that very point was a matter of dispute between the consuls of the Roman people, now discharging the same office for the second time—Appius denying that it was sent, Volumnius affirming that he had been summoned by Appius’s letter. By now Volumnius had taken three forts in Samnium, in which about three thousand of the enemy had been slain and nearly half as many taken, and he had crushed the seditions of the Lucanians, stirred up by plebeian and needy leaders, with the fullest goodwill of the aristocracy, through Quintus Fabius, sent thither as proconsul with his old army. To Decius he leaves the enemy’s fields to be laid waste, and himself, with his own forces, makes for Etruria to his colleague. As he came, all received him gladly: Appius, I believe, from his own conscience, was ill at ease in mind—justly angry, if Volumnius had written nothing; or, if he had needed help, dissembling it with an ungenerous and thankless spirit. For scarcely had the mutual salutation been returned—Appius having gone out to meet him—when he said, "Is all well, Lucius Volumnius? How do affairs stand in Samnium? What cause induced you to quit your province?" Volumnius said that affairs in Samnium were prosperous, that he had come summoned by Appius’s letter; and that, if it were forged and there were no use for him in Etruria, he would straightway wheel his standards about and depart. "Depart, then," said Appius; "nor does anyone keep you; for it is least of all fitting that, when you can perhaps scarce suffice for your own war, you should boast of having come hither to bring aid to others." "Heaven turn it to good, by Hercules," said Volumnius; he would rather his pains had been spent in vain than that anything should have befallen to make one consular army not enough for Etruria.

As the consuls were now parting, the lieutenants and tribunes from Appius’s army stand round about. Some entreated their own commander not, of his own accord, to spurn the aid of a colleague, freely offered, which should rather have been sent for; the more part withstood Volumnius as he was departing, conjuring him not to betray the commonwealth by a perverse rivalry with his colleague: if any disaster fell out, the blame would rest more on the deserter than on the deserted; matters had been brought to such a pass that all the credit or discredit of a thing done well or ill in Etruria was made over to Lucius Volumnius; no one would ask what words Appius had used, but what the fortune of the army had been; he was dismissed by Appius, but kept by the commonwealth and by the army; let him only make trial of the soldiers’ will. By these warnings and entreaties they dragged the consuls, all but resisting, into an assembly. There longer speeches were made, much to the same effect as had been contested in words among the few; and when Volumnius, the better in his cause, seemed not even uneloquent against the surpassing eloquence of his colleague, and Appius, jeering, said that it ought to be set to his own credit that out of a dumb and tongueless man they now had even an eloquent consul—since in his former consulship, in the first months at least, he could not so much as open his mouth, and now was stringing together popular orations—"How much rather," said Volumnius, "would I had learned from you to act vigorously than you from me to speak cleverly!" Finally he offers a condition which should decide—not which was the better orator (for that the commonwealth did not require) but which the better commander. Etruria and Samnium were the provinces; let him choose which he preferred; with his own army he would conduct the campaign either in Etruria or in Samnium. Then a shout arose from the soldiers that they should both together undertake the Etruscan war. Perceiving this agreement, Volumnius said: "Since I have erred in interpreting my colleague’s wish, I will not let it be doubtful what you wish: signify by a shout whether you would have me stay or go." Then indeed so great a shout arose that it called out the enemy from their camp. Snatching up their arms, they come down into the line. And Volumnius bade the trumpets sound and the standards be borne out of the camp. Appius, they say, hesitated, seeing that, whether he fought or kept still, the victory would be his colleague’s; then, fearing lest his own legions too should follow Volumnius, he likewise, at his men’s demand, gave the signal. On neither side were they drawn up well enough; for the Samnite general Gellius Egnatius had gone foraging with a few cohorts, and his soldiers were entering the fight by their own impulse rather than under anyone’s leadership or command, and the Roman armies were neither both led out together nor was there time enough to draw them up. Volumnius engaged before Appius could come up to the enemy; and so the lines met on an uneven front; and, as though by some lot changing their accustomed foes, the Etruscans fell upon Volumnius, the Samnites—delaying a little, because their leader was away—upon Appius. It is said that Appius, in the very crisis of the fight, so that he was seen among the foremost standards with hands raised to heaven, prayed thus: "Bellona, if today you grant us the victory, then I vow you a temple." Having so prayed, as if at the goddess’s instigation, both he himself matched his colleague and the army matched the valor of its leader: the soldiers do the work of commanders too; they strive that the victory may not begin first on the other side. So they rout and put the enemy to flight, who could not easily withstand a greater mass than that with which they had been used to come to grips. By pressing on them as they gave way and pursuing them as they scattered, they drove them to their camp; there, by the coming up of Gellius and the Sabellian cohorts, the fight for a little while flared again. These too soon routed, the camp was now being stormed by the victors; and when Volumnius himself was carrying the standards against the gate, and Appius, again and again hailing Bellona the Victorious, was kindling the soldiers’ spirits, they burst in through the rampart, through the ditches. The camp was taken and plundered; vast booty was won and given over to the soldier. Seven thousand eight hundred of the enemy were slain, two thousand one hundred and twenty taken.

While both consuls and all the Roman force lean rather toward the Etruscan war, in Samnium new armies, sprung up to lay waste the borders of the Roman empire, cross through the country of the Vescini into Campania and the Falernian land and make vast plunder. As Volumnius was returning by forced marches into Samnium—for the end of the prolonged command of Fabius and Decius was now at hand—the report of the Samnite army and of the plunderings of the Campanian land turned him to the protection of the allies. When he came into the Calenian country, he both himself sees the fresh traces of the disaster, and the people of Cales tell him that the enemy were now dragging off so much booty that they could scarcely keep their column in order; and so the leaders were now saying openly that they must go at once into Samnium, to come back for a fresh campaign, leaving the booty there, and not commit so laden a column to battles. These things, although they were like the truth, he yet thought should be more surely investigated, and sends out horsemen to intercept the straggling plunderers wandering in the fields; from whom, by questioning, he learns that the enemy were encamped by the river Volturnus, and would move thence at the third watch; that their route was into Samnium. Having ascertained this well enough, he set out and pitched camp at such a distance from the enemy that his coming could not be known through too near a neighborhood, and that he might fall upon the enemy as he came out of his camp. A good while before dawn he came up to the camp and sends men skilled in the Oscan tongue to find out what was going on. Mingling with the enemy, which was easy in the nocturnal confusion, they learn that the standards had gone out thinly attended with armed men, that the booty and the guards of the booty were going forth—an unwieldy column, each man busy with his own load, with no concert among them and no command sure enough. The time seemed most fit for attacking; and now day was drawing near; and so he ordered the trumpets to sound and attacks the enemy’s column. The Samnites, hampered by booty, few of them under arms, part quicken their pace and drive the plunder before them, part stand uncertain whether it were safer to go forward or back into camp; amid their hesitation they are overwhelmed, and the Romans had already crossed the rampart, and there was slaughter and uproar in the camp. The Samnite column was thrown into disorder not only by the enemy’s onset but also by the sudden defection of the captives, who, part freeing themselves, loosed the bound, part snatched the arms tied up in the baggage, and, mingled with the column, made an uproar more terrible than the battle itself. Then they did a deed worth recording; for they fall upon Staius Minatius, the leader, as he went along the ranks exhorting them; and then, the horsemen who were with him being scattered, they ring him round and, seated as he was upon his horse, take him captive and hurry him off to the Roman consul. By that tumult the foremost standards of the Samnites were recalled and the battle, now well-nigh decided, was renewed; nor could it be sustained any longer. About six thousand men were slain, two thousand five hundred taken—among them four military tribunes—thirty military standards, and, what was most joyful to the victors, seven thousand four hundred of the captives recovered, and vast booty of the allies; and the owners were summoned by edict, on a set day, to recognize and reclaim their property. Of those things for which no owner appeared, the soldier was given the gift; and they were compelled to sell the booty, that they might set their minds on nothing but arms.

That ravaging of the Campanian land had caused a great tumult at Rome; and by chance, in those same days, word had come from Etruria that, after Volumnius’s army had been withdrawn thence, Etruria had been roused to arms, and that Gellius Egnatius, the Samnite leader, and the Umbrians were being called to defection, and the Gauls solicited for a vast price. Terrified by these tidings, the senate ordered a cessation of business (iustitium) to be proclaimed and a levy of men of every kind to be held. Not only the freeborn or the younger men were bound by the oath, but cohorts of the elders too were formed and the freedmen enrolled in centuries; and plans for the defense of the city were debated, and the praetor Publius Sempronius was in chief charge of the whole. But of part of their care the senate was relieved by the letter of the consul Lucius Volumnius, from which it was learned that the ravagers of Campania had been cut down and routed. And so they decree both a thanksgiving (supplicatio) for the thing well done, in the consul’s name, and the cessation of business is remitted, which had lasted eighteen days; and the thanksgiving was a most joyful one. Then they began to debate about a garrison for the region laid waste by the Samnites; and so it was resolved that two colonies be planted round the Vescine and Falernian land, one at the mouth of the river Liris, which was called Minturnae, the other in the Vescine glade, adjoining the Falernian land, where the Greek city of Sinope is said to have stood, afterward called Sinuessa by the Roman colonists. The task was given to the tribunes of the plebs that, by a plebiscite, the praetor Publius Sempronius be ordered to appoint three men (triumviri) to plant colonists in those places; nor were men who would give in their names easily found, since they thought they were being sent into an all-but-perpetual garrison-post of a hostile region, not onto farms. The senate was turned away from these cares by the worsening war in Etruria and the frequent letters of Appius, warning them not to neglect the rising of that region: four nations were bringing their arms together—Etruscans, Samnites, Umbrians, Gauls; their camp was now made in two divisions, since one place could not hold so great a multitude. For these reasons—and because the time was now drawing near—for the sake of the elections the consul Lucius Volumnius was recalled to Rome; who, before he called the centuries to the vote, summoning the people into an assembly, discoursed much on the magnitude of the Etruscan war: even then, when he himself had carried on the campaign there together with his colleague, the war had been so great that it could be waged neither by one leader nor by one army; that afterward, it was said, the Umbrians and a huge army of Gauls had been added; let them remember that on that day leaders—consuls—were being chosen against four peoples. He, unless he were confident that the man would be declared consul by the consent of the Roman people who without doubt was then held the first leader of all, would have named a dictator at once.

To no one was it doubtful that Fabius would by universal consent be marked out for a fifth consulship; and both the prerogative century and all the centuries first called named him consul with Lucius Volumnius. Fabius’s speech was such as two years before; then, as he was being overborne by the general agreement, it turned at last to demanding his colleague Publius Decius: that would be a prop to his old age. Having held the censorship and two consulships together with him, he had found nothing firmer for the protection of the commonwealth than a harmonious colleagueship. To a new partner in command an aged mind could now scarcely grow accustomed; with one whose ways he knew he would more easily share his counsels. The consul subscribed to his speech, both with deserved praises of Publius Decius, and by recalling what good things came from concord, what evils from discord, in the administration of military affairs, and by reminding them how near to the last extremity matters had lately come through the rivalries of himself and his colleague: that Decius and Fabius, who lived with one heart, one mind, were besides men born for soldiering, great in deeds, raw in the contests of words and the tongue. Those were consular talents: shrewd and clever men, learned in law and in eloquence, such as Appius Claudius was, must be kept as guardians of the city and the Forum, and made praetors for the rendering of justice. In transacting these matters the day was spent. On the next day, according to the consul’s prescription, both the consular and the praetorian elections were held. The consuls created were Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius, and Appius Claudius praetor, all in their absence; and to Lucius Volumnius, by decree of the senate and vote of the plebs, the command was prolonged for a year.

In that year there were many prodigies, for the averting of which the senate decreed thanksgivings for two days; wine and incense were furnished at public cost; men and women went in throngs to the supplication. A notable thing made that supplication remarkable: a quarrel that arose among the matrons in the shrine of Patrician Chastity (Pudicitia Patricia)—which is in the Cattle Market (Forum Boarium) by the round temple of Hercules. Verginia, daughter of Aulus, a patrician married to a plebeian, the consul Lucius Volumnius, the matrons had barred from the rites because she had married out of the fathers’ order. A brief altercation, rising from womanly anger, then blazed into a contention of spirits, when Verginia gloried—and truly—that she had entered the temple of Patrician Chastity both a patrician and a chaste woman, the wife of one man to whom she had been led as a maiden, and that she repented neither of her husband nor of his honors and deeds. Then by a noble deed she made good her proud words. In the Vicus Longus, where she dwelt, she shut off from a part of her house as much room as sufficed for a modest shrine, and set up an altar there, and, calling together the plebeian matrons, having complained of the wrong done by the patrician women, "This altar," said she, "I dedicate to Plebeian Chastity (Pudicitia Plebeia); and I exhort you that, as a rivalry in valor holds the men in this state, so let there be one in chastity among the matrons, and that you take care that this altar may be said to be worshipped, if anything can be, more holily and by chaster women than that other." By almost the same rite as that older altar this one too was worshipped, so that no matron save one of proved chastity, and who had been the wife of one man, had the right of sacrificing; afterward the worship, made common by the polluted—and not by matrons only but by women of every order—at last passed into oblivion. In the same year Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius, curule aediles, appointed a day for prosecution against certain money-lenders; whose goods being confiscated, out of what was brought into the public treasury they placed bronze thresholds on the Capitol, and silver vessels for three tables in the shrine of Jupiter, and a Jupiter upon the gable with a four-horse chariot, and, at the Ruminal fig-tree, images of the infant founders of the city beneath the teats of the she-wolf; and they paved with squared stone the footway from the Porta Capena to the temple of Mars. And by the plebeian aediles Lucius Aelius Paetus and Gaius Fulvius Curvus, likewise out of the fine-money which they exacted from those condemned for offenses against the grazing-lands, games were held and golden bowls placed at the temple of Ceres.

Then Quintus Fabius enters on a fifth consulship and Publius Decius on a fourth—colleagues in three consulships and a censorship, and renowned no more for the glory of their deeds, which was vast, than for their concord with one another. That this might not be unbroken, a contest of the orders rather than of the men themselves came between them, I think: the patricians striving that Fabius should hold Etruria as a province out of the usual order, the plebeians prompting Decius to bring the matter to the lot. There was at any rate a contention in the senate, and, after Fabius there had the more power, the matter was brought back to the people. In the assembly, as among military men who relied on deeds rather than words, few words were spoken. Fabius said it was unworthy that another should gather the fruit under the tree which he had planted: he had opened the Ciminian forest and made a road for Roman war through the trackless glades. Why had they troubled him at his time of life, if they meant to wage the war under another leader? Doubtless he had chosen an adversary, not a partner, of his command—he gently reproaches him—and Decius had grudged him three harmonious colleagueships. Finally, he was striving for nothing more than this: that, if they judged him worthy of the province, they should send him to it; he had been at the senate’s discretion, and would be in the people’s power. Publius Decius complained of the senate’s injustice: that, as long as they could, the fathers had striven that the plebeians should have no access to the great honors; that, after valor itself had prevailed that it should be unhonored in no class of men, men were now seeking how not only the votes of the people but even the awards of fortune might be made void and turned into the power of a few. All consuls before him had drawn their provinces by lot: now the senate was giving Fabius a province out of the lot. If it were for his honor’s sake—Fabius had so deserved of him and of the commonwealth that he favored the glory of Quintus Fabius, provided only it shone without contumely to himself. But who could doubt that, where there is one war harsh and difficult, when it is entrusted to one of them out of the lot, the other consul is held as superfluous and useless? Fabius gloried in his deeds done in Etruria; Publius Decius wished to glory too; and perhaps the fire which the other had left smothered, so that again and again it gave, unexpectedly, a new blaze—that fire he himself would put out. Finally, he would yield to his colleague honors and rewards, out of reverence for his age and his majesty; but when peril, when a struggle was set before them, he would neither give way of his own accord, nor would he give way. And if he carried nothing else from that contest, this at least he would carry: that what belonged to the people, the people should order, rather than that the fathers should grant it as a favor. He prayed Jupiter Best and Greatest and the immortal gods to grant him an equal lot with his colleague, if they were going to grant him the same valor and good fortune in conducting the war. Surely it was both by nature just, and useful as a precedent, and bore upon the fame of the Roman people, that those should be the consuls under whichever of the two as leader the Etruscan war might be rightly waged. Fabius, having prayed the Roman people nothing else than that, before the tribes were called within to the vote, they should hear the letter brought from Etruria by the praetor Appius Claudius, left the place of assembly. And with no less consent of the people than of the senate the province of Etruria was decreed to Fabius out of the lot.

There followed then a rushing together to the consul of almost all the younger men, and each for himself gave in his name; so great was the eagerness to serve under that leader. Surrounded by the throng, he said: "It is my mind to enroll four thousand foot and six hundred horse, and no more; those of you who shall have given in your names today and tomorrow I will lead with me. It is more my care to bring all back wealthy than to wage the campaign with many soldiers." Setting out with a fit army, and one bearing the more confidence and hope because the multitude was not missed, he makes for the town of Aharna, not far from which the enemy were, to the camp of the praetor Appius. A few miles short of it, wood-gatherers with an escort meet him; who, when they saw the lictors going before and learned that Fabius was consul, glad and eager give thanks to the gods and to the Roman people that they had sent him to them as their commander. Then, thronging round and saluting the consul, when Fabius asks whither they were bound, and they answer that they were going to gather wood, "Say you so indeed?" said he. "Have you not, then, a palisaded camp?" When at this it was shouted back that they had, with a double rampart and ditch besides, and yet were in vast fear, "You have, then," said he, "wood enough; go back and pull up the rampart." They go back to camp, and there, by pulling up the rampart, struck terror both into the soldiers who had stayed in the camp and into Appius himself; then each for himself said to the others that they did it by order of the consul Quintus Fabius. The next day the camp was moved and the praetor Appius dismissed to Rome. Thereafter the Romans nowhere had a standing camp. He kept saying that it was not useful for an army to sit in one place; that by marches and changes of place it was the more mobile and the more healthful; and marches were made, as great as the winter—not yet over—allowed. Then, at the first of spring, leaving the second legion at Clusium, which they once called Camars, and setting over the camp Lucius Scipio as propraetor, he himself returned to Rome to take counsel about the war—whether of his own accord, because the war was greater in his sight than he had believed it to be by report, or summoned by a decree of the senate; for there are authorities for either. Some would have it seem that he was drawn back by the praetor Appius Claudius, when in the senate and before the people—as he had assiduously done by letter—he kept magnifying the terror of the Etruscan war: that one leader and one army would not suffice against four peoples; that there was danger, whether they pressed in a body upon one army or waged the war in separate fields, lest one man could not meet all at once. He had left two Roman legions there, and fewer than five thousand foot and horse had come with Fabius. It was his judgment that the consul Publius Decius set out into Etruria to his colleague at the first possible time, and that Samnium be given as a province to Lucius Volumnius; or, if the consul preferred to go into his own province, that Volumnius set out into Etruria to the consul with a full consular army. When the praetor’s speech moved a great part of them, they say that Publius Decius gave it as his judgment that all things should be kept entire and free for Quintus Fabius, until either he himself, if it could be done with advantage to the commonwealth, should have come to Rome, or should have sent one of his lieutenants, from whom the senate might learn how great the war in Etruria was, and with how great forces, and through how many leaders, it must be conducted.

Fabius, when he returned to Rome, both in the senate and brought before the people, made a middle speech, so as to seem neither to magnify nor to lessen the report of the war, and rather, in taking a second leader, to indulge the fear of others than to consult his own peril or the commonwealth’s: but that, if they gave him a helper in the war and a partner in command, how could he forget the consul Publius Decius, proved through so many colleagueships? There was none of all men whom he would rather have joined with himself; with Publius Decius he would have forces enough, and the enemy would never be too many. But if his colleague preferred something else, then let them give him Lucius Volumnius as a helper. The arbitrament of the whole matter was left to him both by the people and by the senate and by his colleague Fabius himself; and when Publius Decius had shown that he was ready to set out either into Samnium or into Etruria, there was such joy and congratulation that the victory was anticipated in men’s minds, and a triumph, not a war, seemed decreed to the consuls. I find in some authors that, immediately on entering the consulship, Fabius and Decius set out into Etruria without any mention of the casting of lots for the provinces and of the contests between the colleagues which I have set forth. There are some for whom not even to set forth these contests was enough, who have added both Appius’s accusations against the absent Fabius before the people, and the praetor’s obstinacy against the consul present, and another contention between the colleagues, Decius striving that each should keep the lot of his own province. The account begins to be agreed from the time when both consuls set out to the war. But before the consuls came into Etruria, the Senonian Gauls came in vast multitude to Clusium to storm the Roman legion and camp. Scipio, who was in command of the camp, thinking he should aid the smallness of his own soldiers by position, drew up his line upon a hill which was between the city and the camp; but, as in a sudden matter, having scouted his route too little, he pushed on to a ridge which the enemy had seized, attacking from another quarter. So the legion was cut down from the rear and surrounded in the midst, the enemy pressing on every side. Some authorities say that the legion was there destroyed too, so that not a messenger survived, and that no report of that disaster was brought to the consuls—who were now not far from Clusium—before the Gallic horsemen came into sight, carrying heads hung from their horses’ breasts and fixed on their lances, and exulting in the song after their fashion.—There are those who relate that they were Umbrians, not Gauls, and that no such disaster was suffered; that the foragers, surrounded along with the lieutenant Lucius Manlius Torquatus, were relieved by the propraetor Scipio bringing succor from the camp, and that the victorious Umbrians, the battle being renewed, were beaten, and the captives and booty taken from them. It is more like the truth that the disaster was suffered at the hands of a Gallic than an Umbrian enemy, because, as often at other times, so in that year especially, the terror of a Gallic tumult held the state.—And so, besides that both consuls had set out to the war with four legions and a great Roman cavalry, and a thousand picked Campanian horse sent to that war, and with a larger army of the allies and of the Latin name than the Roman, two other armies were posted not far from the city, over against Etruria, one in the Faliscan, the other in the Vatican country. Gnaeus Fulvius and Lucius Postumius Megellus, both propraetors, were ordered to hold standing camps in those places.

The consuls, the Apennine crossed, came against the enemy into the country of Sentinum; there, at an interval of about four miles, the camps were pitched. Then deliberations were held among the enemy, and it was thus agreed that they should not all mingle in one camp, nor go down into the line at the same time; to the Samnites the Gauls were joined, to the Etruscans the Umbrians. A day was appointed for the battle; the fight was assigned to the Samnite and the Gaul; in the very midst of the struggle the Etruscans and Umbrians were ordered to assault the Roman camp. These plans were upset by three deserters of Clusium, who passed over secretly by night to the consul Fabius; who, when they had disclosed the enemy’s plans, were sent away with gifts, that, from time to time as each new measure was resolved, they might bring word of it, scouted out. The consuls write to Fulvius and Postumius to move their armies, the one from the Faliscan, the other from the Vatican country, up to Clusium and lay waste the enemy’s borders with the utmost force. The rumor of this devastation moved the Etruscans from the country of Sentinum to defend their own borders. Then the consuls press on, that the battle be fought while these were away. For two days they provoked the enemy to battle; for two days nothing worth mention was done; a few fell on either side, and men’s spirits were rather goaded to a regular contest than the whole issue brought to a decision. On the third day they came down into the plain with all their forces. When the lines stood drawn up, a hind, fleeing the wolf and driven from the mountains, ran down across the plain between the two lines; thence the beasts turned different ways, the hind toward the Gauls, the wolf toward the Romans. To the wolf a way was given between the ranks; the hind the Gauls pierced through. Then one of the front-rank soldiers, a Roman, said: "That way flight and slaughter have turned, where you see lying the beast sacred to Diana; on this side the wolf of Mars, victor, whole and untouched, has reminded us of the Martian race and of our founder." On the right wing the Gauls took their stand, on the left the Samnites. Against the Samnites Quintus Fabius drew up the first and third legions for the right wing, against the Gauls Decius the fifth and sixth for the left; the second and the fourth were waging war in Samnium with Lucius Volumnius the proconsul. At the first encounter the matter was carried on with strength so even that, if the Etruscans and Umbrians had been present either in the line or in the camp, to whichever side they had inclined, a disaster must have been suffered there.

But although the War-god of the battle was as yet impartial, and fortune had not yet made the decision on which side she would bestow her strength, by no means alike was the fighting on the right wing and on the left. The Romans under Fabius were warding off the battle rather than offering it, and the contest was being drawn out to as late in the day as might be, because the leader was thus persuaded—that both the Samnites and the Gauls are fierce in their first onset, which it is enough to withstand; that in a longer contest the spirits of the Samnites by degrees subside, and the very bodies of the Gauls, most unable to bear toil and heat, melt away, and that their first battles are more than men’s, their last less than women’s. Against that time, therefore, when the enemy was wont to be beaten, he was keeping the strength of his soldiers as fresh as he could. Decius, more impetuous both in years and in vigor of spirit, poured out in the first contest whatever strength he had. And because the battle of the foot seemed too slow, he stirs up the cavalry to the fight, and, himself mingled with a troop of the bravest of the young men, he begs the nobles of the youth to make the charge upon the enemy along with him: their glory would be double, if the victory began from the left wing and from the cavalry. Twice they turned the Gallic cavalry; when, having ridden too far the second time and now stirring the fight in the midst of the columns of the foot, a new kind of fighting dismayed them: the enemy, armed and standing upon war-chariots and wagons, came on with a vast din of horses and wheels, and terrified the Romans’ horses, unused to that uproar. So a panic, as it were of madness, scatters the victorious cavalry; it lays low, then, horses and men, dashing down in their blind flight. Hence the standards of the legions too were thrown into disorder, and many of the front-rankers were trampled by the rush of the horses and the vehicles swept through the line; and the Gallic line followed up, the moment it saw the enemy terrified, and gave no space for breath or for recovery. Decius cried aloud whither they were fleeing, or what hope they had in flight; he set himself against them as they gave way and called back the routed; then, when by no force could he stay the stricken, calling upon his father Publius Decius by name, he said: "Why do I delay any longer the destiny of my house? It is given to our line that we be the expiatory victims for the public perils. Now will I give the enemy’s legions, along with myself, to be slaughtered to Tellus and to the Manes." Having said this, he bade Marcus Livius the pontiff—whom, going down into the line, he had forbidden to part from his side—pronounce before him the words by which he should devote himself and the enemy’s legions on behalf of the army of the Roman people of the Quirites. Devoted then with the same prayer and in the same garb in which his father Publius Decius had bidden himself be devoted at Veseris in the Latin war, when, after the solemn prayers, he had added that he drove before him terror and flight, slaughter and gore, the wrath of the gods above and below, that he would blast with funereal curses the standards, the weapons, the arms of the enemy, and that one and the same place should be of his own destruction and of the Gauls’ and the Samnites’—having so cursed himself and the enemy, where he saw the Gallic line thickest, he spurs his horse, and bearing himself in against the leveled weapons, was slain.

From that point the battle could scarcely seem a thing of human aid. The Romans, their leader lost—which at other times is wont to be a cause of terror—stayed their flight and would begin the battle anew from the start; the Gauls, and most of all the knot that stood about the consul’s body, as though their minds were estranged, were hurling their weapons idly and in vain; some were numbed, and remembered neither fight nor flight. But on the other side the pontiff Livius, to whom Decius had handed his lictors and had bidden act as propraetor, cried aloud that the Romans had conquered, delivered by the consul’s doom; that the Gauls and Samnites were the prey of Mother Tellus and the Manes; that Decius was dragging to himself and calling the army devoted along with him, and that all on the enemy’s side was full of furies and of terror. Then, as these were restoring the battle, came up Lucius Cornelius Scipio and Gaius Marcius with the reserves from the rearmost line, sent by order of the consul Quintus Fabius to the support of his colleague. There the issue of Publius Decius is heard—a mighty spur to dare all things for the commonwealth. And so, when the Gauls stood close-packed, their shields set up before them, and the fight at close quarters seemed no easy thing, by the lieutenants’ order the javelins, which lay strewn between the two lines, were gathered up from the ground and hurled against the enemy’s testudo; and as the most of these were fixed in the shields, and a few of the spear-points in the bodies themselves, the wedge was laid low, so that a great part fell stunned, their bodies unhurt. So had fortune varied on the left wing of the Romans. Fabius on the right, at the first, as has been said before, had drawn out the day by delay; then, after neither the enemy’s shouting nor their onset nor their hurled weapons seemed to have the same force, bidding the prefects of the horse lead the squadrons round to the flank of the Samnites, that at the signal given they might charge them in the flank with the greatest possible impetus, he bade his own men advance their standards by degrees and dislodge the enemy. After he saw that there was no resistance and that their weariness was beyond doubt, then, gathering all the reserves which up to that time he had kept back, he both urged on the legions and gave the signal to the horsemen to fall upon the enemy. Nor did the Samnites withstand the charge, but, abandoning their allies in the struggle, were borne in headlong course past the very line of the Gauls to their camp: the Gauls, forming a testudo, stood close-packed. Then Fabius, hearing of his colleague’s death, bids the Campanian squadron, about five hundred horse, leave the line and, riding round, fall upon the Gallic line from the rear; the principes of the third legion were to follow, and, where they saw the enemy’s column disordered by the charge of the horse, to press on and cut down the terrified. He himself, when he had vowed a temple to Jupiter the Victor and the spoils of the enemy, pushed on to the camp of the Samnites, whither all the dismayed multitude was being driven. Under the very rampart, because the gates could not receive so great a multitude, a battle was attempted by the throng of their own men shut out; there Gellius Egnatius, the commander of the Samnites, fell; then the Samnites were driven within the rampart, and the camp taken after a small struggle, and the Gauls surrounded from the rear. There were slain that day twenty-five thousand of the enemy, eight thousand taken; nor was the victory without blood; for of Publius Decius’s army seven thousand were slain, of Fabius’s seventeen hundred. Fabius, having sent men to seek his colleague’s body, heaped the enemy’s spoils in a pile and burned them to Jupiter the Victor. The consul’s body could not be found that day, because it was buried under the heaped corpses of the Gauls strewn over it; the next day it was found and brought back amid many tears of the soldiers. Then, all care of other things laid aside, Fabius celebrates his colleague’s funeral with every honor and with deserved praises.

And in Etruria, during those same days, the affair was conducted to his mind by the propraetor Gnaeus Fulvius, and, besides the vast disaster inflicted on the enemy by the laying waste of their fields, there was fought also a notable battle, and more than three thousand of the Perusini and Clusini were slain, and about twenty military standards taken. As the column of the Samnites was fleeing through the Paelignian country, it was surrounded by the Paelignians; out of five thousand, about a thousand were slain. Great is the fame of that day on which the war was waged in the country of Sentinum, even on a true reckoning; but some have overshot belief by exaggeration, who have written that in the enemy’s army there were six hundred thousand foot, forty-six thousand horse, a thousand wagons—reckoning in, of course, the Umbrians and the Tuscans, whom they make to have been present at the battle too; and, that they might increase the Romans’ forces as well, they add Lucius Volumnius the proconsul as a leader to the consuls, and his army to the legions of the consuls. In the more numerous annals that victory belongs properly to the two consuls; Volumnius meanwhile conducts affairs in Samnium, and, having driven the Samnite army onto Mount Tifernus, not deterred by the unfavorable ground, routs and puts it to flight. Quintus Fabius, leaving the Decian army as a garrison for Etruria, and bringing down his own legions to the city, triumphed over the Gauls and the Etruscans and the Samnites. The soldiers followed him in his triumph. Celebrated in the soldiers’ rude verses was not so much the victory of Quintus Fabius as the glorious death of Publius Decius; and the memory of the father was stirred up, matched, in fortune public and private, by the praises of the son. Out of the booty there were given to the soldiers eighty-two asses apiece, and cloaks and tunics—rewards, in that age of soldiering, by no means to be despised.

These things being so done, there was yet peace neither among the Samnites nor in Etruria; for both, on the prompting of the Perusini, there had been a fresh revolt after the army was withdrawn by the consul, and the Samnites were coming down to plunder—into the Vescine and Formian country, and on another quarter into the Aesernian and the parts that lie along the river Volturnus. Against them the praetor Appius Claudius was sent with the Decian army. Fabius, Etruria revolting anew, killed four thousand five hundred of the Perusini, took about one thousand seven hundred and forty, who were ransomed at three hundred and ten asses apiece; all the rest of the booty was given to the soldiers. The Samnite legions—when Appius Claudius the praetor was pursuing part, and Lucius Volumnius the proconsul part—gathered in the Stellate country; there they all encamp at Caiatia, and Appius and Volumnius join their camps. They fought with the bitterest spirits—on this side anger goading them against men so often in revolt, on that side men fighting now from the last of hope. There were slain, therefore, of the Samnites sixteen thousand three hundred, taken two thousand seven hundred; of the Roman army there fell two thousand seven hundred. A year fortunate in matters of war, grievous with pestilence and troubled with prodigies; for it was reported both that the earth had rained in many places, and that in the army of Appius Claudius very many had been struck by thunderbolts; and the Books were consulted on this account. In that year Quintus Fabius Gurges, the consul’s son, fined with a money-penalty certain matrons condemned before the people of unchastity; out of the fine-money he saw to the building of the temple of Venus which is near the Circus. There remain even now the Samnite wars, which, unbroken, we are now pursuing through a fourth volume and a forty-sixth year from the consulship of Marcus Valerius and Aulus Cornelius, who first carried arms into Samnium; and—not to recount now the disasters of so many years of both peoples, and the toils undergone, by which nevertheless those hard hearts could not be conquered—in the last year the Samnites, in the country of Sentinum, among the Paelignians, at Tifernum, in the Stellate plains, had been cut down—with their own legions and mingled with others’—by four armies and four Roman leaders; they had lost the most renowned commander of their nation; they saw their allies in the war—Etruscans, Umbrians, Gauls—in the same fortune as they themselves were; they could no longer stand by their own strength nor by foreign; yet they did not abstain from war. So far were they from being weary even of a liberty unhappily defended, and they preferred to be conquered rather than not to try for victory. What man is there whom it would weary, in the writing or the reading, by the long duration of wars which did not weary those who waged them?

Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius were followed by the consuls Lucius Postumius Megellus and Marcus Atilius Regulus. Samnium was decreed to both as their province, because the rumor was that three armies of the enemy had been enrolled, with one to make again for Etruria, with another for the plunderings of Campania, while the third was being prepared for the guarding of their borders. Ill health kept Postumius at Rome; Atilius set out at once, to overwhelm the enemy in Samnium—for so it had pleased the fathers—before they had yet gone forth. As if by agreement, they found the enemy in their way at the very point where they themselves were hindered from entering the Samnite country, and where they hindered the Samnite from going forth thence into the peaceful borders of the allies of the Roman people. When camp had been pitched over against camp, the Samnites dared—a thing which the Roman, so often victor, would scarcely have dared (so much does the last despair beget of rashness)—to assault the Roman camp; and although so bold an undertaking did not come to its end, yet it was not altogether vain. There was a mist, dense for a great part of the day, so thick that it took away the use of daylight, the view beyond the rampart being cut off, and even the near sight of men engaging with one another. Trusting in this as in a lurking-place for ambush, the Samnites, when the light was scarcely sure enough and that itself oppressed by the murk, come up to the Roman picket keeping watch slackly at the gate. Overwhelmed unawares, the men had neither spirit enough nor strength to resist. An assault was made from the rear of the camp, by the decuman gate; and so the quaestor’s quarters were taken, and the quaestor there, Lucius Opimius Pansa, slain. From this the cry "to arms!" was raised.

The consul, roused by the tumult, bids two cohorts of the allies, the Lucanian and the Suessan, which by chance were nearest, guard the headquarters; the maniples of the legions he leads in by the principal way. With their arms scarcely fitted on, they go into their ranks, and know the enemy by the shouting rather than by the eyes, nor can the number be reckoned. At first they give way, uncertain of their fortune, and admit the enemy inward into the middle of the camp; then, when the consul cried out, asking whether they meant, once driven out beyond the rampart, to storm their own camp next, raising a shout and straining, they first stand fast, then carry their step forward and press on, and, once thrust back by terror, drive them by the same terror with which they had begun, out beyond the gate and the rampart. Then, not daring to go on and pursue, because the murky light bred a fear of ambushes round about, content with their camp freed, they drew back within the rampart, about three hundred of the enemy being slain. Of the Romans—of the first picket and of the watches, and of those who were overwhelmed about the quaestor’s quarters—there perished about seven hundred and thirty. This not unlucky daring raised the Samnites’ spirits, and they suffered the Roman not only not to move his camp thence, but not even to forage through their fields; the foragers went back into the peaceful Soran country. The fame of these things, more tumultuous even than the things were, carried to Rome, compelled the consul Lucius Postumius, though scarcely yet strong, to set out from the city. Yet before he went out, the soldiers being ordered by edict to assemble at Sora, he himself dedicated the temple of Victory which, as curule aedile, he had seen built out of fine-money. So he set out to the army, and from Sora pushed on into Samnium to his colleague’s camp. Then, after the Samnites, distrusting that they could resist two armies, withdrew, the consuls part different ways, to lay waste the fields and storm the cities.

Postumius, setting about the storming of Milionia, at first by force and onset, then, after that succeeded too little, by siegework and at last by sheds (vineae) joined to the wall, took it. There, the city now taken, from the fourth hour until about the eighth there was fighting in all parts of the city, long with the issue doubtful; at last the Roman gets possession of the town. Of the Samnites there were slain three thousand two hundred, taken four thousand seven hundred, besides the other booty. Thence the legions were led to Feritrum, whence the townsmen, with all their goods that could be carried and driven, had gone out by night through a gate at the back in silence. And so, the moment the consul arrived, he came up to the walls drawn up and arrayed at the first as though the struggle would be the same as had been at Milionia; then, when he saw a vast silence in the city, and neither arms nor men upon the towers and walls, he holds back the soldier, eager to invade the deserted walls, lest unwary he should rush into some hidden trap; he bids two squadrons of the allies of the Latin name ride round the walls and explore all. The horsemen catch sight of one gate, and a second, standing open near by in the same quarter, and on those roads the traces of the enemy’s nocturnal flight. Then they ride up by degrees to the gates, and from a safe vantage see the city passable by straight ways, and report to the consul that it was abandoned; that this was plain by the unmistakable solitude and by the fresh traces of flight, and the wreckage of things left here and there in the nocturnal alarm. On hearing this, the consul leads his column round to that part of the city which the horsemen had approached. The standards being set up not far from the gate, he bids five horsemen enter the city, and, having advanced a moderate space, three to stay in the same place if it seemed safe, and two to report back to him what they had explored. When they had returned and reported that they had advanced to a point from which there was a view in all directions, and had seen, far and wide, silence and solitude, at once the consul led light cohorts into the city, and ordered the rest meanwhile to fortify a camp. The soldiers, entering, the doors being broken open, find a few heavy with age or weak, and the things left behind that were hard to remove. These were plundered; and it was learned from the captives that several cities round about had, by common counsel, resolved on flight; that their own people had set out at the first watch; that they believed they would find the same solitude in the other cities. The captives’ words were borne out; the consul gets possession of the deserted towns.

For the other consul, Marcus Atilius, the war was by no means so easy. As he was leading his legions to Luceria, which he had heard was being besieged by the Samnites, the enemy met him at the Lucerine border. There anger made the strength even; the battle was wavering and doubtful, yet sadder in its issue for the Romans, both because they were unused to be beaten, and because, on parting rather than in the very struggle, they felt how much more of wounds and slaughter there had been on their side. And so such terror arose in the camp as, had it seized the men while fighting, would have made the disaster suffered a notable one; even as it was, the night was anxious, men believing that the Samnite would now assail the camp, or that at first light they must come to grips with the victors. There was less of disaster on the enemy’s side, but not more of spirit. The moment it grew light, they desire to depart without a fight. But there was one road, and that itself past the enemy; entering on which they gave the appearance of men making straight to storm the camp. The consul bids the soldiers take up their arms and follow him outside the rampart; to the lieutenants, the tribunes, the prefects of the allies he gives command, what each must do. All affirm that they indeed would do everything, but that the soldiers’ spirits were low; that all night long they had kept watch amid the wounds and the groans of the dying; that, had the enemy come to the camp before light, there had been so much panic that they would have abandoned their standards; that now they were held back from flight by shame, but were otherwise as good as beaten. When the consul heard this, thinking he must himself go round and address the soldiers, as he came to each he chid them for hanging back to take up arms: why did they delay and shuffle? The enemy would come into the camp, unless they went out of the camp; and they would fight before their own tents, if they would not before the rampart. For armed and fighting men the victory was doubtful; but he who waited for the enemy naked and unarmed must suffer either death or slavery. To him as he railed and chid they answered that they were worn out with yesterday’s fight; that there was nothing left of strength nor of blood; that the multitude of the enemy appeared greater than it had been the day before. Meanwhile the column was drawing near; and now, viewing things more surely at a shorter distance, they affirm that the Samnite was carrying a rampart-stockade with him, and that there was no doubt but that they meant to wall the camp round. Then indeed the consul cried out that it was an unworthy deed that so great a contumely and disgrace should be suffered from a most cowardly enemy. "Shall we even be besieged," said he, "in our camp, that we may die rather by famine through ignominy than by the sword, if it must be, through valor?" Let them do—and may the gods turn it to good—what each thought worthy of himself; the consul Marcus Atilius, even alone, if no other followed, would go against the enemy and fall amid the standards of the Samnites rather than see the Roman camp walled round. The consul’s words the lieutenants and tribunes and all the squadrons of horse and the centurions of the first ranks approved. Then the soldier, overcome by shame, slowly takes up his arms, slowly goes forth from the camp, in a long column and not unbroken; downcast and all but beaten, they advance against an enemy no more certain in hope or in spirit. And so, the moment the Roman standards were sighted, at once from the first column of the Samnites to the last a murmur is carried, that the Romans were coming out—the thing they had feared—to bar their march; that thence no way, not even of flight, lay open; that on that spot they must either fall, or, the enemy laid low, make their escape over their bodies.

They throw their packs into the midst; armed, each in his own ranks, they draw up the line. Now there was but a scanty space between the two lines, and they stood waiting, until from the enemy first the onset, first the shout, should begin. Neither side had the spirit to fight, and they would have gone apart, both whole and untouched, had they not feared that the one would press upon the other as it gave way. Of its own accord, among men unwilling and shuffling, a slack battle began with a shout uncertain and unequal; nor did anyone stir from his footing. Then the Roman consul, to rouse the matter, sent in a few squadrons of horse out of their order; of whom, when the most had slipped from their horses, and others were thrown into disorder, both from the Samnite line there was a running-out to overwhelm those who had fallen, and from the Roman to protect their own. Thence the fight was a little kindled; but the Samnites had run out somewhat both more briskly and in greater numbers, and the disordered horse trampled their own supports, their horses being terrified. From this a flight began that turned the whole Roman line; and now the Samnites were fighting upon the backs of the fleeing, when the consul, riding forward to the gate of the camp and setting a picket of horse there against them, and proclaiming that whoever made for the rampart, whether he were Roman or Samnite, they should hold for an enemy, with these very threats himself stood in the way of his own men streaming into the camp. "Whither do you go, soldier?" said he. "Here too you will find arms and men, and, while your consul lives, you shall not enter the camp save as victor; therefore choose whether you would rather fight with a fellow-citizen or with an enemy." As the consul said this, the horsemen with leveled points pour round about and bid the foot return to the fight. Not the consul’s valor alone but fortune also helped, in that the Samnites did not press on, and there was space to wheel the standards about and turn the line from the camp against the enemy. Then they exhort one another to renew the fight; the centurions snatch the standards from the standard-bearers and bear them forward, and show their men that the enemy were coming few and in disordered ranks, scattered. Amid this the consul, raising his hands to heaven, in a clear voice, so that he was heard, vows a temple to Jupiter the Stayer (Jupiter Stator), if the Roman line should halt from its flight and, the battle renewed, should cut down and conquer the legions of the Samnites. On every side all strained to restore the fight—leaders, soldiers, the force of foot and horse. The divine power of the gods too seemed to have looked back upon the Roman name; so easily was the matter turned, and the enemy repulsed from the camp, and soon even driven back to that place where the fight had been joined. There, the heaped packs which they had thrown into the midst lying in their way, they stuck fast, hampered; then, lest their goods be plundered, they ring the packs with a circle of armed men. Then indeed the foot press them in front, the horse, riding round, from the rear; thus, in the midst, they were cut down and taken. The number of the captives was seven thousand eight hundred, who were all sent under the yoke stripped; the slain they reckoned at about four thousand eight hundred. Nor was the victory a glad one even for the Romans; for, the consul reviewing in two days the disaster suffered, the number of soldiers lost was returned at seven thousand eight hundred. While these things were being done in Apulia, with their other army the Samnites, having tried to seize Interamna, a Roman colony on the Latin Way, did not hold the city; having laid waste the fields, when they were driving off thence their other booty, mingled of men and cattle, and the colonists taken captive, they fall in with the victorious consul returning from Luceria, and not only lose their booty but are themselves, in a long and encumbered column, cut down in disorder. The consul, having recalled by edict the owners to Interamna to recognize and reclaim their property, and leaving his army there, set out for Rome on account of the elections. To him, when he treated of a triumph, the honor was refused, both for the loss of so many thousands of soldiers and because he had sent the captives under the yoke without a compact.

The other consul, Postumius, because among the Samnites the material of war was lacking, having led his army across into Etruria, first laid waste thoroughly the Volsinian country; then, when they came out to defend their borders, he fights it out not far from their very walls; two thousand eight hundred of the Etruscans were slain; the rest the nearness of the city protected. The army was led across into the Rusellan country; there not only were the fields laid waste, but the town also stormed; more than two thousand men were taken, fewer than two thousand slain about the walls. Yet a peace more famous and greater than the war that had been in Etruria that year was won. Three most powerful cities, the heads of Etruria—Volsinii, Perusia, Arretium—sought peace; and, having bargained with the consul for clothing for the soldiers and grain, that it might be permitted to send envoys to Rome, they obtained a truce for forty years. A present indemnity of five hundred thousand asses was laid upon each city. For these deeds done, when the consul had sought a triumph of the senate, more for custom’s sake than in hope of obtaining it, and saw that some—because he had gone out of the city too late, others—because he had crossed from Samnium into Etruria without the senate’s order—part his own enemies, part his colleague’s friends, for the solace of a repulse made equal—were denying a triumph to him too, he said: "Not so, conscript fathers, will I remember your majesty as to forget that I am consul. By the same right of command by which I waged the wars, the wars happily waged, Samnium and Etruria subdued, victory and peace won, I will triumph." So he left the senate. Then a contention arose among the tribunes of the plebs; part said they would interpose to forbid his triumphing by a new precedent, part that they would be a help to him against their colleagues as he triumphed. The matter was brought before the people, and the consul, summoned thither, when he said that Marcus Horatius and Lucius Valerius as consuls, and lately Gaius Marcius Rutulus—father of him who was then censor—had triumphed not by the senate’s authority but by the people’s order, added that he too would have brought it before the people, did he not know that the slaves of the nobles, the tribunes of the plebs, would hinder the law; that the goodwill and favor of a consenting people was to him in place of all orders, and would be; and on the next day, by the help of three tribunes of the plebs against the intercession of seven tribunes and the consent of the senate, while the people kept the day, he triumphed. And of this year too the record is little consistent. Claudius is the authority that Postumius, after taking several cities in Samnium, was routed and put to flight in Apulia, and, himself wounded, driven with a few men into Luceria; that the deeds in Etruria were done by Atilius, and that he triumphed. Fabius writes that both consuls did their deeds in Samnium and at Luceria, and that the army was led across into Etruria—but he did not add by which consul—and that at Luceria many were slain on both sides, and that in that battle the temple of Jupiter Stator was vowed, as Romulus had vowed before; but there had been only a fane, that is, a place set apart by formula for a temple; but in this year at last it came into religious scruple that the senate should order even a temple to be built, the commonwealth being twice held bound by the same vow.

This year is followed by a consul notable too, Lucius Papirius Cursor, both for his father’s glory and for his own, and by a vast war and a victory as great over the Samnites as no one down to that day, save Lucius Papirius the consul’s father, had won. And by chance, with the same effort and equipment, in all the opulence of splendid arms, they had arrayed the war; and they brought in the help of the gods too, by a certain ancient rite of an oath, the soldiers being as it were initiated, a levy being held through all Samnium by a new law: that whoever of the younger men should not have come at the commanders’ edict, and whoever should have departed without leave, his life should be forfeit to Jupiter. Then the whole army was summoned to Aquilonia. About sixty thousand soldiers—what there was of strength in Samnium—came together. There, about the middle of the camp, a place was fenced round with hurdles and screens and covered over with linen cloths, open some two hundred feet equally on every side. There a sacrifice was made according to a reading from an old linen book, by a certain priest, Ovius Paccius, a man of great age, who affirmed that he was fetching that rite out of an ancient religion of the Samnites, which their forefathers had once employed when they had taken the secret design of wresting Capua from the Etruscans. The sacrifice finished, the commander would order, through an attendant, that each of the noblest in birth and in deeds be summoned; they were brought in one by one. There was, besides the other apparatus of the rite that could steep the mind in religious awe, in the place, all round about covered over, an altar in the midst, and victims slaughtered around it, and centurions standing round with drawn swords. The man was brought up to the altars more as a victim than as a sharer in the rite, and was bound by an oath not to divulge the things seen and heard in that place. They compelled him to swear by a certain dreadful formula, framed for the execration of his life, his household, and his stock, unless he went into battle whither the commanders led, and if either he himself fled from the line, or, seeing any other fleeing, did not slay him at once. Some at first, refusing to swear this, were hewn down about the altars; then, lying amid the slaughter of the victims, they were a warning to the rest not to refuse. The chief men of the Samnites being bound by that imprecation, ten being named by the commander, it was told to these that they should choose man by man, until they had made up the number of sixteen thousand. That legion was called the Linen Legion, from the covering of the enclosure in which the nobility had been consecrated; to these were given splendid arms and crested helmets, that they might stand out among the rest. A little more than twenty thousand was the other army, not unequal to the Linen Legion either in the comeliness of their bodies, or in renown of war, or in equipment. This number of men, what there was of strength, encamped at Aquilonia.

The consuls set out from the city, Spurius Carvilius the first, to whom the old legions, which Marcus Atilius the consul of the year before had left in the country of Interamna, had been decreed. Having set out with them into Samnium, while the enemy, busied with their superstitions, held their secret councils, he took by force the town of Amiternum from the Samnites. There were slain about two thousand eight hundred men, taken four thousand two hundred and seventy. Papirius, a new army being enrolled—for so it had been decreed—stormed the city of Duronia; he took fewer men than his colleague, but slew somewhat more; rich booty was won in both places. Then, ranging through Samnium, the consuls—the country of Atina being most thoroughly ravaged—Carvilius came to Cominium, Papirius to Aquilonia, where the chief strength of the Samnites was. There for some while there was neither a ceasing from arms nor a vigorous fighting; the time was spent in provoking them while they were quiet, in giving way when they resisted, and in threatening battle rather than offering it. Whatever was begun and let drop, the issue of all things, even small, was put off from day to day. The other Roman camp was twenty miles distant, and the counsels of the absent colleague had part in all that was done; and Carvilius was more intent on Aquilonia, where matters turned on a greater crisis, than on Cominium which he was besieging. Lucius Papirius, now in all points prepared enough for fighting, sends a messenger to his colleague that it was in his mind, on the morrow, if the auspices allowed, to come to grips with the enemy; that it was needful that he too storm Cominium with the greatest force he could, that there be no respite for the Samnites to send reinforcements to Aquilonia. The messenger had a day for his journey; by night he returned, reporting that his colleague approved the plan. Papirius, the messenger sent, at once held an assembly; he discoursed much on the whole character of the war, much on the enemy’s present array, vain in show rather than effectual to the issue: for crests, he said, make no wounds, and the Roman javelin passes through painted and gilded shields, and the line gleaming with the whiteness of tunics is stained with blood when the matter is done with steel. A golden and silver line of the Samnites his own father had once slain with utter slaughter, and those spoils had been more honorable to the victorious enemy than the arms to the men themselves. It had perhaps been given to his name and his family that they should be set against the greatest efforts of the Samnites and bring back those spoils which should be a distinction even for the adorning of public places. The immortal gods were at hand, because of treaties so often sought, so often broken; then, if there were any conjecture of the divine mind, never had any army been more hateful to them than this—sprinkled, by an impious rite, with the mingled slaughter of men and beasts, devoted to the twofold wrath of the gods—dreading on the one hand the gods, witnesses of the treaties struck with the Romans, and on the other the execrations of the oath taken against the treaties—an army that had sworn unwilling, that hated its own oath, and feared at one and the same time gods, citizens, and enemies.

When he had set forth these things—learned by the disclosures of deserters—before soldiers now of themselves hostile, full at once of divine and human hope, with a consenting shout they demand battle; it irks them that the struggle is put off to the next day; they hate the delay of a day and a night. At the third watch of the night, the letter from his colleague now brought back, Papirius rises in silence and sends the keeper of the sacred chickens (pullarius) to take the auspice. There was no kind of men in the camp untouched by the desire for battle; highest and lowest were alike intent; the leader watched the soldiers’, the soldier the leader’s ardor. That ardor of all reached even to those who attended the auspice; for, though the chickens would not feed, the keeper dared to lie about the auspice and reported to the consul a most favorable tripudium—the chickens feeding so greedily that the food spilled from their beaks. The consul, glad, proclaims that the auspice was excellent, and that they would conduct the matter with the gods for authors, and displays the signal for battle. As he was now by chance going out into the line, a deserter reports that twenty cohorts of the Samnites—they were about four hundred men each—had set out for Cominium. That his colleague might not be ignorant of this, he straightway sends a messenger; he himself bids the standards be carried forward the faster. He had assigned the supports each to their places, and prefects to the supports; on the right wing he set Lucius Volumnius, on the left Lucius Scipio, over the cavalry other lieutenants, Gaius Caedicius and Titus Trebonius; Spurius Nautius he bids lead the mules, their pack-saddles taken off, with three cohorts of the allied wing, round in haste to a conspicuous hillock, and thence, in the very midst of the fighting, to show himself with the greatest stir of dust he could. While the commander was intent on these things, a wrangle arose among the chicken-keepers about that day’s auspice, and was overheard by the Roman knights, who, thinking the matter not to be despised, reported to Spurius Papirius, the consul’s brother’s son, that there was a dispute about the auspice. The young man, born before the doctrine that despises the gods, having inquired into the matter, that he might bring nothing unascertained, reported it to the consul. To whom he said: "Be you indeed blessed for your valor and your diligence; but as for him who attends the auspice, if he reports anything false, he takes the religious guilt upon his own head; to me, at any rate, a tripudium has been reported—to the Roman people and the army an excellent auspice." He then ordered the centurions to set the chicken-keepers among the foremost standards. The Samnites too advance their standards; the line follows, adorned and armed, so that it was a magnificent spectacle even to the enemy. Before the shout was raised and the charge made, the chicken-keeper, struck by a javelin rashly hurled, fell before the standards; and when this was reported to the consul, "The gods are in the battle," said he; "the guilty head has its punishment." As the consul said this, a raven before him croaked with a clear voice; glad at which augury, the consul, affirming that never had the gods been more present and at hand in human affairs, ordered the trumpets to sound and the shout to be raised.

Battle was joined, fierce, but with spirits far unequal. The Romans, eager for the enemy’s blood, were carried into the battle by anger, by hope, by the ardor of the contest; a great part of the Samnites necessity and religion compelled, unwilling, to resist rather than to offer battle; nor would they have withstood the first shout and onset of the Romans, used now for several years to be beaten, had not another, more powerful, fear, sitting upon their hearts, held them back from flight. For there was before their eyes all that apparatus of the secret rite, and the armed priests, and the promiscuous slaughter of men and beasts, and the altars sprinkled with blood lawful and unlawful, and the dread execration and the maddening formula, framed for the cursing of their household and their stock; bound by these fetters from flight, they stood, fearing their own countryman more than the enemy. The Roman presses on from either wing, from the center, and cuts down men stunned with the fear of gods and men; there is a feeble fighting back, as from men whom fear kept from flight. Now the slaughter had come well-nigh to the standards, when, from the flank, dust appeared, raised as by the march of a vast column; Spurius Nautius—some relate that it was Octavius Maecius—was leader of the allied-wing cohorts; they raised more dust than their number warranted; the camp-servants, seated on the mules, dragged leafy boughs along the ground. Arms and standards appeared in front through the murky light; behind, a higher and denser dust gave the appearance of cavalry bringing up the column, and deceived not the Samnites only but the Romans too; and the consul confirmed the error, crying out among the foremost standards, so that his voice fell even upon the enemy, that Cominium was taken, that his victorious colleague was at hand; let them strive to conquer before the glory should be the other army’s. This he said, sitting upon his horse; then he bids the tribunes and centurions open a way for the cavalry; he had himself told Trebonius and Caedicius beforehand that, when they saw him raise and shake his spear, they should drive the horsemen upon the enemy with the greatest possible force. At his nod all things are done, as from preparation beforehand; ways are opened between the ranks; the cavalry flies forward and with leveled points rushes into the middle of the enemy’s column and breaks through the ranks wherever it gave its charge. Volumnius and Scipio press on and lay low the stricken. Then, the force of gods and men being now overcome, the Linen cohorts are routed; sworn and unsworn alike flee, and fear no one but the enemy. The column of foot that survived the battle was driven into the camp or into Aquilonia; the nobility and the horsemen took refuge in Bovianum. Horse pursues horse, foot foot; the two wings make, the right for the camp of the Samnites, the left for the city. Volumnius took the camp somewhat the sooner; at the city Scipio is resisted with greater force, not because the conquered have more spirit, but because walls keep off armed men better than a rampart; from these they drive the enemy back with stones. Scipio, thinking that, unless the matter were finished in the first panic, before their spirits were gathered, the storming of a fortified city would be the slower, asks the soldiers whether they would bear it with mind even enough that the camp had been taken by the other wing, while they, the victors, were driven from the gates of the city. All crying out against it, he himself first, his shield held up over his head, makes for the gate; the others, following, a testudo formed, break into the city, and, the Samnites dislodged, seized that part of the wall which was about the gate; to penetrate into the inner parts of the city, because they were very few, they dare not.

Of these things the consul at first was ignorant, and was intent on withdrawing his army; for now the sun was headlong toward its setting, and the approaching night made all things dangerous and suspect even to the victors. Having advanced farther, he sees on the right the camp taken, on the left hears in the city a shout mingled of the din of fighters and of the frightened; and just then, by chance, there was a struggle at the gate. Then, carried nearer on his horse, when he sees his own men on the walls, and that nothing was now untouched, since by the rashness of a few the occasion of a great thing had been won, he ordered the forces which he had drawn off to be summoned and the standards borne into the city. Entering on the nearest side, because night was approaching, they rested; in the night the town was deserted by the enemy. There were slain that day at Aquilonia twenty thousand three hundred and forty of the Samnites, taken three thousand eight hundred and seventy, military standards ninety-seven. Moreover this is handed down to memory, that scarcely any other leader was seen more cheerful in the line, whether by his own nature or by confidence of conducting the matter well. From that same firmness of spirit he could neither be recalled from battle by a disputed auspice, and, in the very crisis in which it was the custom that temples be vowed to the immortal gods, he had vowed to Jupiter the Victor that, if he routed the enemy’s legions, he would offer a little cup of mead before he drank strong wine. That vow was pleasing to the gods, and they turned the auspices to good.

With the same fortune the matter was conducted by the other consul at Cominium. At first light, all his forces being brought up to the walls, he girt the city with a ring (corona) and set firm supports against the gates, lest any sally be made. As he was now giving the signal, a messenger from his colleague, in alarm about the coming of the twenty cohorts, both stayed him from the assault and forced him to recall part of his forces, drawn up and bent upon the storming. He bade Decimus Brutus Scaeva, a lieutenant, go with the first legion and ten cohorts of the allied wing and the cavalry against the enemy’s relief: wherever he met them, he should stand against them and delay them, and join hand to hand, if perchance the matter so required, only that those forces could not be brought up to Cominium. He himself bade ladders be carried to the walls on every side of the city, and came up to the gates in testudo; at one and the same time the gates were being broken open and force was being brought against the walls on every side. The Samnites, just as, before they saw armed men on the walls, they had spirit enough to keep the enemy from the approach to the city, so, after the matter was now being conducted not at an interval nor with missiles but at close quarters, and those who had with difficulty mounted from the level onto the walls—the place which they had feared the more being overcome—fought easily, on even terms, against an enemy now unequal: abandoning the towers and the walls, all driven into the forum, they tried there for a little the last fortune of the fight; then, throwing down their arms, to the number of about eleven thousand four hundred men, they came into the consul’s protection; about four thousand eight hundred and eighty were slain. So at Cominium, so at Aquilonia, was the matter conducted; in the space midway between the two cities, where the third battle had been looked for, the enemy were not found. When they were seven miles from Cominium, recalled by their own people, they came to neither battle. About the first dark, when they had now in sight both the camp and Aquilonia, a shout, falling equal on either side, stayed them; then, in the quarter of the camp which had been burned by the Romans, a flame spreading wide, by the token of a surer disaster, forbade them to advance farther; on that very spot, strewn at random under arms here and there, they passed all the restless time of the night in awaiting and dreading the light. At first light, uncertain which way to direct their march, they are suddenly stampeded into flight, being caught sight of by the horsemen, who, having pursued the Samnites that had come out of the town by night, had seen the multitude strengthened by no rampart, by no pickets. The multitude had been seen also from the walls of Aquilonia, and now even the legionary cohorts were following; but the foot could not pursue the fleeing, and by the horse about two hundred and eighty of the rearmost column were slain; many arms in their panic, and eighteen military standards, they left behind; with the rest of the column unharmed—as far as could be amid so great an alarm—they reached Bovianum.

The joy of each Roman army was increased by the affair happily conducted on the other side too. Each consul, by the other’s judgment, gave the captured town to the soldier to plunder, and then, the houses emptied, set fire to it; and on the same day Aquilonia and Cominium burned to the ground, and the consuls, with mutual congratulation of their legions and of themselves, joined their camps. In the sight of the two armies both Carvilius praised his men according to each man’s desert and rewarded them, and Papirius—with whom the contest had been manifold, in the line, around the camp, around the city—rewarded Spurius Nautius, Spurius Papirius his brother’s son, and four centurions and a maniple of hastati with armlets and golden crowns: Nautius for the expedition by which, in the fashion of a great column, he had terrified the enemy; the young Papirius for the service zealously rendered with the cavalry both in the battle and in the night in which he made the flight perilous to the Samnites stealing out from Aquilonia; the centurions and soldiers because they had first seized the gate and wall of Aquilonia; all the horsemen, for their notable service in many places, he rewards with horns (corniculi) and silver armlets. Then a council was held, whether it were now time to withdraw the armies from Samnium, either both or at any rate one; it seemed best, the more the power of the Samnites was broken, the more stubbornly and the more fiercely to push the rest and to follow it up, so that Samnium, utterly subdued, might be handed over to the consuls following: since now there was no army of the enemy that seemed likely to fight a pitched battle, one kind of war remained, the storming of cities, by the sack of which they could both enrich the soldier with booty and finish off the enemy fighting for his altars and his hearths. And so, a letter being sent to the senate and people of Rome about the deeds done by them, the two go their separate ways, Papirius to storm Saepinum, Carvilius Velia.

The consuls’ letter was heard with vast joy both in the senate-house and in the assembly, and the public gladness was celebrated with a four days’ thanksgiving with private zeal. Nor was that victory to the Roman people great only, but also most opportune, because by chance, about the same time, it was reported that the Etruscans had revolted; the thought stole into men’s minds in what way Etruria would have been bearable, had any adverse thing befallen in Samnium—Etruria, which, roused by the conspiracy of the Samnites, since both consuls and all the Roman force had been turned away into Samnium, would have held the engagement of the Roman people as its occasion for rebelling. Embassies of the allies, brought into the senate by the praetor Marcus Atilius, complained that their fields were being burned and laid waste by the neighboring Etruscans because they would not fall away from the Roman people, and besought the conscript fathers to protect them from the force and wrong of common enemies. The answer was given to the envoys that it would be the senate’s care that the allies should not repent of their faith: the Etruscans would shortly have the same fortune as the Samnites. Yet, as far as concerned Etruria, the matter would have been pushed more slackly, had it not been reported that the Falisci too, who for many years had been in friendship, had joined their arms to the Etruscans. The nearness of this people sharpened the fathers’ care, so that they decreed that fetials be sent to demand restitution; and, this not being made, by the fathers’ authority and the people’s order war was declared on the Falisci, and the consuls were bidden draw lots which of them should cross from Samnium into Etruria with his army. By now Carvilius had taken Velia and Palumbinum and Herculaneum from the Samnites—Velia within a few days, Palumbinum on the same day on which he came up to the walls. At Herculaneum he even fought a pitched battle, the issue doubtful, and with greater loss of his own than of the enemy; then, a camp being pitched, he shut up the enemy within their walls; the town was stormed and taken. In these three cities about ten thousand men were taken or slain, in such proportion that a very little more were taken. As the consuls drew lots for the provinces, Etruria fell to Carvilius, in accordance with the prayers of the soldiers, who could no longer bear the force of the cold in Samnium. To Papirius at Saepinum a greater force of the enemy made resistance. Often in the line, often on the march, often around the city itself against the enemy’s sallies there was fighting, and it was not a siege but a war on even terms; for the Samnites guarded themselves no more by their walls than their walls by arms and men. At last, by fighting, he forced the enemy into a regular siege, and, by besieging, took the city by force and by siegeworks. And so, the city taken, more slaughter was dealt out of anger; seven thousand four hundred were slain, fewer than three thousand men taken. The booty—which was very great, the goods of the Samnites being heaped into a few cities—was given to the soldier.

The snows had now covered everything, and it was not possible to hold out beyond doors; and so the consul led his army down from Samnium. As he came to Rome a triumph was conferred by universal consent. He triumphed while in office, with a triumph notable, as was the fashion of those times. The foot and horse, distinguished with gifts, passed by and were borne along; many civic crowns and rampart-crowns and mural crowns were to be seen; the spoils of the Samnites were viewed, and were compared in grace and beauty with the paternal spoils, which were well known from the frequent adornment of public places; several noble captives, renowned for their own and their fathers’ deeds, were led along. Of heavy bronze there were carried past two million five hundred and thirty-three thousand asses; that bronze, it was said, had been realized from the captives; of silver, which had been taken from the cities, one thousand eight hundred and thirty pounds. All the bronze and silver was stored in the treasury, and nothing of the booty was given to the soldiers; and that ill-will was increased toward the commons, because a tribute was levied even toward the soldiers’ pay, when, if the glory of the captured money carried into the treasury had been spurned, both a gift could then have been given to the soldier out of the booty and the soldiers’ pay furnished. He dedicated the temple of Quirinus—which, vowed in the very battle, I find in no old authority, nor, by Hercules, could he have finished in so short a time—vowed by his father the dictator, the son as consul dedicated and adorned with the enemy’s spoils; of which there was so great a multitude that not only the temple and the forum were adorned with them, but they were even distributed to the allies and the neighboring colonies for the adornment of their temples and public places. After the triumph he led his army into the Vescine country to winter, because that region was infested by the Samnites. Meanwhile the consul Carvilius in Etruria, setting about to storm Troilum first, dismissed four hundred and seventy of the wealthiest, who had bargained for a great sum of money that it might be allowed them to depart thence; the rest of the multitude and the town itself he took by force. Then he stormed five forts set in fortified places. There were slain two thousand four hundred of the enemy, fewer than two thousand taken. And to the Falisci, who sought peace, he gave a year’s truce, having bargained for a hundred thousand asses of heavy bronze and that year’s pay for the soldiers. These things done, he withdrew to a triumph, which—as it was less famous over the Samnites than his colleague’s triumph had been, so, by the heaping-on of the Etruscan war, it was made equal. Of heavy bronze he carried into the treasury three hundred and eighty thousand asses; with the rest of the bronze he let out the building of the temple of Fors Fortuna, out of the spoils, near the temple of that goddess dedicated by King Servius Tullius; and to the soldiers, out of the booty, he distributed a hundred and two asses apiece, and as much again to the centurions and horsemen—a gift the more gratefully received because of his colleague’s niggardliness. The favor of the consul protected before the people his lieutenant Lucius Postumius, who, having had a day appointed for him by Marcus Scantius, tribune of the plebs, had escaped, as the rumor went, the people’s judgment into a lieutenancy; and his accusation could rather be bandied about than carried through.

The year being now finished, the new tribunes of the plebs had entered upon their magistracy; and for these themselves, because they had been created with a flaw, others were substituted five days later. The lustrum was closed that year by the censors Publius Cornelius Arvina and Gaius Marcius Rutulus; there were registered two hundred and sixty-two thousand three hundred and twenty-one heads. These were the twenty-sixth censors from the first censors, and it was the nineteenth lustrum. In the same year, for the first time, men crowned for deeds done well in war watched the Roman Games, and palms then for the first time, the custom being transferred from the Greeks, were given to the victors. In the same year, by the curule aediles who held those games, several graziers being condemned, a road was paved with flint from the temple of Mars to Bovillae. The consular elections Lucius Papirius held; he created as consuls Quintus Fabius Gurges, son of Maximus, and Decimus Iunius Brutus Scaeva. Papirius himself was made praetor. A year glad in many things scarcely sufficed for the solace of one ill, the pestilence burning at once the city and the fields; and the calamity was now like a portent, and the Books were consulted, what end or what remedy of that ill might be given by the gods. It was found in the Books that Aesculapius must be summoned from Epidaurus to Rome; nor in that year, because the consuls were occupied with the war, was anything done about that matter, save that a one-day thanksgiving was held to Aesculapius.